The Eagle's Throne Read Online Free PDF Page A

a German philosopher, “this,” the word “this,” is the hardest one to say. Very well, Mr. President, that’s what I urge you to do: Do THIS. Say, dare to say, THIS.
    Postscript: I enclose the memorandum that I asked Xavier Zaragoza to write, explaining the communications breakdown.
    MEMORANDUM
    Our modern communications system has suffered a grave paradox. On the one hand, we have striven to become part of the largest global communications network in existence. On the other, we have wanted to monopolize access to information for our government’s benefit. To attain the first goal, we handed over the management of television, radio, telephony, as well as wireless communications, the Internet, etc., to the Florida Satellite Center and the so-called capital of Latin America, Miami. Our hope was that this decision would ensure our global access to communications. We turned our worldwide operations over to private companies such as B4M and X9N, in search of maximum efficiency and maximum range. What we did not know, however, was that these private companies upon whom we depended were, in turn, dependent upon an infrastructure controlled by the U.S. Defense Department. Nor did we know that the Florida Satellite Center was under the auspices of the Pentagon, which controlled the system’s effectiveness or lack thereof, as well as its real, potential, and planned crises, through exclusive access to the synchronized orbits of a number of fixed satellites located 40,000 kilometers above sea level. The precursor to this was the Y2K crisis of the 1999–2000 new year, the so-called “millennium bug” that was thought capable of causing a breakdown in the global communications system, when the computers programmed according to the digits “19” jumped to “20.” The panic, as we now know, was nothing more than the Pentagon’s way of reminding everyone of its ability to decentralize information in the event of an attack on the infrastructure, or to voluntarily destabilize the system, while claiming to be under (nonexistent) attack. The Mexican national mistake, then, was to take the plunge with our eyes closed and with the hope of rapidly globalizing our communications by latching on to an operation we didn’t control ourselves, while politicizing communications internally to thwart the democratic, pluralistic use of these media. The restored PRI government of 2006 opted for external modernity through Florida and internal anachronism through an official monopoly of the grid. Governments are organized vertically. The grid, on the other hand, works horizontally. President César León decided to verticalize all internal communications, which meant that unions, local bosses, universities, local governments, and civil society in general were all deprived of access, while the government’s most favored businesses and, fatally, the entertainment industry were granted horizontal communications access. A lot of Big Brother. No Big Strikes (actually, we haven’t avoided them, we simply declare them null and void; the main thing is to make sure that no one strike senses any kind of emulation or support from another strike). The point is that, while the world’s systems started out small, grew rapidly, and delivered value, the Mexican government started out big, grew slowly, and delivered garbage. Domestically, we restricted ourselves to a narrow portal. Internationally, we exposed ourselves to a massive portal. Thus we became doubly vulnerable. The United States has now cut off our big portal, affecting every aspect of our communications, not just external but internal as well, given that the latter, negligible as they were, also depended on the Florida Satellite Center. The hypothetical Y2K bug was simply replaced by a so-called Y2020 bug exclusively affecting Mexico, as a way of punishing the country for opposing the U.S. military occupation of Colombia and for supporting the rise in oil prices determined by OPEC. It is known