Please Note
This Article is written based on testimony from a fictious, and verifiably insane character. Some aspects of this account may be misinterpreted. |
The Redeker Plan is a strategy employed in the fictional world of World War Z, a novel written by Max Brooks. The Redeker Plan the sacrifice of a large portion of the population in order to save the population in more defensible or important locations.
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 irrelevant and inefficient. Plan Orange made Redeker a hated man in South Africa, and he assumed that in the chaotic times of South Africa's Great Panic (which started weeks earlier than that os the Unites States), someone would exact retribution for it.
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 nation. 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 emphasize this. The unexpected shock of this hug may have caused Redeker to go through an emotional and mental breakdown, which resulted in Redeker functioning under the assumed identity of Xolelwa Azania.
Basic Premise
The plan was as coldly logical as it was brilliant, with no detail left out. Everything from geography and military capability, to the nature and capabilities of the undead and their "motivations", to available resources, 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 undead fewer entry points into the safe zone, and to reduce the resources 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.