Redeker Plan

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It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with [[::World War Z|World War Z]]. (Discuss)

The Redeker Plan is a strategy employed in the fictional world of World War Z, a novel written by Max Brooks. The Redeker Plan calls for sacrificing a large portion of the population in order to save a small genetically fit population.

Background

The strategy is named after fictional character Paul Redeker, who lives in Robben Island, Cape Town Province, in what is currently Southern Africa. Redeker had previously redrafted Plan Orange 84, the survival plan for the Apartheid government should the Black African population rise up in a race war against the White Afrikaners. Redeker himself was a logical and dispassionate man, who believed emotions such as love and hate to be irrelevent and inefficient. Plan Orange made Redeker a hated man in South Africa, and he assumed that "they" would come for him eventually.

During the zombie outbreak in South Africa, Nelson Mandela covertly sent a special forces team to retrive Redeker, not to kill him as he suspected, but to draft a zombie survival plan for the government. Redeker had already drafted most of the plan out of boredom, being holed up in a cabin since the initial outbreaks. After his plan was introduced, the South African president and most of his surviving cabinet were ready to reject the plan outright out of a combination of it's heartlessness and out of hatred of Redeker himself. It was at this point Mandela stepped in to personally vouch for Redeker's plan, and he embraced Redeker to emphisize this. the unexpected shock of this hug caused Redeker to go through an emotional and mental breakdown, which resulted in Redeker functioning under the assumed identity of Xolelwa Azania.

The plan was as coldly logical as it was brilliant, with no detail left out. Everthing from geography and military capability, to the nature and capabilties of the undead and their "motivations", to available resourses, to civilians, their vocations, physical and mental heath, their skills, and their location to potential crisis zones. The plan called for the government and military to relocate to a fortified "Safe Zone", a reasonably large area with as many natural barriers, like mountains canyons and rivers, so as to give the undeadless entry points to the safe zone, and to reduce the resourses and manpower needed to fortify those entry points. The plan listed those refugees and civilians who would be chosen to inhabit this safe zone (since not everyone could be saved), to provide a skilled labor pool for wartime production and to eventually repopulate retaken infested areas. The most controversial part of the plan (which many claim Redeker will go to Hell for) is to keep pockets of isolated survivors deep into infested areas, to distract the hoards of zombies. These isolated survivors would need to be resupplied by the government occasionally so the the survivors can continue to act as bait, for every zombie attacking their fortification is one less attacking the government's safe zone.

This is a utilitarian notion, which has ethical implications, because it implies that there are people who are less fit to survive than others. With this plan, the value of people is not based on socio-economic value, but rather strategic location. An example would be a large population existing at bottle neck landmark. In World War Z, the military withdrew from a bottle neck area, leaving unarmed civilians to fend for themselves. This occupied the outbreak while the military was able to reform and fortify.

The Redeker Plan goes by several names, most notably the "South African Plan", from which Paul Redeker hails. It is called "The Chang Doctrine" in South Korea.