3:3 Create fear, distrust and division

You yourselves should trust nobody, whether individuals or countries. Treat even your friends with suspicion, for human nature is deeply corrupted through the Fall of Man from grace. Assume the worst motives lie behind people’s actions. Strike before you are struck – the great advice of Machiavelli and Clausewitz and Stalin. Assume that your own populations are driven by base motives (fear, greed, ambition) and appeal to them. You will not often be disappointed.

Try to divert attention from your plans by filling people’s minds with distractions. Divide your critics and rule them. Sow fear and distrust in everyone so that they can not form into solid opposition to you.

Here you are very wise to have talked about ‘a war on terrorism’, for the weapon of the threat of terrorism is one of the very most successful in history. Whenever the terrorists strike, ratchet up your political powers so that your weapons are stronger. Fear is a powerful emotion and most people will surrender their liberties if they fear for their lives. And of course, tell them that it is a temporary loss, which will be restored, since both their dependence on you will be increased and they may be able to rationalize away their losses and face the temporary discomforts with hope that perhaps things will get better again ‘after the war’.

Even if there are few or no actual attacks, you can easily keep the population in anxiety and even terror. You can spread reports of ‘credible sources’ which have reported ‘heightened activity’ among your enemies. Of course you cannot reveal any of the details as this would strengthen your enemies – so people just have to trust in you, so you can make up what you like, especially as there are always people out there who want to feed you with bits and pieces to justify alerts.

Take some practical steps. From time to time suddenly swoop down on ‘suspects’, arresting them in dawn raids, make sure the press is there, try to make sure they look tired and dishevelled (and preferably of a different race) for the photos. Lock them away without explicit charges. Hunt around for evidence. Mostly you will find nothing, in which case you may, if you have not tidied up your legal system sufficiently, finally be forced to release them. But that will be months later and few will notice that nothing happened. People will just remember the vigorous measures you took against likely Evil persons. This will lead to confidence in your measures, gratitude to you, and relief at disasters potentially averted. If anything really does happen afterwards elsewhere, you can point to your active measures which, unfortunately, did not quite work.

Other methods are worth using. For instance, suddenly close off parts of cities, station tanks outside airports, divert planes at the last moment, suggest that vital information of an imminent attack has been discovered and you need to raise the threat level to a high point on whatever scale you have.

We cannot emphasize enough that the great enemy to your cause is complacency. After a period of nothing particular happening, your followers may start to accept that life is full of risk, that the enemy is not as fierce or ubiquitous as you allege. They may even wonder whether the huge sacrifices you ask, the heavy taxes, the surveillance, the loss of liberties, are really justified. At this point you should inspire them with fear and terror.

If things get really quiet and complacent, try to provoke the Evil Ones into attacking you. An assassination of a few of their supposed leaders, or some ‘collateral damage’ of women and children killed when you bomb or blast your way into one of their miserable refugee camps should do the trick. After all, it is better that a few innocent people on their side should suffer in the process than that the whole momentum of your crusade should falter and people begin to ask whether the war you are fighting is largely of your own making.

3:2 Should the Inquisition and Media Censorship be re-introduced?

All this is a good start, but much more is needed. When we faced the terrorism of the witches we had a much more tightly controlled situation. The Holy Office of the Inquisition had to licence every book or article that was published in the Christian World. There was a list of banned books. Anyone found with such a book in their house could be imprisoned and tortured. Writers and publishers were imprisoned and spies observed what was being said in drinking places and universities.

Some people think that this was just a medieval system. But when the philosopher the Baron de Montesquieu wrote his works in the middle of the eighteenth century, he had to publish them outside France to avoid the censor, and he recounts how he had nightmares at the thought that Inquisition spies might pounce on him. If it was a good enough system to last four hundred years, until a couple of centuries ago, it is good enough for today.

Indeed, the techniques never really ceased. These were the methods renewed and refined by Joseph Stalin in his iron control and elimination of millions of his citizens. In this current menace of your times, we would strongly recommend that you set up a ‘Czar’ (we believe this is the fashionable term in Britain, a ‘Chief’ in America perhaps), something similar to the Inquisitor General. They should have almost unbounded power in the areas of thought and media. They should co-ordinate the battle against contrary messages being aired. They should head a new bureau of thought police, the successor to the Holy Office of the Inquisition. They could monitor universities, schools, the media.

This was always done in conventional wars in the past in some way or another, and now that you are at war again, it is an urgent necessity. The papers are particularly to be scrutinized and their sources should not be protected, nor their editors have independence, for who knows what their links with the Evil One is.

After all, who do these critics and questioners think that they are? You are appointed by Heaven, not by your population. The people should trust and revere you. Their doubts, inspired by the Devil, are not only treasonable but sacrilegious. This is beginning to be realized. We heard a Russian minister rightly remark of some foreign diplomat who dared to question his government’s annihilation of the people’s of one of its satellites and the predictable backlash, that to discuss this policy was ‘blasphemous’. The State had spoken, God’s will was revealed, and you should bow down.

3:1 The need for intolerance and hate

The battle against the Empire of Evil is ultimately about winning hearts and minds. It is a bitter fight against a deadly and cunning foe who will try to undermine and seduce your peoples. So you must give a great deal of careful thought as to how you are going to make them aware of what you know – the great danger they face and their need to trust in you.

You are entering a new phase of civilization. For most of the last five hundred years your governments and educators assumed it was part of their task to whip up hatred of your enemies. The Holy Roman Church thundered constantly against the threats of Satan and his Evil Empire and the terrors of sin and damnation . The art systems of the world portrayed the Devil and the terrors of Hell. The ideology taught all right-minded citizens that the world was divided into the Godly (us) and the heathens and idolaters (them). It was your mission to either convert or destroy them.

Unfortunately, after the Second World War, a rapid weakening of this black and white vision occurred. You were encouraged to tolerate, even to like, people of other races and creeds. Multi-culturalism, cultural relativism, artistic and intellectual exchanges, even inter-racial marriages and mixing of blood were encouraged. All this confused the simple message.

All was not lost, however. Your schools, sporting contests, national histories, the media, all portrayed the enemy (then the Soviet Union) as Evil and malicious. You should fight them in your war games, your sports competitions, your arms races and, if necessary, with real bullets and bombs. ‘Better dead than red’ was a popular motto, and a good one since red is the colour not only of Communism, but of the Devil. Yet gradually standards have slipped and you seemed to be on the brink of ‘going soft’ on the enemy. So you need to bring back a proper educational and training system for the emergency of your times.

You should instruct all your schools to use text-books which do not prevaricate about this issue. They should praise the glories of your civilization, the great role of your religion, the major victories which your forces have won, the inventions you have made. If information has to be given about other countries, those who are currently your enemies should be portrayed in a negative light.

In your sports you should teach children fervently to support your own teams. We heard of a major British politician who suggested that those who did not support the British cricket or football teams were unpatriotic and should, perhaps, be repatriated to their country of origins since their hearts were not wholly with us. We applaud this frank and logical approach, which might be applied more widely to support for local food, music, religion and other parts of culture. We are glad to hear that ‘oaths of allegiance’ and a ‘nationalist ceremony’ are being introduced for foreigners in some of your countries. Also that training courses in your local traditions are becoming compulsory. It is a pity you cannot change the colour of the skins of immigrants, but at least you can change their hearts and minds.

2:5 When should you move on down the list and who should be added?

How do you know when to move on from one act of ‘regime change’ to the next? Here there are two major criteria. One is the degree to which your actual mission is accomplished. If you attacked to kill certain people who had the effrontery to laugh at us or condemn us, to put in a government that will allow us to build a pipeline, to build bases and control oil wells, you can say that the mission is achieved when these things are effected. Mission accomplished and you can move on to the next.

Moving on will probably be sensible because your attack often causes intractable side-effects; a rise of internal violence, a rash of criminality, a boom in illegal activity such as opium production. It would be unfair to expect us to prepare for all these possibilities or to do all the mopping up. Yet your critics often go on about the chaos have brought, so it is good to give people something else to think about. So distract their attention by moving on to the next country on the list and people will soon forget your promises not to give up on them.

Fortunately attention spans are short, memories poor, the current war is enough to fill the media. So move the battle on and give a sense of success, movement forward, progress, a rolling, serious, concerted and planned brushing back of evil. No one likes stagnation. So God speed and keep the Crusades moving forward with further ‘successes’.

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When you run out of people on the ‘A’ list, start to move on to a ‘B’ list, which are the reserves for attack, but which currently you deal with in a different way. You know that you are already starting to work on this. The second list are the countries you would like to undermine, weaken or perhaps crush because you know they will threaten your supremacy in the future, but you cannot do so as yet by conventional means. The most obvious on this list is China. So you need to continue to pour weapons into Taiwan, encourage Japan to break its post-war commitment to non-aggression, try to spin up negative stories about China, keep out as many Chinese as possible, build up the central Asian border states, send your spy planes over, try to use import tariffs to dampen down China’s exports.

All this will hopefully needle, undermine, threaten, destabilize China, as you did with the Soviet Union, but without actually attacking it militarily which would be futile and dangerous. Currently this approach applies mainly to China, but it might soon have to be what you do to India as well. And if Japan ever stopped being as subservient and accommodating to us, and asserted some independence, or switched loyalty from us to China, you would have to put it on the ‘B’ list.

Another point about the lists is that they help us to prioritise action. You work down a list. Just knowing they are on your list is useful in combating your enemies. It will cause fear, and perhaps defiance, which will further justify your attacks. So you pick them off one by one.

Then there is the question of who should decide on the list. Clearly this cannot be left to the United Nations. To start with, the ‘United’ suggests that that body would be averse to an approach that tries to destroy or re-model sovereign states on the basis of the self-interest of another sub-group of states. The most that organization ever comes up with is largely useless sanctions, even if they occasionally, as in South African apartheid, have some effect. Furthermore, some of the greatest ‘rogue states’ are members of the United Nations. Others have friends there. They would be unlikely to support their own destruction.

So the list making must be a matter for the leaders of the top ‘free’ countries – namely you. Of course if some other nations, for instance Pakistan or Vietnam, decided to make such a list and unilaterally attacked another neighbouring country that would be totally despicable and unacceptable. The exception, of course, is Israel, which has a special licence to invade its neighbours pre-emptively because of its beleaguered position and history.

2:5 How do you choose the enemies to attack?

There are those who challenge your actions by asking why you decide to bomb and invade one ‘rogue’ state before another. This is indeed a difficulty. Since your enemies form an ‘axis’ (with shades of Hitler and Mussolini) or as it has recently been termed an ‘arc’, and cross-infect each other, if you had the resources available it would be good to attack them all simultaneously. Yet this is impracticable because of the cost and the fact that it might simultaneously disrupt your oil supplies and over-stretch your forces. The best you can do, therefore, is to make a ‘wish’ list and start to work down it.

This list has to be compiled very carefully. In order to place a state onto it, a number of inter-secting criteria can be used. The country to attack must be strategically (Afghanistan) or economically (oil rich) important. The dictatorships and human rights abusers in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, are unlikely to be on the list since they do not fulfil either of these criteria.

The state should contain a reasonable sized military arsenal and be on the edge of possibly joining the nuclear club, such as North Korea, Iran or, as you thought, Iraq. Yet it should not already have joined the nuclear powers (as Israel, South Africa, Pakistan, India, China) for they would be too dangerous to attack. There is no point in risking your own civilization seriously. Likewise it should not have too large a conventional military force for if you invade it, you want to be able to crush it dramatically and quickly. So this rules out China, which is a menace but would probably defeat us in a conventional war. Discretion is the better part of valour.

The potential rogue state should have an ideology that is very different from ours. It should show active hostility to capitalism and individualism and seriously propose an alternative world view to your core values. The major two options here are communism and some forms of Islam. Yet this criterion on its own is not enough. Currently you would not attack Pakistan or Indonesia or China, even though they fulfil this test, because they do not fit in other ways.

Of course what really warns us of their rogue status is that their leaders not only refuse to accept our ‘democratic’ and civilized way of life, but actively challenge us and proclaims they do not need us. When Libya did this, you bombed it and applied punitive sanctions. It has come to heel. Cuba is a thorn in the flesh and you tried to invade it, but failed, as did your attempts to use the method of assassinating its President. You have temporarily learnt to forget about Cuba since it is of marginal strategic and economic significance, though no doubt when its leader dies or retires you will prudently interfere.

So you begin to obtain a composite model of who should be on your list of rogue states to attack and ‘regime change’. Middle-sized, oil rich (or useful for oil pipelines such as Afghanistan), ideologically intransigent, militarily quite powerful but not yet nuclear powers with dilapidated conventional forces which cannot stand up to your modern technology. This is, so to speak, the ‘A’ list, and these have already been given a preliminary formulation: Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, North Korea.


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A well-known technique to help you in compiling your list is known as ‘rogue state profiling’. Terrorist-harbouring states can be discerned by their looks and actions. They are, like witches, often poor and shabby and run-down, places like Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea or Palestine. That much of their misery is the consequence of your own sanctions and trade embargoes is not be to considered an objection. For why would you be punishing them already if they were not havens for terrorists?

They are inhabited by people who look like terrorists, that is to say, with swarthy, bearded, faces or inscrutable Mongolian eyes. They practice ‘fundamentalist’ religions (not Christian fundamentalism, or capitalist fundamentalism of the godly kind you find in the west of course), but fundamentalist Islam or unreconstructed communism. The people often look surly, angry, form into mobs to demonstrate against you, criticize you as hypocrites and imperialists and other gross exaggerations.

The leaders and their manipulated followers tend to be critical of the glories of capitalism, reluctant to accept the domination of your Empires, organized around a charismatic leader who acts in a repressive way to his people. Given his behaviour, it is odd that that their leaders often seem to be more loved by many than you are, despite the poverty that their arrogant rejection of your supremacy has brought. Such countries often have the effrontery to try to arm themselves with weapons. These weapons, to add to the seriousness of their crimes, were often given to them in an earlier period when they were your friends and they now refuse to destroy at your request. Or they come from your very own arms dealers by way of intermediaries, and they have the temerity to say that having paid good money to you for them, they should be allowed to keep them.

2:4 What if people say military aggression has failed in the past?

There are weak-spirited critics of your war on terror who try to draw analogies with previous attempts to quell insurgency which have failed. They suggest that the history of the French debacle in Algeria, the Belgians in the Congo, the Americans in Vietnam, the Russians in Afghanistan, the Israelis in Lebanon (twice) , show one simple fact about these kinds of wars – that they never work. The reason, they say, is quite simple. By using military force against a country, it quickly turns people against the outsiders, whatever the original feelings of the majority may have been. They come to hate the people they might have been expected to love.

Furthermore, insurgency is hydra-headed. The more fire-power that is brought against it, the more it seems to flourish. It is like a rubber band; the more it is pushed against, the stronger its resistance. For each ‘terrorist’ killed, two more spring up. Each weapon that is deployed seems mysteriously to generate two in counter-opposition.

What is alleged by these critics is that these kinds of wars are in nature different to the traditional wars such as those of nineteenth century Europe or the American Civil War. It is not a matter of two groups fighting for a finite period, one winning on the field of battle, peace being declared at the end with a ‘victor’ and it all being over. These wars seem much more like feuds; each time you strike, the counter-strike gets larger. There is a terrible and bloody echo. The enemy is diffuse, impossible to pin down, fails to accept when he is beaten, gains in conviction every time you make a mistake and kill or torture the wrong people, resents the fact that, for example, tens of thousands of women and children are killed as ‘collateral’ damage.

So your critics liken us to someone entering a dangerous swamp, sucked in further and further, finally to be pulled out after countless atrocities, in a humiliating retreat as happened in all the cases mentioned above. They suggest that this is what you have already witnessed with the collapse of the well-meaning initiative in Afghanistan and the growing mayhem in Iraq. Are they right?

There is clearly something in what they say, but consider the implications. If you accepted this argument, you would have to leave the nests of vipers in the rogue states to breed without molestation. You would have to pursue the slow and cumbersome route to international peace through bodies like the United Nations, thereby surrendering some of your freedom of action and self-interests. You would just be one among a body of nations, seemingly having to listen to puny countries like Canada or Sweden with their dangerous liberal leanings.

It would be tantamount to re-thinking the whole world order and to accepting that military might is not the solution. It would mean that you should attempt to persuade, encourage and seduce your enemies rather than destroy them. This is clearly unacceptable.

Why can’t your enemies accept defeat graciously like the Japanese did after you had dropped two atom bombs on them and shown them who was military boss, or the Germans when you had defeated their armies and destroyed their cities in infernos? It is all very disappointing, but should not lead us to despair. If you can throw enough weapons, enough troops, enough terror at them, surely they will give up?

The final consolation is that if you fail again, as you did in Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and elsewhere, the memory of this defeat and humiliation will not last for long. After previous failures, people said you would never forget your mistakes. But a generation on and the memories are dying. If your current policies do not succeed, in a generation or two people will have forgotten. Indeed, it may be sooner than that, for the effective failure of your attempt to bring a new and more decent order to Afghanistan is already largely forgotten, only a year or two into the process.

Furthermore, it is not winning or losing that matters, it is the game itself. While you’re at war with terror, it has such exquisite side-effects. It increases your power and ability to pursue whatever goals you like, so that the final outcome does not really matter. Europe grew rich during the Crusades, even if it did not gain the Holy Land for good. It grew rich on the pillage of China, even if China slipped from its grasp. It grew rich from its control of India, even if the Indians gained independence in the end. The same was true in Africa and the Middle East. Even the Vietnam years were not bad ones in America.

It is perhaps a pity that many should have to be shrivelled up in the process, but that is the world you live in. The ‘survival of the fittest’, nature ‘red in tooth and claw’, these are good analogies. Make sure you are the fittest and that your teeth and claws are really sharp and you will survive. ‘Attack first, think later’, is not a bad motto.