The necessary costs of endless war; further criticisms answered
Before we end, it may be helpful for you if we directly face some further criticisms and nagging doubts (Factual Questions and Answers, FQA).
By arming your friends are younot filling the world with weapons?
It is an unfortunate fact, which you will have noticed, namely that your friends are fickle and not to be trusted. They appear to be on your side, so you generously give them of your best, your latest weapons, training, chemicals to make biological agents and so on. They switch sides and become your enemies. We do not need to rehearse cases, for this is so common, but a recent dramatic one was in Iraq where you armed Sadam Hussein for years to fight Iran and overlooked with generosity his gassing of the Kurds, as friends do. Then he traitorously refused to bow to your demands and became a threat, or so you alleged.
The trouble with this fickleness would appear to be that each time it happens, it floods the world with more weapons, some of which can be used against us. It appears to make the world a more dangerous place. On the surface it looks as if you are throwing petrol on the very fire you proclaim you are trying to put out.
This criticism is based on a misunderstanding. As the old saying goes, give a man enough rope and he will hang himself. By scattering chemical agents, tanks, rockets, splinter bombs and other weapons around you give lots of nasty regimes and groups enough rope to hang themselves. It gives them enough power to make them sufficiently noticeable and threatening so that you can pounce on them. Without these weapons they would just mutter in their caves and secretly plot your downfall, and you would never know where they were. By giving them weapons, you get them to come ‘over-ground’ as it were and then you can engage with them.
It also helps to persuade your own populations that the war is real. If they knew how vastly unequal the resources are as between us and your foes, they might baulk at further taxes, infringements of what they call their civil liberties and inconveniencies. But if your enemies really can blow things up and have ‘credible’ armies, then, as long as it does not get out of hand, your warning of imminent attacks are believable.
Anyway, if the anti-arms lobby gets too excited there is the well known argument to put them down, namely that if you do not supply the weapons, someone else will. Better you do so than the North Koreans or Pakistanis or even the cheese-eating French. At least that way you keep some control, and you make the profits.
Of course, your critics may say that you should put an effort into trying to make an enforceable international agreement about the arms trade. That sounds on the surface like good sense, but it would clearly not be in your interests. It might save millions of lives at a general level, and even make the world in general a safer place. But what about your economies? Modern weaponry is very high tech. Youare very good at making these things. No one wants your cars, your fridges, or even, soon, your computers. But they do want your advanced radar systems, your missiles, your night vision guns, your ‘smart’ weapons and uranium-enriched shells. If you gave up your last advantage in manufacture, what would you do? It is unthinkable.
That such activity will provide untold wealth for your friends in the arms industry and hence donations to your great cause is another pleasant spin-off. Indeed, it is a central part of the strategy. After the fall of communism, the huge war machines which you had built up no longer had a purpose. In your resolute and brave struggle you had devoted much of your science and energy to weapons manufacture. You had left the goods of peace to others. If there was no continued war, other nations would soon overtake you and you might become poor and weak. No longer could you be the saviours of civilization. To encourage your weapons programmes, you need perpetual fear and small wars.
Indeed encouraging an international arms embargo is as unthinkable as previous suggestions along these lines. When Christian nations were exhorted a few hundred years ago not to make or distribute previous ‘state of the art’ weapons in the name of love and humanity, for instance the deadly cross-bow or gunpowder weapons, they took no notice. The infidels might ban or strictly contain gunpowder if they liked, as the Chinese (who invented them) and the Japanese (who banned them in the seventeenth century) or the Islamic nations did. But look what happened to them! They were easy meat for the Christians when you destroyed the pride of the Ottoman Empire, the haughty Chinese in the Opium Wars, the resistant Japanese when your black ships threatened them and helped in the 1850s to start the process which would topple the Shoguns.
Stick with the weapons, sell what you can, make sure that you keep the best ones for yourselves, but make what profit you can. And follow the trails which the weapons will lay down until they lead you to the lairs (for they are animals) of the Evil Ones. If they do not hang themselves with the rope you provide, do the job for them.
Is there not a serious danger that this everlasting war will bankrupt you?
It is sometimes alleged that however worthy your crusade against the Empire of Evil, your activities will bankrupt your countries. This is indeed a difficult objection for there is some force in it.
Looked at objectively, many people note that America is heading for economic catastrophe. It is pillaging its own resources (social security), like a famine victim sucking up its body-fat. It is borrowing an extra billion dollars a day just to keep from bankruptcy. If China and Japan, for example, called in their American debts, the American economy would collapse in a few minutes. America is like a great oil tanker (a nice analogy) which is heading for the rocks and however hard it turns its rudder or reverses its engines, it will crash within a few years.
This situation can plausibly be linked to the huge proportion of the American expenditure that goes on “defence” ($500 billion a year) and “intelligence” ($35 billion a year) expenditure, including keeping large armies occupying other countries. To such critics, America seems to produce not wealth, but negative wealth or “illth” (as Ruskin called it). It is rapidly ceasing to be the major producer of ‘goods’, but rather the major producer of ‘bads’ – machines for destruction and killing.
This problem is thrown into stark relief if you compare it to its rivals, particularly in Asia; India, South Korea, Malaysia and above all China are now producing the goods. Within the next few years they may well outclass the west in the production of almost all ‘goods’, even computer software it is alleged. They are now producing goods of a very high quality, cheaply and in great volume. They are busily manufacturing, making and selling things that people want, while the war on evil, your critics suggest, is skewing your economy towards short-term conquests, but long-term catastrophe.
Your critics sometimes point to the eighteenth century in Europe when the great predatory war machines of Spain and France were ultimately defeated by the productive burst of wealth creation in Britain. Or they make an analogy with the battle on the Eur-Asian continent. For a while the advanced war machine of the Mongols could control most of Eur-Asia. Predation on others was the most effective way to wealth and the marauders were the rulers. In the end, however, it was the wealth producers who won and the nomadic warriors were marginalized. This is what your critics say of you. And it all seems rather plausible. How should you answer?
Firstly you should remember that it does not ultimately matter. If your populations are ruined, the economy collapses, the rust belt expands, the jobs migrate elsewhere even more rapidly, your oil supplies dry up, all this is the price you have to pay to fight for God’s kingdom. There are many precedents. The gallant Empire of Spain was ruined and collapsed into insignificance in a similar way fighting for God’s Catholic Empire against the heretics and evil threats perceived in the Reformist sects. It was praised at the time. Christ’s kingdom comes first, and people’s carnal passions second.
Furthermore, the current bonanza will see you and your children out, with luck. It is your grand-children’s generation who will bear the brunt of the disaster, if there is one, and that is not your business. And even if there is general meltdown, your own grand-children should be alright, for being in power at present gives you golden opportunities to build up wealth so that your own family can accumulate large fortunes and salt up reserves for the lean years ahead, as can your friends.
Another thought is that perhaps there is still hope that predation can win out. Let India, China, Japan and the rest soil themselves with the hard manufacturing tasks, the grubby money making which your university educated sons and daughter no longer want to do. Let your own children learn how to predate on the new wealth through more sophisticated tools, Wall Street, law, international banking. Set yourselves up, as Britain has done, as a country which produces nothing but ‘invisible’ goods, heritage and financial services.
This can be combined with the other forms of predation. If you have a monopoly of the advanced war technologies you could operate a sort of ‘danegeld’ economy. When the Vikings needed funds as the leading warriors of their times in Europe, they did not even have to attack their neighbours – they turned up in their boats and were paid off with ‘Danish gold’. You do not need gold, but huge loans, preferential treatment in other’s markets for the few goods you still do make, protective tariffs against foreign imports, all help. Being nuclear superpowers bring all these blessings in their wake.
There is another indirect economic benefit in pursuing the perpetual war on evil, as the previously mentioned ‘Report from Iron Mountain’ explains in detail. Your countries are increasingly filled with what sociologists call rather pompously ‘the under class’ (though we prefer to use the folksy term used by you and your friends privately, ‘trailer trash’). That is to say a growing army of Hispanics, blacks, poor whites; badly educated, unprotected, paid very little – the sort of people you see doing the menial work in your airports, garbage firms and hospitals.
Other civilizations which have had such a debauched, ill-behaved and hopeless under-class have either enslaved them, put them in the galleys, or sent them off to their colonies. All these options are running out. No-one wants them and they are of little use to you. So the final solution, which has so often been successful in history, is to enlist them in the army and navy.
They are then subjected to discipline, taught loyalty to you, made to feel that killing on your behalf is a worthy cause. They may even earn their keep by being stationed in other people’s countries and the oil revenues or other wealth from those countries can pay for them. ‘Living off the country’ is an old expedient with armies, and it is something you are clearly experimenting with.
Anyone can see that it is better to spend the money on building up your military capability rather than the pure waste of social security. So cut social security, medical care, education and so on to the bone, and put the money into the military. The only problem is that to persuade your electorate, if you cannot bribe and misinform them in other ways, a justification is needed.
That is why, again, it cannot be stressed too much that it is so fortunate that the Axis of Evil has re-appeared. There was a real crisis in the 1990’s when the Star Wars (Son of) programme, the Nasa programme, and all the huge military expenditure looked ridiculous and people were calling for huge cuts. They had the misguided idea that the money could be used to educate, improve health, train people for making things. Until you had a new world war to fight, it was difficult to argue with them. Now that the ‘war against terrorism’ has replaced the Cold War, those critics can be silenced.
Of course, as we admitted above, it may well be that in the longer run this is not a good strategy. It is almost certain that within a generation or two, the Christian nations will have sunk back to a second position again. Yet it is your tradition to go out into the final battle with all guns blazing. Better a bang than a whimper. Defeatism is not acceptable. They used to say ‘Better Dead than Red’, the same is true in another form today. With Christ on your side, perhaps something will turn up.
Could not the huge expenditure be better deployed to save rather than destroy lives?
At first the argument that if you are sincerely trying to make the world a safer and happier place there must be a better way than bombs and torture seems attractive. The cost of an average ‘invasion’ might be put at, say, a minimum, of two hundred billion dollars. Two or three of these would provide clean drinking water for most of the world, help to eliminate some of the major diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria, build good health and educational systems throughout the Third World, help to combat famine in Africa, bring the appalling civil wars in many parts of the world under control.
This is a specious argument, however, for while all of that may be true, it is beside the point. What good does it do to Christ’s kingdom if you stop thousands of people suffering if they are heathens? What good is it if they still fall into the snare of the Devil? What good does it do for your personal wealth, power and status?
Furthermore it won’t cut much ice with your arms manufacturers, the poor blacks who need jobs in the military, those who want to secure your power abroad. If you had been in the do-gooding business, you would have joined a charity like Oxfam. Your business is power and the spread of God’s word. So let us not get deflected by sentiment. Did the Crusaders go around fighting the plague or improving the water supplies of the heathen? No, they spread the plague by firing dead bodies into enemy castles, they poisoned the wells and blew up the water supplies. Regrettable, perhaps, but necessary.
Of course, when you have bombed your way into an infidel country, there will be the possibility of lucrative ‘reconstruction’ contracts, to be paid for partly by your own taxpayers. But do not hurry into this work. If it is all done too quickly, there will be no need for your personnel to stay around. Span it out, let things continue in a half collapsed state, so that the profits of reconstruction last for years. Remember that all the profits can go to your supporters and will further Christ’s wonderful work.
How is it that the trouble continues even when you kill their leaders?
One difficulty you face is that many people increasingly realize that Evil is now headless. In the old days you got rid of a Napoleon or Hitler, and the other side surrendered. Now you get rid of the head of one of the godless cells of the enemy, or even the Head of a rogue state such as Saddam Hussein, and the trouble continues apparently unabated.
This was our experience with witches, Jews, heretics and others. We could burn, assassinate or imprison the ‘ring leaders’, but the ring went on. Of course this is officially built into the old Maoist version of the previous Axis of Evil ideology, the communist cells. In the revolutionary war period, people were deliberately prevented from developing a permanent command structure and were then able to act even if their local commanders were liquidated. The same seems to be happening in the godless uprisings in Palestine. It is a great trouble. The old days of ‘Take me to your leader’, and then shooting him, are over.
On the other hand it can be a blessing in disguise. For it ensures that the war against terror can never end. It can never be ‘won’ since there is no-one who can speak for the opposition. Every witch, every heretic, every member of a Satanic cult, can act as a sole trader, as it were. It is a great co-ordinated conspiracy, but also a very loose and individualistic network of individuals who can act alone.
This, of course, presents other dangers. It means that all previous barriers, all quarantining, all missile defence systems, all visa checks are largely a waste of time. A single individual can board a plane and force it to fly into a power station and release nuclear fuel. So most of your actions which purport to protect your populations are, as you must know, a waste of time and money. But as we have explained elsewhere, they are necessary both to show that you care for your people and are trying to do something, and to keep your population in a constant state of fear.
So do not be disheartened. Everyone is a potential terrorist, the fight is endless, Satan is everywhere. Be eternally vigilant, but don’t ever expect to win the war on terror, even if, in order to keep your people’s hope up, you say it is winnable and indeed being won.
Is it not strange that Christians should be so aggressive?
At first sight it might seem paradoxical that the spear-head (note the metaphor) of the Crusade against Evil should be Christian nations, often led by devout Christian leaders. After all, as our adversaries point out, Christ himself preached peace, exhorted people to love their enemies, to turn the other cheek if they were struck, to forgive those who sinned against them. Some Christian sects such as the Quakers have taken this literally and practice pacifism.
Yet this paradox is easily overcome if you look at what Christians have done, rather than what Christ preached. Like its major adversary Islam, which also has a strong strand of brotherly love in its teachings but is also in part a desert warrior religion, Christianity had tended to be a religion of the sword. It preached non violence and peace in the early days when it was weak and subject to the might of pagan powers. Yet once it was in control, it recognized that Christ’s message could best be spread by combining the pen and the sword.
We don’t suppose that you will need to do more than draw your attention to a few of the facts. The crusades were full of blood and vengeance and massacres perpetrated not just by Christians on infidels, but also on other Christians, as in the sack and slaughter in Constantinople by the Third Crusade as part of Venice’s expansion plan.
Europe itself for the five hundred years from about 1200 onwards was full of Christian princes constantly at war with each other, using the most savage weapons they could command. The ‘Wars of Religion’ in France, and the Thirty Years War in Germany are just two long and bloody periods. Catholics against Catholics, Catholics against Protestants, Protestants against Protestants, and all of them against Muslims. There was constant military activity which contrasted very strongly with the long periods of peace in some of the Eastern non-Christian Empires such as China and Japan.
The slaughter in Christ’s name reached a new level when the Holy Catholic Church turned its sword on the heathens in the newly discovered lands of America and the Pacific. Millions were killed by the sword and disease, innumerable cultures wiped out so that God’s will could be done and the great Christian kingdoms could benefit from the riches of ancient civilizations.
Of course a few liberals of the time lamented this rape of the third world in the pursuit of Christ’s glory and the wealth of others (which fortunately went hand in hand). One of these was Montaigne. He did not see that we were justified in our actions and bizarrely suggested that we might have pursued a different approach.
‘How easy it would have been to turn to profit minds so fresh, so hungry to learn, which had, for the most part, naturally made so good a beginning! On the contrary, we took advantage of their ignorance and inexperience, to bend them more easily to treachery, luxury, avarice, and to every kind of inhumanity and cruelty, by the pattern and example of our manners.’
He then proceeds to lament the consequences. ‘Who ever set so high a value on the utility of trade and commerce? So many cities razed to the ground, so many nations exterminated, so many millions of people put to the edge of the sword, and the richest and most beautiful parts of the earth turned upside down, for a traffic in pearls and pepper!’
Of course he is right about the destruction, but wrong in his estimation of both the motives and the necessity. It was not just lust for goods, but also to bring their souls to Christ – if necessary by destroying them or, as you would say, ‘regime change’. Furthermore, what other way is there? We had God on our side. We needed their wealth. No one could stop us. It would have been immoral just to be passive and loving.
So your actions are in a great and glorious crusading tradition. Love and kindness and forgiveness are all very well in their place. But as another religious warrior, Oliver Cromwell, well put it ‘Pray to God and keep your (gun) powder dry’. Do not waste too much time and energy thinking about alternatives.
All that we would suggest is a small change. Perhaps, as your tanks go blazing into the cities of infidels, or your planes fly low and burn up villages with napalm or its modern equivalent, perhaps the deafening music that the soldiers and airmen listen to on their headphones to drown out the screams or the doubts might be altered. At present it is heavy rock music which anaesthetizes. It might be better to have stirring martial music, perhaps jazzed up, but with more mission directed lyrics. How about ‘Onward Christian soldiers, onward as in war’ or some such? And for the classically inclined things like Handel’s ode ‘Our God is a God of War’.
One great advantage you have is that now the boundary lines are clearer. When Christian slaughtered Christian in the trenches of the First World War, or fire bombed Christians in the cities of the Second, it was a bit messy. But now there is, as current jargon goes, some clear blue water between the sides. Most of the Axis of Evil are non Christians. Indeed, that is almost part of their definition.
So you need have no compassion. They are damned already, heading for Hell because of their unbelief. If you destroy their leadership and let in your economic and other missionaries, perhaps a few will be saved. God’s glory be with you. Onward Christian soldiers, with the Cross of Jesus going on before!
What if all of your policy is based on a delusion sent by Satan?
This may come as a shock to you, but some of the doubters and critics of your war on terror have gone so far as to suggest that it is not your enemies who have been deceived by Satan, but you yourselves who have wittingly, or unwittingly, been seduced by him.
They say that ‘by your fruits you shall know them’ and that the fruits of your belief suggest Satan’s hand rather than that of Christ. They especially point to bombed cities, to tortured prisoners, to the neglect of real suffering in many parts of the world, to your opposition to international courts of justice, your breaking of international law and the undermining of the United Nations.
They suggest that the huge fortunes made by your friends, your encouragement of the centralization of power, your lavish lifestyles, your campaign of spreading fear and imprisoning your enemies, all suggest that you are not the solution but the problem. They say that if Satan exists – which many of them have the temerity to doubt – He has captured you.
This is obviously monstrous, but you will be comforted to know that such scandalous charges have been made before. Again and again the Holy Father in Rome was satirized as the Anti-Christ by his opponents. They pointed to the same things; his opulence, the decadence and debauchery of many of his priests, his onslaught with fire and wrack on apparently innocent people, his Holy Wars and his intolerance. They said that all this showed, as it does in your case, that he was the Anti-Christ and that both his, and your, message, if heeded will lead us into the fiery furnace.
As we have explained elsewhere, all these allegations rest on a misunderstanding of your noble and pious motives and an over-concentration on the outside or semblance of things. The same was true of the Papacy. The Papal attack on women, obsession with sexuality, condemnation of vice in public but indulged in private, and many other things gave an outward show which the critics could grasp. But we know that the Holy Fathers were God’s appointees on earth, as you are now, and that they could do no wrong – as you cannot.
So just brush off these calumnies and accusations. They are hardly worth answering. If you attempt to do so in too much detail you may get into an unprofitable muddle since they are very devious people. Just continue to assert your sincerity, your honesty, your trustworthiness, and make sure the media support you. If they do not, stamp on them. He who controls the media, controls the people, as the Papacy also knew – hence the index of prohibited books. The Holy Father is still with us and hopefully your reign will also be eternal.
How can you bear the ingratitude?
One of the crosses you have to carry, and one which Christ also bore, is the people’s ingratitude. Remember his experience. He was giving his life and work for them and then, in his hour of need, they chose a thief to be released rather than him, and shouted at him and scourged him. This may be your fate, though hopefully you will not suffer physically and you should salt up ample reserves on the way.
You will already have faced the jibes and jokes, the impugning of your sincerity and honour. You will know that the majority of your population do not trust you, call you liars, say you are hypocrites, that you are foisting you own personal morality on the rest of us. Can they not see how sincere you are? Can they not see the depth of the Evil you are fighting? The ingratitude of it all.
We can only give you encouragement by reminding you of Christ’s suffering at the hands of his people, of the ingratitude of the British who booted out Churchill after the Second World War and, of course, there are many other examples. We know that you not only wish to terrorize and pulverize your enemies and pleasure your friends, but to be loved and seen as great saviours by your people. You are, like us, insecure and frail humans who need approbation and regard. We understand that. But I’m afraid you may have to choose.
The pursuit of power is a lonely business. You can surround yourselves with sycophants and courtiers. You can ensure that the press and television are muted or crushed. You can bring out the flag-waving crowds as Hitler did. But you cannot conquer the inner hearts and minds of your subjects, however hard your press. You cannot force them to love you for making them into your slaves, terrified and divided.
This is a bitter truth you will need to face. It was well expressed in a book by that infidel Montesquieu. In terror of the Inquisition, he anonymously published his Persian Letters. In it he described people who are your predecessors, people who sought absolute power over their subjects. They wanted not just their people’s wealth and obedience, but their hearts and souls. But, at the end, Montesquieu describes how this is impossible.
Throughout the book the absolutist Usbek had been trying to break the spirit of the women in the harem. He believed he had at least achieved this in the case of his favourite Roxanne, whom he had raped into submis-sion. Then, in the last letter she writes to him as she dies from self-poisoning, she exults that all his oppression has failed. In the midst of tyranny, watched and guarded and punished, she has kept her spirit and soul free.
'How could you think that I was such a weakling as to imagine there was nothing for me in the world but to worship your ca-prices; that while you indulged all your desires, you should have the right to thwart me in all mine? No: I have lived in slavery, and yet always retained my freedom: I have remodelled your laws upon those of nature; and my mind has always maintained its independence.'
We should warn you that this may be your fate. Your enemies, even if you physically crush them, will not forgive you. The people from whom you take freedom and dignity in this great cause will not love you. The history books may well describe your actions as terrible blunders. They may describe your crusade as a disastrous turning point.
Yet you can rest content. You know what is right. The world is black and white. You are white, they are black. Do not listen to the seductions of false popularity, of the affection of your people, of the pleasures of making the world a seemingly better place. This is not a battle of a normal kind. It is a Holy War. The Crusaders did not try to earn the love of their victims. Go forth with Christ’s sword and leave history to the historians or, as Stalin nicely called them, the archive rats.
As for your grand-children and history in general, you can lift your head in pride. No-one will judge you as wholly evil. They may, as with Chairman Mao, give you as sixty per cent good, forty per cent disastrous, or some such. And can we ask more? They will never know the terrible choices you had to make, or the secret information which cannot be released which you say justifies your apparently strange behaviour.
When your grand-children gather round you in your old age and you show them the family albums, just show them the cheering crowds, the toppling statues of dictators, the headlines supporting your crusades. Make sure that the photos of tortures, gutted cities, looted museums, amputated limbs of children are safely locked away.
If occasionally you wake with sweat on your brow, seeing the fruits of your crusades with their mangled bodies and helpless eyes in front of you, remember these also are the tricks and temptations of the Devil. We know, for we have had our nightmares and doubts. Wars are not for the weak. It is too late to turn back. The Kingdom of Christ will assuredly emerge in the end and meanwhile we must suffer (and make others suffer) and strive.
We must end our very short homily here, for you are busy people. As Dominicans we end by blessing you in the name of our Christian God. Perhaps we can leave you with a stirring piece of poetry, a battle hymn if you like.
“… Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.
[…]
I've learned to hate Russians
All through my whole life
If another war starts
It's them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side.
But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we're forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God's on your side.
[…]
So now as I'm leavin'
I'm weary as Hell
The confusion I'm feelin'
Ain't no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God's on our side
He'll stop the next war.”
Sunday, 11 March 2007
7. Moral re-armament.
Moral Re-Armament
You live in a wicked world and such is its wickedness that many people do not even recognize the degree of its depravity. You must morally re-arm yourselves, for without this central spiritual core of high morality you cannot hope to defeat the Devil and all His works.
Clearly the first step is to see the world in terms of deeply opposed good and evil once again. The worst believers are those who, as St. Paul said, are neither hot nor cold. Infidels are at least clear-cut and you can convert or exterminate them. But lukewarm, dissembling, outwardly pious folk who nevertheless seldom attend church, do not bring their children up to be zealous, who equivocate on moral issues, who will not accept Christ fully into their hearts to redeem them, these are the real danger and must be flushed out.
This world is a moral battleground and people, as in war, are either for us or against us. There can be no greys (or gays, for that matter, with their ambivalent sexuality), no awkward ambiguities and half opinions, all is either white – Christian, pure, right, wholesome, blessed – or black – non-Christian, impure, wrong, unwholesome, damned and Evil. So you should push for these good and pure things, and shun the works of the Devil in every sphere of life.
We will not go into detail over this since you are already doing a good job rolling back the permissive and over-tolerant world of the 1960’s, when the corruptions of too much sudden wealth and individualism so quickly sapped away the foundations of Christ’s world. Those obscene scenes of licence and debauchery, of relativist thought and action, where anything goes and nothing is certain: all that has got to go. You have to make a bonfire of the vanities and burn them to cinders. Yet it may be helpful to you to if we give a few examples which we draw from our the thoughts and actions of our holy father the Pope.
Sex and the absolute right to life
Firstly there is the troubled matter of sex. Sex has been turned into an industry and a frivolous and licentious matter. It has been debased into mere bodily carnality, a means to pleasure rather than an expression of God’s love. It is gross, revolting, demeaning and everywhere. It haunts your media and your dreams, it drives your economy, it perverts pure young minds, it even intrudes into your prayers. It has got completely out of hand. So you must crack down on the extremes.
Clearly you cannot do anything much about the sex industry itself, since much of your revenue comes from clubs and bars, advertizing, the media and so on, and most goods are sold by using sex in your western countries. To attack this would also be an infringement of human rights. It might also have the unfortunate effect of turning people from the enjoyments which divert their minds from criticizing you, to leaving them with more time to look at and question their world. No, leave pornography alone.
What we are thinking of is the obscene practice of interfering in the outcome of sex. We note that some of you have already withdrawn funding from organizations that encourage people in poor countries to avoid conception. That is a good start. It may be unfortunate that doing so takes away one of the main ways of combating AIDS, but Christ moves in mysterious ways and perhaps that is a blessing in disguise. Making it impossible for millions of poor people to engage in the vile practices of contraception which interferes with God’s will, will lead to numerous unwanted children, but many will die of AIDS, so that will balance things out. The guilt is not on your hands. If possible, try to extend the pressure against contraception more widely, close down family planning clinics, dis-invest in contraceptive research, shut down education on the subject.
To carry on along this line, let us remind you that all conceptions are blessed, life is in the seed itself (hence the need to halt contraception except by the natural ‘rhythm’ method endorsed by our Holy Father). From this it flows that any tampering or tinkering with a foetus, after the first conception, is Evil. Remember that we paid great attention to this in our original Malleus Maleficarum, singling out sexual offences and writing whole sections (quote a little? XX) to the way in which Satan and witches aborted foetuses and helped midwives commit infanticide. This is therefore a crucial area of concern.
The idea that women have rights over their own bodies, that they are anything more than vessels for God’s purpose, is obscene and must be squashed. All abortions, whatever the length of gestation, must be made illegal. Those who help women in this way should be treated like the witches who did the same thing. They must be imprisoned, and tortured if necessary to find out their accomplices. And if capital punishment for them may be a bit extreme, you should be lenient to those vigilantes who are already expressing their Christian indignation by bombing and assassinating such evil doers. There must be no grey areas in your treatment of the human body. All life is sacred, there must be no interference, let the fruits of evil intercourse be born.
As for what happens after birth that is not your concern. People have brought their misfortunes on themselves. If they will indulge in lust, if they will be feckless, poor, ill-educated, that is their decision. If the infants suffer and grow up deprived and stunted through lack of support they will provide a useful warning to others not to go around having illegitimate and unwanted children. Your duty is clear. While the foetus is in the womb, it is to the foetus, the precious life given by Christ, to the total exclusion of the mother, that we owe our duty. The mother, as many societies have correctly observed, is really only a kind of oven within which the child is baked. If the mother was raped, if the child is diagnosed as having a dreadful illness, you should still not allow abortions. It is a clear matter of right and wrong.
Then, when it is born, you should not interfere with Christ’s work. You have saved the life, it has its chance, it can sink or swim. You have averted murder, loosed the living being into the world where he or she and her parents must fend for themselves. This is the Holy Father’s way, and it should be yours. Anything else is the narrow end of a wedge which leads to unspeakable Evil, to the gas chambers and euthanasia.
How to be tough on crime, not the supposed causes of crime
Another area where you must be black and white is in relation to crime. There was an unfortunate period in the 1960’s onwards when relativistic disciplines like criminology, sociology and the other thinly disguised atheistical tendencies tried to persuade us that you should pay attention to the causes of crime. They tried to shift the victimhood from the victim to the criminal. They went on about the hopelessness, the poverty, the bad education, the joblessness, the drug culture, the unfairness which they claimed drove people to crime. They suggested that unless you tackled these, the problems of crime would continue. This is all patent nonsense. You know what causes crime, it is the Devil.
Basically criminals are Evil. They have wicked hearts which lead them to steal, mug old ladies and so on. You should not ask yourselves what drove them to this, since anyone can trot out excuses. Instead you should frighten and threaten and scold the potential criminals. You should arm your populace, as we are glad to see has happened in America, and arm your police. And if this does not work, you should catch the Evil ones and lock them away permanently out of sight.
We are pleased to see that your legal systems are moving in this direction, that the number of offences is steadily increasing, that the legal protections for these monsters are being whittled away, that ‘the balance is being tipped back’ towards the true victims, as you put it. We are glad to see that you are imprisoning more and more people, one in every 200 of the population in the United States we are told, and that you are building even more prisons and privatising the prison business.
One practical suggestion we might make here is that as the numbers increase, you may need even more space. Your predecessors sent off ship-loads of criminals to Australia and elsewhere. Surely you can find a few islands, perhaps hire a small Japanese island as you do for your military bases, and turn them into penal colonies? You could keep millions locked away in this way in some security, as the South African government did with trouble-making terrorists like Nelson Mandela.
This policy of draconian, ‘we are good and they are totally evil’, and evil for ever without hope of reform, plays very well with your people. Make them terrified of the criminals, arm your police if they are not already, make a parallel to the war on terrorism with a ‘war on crime’, and, to instil a Russian fear in them, call the person in charge a ‘War against crime Czar’, to go with the drugs Czar and all the other Czars who ‘fight’ against the evil ones. The ‘enemies’ here are the sub-class of criminals who fight against, and are entirely separate, from the good and the virtuous whom you represent.
*
Of course, when we say ‘crime’ you must be careful about what you include. We are talking of the vicious and evil physical crimes against property and the person, burglary, assault and so on. Activities which do not involve a direct physical attack, what you call white collar offences, are an entirely different matter. Indeed it would be better to refine the language so that these are no longer called ‘crimes’ but rather something like ‘breaking the rules’ or ‘infringements’ or ‘petty offences’.
What we mean here are bank fraud, fiddling taxes, corrupt behaviour in compnay law, insider dealing, money laundering, arms dealing, the sort of thing that has unfortunately engulfed large companies like Enron and World.com. Admittedly many of these involve huge sums of money which completely dwarf the petty pilfering and shop-lifting and burglary which are the offences of the people who fill your prisons. But you should not judge in terms of the scale or the rippling effects of the breaking of the rules. If you went down that path, then the murder of thousands in an illegal war might have to be set alongside homicide. What we are talking about is quality, differences of kind.
Your way of capitalist activity depends on trust, honesty, playing by the rules. The rules are complex and ever-changing and the art is to sail so close to the wind that one makes a profit. Occasionally people sail a little too close, or the wind slightly shifts, and the boom swings across and people are hurt. Millions may be hurt, small investors, pensioners, people whose lives are ruined by chemical disasters, people whose lives are destroyed by a flood of illegally imported weapons. But the people who cause these effects are not really criminals. They are just too avid players in the game.
We have had all this argument before in relation to the Holy Papacy, which was accused of many financial and other scams and irregularities. But the Cardinals were not imprisoned, just warned to be more careful in the future.
So, on the moral borderline between good and evil, you can place white collar offenders as basically good, but with a few weaknesses and stupidities which should be gently corrected. But those who in desperation or malice try to take a short-cut out of their situation by stealing a loaf of bread for a starving child, killing an abusive partner, stealing electronic goods to feed their drug addiction, they are perfectly Evil and the hammer must be brought down to crush them.
That these criminals are not just victims of their circumstances, ‘there but for the grace of God’ people, but intrinsically evil, minions of Satan, is well shown and realized by your newspaper editors and large sections of the general public. For instance, in a number of cases when little children of only eleven or twelve killed another child, they are immediately known to have been possessed by the Devil and are beyond redemption. They are pure Evil. There is no question of asking yourselves whether you have had murderous feelings towards friends or relatives or wished them dead. We could not possibly harbour such thoughts.
You are dealing with monsters. They were pure Evil at eleven or twelve and they will always be Evil. They should never be let out of prison. They should suffer for ever. If, unfortunately, some over-lenient judge lets them out, the mob should stone them to death, as it often feels like doing. Likewise the wives, accomplices or other close associates of serial killers are innately Evil for ever. However they dissemble and say they are reformed, they should not be trusted. However much the experts say that they are now different people and no possible threat to society, they are Evil and must not be allowed to come back and contaminate your purity.
How to extend capital punishment
Indeed, as you can see, the proper solution to all this is death. In minor cases, mutilation of limbs, branding so that the mark of Evil is always on them, transportation to another part of the world where they will no longer corrupt us may do. But in more serious cases the death penalty is really the only answer. In earlier periods in your countries, a person who stole goods worth over one shilling would be hanged. Certainly all murderers would be hanged. This excellent punishment, which eliminates the Evil person entirely, extinguishes them, snuffs out the incarnation of the Devil is, we are glad to see, widespread in may parts of your Empires. And we are pleased to see that some of your Christian leaders exercized their judgement in a way which led to hundreds of executions. This is God’s holy work.
Yet, unfortunately, there are wide areas where the death penalty has been abolished. We suggest that to reverse this where it has happened you do not try to bring back too much at once. Start with a few offences which many would agree are particularly horrific, say the murder of a policeman, a small child, terrorism, serial killing. Once there are some capital offences, it is very easy to extend the list, the principle, praise God, having been re-introduced. Nowadays, with your excellent ‘three strikes’ legislation, a person can be imprisoned for twenty years or more for stealing a pizza. Why not capital punishment for such a person?
This would have another advantage. Not only would it extinguish Evil, but it would save money. You should move to the excellent system which China used to have (unfortunately, in emulation of your too lenient practices they are giving this up now), whereby as soon as someone was found guilty they were taken out and shot. No lingering in uncertainty for twenty years on death row. No, a bullet through the head or lethal injection to dispense with them like an animal, which is what they have become. That would certainly lower the prison population and might (though unfortunately studies are not clear on this) act as a deterrent.
The need for self-defence in a world of Evil
What we are driving at in general is the ridding of your society of all greyness, ambiguity, relativism, over-tolerance. All life is sacred – at least until birth. No fiddling there. All property is sacred, at least from the physical attacks by citizens who are not sufficiently trained to use subtler means. As Bob Dylan sang, quite truly for such a dissolute person, far more can be taken from people with a fountain pen than with a gun. All physical bodies are sacred, from assault, attack and so on, or at least from murder. There may, unfortunately need to be beatings in schools and the home, husbands may have to beat their wives to control them, but anyone who murders someone must be exterminated.
The one exception to this is, of course, self-defence. We should punish those who attack others with extreme harshness, and this right should be held by individuals as well as the State. We all have the right to defend ourselves, and if you sincerely believe that you are about to be attacked, you should pre-emptively destroy your attacker. We should not wait until it is too late.
Of course, if it turns out either at the personal or international level that you made a mistake, you should be treated with forgiveness. All humans make mistakes, and you cannot always read the signals correctly. Since your enemies are inspired by Satan they are very cunning. An innocent smile, a suspicious absence of any weapons or any intent may be the most telling sign of an imminent attack. Get your defence in first. As long as it is clear that your motive is not greed or desperation, but rather protecting your way of life and body from the threats of evil people, you will be judged with understanding.
Our approach is that you should think in moral absolutes, excluding all middle of the road, equivocal, ambiguous, arguments. This can be applied to almost all of life. But let us give you two more examples of how to apply this approach.
Cleansing and protecting your purity against intruders
Your way of life is threatened by hordes of people with strange beliefs and customs, who do not necessarily share your values. Up to a certain point it is possible to absorb small numbers of such peoples to do the jobs which you do not want to do. This may be necessary and even advantageous. Many of your nations are really a composite of waves of immigrants. But enough is enough. Your culture will be submerged by these ‘waves’. Your identity will be lost. Yours jobs will be stolen, your daughters seduced. You must protect yourself and cleanse yourself.
We have great experience in this field since our Holy Father presided over many experiments to cleanse the blood of the Holy Nations which he controlled. The Spanish, Italian and other national governments searched out the impure blood of outsiders, people who had originally contributed somewhat to these countries, but were later surplus to requirements. They expelled or placed into ghettoes the Jews, the Africans (Moors), the non-conformists from the north. ‘Pure blood’ was what was involved and all dirty blood had to be drained away.
We advise you to do the same thing. It may be a little late to eradicate those impure lumps in your midst, the Indians, Bangladeshis, Ugandan Asian, peoples from the Caribbean and so on. The calls to ‘send them back to where they came from’ sound a little hollow when they were mostly born and brought up here. But you can stop the flow. The new threat to your purity, as you know well, are the fresh ‘waves’ of asylum seekers. To these must be added a new wave of educational migrants, hordes of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and others who come over to learn about your society, then either stay and take your jobs, or go back with your technological secrets to their countries.
So, be on your guard against all these. Set very low quotas for educational immigrants. Devise clever rules requiring those who want to seek asylum to read the notices in English (a language they often do not speak) warning them to apply for asylum as they arrive during the chaotic and traumatic fifteen minute walk from their planes to immigration. If they fail to apply immediately, ship them home for breaking that condition. Think about transit camps, as I gather you are already doing, perhaps an island off Australia, as the Australians have done, or in some other distant land. There people can be held indefinitely in asylum camps or in other remote areas. There are innumerable methods open to you once you have plucked up courage.
You must never let the consideration that you are cutting your creativity, diversity and energy by keeping out large groups of people who have in the past made you what you are, deflect you from this worthy track. Such an argument never deterred the Spanish and they were prepared to sacrifice their cultural, economic and social system and see their Empire stagnate in order to follow the holy path of the pure blood of a Christian civilization. You should be prepared to make the same sacrifice and if necessary watch the creativity of diversity go elsewhere.
Nor should you let any sentimental attachments to international conventions or the history of tolerance and accepting refugees sway your judgement. It was all very well when Hitler was on the rampage and your parents brought you over. But now you are too crowded, too frightened, too moral to follow that example. We cannot afford the luxury of international conventions or the due process of law. You are, let us remind you, in a war. The countries from which these people are now coming are often ruled by wicked governors who are part of the Evil conspiracy. The asylum or job seekers themselves are often not Christians. Imagine if boat-loads of Saracens had arrived in France or England trying to escape the massacres of Tamburlaine and the Mongols in the fourteenth century. They would have got short shrift and been lucky only to be sent packing.
You now have a perfectly valid and good reason for pulling up the draw-bridge. Every asylum seeker is a potential spy, terrorist, underminer of your way of life. You are at war. Boatloads of Germans in 1941 would not have been any less welcome. Send them home, spread stories of their vices and their evil. Starve them of all support if they are here so they are forced into crime, and then use their misbehaviour as evidence that they should never have been let in the first place.
It is all a matter of principle. You got here first. You have worked to build this place up. Your comforts and securities must come first – and last. Charity begins and, I am afraid in this case, ends at home. You are pure (or have become purified from your mongrel origins through time) and must not be sullied.
That self-murder is always evil
Finally, there is the last example we’d like to give, that is the morality of death, or rather keeping alive. The basis of all your thoughts and morality must be a rigid distinction between life – which is God-given – and death, which is the work of Satan. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ was one of the Ten Commandments and it applies at both ends of the life cycle. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ an unborn child, or even a sperm cell, or a part of an embryo (so no stem cell research please). And thou shalt not kill at the other end, you must not help people to die or to practice ‘euthanasia’, that sly word meaning a ‘good death’, as if aiding people to murder (even themselves) could ever be good.
Of course ‘thou shalt not kill’ only applies to the redeemed and the saved. It is permitted to kill the wicked minions of Satan, the enemies whose cities you bomb or children you kill. Likewise you can kill the internal monsters, the criminals who do Satan’s will and should, as we mentioned, be executed. But other killing (apart from the decimation of animals of course) is always wrong.
So do not let a squeamish softness seduce you. Even if a person is terminally ill, with no hope of a decent life, in great pain, and she and all her loved ones entreat that she be allowed to die in dignity and at the time of her choice, this must never be allowed. Who are we to extinguish the spark that God has sent before his merciful hand extinguishes it?
God has counted every hair on your heads. He knows of the death of every sparrow. He has numbered your days and we have no right to shorten them for your own selfish purposes. Suicide has always been a serious crime in Christianity and for good reason. It questions God’s love and his mercy. It asks whether the pain and hopelessness you sometimes feel is for a purpose.
Of course it is. You need to feel God’s rod on your backs as Christ felt the scourge on his back and the nails in his hands and feet. If He could suffer and die at God’s will, so can we. Let there be no more talk of euthanasia or such-like. Let Christ’s kingdom defend your lives, as God gave us, without question or alternative. Black and white must never be mixed. Grey, mixtures of any kind, are intolerable. You must live in a clear, certain and secure world. You must get back to fundamentals and absolutes and cleanse this world of all the wicked compromises and false tolerance which the Devil has whispered into the ears of the so-called liberals.
You live in a wicked world and such is its wickedness that many people do not even recognize the degree of its depravity. You must morally re-arm yourselves, for without this central spiritual core of high morality you cannot hope to defeat the Devil and all His works.
Clearly the first step is to see the world in terms of deeply opposed good and evil once again. The worst believers are those who, as St. Paul said, are neither hot nor cold. Infidels are at least clear-cut and you can convert or exterminate them. But lukewarm, dissembling, outwardly pious folk who nevertheless seldom attend church, do not bring their children up to be zealous, who equivocate on moral issues, who will not accept Christ fully into their hearts to redeem them, these are the real danger and must be flushed out.
This world is a moral battleground and people, as in war, are either for us or against us. There can be no greys (or gays, for that matter, with their ambivalent sexuality), no awkward ambiguities and half opinions, all is either white – Christian, pure, right, wholesome, blessed – or black – non-Christian, impure, wrong, unwholesome, damned and Evil. So you should push for these good and pure things, and shun the works of the Devil in every sphere of life.
We will not go into detail over this since you are already doing a good job rolling back the permissive and over-tolerant world of the 1960’s, when the corruptions of too much sudden wealth and individualism so quickly sapped away the foundations of Christ’s world. Those obscene scenes of licence and debauchery, of relativist thought and action, where anything goes and nothing is certain: all that has got to go. You have to make a bonfire of the vanities and burn them to cinders. Yet it may be helpful to you to if we give a few examples which we draw from our the thoughts and actions of our holy father the Pope.
Sex and the absolute right to life
Firstly there is the troubled matter of sex. Sex has been turned into an industry and a frivolous and licentious matter. It has been debased into mere bodily carnality, a means to pleasure rather than an expression of God’s love. It is gross, revolting, demeaning and everywhere. It haunts your media and your dreams, it drives your economy, it perverts pure young minds, it even intrudes into your prayers. It has got completely out of hand. So you must crack down on the extremes.
Clearly you cannot do anything much about the sex industry itself, since much of your revenue comes from clubs and bars, advertizing, the media and so on, and most goods are sold by using sex in your western countries. To attack this would also be an infringement of human rights. It might also have the unfortunate effect of turning people from the enjoyments which divert their minds from criticizing you, to leaving them with more time to look at and question their world. No, leave pornography alone.
What we are thinking of is the obscene practice of interfering in the outcome of sex. We note that some of you have already withdrawn funding from organizations that encourage people in poor countries to avoid conception. That is a good start. It may be unfortunate that doing so takes away one of the main ways of combating AIDS, but Christ moves in mysterious ways and perhaps that is a blessing in disguise. Making it impossible for millions of poor people to engage in the vile practices of contraception which interferes with God’s will, will lead to numerous unwanted children, but many will die of AIDS, so that will balance things out. The guilt is not on your hands. If possible, try to extend the pressure against contraception more widely, close down family planning clinics, dis-invest in contraceptive research, shut down education on the subject.
To carry on along this line, let us remind you that all conceptions are blessed, life is in the seed itself (hence the need to halt contraception except by the natural ‘rhythm’ method endorsed by our Holy Father). From this it flows that any tampering or tinkering with a foetus, after the first conception, is Evil. Remember that we paid great attention to this in our original Malleus Maleficarum, singling out sexual offences and writing whole sections (quote a little? XX) to the way in which Satan and witches aborted foetuses and helped midwives commit infanticide. This is therefore a crucial area of concern.
The idea that women have rights over their own bodies, that they are anything more than vessels for God’s purpose, is obscene and must be squashed. All abortions, whatever the length of gestation, must be made illegal. Those who help women in this way should be treated like the witches who did the same thing. They must be imprisoned, and tortured if necessary to find out their accomplices. And if capital punishment for them may be a bit extreme, you should be lenient to those vigilantes who are already expressing their Christian indignation by bombing and assassinating such evil doers. There must be no grey areas in your treatment of the human body. All life is sacred, there must be no interference, let the fruits of evil intercourse be born.
As for what happens after birth that is not your concern. People have brought their misfortunes on themselves. If they will indulge in lust, if they will be feckless, poor, ill-educated, that is their decision. If the infants suffer and grow up deprived and stunted through lack of support they will provide a useful warning to others not to go around having illegitimate and unwanted children. Your duty is clear. While the foetus is in the womb, it is to the foetus, the precious life given by Christ, to the total exclusion of the mother, that we owe our duty. The mother, as many societies have correctly observed, is really only a kind of oven within which the child is baked. If the mother was raped, if the child is diagnosed as having a dreadful illness, you should still not allow abortions. It is a clear matter of right and wrong.
Then, when it is born, you should not interfere with Christ’s work. You have saved the life, it has its chance, it can sink or swim. You have averted murder, loosed the living being into the world where he or she and her parents must fend for themselves. This is the Holy Father’s way, and it should be yours. Anything else is the narrow end of a wedge which leads to unspeakable Evil, to the gas chambers and euthanasia.
How to be tough on crime, not the supposed causes of crime
Another area where you must be black and white is in relation to crime. There was an unfortunate period in the 1960’s onwards when relativistic disciplines like criminology, sociology and the other thinly disguised atheistical tendencies tried to persuade us that you should pay attention to the causes of crime. They tried to shift the victimhood from the victim to the criminal. They went on about the hopelessness, the poverty, the bad education, the joblessness, the drug culture, the unfairness which they claimed drove people to crime. They suggested that unless you tackled these, the problems of crime would continue. This is all patent nonsense. You know what causes crime, it is the Devil.
Basically criminals are Evil. They have wicked hearts which lead them to steal, mug old ladies and so on. You should not ask yourselves what drove them to this, since anyone can trot out excuses. Instead you should frighten and threaten and scold the potential criminals. You should arm your populace, as we are glad to see has happened in America, and arm your police. And if this does not work, you should catch the Evil ones and lock them away permanently out of sight.
We are pleased to see that your legal systems are moving in this direction, that the number of offences is steadily increasing, that the legal protections for these monsters are being whittled away, that ‘the balance is being tipped back’ towards the true victims, as you put it. We are glad to see that you are imprisoning more and more people, one in every 200 of the population in the United States we are told, and that you are building even more prisons and privatising the prison business.
One practical suggestion we might make here is that as the numbers increase, you may need even more space. Your predecessors sent off ship-loads of criminals to Australia and elsewhere. Surely you can find a few islands, perhaps hire a small Japanese island as you do for your military bases, and turn them into penal colonies? You could keep millions locked away in this way in some security, as the South African government did with trouble-making terrorists like Nelson Mandela.
This policy of draconian, ‘we are good and they are totally evil’, and evil for ever without hope of reform, plays very well with your people. Make them terrified of the criminals, arm your police if they are not already, make a parallel to the war on terrorism with a ‘war on crime’, and, to instil a Russian fear in them, call the person in charge a ‘War against crime Czar’, to go with the drugs Czar and all the other Czars who ‘fight’ against the evil ones. The ‘enemies’ here are the sub-class of criminals who fight against, and are entirely separate, from the good and the virtuous whom you represent.
*
Of course, when we say ‘crime’ you must be careful about what you include. We are talking of the vicious and evil physical crimes against property and the person, burglary, assault and so on. Activities which do not involve a direct physical attack, what you call white collar offences, are an entirely different matter. Indeed it would be better to refine the language so that these are no longer called ‘crimes’ but rather something like ‘breaking the rules’ or ‘infringements’ or ‘petty offences’.
What we mean here are bank fraud, fiddling taxes, corrupt behaviour in compnay law, insider dealing, money laundering, arms dealing, the sort of thing that has unfortunately engulfed large companies like Enron and World.com. Admittedly many of these involve huge sums of money which completely dwarf the petty pilfering and shop-lifting and burglary which are the offences of the people who fill your prisons. But you should not judge in terms of the scale or the rippling effects of the breaking of the rules. If you went down that path, then the murder of thousands in an illegal war might have to be set alongside homicide. What we are talking about is quality, differences of kind.
Your way of capitalist activity depends on trust, honesty, playing by the rules. The rules are complex and ever-changing and the art is to sail so close to the wind that one makes a profit. Occasionally people sail a little too close, or the wind slightly shifts, and the boom swings across and people are hurt. Millions may be hurt, small investors, pensioners, people whose lives are ruined by chemical disasters, people whose lives are destroyed by a flood of illegally imported weapons. But the people who cause these effects are not really criminals. They are just too avid players in the game.
We have had all this argument before in relation to the Holy Papacy, which was accused of many financial and other scams and irregularities. But the Cardinals were not imprisoned, just warned to be more careful in the future.
So, on the moral borderline between good and evil, you can place white collar offenders as basically good, but with a few weaknesses and stupidities which should be gently corrected. But those who in desperation or malice try to take a short-cut out of their situation by stealing a loaf of bread for a starving child, killing an abusive partner, stealing electronic goods to feed their drug addiction, they are perfectly Evil and the hammer must be brought down to crush them.
That these criminals are not just victims of their circumstances, ‘there but for the grace of God’ people, but intrinsically evil, minions of Satan, is well shown and realized by your newspaper editors and large sections of the general public. For instance, in a number of cases when little children of only eleven or twelve killed another child, they are immediately known to have been possessed by the Devil and are beyond redemption. They are pure Evil. There is no question of asking yourselves whether you have had murderous feelings towards friends or relatives or wished them dead. We could not possibly harbour such thoughts.
You are dealing with monsters. They were pure Evil at eleven or twelve and they will always be Evil. They should never be let out of prison. They should suffer for ever. If, unfortunately, some over-lenient judge lets them out, the mob should stone them to death, as it often feels like doing. Likewise the wives, accomplices or other close associates of serial killers are innately Evil for ever. However they dissemble and say they are reformed, they should not be trusted. However much the experts say that they are now different people and no possible threat to society, they are Evil and must not be allowed to come back and contaminate your purity.
How to extend capital punishment
Indeed, as you can see, the proper solution to all this is death. In minor cases, mutilation of limbs, branding so that the mark of Evil is always on them, transportation to another part of the world where they will no longer corrupt us may do. But in more serious cases the death penalty is really the only answer. In earlier periods in your countries, a person who stole goods worth over one shilling would be hanged. Certainly all murderers would be hanged. This excellent punishment, which eliminates the Evil person entirely, extinguishes them, snuffs out the incarnation of the Devil is, we are glad to see, widespread in may parts of your Empires. And we are pleased to see that some of your Christian leaders exercized their judgement in a way which led to hundreds of executions. This is God’s holy work.
Yet, unfortunately, there are wide areas where the death penalty has been abolished. We suggest that to reverse this where it has happened you do not try to bring back too much at once. Start with a few offences which many would agree are particularly horrific, say the murder of a policeman, a small child, terrorism, serial killing. Once there are some capital offences, it is very easy to extend the list, the principle, praise God, having been re-introduced. Nowadays, with your excellent ‘three strikes’ legislation, a person can be imprisoned for twenty years or more for stealing a pizza. Why not capital punishment for such a person?
This would have another advantage. Not only would it extinguish Evil, but it would save money. You should move to the excellent system which China used to have (unfortunately, in emulation of your too lenient practices they are giving this up now), whereby as soon as someone was found guilty they were taken out and shot. No lingering in uncertainty for twenty years on death row. No, a bullet through the head or lethal injection to dispense with them like an animal, which is what they have become. That would certainly lower the prison population and might (though unfortunately studies are not clear on this) act as a deterrent.
The need for self-defence in a world of Evil
What we are driving at in general is the ridding of your society of all greyness, ambiguity, relativism, over-tolerance. All life is sacred – at least until birth. No fiddling there. All property is sacred, at least from the physical attacks by citizens who are not sufficiently trained to use subtler means. As Bob Dylan sang, quite truly for such a dissolute person, far more can be taken from people with a fountain pen than with a gun. All physical bodies are sacred, from assault, attack and so on, or at least from murder. There may, unfortunately need to be beatings in schools and the home, husbands may have to beat their wives to control them, but anyone who murders someone must be exterminated.
The one exception to this is, of course, self-defence. We should punish those who attack others with extreme harshness, and this right should be held by individuals as well as the State. We all have the right to defend ourselves, and if you sincerely believe that you are about to be attacked, you should pre-emptively destroy your attacker. We should not wait until it is too late.
Of course, if it turns out either at the personal or international level that you made a mistake, you should be treated with forgiveness. All humans make mistakes, and you cannot always read the signals correctly. Since your enemies are inspired by Satan they are very cunning. An innocent smile, a suspicious absence of any weapons or any intent may be the most telling sign of an imminent attack. Get your defence in first. As long as it is clear that your motive is not greed or desperation, but rather protecting your way of life and body from the threats of evil people, you will be judged with understanding.
Our approach is that you should think in moral absolutes, excluding all middle of the road, equivocal, ambiguous, arguments. This can be applied to almost all of life. But let us give you two more examples of how to apply this approach.
Cleansing and protecting your purity against intruders
Your way of life is threatened by hordes of people with strange beliefs and customs, who do not necessarily share your values. Up to a certain point it is possible to absorb small numbers of such peoples to do the jobs which you do not want to do. This may be necessary and even advantageous. Many of your nations are really a composite of waves of immigrants. But enough is enough. Your culture will be submerged by these ‘waves’. Your identity will be lost. Yours jobs will be stolen, your daughters seduced. You must protect yourself and cleanse yourself.
We have great experience in this field since our Holy Father presided over many experiments to cleanse the blood of the Holy Nations which he controlled. The Spanish, Italian and other national governments searched out the impure blood of outsiders, people who had originally contributed somewhat to these countries, but were later surplus to requirements. They expelled or placed into ghettoes the Jews, the Africans (Moors), the non-conformists from the north. ‘Pure blood’ was what was involved and all dirty blood had to be drained away.
We advise you to do the same thing. It may be a little late to eradicate those impure lumps in your midst, the Indians, Bangladeshis, Ugandan Asian, peoples from the Caribbean and so on. The calls to ‘send them back to where they came from’ sound a little hollow when they were mostly born and brought up here. But you can stop the flow. The new threat to your purity, as you know well, are the fresh ‘waves’ of asylum seekers. To these must be added a new wave of educational migrants, hordes of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and others who come over to learn about your society, then either stay and take your jobs, or go back with your technological secrets to their countries.
So, be on your guard against all these. Set very low quotas for educational immigrants. Devise clever rules requiring those who want to seek asylum to read the notices in English (a language they often do not speak) warning them to apply for asylum as they arrive during the chaotic and traumatic fifteen minute walk from their planes to immigration. If they fail to apply immediately, ship them home for breaking that condition. Think about transit camps, as I gather you are already doing, perhaps an island off Australia, as the Australians have done, or in some other distant land. There people can be held indefinitely in asylum camps or in other remote areas. There are innumerable methods open to you once you have plucked up courage.
You must never let the consideration that you are cutting your creativity, diversity and energy by keeping out large groups of people who have in the past made you what you are, deflect you from this worthy track. Such an argument never deterred the Spanish and they were prepared to sacrifice their cultural, economic and social system and see their Empire stagnate in order to follow the holy path of the pure blood of a Christian civilization. You should be prepared to make the same sacrifice and if necessary watch the creativity of diversity go elsewhere.
Nor should you let any sentimental attachments to international conventions or the history of tolerance and accepting refugees sway your judgement. It was all very well when Hitler was on the rampage and your parents brought you over. But now you are too crowded, too frightened, too moral to follow that example. We cannot afford the luxury of international conventions or the due process of law. You are, let us remind you, in a war. The countries from which these people are now coming are often ruled by wicked governors who are part of the Evil conspiracy. The asylum or job seekers themselves are often not Christians. Imagine if boat-loads of Saracens had arrived in France or England trying to escape the massacres of Tamburlaine and the Mongols in the fourteenth century. They would have got short shrift and been lucky only to be sent packing.
You now have a perfectly valid and good reason for pulling up the draw-bridge. Every asylum seeker is a potential spy, terrorist, underminer of your way of life. You are at war. Boatloads of Germans in 1941 would not have been any less welcome. Send them home, spread stories of their vices and their evil. Starve them of all support if they are here so they are forced into crime, and then use their misbehaviour as evidence that they should never have been let in the first place.
It is all a matter of principle. You got here first. You have worked to build this place up. Your comforts and securities must come first – and last. Charity begins and, I am afraid in this case, ends at home. You are pure (or have become purified from your mongrel origins through time) and must not be sullied.
That self-murder is always evil
Finally, there is the last example we’d like to give, that is the morality of death, or rather keeping alive. The basis of all your thoughts and morality must be a rigid distinction between life – which is God-given – and death, which is the work of Satan. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ was one of the Ten Commandments and it applies at both ends of the life cycle. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ an unborn child, or even a sperm cell, or a part of an embryo (so no stem cell research please). And thou shalt not kill at the other end, you must not help people to die or to practice ‘euthanasia’, that sly word meaning a ‘good death’, as if aiding people to murder (even themselves) could ever be good.
Of course ‘thou shalt not kill’ only applies to the redeemed and the saved. It is permitted to kill the wicked minions of Satan, the enemies whose cities you bomb or children you kill. Likewise you can kill the internal monsters, the criminals who do Satan’s will and should, as we mentioned, be executed. But other killing (apart from the decimation of animals of course) is always wrong.
So do not let a squeamish softness seduce you. Even if a person is terminally ill, with no hope of a decent life, in great pain, and she and all her loved ones entreat that she be allowed to die in dignity and at the time of her choice, this must never be allowed. Who are we to extinguish the spark that God has sent before his merciful hand extinguishes it?
God has counted every hair on your heads. He knows of the death of every sparrow. He has numbered your days and we have no right to shorten them for your own selfish purposes. Suicide has always been a serious crime in Christianity and for good reason. It questions God’s love and his mercy. It asks whether the pain and hopelessness you sometimes feel is for a purpose.
Of course it is. You need to feel God’s rod on your backs as Christ felt the scourge on his back and the nails in his hands and feet. If He could suffer and die at God’s will, so can we. Let there be no more talk of euthanasia or such-like. Let Christ’s kingdom defend your lives, as God gave us, without question or alternative. Black and white must never be mixed. Grey, mixtures of any kind, are intolerable. You must live in a clear, certain and secure world. You must get back to fundamentals and absolutes and cleanse this world of all the wicked compromises and false tolerance which the Devil has whispered into the ears of the so-called liberals.
6. What legal weapons are available to you?
What legal weapons are available to you?
The terrorists, or servants of Satan, are a particularly difficult target in a war. So you have to plan our approach very carefully. It is here that our experience is most relevant since our deadly foes, the witches, were an equally secretive, maniacal and deadly foe and we had to devise special methods to deal with them. Perhaps we can suggest some ways to improve your rather amateur methods of discovering, trying and destroying terrorists?
How to hunt down the terrorists
Firstly find your terrorist. Since they are so secretive and they can work at a distance through means equivalent to the magical methods of witches (sending anthrax through the post, corrupting computer systems in cyberspace etc), they are very hard to find. So you need means which are not used against ordinary criminals.
One method is criminal ‘profiling’. We knew a witch from her looks. She looked like a witch – old, ugly, angry-faced, dirty. Terrorists often give themselves away by their looks. They are usually young, of middle Eastern origin, often with beards.
Witches behaved in a suspect way. They muttered to themselves, harassed their neighbours by constantly begging, cursed people, flew into rages, threatened people, kept small pets which were their ‘familiars’. Modern terrorists go to mosques where they listen to radical clerics, they read books by certain thinkers, they have bank accounts with a surprising amount of money in them, they spend periods of time in suspect countries in the middle East, they consort with other suspects.
All these profiles lead to a prima facie case that they are terrorists and justify you in raiding their houses at dawn, hand-cuffing them, putting them in solitary confinement without charge for some months. But if you cannot obtain more evidence than this, even after long interrogation of a degrading kind, often verging on, or employing, torture, then you will probably finally have to release them after some months or years.
This is unfortunate, but you live in societies where busy-body lawyers and others seem not to realize that the best thing would be to eradicate all suspects at this stage, or at least to send them back to the infidel countries from which they come.
So you will need a little more evidence to rid yourself of them. One obvious technique is to use spies. In our case we used inquisitors, who dressed as ordinary citizens or joined in suspect organizations, ‘infiltrated’ in your language. They then laid bare the plots. We also had bribed informants. Furthermore we encouraged people to spy on each other, and thoughtfully provided in all our cities boxes into which people could drop a letter informing on their neighbours. In your age you should start an anonymous web-site to which people could send messages of accusation against their friends and neighbours.
Since those accused were not told who had informed against them, or even what they were accused of, there was no danger for the accuser. The fact that some of the accusations were made out of pure malice or as a result of a grudge, and turned out to be inaccurate, was a small price to pay for much valuable information.
How to spread the net wider; the use of accusations and especially children
Our most useful method, however, was to penetrate a nest of witches, and then systematically to work through the network of contacts. An old woman would be brought in as a suspect. She would be deprived of sleep for long periods, told that she would be burnt unless she confessed. She would be suspended with heavy weights attached to her feet, or put on a rack and her joints slowly pulled apart, or splinters inserted under her nails, or her feet slowly crushed.
We know that you have your equivalents with electric shocks, burning with cigarette ends, immersion in freezing water and air, ‘waterboarding’ (almost drowning people on a wooden board which tips into the water again and again), playing unbearably loud music or ‘white sound’ that nearly destroys the ear drums and so on. We gather that one Harvard Professor of Law’s suggested method is exactly the same as ours of splinters under the nails – extraordinarily painful, yet leaving no long-term marks.
You may like to use another favourite technique of ours. A suspect was told that her sentence would be lightened if she named her accomplices. Instead of being burnt alive in excruciating pain, she would be strangled before death, for example. Then all sorts of names of possible accomplices would be read out to her – implying that the evidence was already very strong against them and she was just adding another stick to their pyre. All she had to do was to confirm that they were fellow witches. Sometimes this uncovered whole nests of these vermin.
Children were particularly helpful. If an older person was suspected, we decided that contrary to the situation with ordinary criminals, the evidence of their children, their husbands or wives, or other close relatives was admissible. It is amazing what some threats or bribes will affect in a young child. This was a wonderful method in our medieval trials and we understand that the evidence of young people in their teens was particularly useful in the glorious persecution of witches in Salem, Massachusetts at a later period.
We know that you have adopted some of these methods. We know that you arrest people, hold them in solitary confinement without formal charges, keep them in degrading conditions which wear them down physically, deprive them of sleep, set dogs on them, urinate on them, force them to masturbate or have sex in front of you, beat and electrify them. We have seen photographs of all this. We know that the purpose of all this torture must be to get ‘credible information’ for use against others. These methods indeed are rightly defended by you as necessary in order to uncover the cells of the terrorists. And sensibly, when through some foolishness the more extreme methods become known to the public you claim that it was just one or two ‘rotten apples’ that caused it and you knew nothing about it.
We also know that you use the technique which we found so effective, which is to tell a particular individual that all sorts of things about his or her activities have been already revealed by another named person, and ask him to make counter-accusations against that person. You have, of course, made this up, but the technique often softens people up, puts them in a state of constant anxiety, undermines any resolve they have to hold out against you.
Yet while you are to be commended on adopting methods which were also used so effectively by Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao in their successful ferreting out of traitors, you still, to us at least, seem to pull your punches a bit.
While children were encouraged to destroy their parents and other adults in Satanic child abuse cases, as in our time, we have not heard so much about their use in anti-terrorism cases. Perhaps they are herded up and tricked or tortured into revealing their parents’ activities. Or perhaps you just bomb and shoot them as part of ‘collateral damage’ to a suspected person’s imprisonment, thus deterring future traitors in a form of collective retribution which was a mainstay of most States through history. Yet we would urge you that you should look into better use of children’s evidence. They often have their grievances and in their mixture of fact and fantasy, it is very easy to get them to say what you like with strong suggestions and leading questions. We recommend this to you as a tried and tested method.
The need to force confessions
Then there is the question of how, having got your terrorists in prison, you convict them. How can you prove them guilty so that there can be no question in any one’s mind?
We believe that we adopted the best solution, which was embodied in the heart of the legal system of most of Europe from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. This is to force the accused to confess their guilt, preferably publicly, but at least in a signed confession. This method was clearly first rate, since it is also the one which Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao employed, two great thinkers in this field. For them, and particularly Stalin, confession was essential before a person could be executed by a firing squad.
If you use this method, of course, you need to be able to force a confession. You will know for certain that they are guilty, even if the evidence is nearly always below the level of normal criminal proof, circumstantial and hearsay rather than factual. But we believed that they must be forced to confess this.
So the question of how to prove guilt became quite a narrow technical one. What methods can you employ to cause the most pain and anxiety to a human being without actually killing them? Since this is such an important matter, and one where you have learnt a good deal, though you still seem occasionally a little squeamish, we refer you to the manuals for the torture of heretics which we and others wrote.
The need to change the legal process of trials
We must say, however, that though, in effect, you are using most of the methods which we found so helpful, secretly trying to extract confessions using methods tantamount to torture, your modern new-fangled legal procedures seem to pose considerable obstacles. You have inherited concepts completely opposite to ours. We believed that a person was guilty until proven innocent; some of your lawyers talk about ‘the presumption of innocence’ and ‘innocent unless proven guilty’. Your activists say that a person should be represented by a trained lawyer to stop them being entrapped. They say that a person should have a fair and open trial which the public can attend. They say that a jury, free from political or other pressure, should stand between the accused and the power of the State.
Fortunately you have managed to persuade your people that in view of the fact that you are in a (constant) state of war, these legal provisions should be dispensed with. The right to know what you have been accused of, of being brought to trial rather than lying untried for years, of access to friends, family and legal advice, of being brought before judges who are not part of the State’s direct machine (for example military judges), all of these, we note, have been briskly wiped away or weakened.
Your politicians, who enact overnight new legal provisions, may not have had the time to read through the legislation which give vastly heightened powers to the State and destroy the traditional separation of legal and political power. They can lie easy in their beds, however, for they know that the clumsy old liberties of the citizen are worth suspending for the duration of this war.
The short, quick, way to eradicating your enemies
Even with all this, you seem a little reluctant to go the whole way and return to the fine system we established. Why not return to the clean and efficient method which was good enough for us, our successors and Stalin? Why not simply state that all those you hold will only be executed if they admit their guilt by a signed confession? This looks a very reasonable policy. People will only be punished on their own decision. And then, of course, you can torture them with as refined methods as possible until they confess.
You are very likely to get those confessions. We were pretty successful, but there has been a great deal of research since our time on the best psychological techniques, and refined physical ones which leave no physical mark. Hardly anyone could withstand you for a few months.
If they do resist you for a while, you can easily justify your continued tortures by pointing out that Satan makes witches (and terrorists), particularly obdurate and almost oblivious to pain. In our day, their broken bones and screams of pain only redoubled Satan’s efforts to prevent them from confessing. So, very extreme methods are needed to press and crush out what we know to be the truth. One of your leaders very fairly stated that the people in one of your major prisons were all evil people, even before they had been formally accused, let alone tried. So why do you hesitate?
Always remember the unanswerable argument to anyone who suggests that you should preserve the basic tenets of the post-Enlightenment rule of law. If a terrorist is in prison and knows the whereabouts of a bomb which will explode and kill hundreds of innocent people, is it not right to torture him or her in any way that works in order to potentially save many lives? Better a few people are tortured, if necessary to death, than that hundreds of innocents die. The old adage that it is better that several guilty men go free rather than one innocent man be falsely punished is clearly untenable in the face of terrorism. Pinochet, Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin and your own troops in Algeria, Vietnam and elsewhere soon grasped this point and behaved accordingly. You should never forget it nor succumb to doubts as to whether the system you are erecting is as savage and arbitrary as that of your enemies.
You might learn a little here from some governments which believe in pre-emptive strikes. There was a brief period in the later twentieth century when it was believed that it was wrong for a State to assassinate its believed enemies without trial. Yet in the face of threats this very quickly reversed. You have the ‘smart’ bombs, the helicopter gun-ships. You have the spies and hidden sensors which enable you to ‘profile’ likely suspects. They are vermin and should be assassinated before they even have a chance to raid your chicken yard. And if some of their families and friends and ‘innocent’ civilians are killed in the process, that is unfortunate. But if they will consort with people you know are terrorists, they really cannot complain too much.
A way around some obstacles
If you used this method against all terrorists you would be more effective. Profile them, place them in a network, then torture or kill them. War is not a time to be squeamish. A huntsman who hesitates as the tiger leaps will be dead. The ends justify the means. You must use all means available and those who are part of the ‘collateral damage’ are a necessary cost. Remember, this is a total war. When you hunt animals, you do not always have time or knowledge to avoid other species, their bodies can be discarded. As long as you weed out the vermin.
If, by extreme mismanagement or bad luck, your lawyers obdurately refuse to allow torture to take place on your own homeland, there are many ways to subcontract this work out. Designate certain areas which you control, but are not in your territory, as centres for detention. We believe that this is called ‘extreme rendition’ and that your most powerful leader has recently defended this when it was unfortunately revealed that hundreds of suspects were secretly being held in foreign prisons. Whey people should be squeamish about this, it is difficult to say, for it is a great advantage that they are not subject to your law, though they are in your power. Do the torturing there. Ensure that your judges rule that even if you cannot torture yourself, if others do the job for you, their good work can be used by you. Get them to rule that evidence gained under torture is admissible in your legal system, as long as it was done by someone else. Then send suspects off to centres of excellence in torture methods and wait for the evidence.
The need to strike on the basis of intent rather than action
You will know that one of the pillars of your legal traditions in the past was that a person could only be tried for an offence they had committed, or were obviously about to commit. In the case of witches or now terrorists, this pillar must be pulled down. Just as Thomas Hobbes argued that if a person believed that if a person believed that saying a few words and waving his hat over someone’s head would cause them to die, and then carried out this act, the intention was enough for the State to execute them, so you must act in the same way. If some foolish person has the intention to cause harm, even if they could possibly not do so, they should be severely punished. Furthermore, you should try to guess long-term intent. You cannot afford to wait until a terrorist strikes. The risks are so great that even if people meet in a pub for a chat and talk about what they might do, that is enough to lock them up out of harm’s way. You must strike first even before even the planning has begun.
This means, when combined with the other methods described above, that you can decide that you will order the arrest of an individual who has done nothing very definite, said nothing in itself treasonable, but seems to be somewhat suspect. If possible, enact laws so that they can be held indefinitely, without being told their offence or tried, just in case. The gulags of Stalin or thought trials of Chairman Mao are in this tradition, and we are pleased to see that you have set up a gigantic camp in just outside your normal jurisdiction so that you can continue this tradition. This will mean that anyone who makes any criticism of the government, particularly if they are from an ethnic minority, will realize that this could lead to detention without trial or deportation.
Perhaps the best model was in previous wars. You did it in the Second World War, when thousands of Japanese were herded up and imprisoned in America on the single grounds that they were Japanese. Thousands of suspects were similarly imprisoned without charge or trial in Britain, just in case. The same thing happened in the Vietnamese war. Now that you are permanently at war, this could well become a permanent feature of our landscape. You will find not only that the normal criminal population rises, but that ever greater numbers of persons are arrested, or placed under house arrest in the way they were in South Africa under apartheid. You can do all this in the name of fighting for ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. After all is it not the government’s duty to protect its people, which is paramount and over-rides everything else. Every individual right, including the right to freedom and a fair trial, must be put on one side to guard your citizens from their devious enemies. For what is more important, freedom from being bombed, or the rights of individuals?
The best way to punish the Evil ones
This takes us finally to the punishment for terrorists. Here again you seem a little confused and sometimes even squeamish. These are not just criminals, or even human beings. They are deadly enemies, but not subject to the protection of enemy combatants. They may argue that they are fighting for their homeland, their families, their rights and dignity. These you know are lies, not worth arguing with.
Your enemies, like our witches, are non-human, beasts, whose bodies should be mutilated and their names blotted out from human history. We had a good way of punishing them. We first paraded them in ignominy through our streets, the marks of their shame placed on them in long hats and over-garments with flames on to show they would be burnt. The crowd could scream, or be terrified. We took away all their property and so made their whole family destitute.
Then we tied them to a stake and burnt them alive in front of the crowds. This was called the auto da fé and was a grand carnival or theatrical performance, which entertained, admonished and terrified at the same time. It also ensured that their bodies could not be buried as Christians. They were dust and ashes, blotted out from memory.
We suspect that returning to such a salutary system might meet some resistance in your nations. But at least, for God’s sake, kill them. We know that your are trying to do this. We believe, as we expect you do, that if you continue to panic your populations enough even where the death penalty currently does not exist, the capital punishment for terrorism will be introduced.
If you could also bring in a law to confiscate all their property and to make their names infamous, that would be even better. As for the method of execution, I suppose you will have to settle for the firing squad, lethal injections, noose or electric chair, your preferred methods. More educational methods, like hanging, drawing and quartering, or even burning alive, you have to leave to a braver, more self-confident, past age. Do what you can, in the Name of God.
That it is necessary to forget the past
Your critics may say that one of the tragedies of what is happening in the brave war you are fighting against terrorists is that you have become just as bad as the enemies you have sought to fight. We use their methods and debase the civilization which you claim to be defending. With torture and threat, you defend yourselves by winding up the very freedoms which you say you uphold. It often feels as if minds have grown crooked fighting crooked minds. They say that this has happened before many times, and you are repeating the mistakes.
Such evil doubters say that any serious knowledge of previous battles against so-called evil threats, from the Albigensian heretics (Cathars), through other medieval heretics, witches, Jews, communists under McCarthy and supposed satanic child abusers has shown a consistent pattern. A panic has arisen, sometimes based on complete fantasy, sometimes with a core of real threat which has been vastly inflated. The legal system has been tampered with to make it easier to convict people. A vast conspiracy has been unearthed using the new methods. And then, decades or centuries later, when hundreds of thousands of people in some case have been slaughtered, it is realized that it was the legal methods which then created the supposed objects of the attack.
Witches did not exist. Jews did exist but were not guilty of the crimes they were accused of. Most communists were not part of the plot of which they were accused.. Their numbers and their danger was multiplied immensely once the usual safeguards of the liberty of the citizen were cut away.
Your critics say that the same is true of terrorism. They say it is a nightmare largely caused by the methods used to face it. Just as the Japanese and other interned people were released at the end of the Second World War and found to have been harmless, so, in the future, they say, if we ever escape from this nightmare which has been created out of a conspiracy between you and your opponents, we will discover the same result. We will wonder why so many lives were wasted and anger and resentment increased by what is perceived in many parts of the world as patently unfair treatment for no sensible purpose.
There are indeed many apparent parallels and if people knew of them they might withdraw their backing from you. So in the well tried and established method, erase history. Say that there is no parallel with previous persecutions because the terrorists are something entirely new and more terrible. But best of all, cover over history and experience, or re-write it. He who controls the present also controls the past and hence the future. Imagine away all the past gulags, persecutions, failures, and make a brave new world for peace-loving peoples cleansed of the nightmare of evil.
The terrorists, or servants of Satan, are a particularly difficult target in a war. So you have to plan our approach very carefully. It is here that our experience is most relevant since our deadly foes, the witches, were an equally secretive, maniacal and deadly foe and we had to devise special methods to deal with them. Perhaps we can suggest some ways to improve your rather amateur methods of discovering, trying and destroying terrorists?
How to hunt down the terrorists
Firstly find your terrorist. Since they are so secretive and they can work at a distance through means equivalent to the magical methods of witches (sending anthrax through the post, corrupting computer systems in cyberspace etc), they are very hard to find. So you need means which are not used against ordinary criminals.
One method is criminal ‘profiling’. We knew a witch from her looks. She looked like a witch – old, ugly, angry-faced, dirty. Terrorists often give themselves away by their looks. They are usually young, of middle Eastern origin, often with beards.
Witches behaved in a suspect way. They muttered to themselves, harassed their neighbours by constantly begging, cursed people, flew into rages, threatened people, kept small pets which were their ‘familiars’. Modern terrorists go to mosques where they listen to radical clerics, they read books by certain thinkers, they have bank accounts with a surprising amount of money in them, they spend periods of time in suspect countries in the middle East, they consort with other suspects.
All these profiles lead to a prima facie case that they are terrorists and justify you in raiding their houses at dawn, hand-cuffing them, putting them in solitary confinement without charge for some months. But if you cannot obtain more evidence than this, even after long interrogation of a degrading kind, often verging on, or employing, torture, then you will probably finally have to release them after some months or years.
This is unfortunate, but you live in societies where busy-body lawyers and others seem not to realize that the best thing would be to eradicate all suspects at this stage, or at least to send them back to the infidel countries from which they come.
So you will need a little more evidence to rid yourself of them. One obvious technique is to use spies. In our case we used inquisitors, who dressed as ordinary citizens or joined in suspect organizations, ‘infiltrated’ in your language. They then laid bare the plots. We also had bribed informants. Furthermore we encouraged people to spy on each other, and thoughtfully provided in all our cities boxes into which people could drop a letter informing on their neighbours. In your age you should start an anonymous web-site to which people could send messages of accusation against their friends and neighbours.
Since those accused were not told who had informed against them, or even what they were accused of, there was no danger for the accuser. The fact that some of the accusations were made out of pure malice or as a result of a grudge, and turned out to be inaccurate, was a small price to pay for much valuable information.
How to spread the net wider; the use of accusations and especially children
Our most useful method, however, was to penetrate a nest of witches, and then systematically to work through the network of contacts. An old woman would be brought in as a suspect. She would be deprived of sleep for long periods, told that she would be burnt unless she confessed. She would be suspended with heavy weights attached to her feet, or put on a rack and her joints slowly pulled apart, or splinters inserted under her nails, or her feet slowly crushed.
We know that you have your equivalents with electric shocks, burning with cigarette ends, immersion in freezing water and air, ‘waterboarding’ (almost drowning people on a wooden board which tips into the water again and again), playing unbearably loud music or ‘white sound’ that nearly destroys the ear drums and so on. We gather that one Harvard Professor of Law’s suggested method is exactly the same as ours of splinters under the nails – extraordinarily painful, yet leaving no long-term marks.
You may like to use another favourite technique of ours. A suspect was told that her sentence would be lightened if she named her accomplices. Instead of being burnt alive in excruciating pain, she would be strangled before death, for example. Then all sorts of names of possible accomplices would be read out to her – implying that the evidence was already very strong against them and she was just adding another stick to their pyre. All she had to do was to confirm that they were fellow witches. Sometimes this uncovered whole nests of these vermin.
Children were particularly helpful. If an older person was suspected, we decided that contrary to the situation with ordinary criminals, the evidence of their children, their husbands or wives, or other close relatives was admissible. It is amazing what some threats or bribes will affect in a young child. This was a wonderful method in our medieval trials and we understand that the evidence of young people in their teens was particularly useful in the glorious persecution of witches in Salem, Massachusetts at a later period.
We know that you have adopted some of these methods. We know that you arrest people, hold them in solitary confinement without formal charges, keep them in degrading conditions which wear them down physically, deprive them of sleep, set dogs on them, urinate on them, force them to masturbate or have sex in front of you, beat and electrify them. We have seen photographs of all this. We know that the purpose of all this torture must be to get ‘credible information’ for use against others. These methods indeed are rightly defended by you as necessary in order to uncover the cells of the terrorists. And sensibly, when through some foolishness the more extreme methods become known to the public you claim that it was just one or two ‘rotten apples’ that caused it and you knew nothing about it.
We also know that you use the technique which we found so effective, which is to tell a particular individual that all sorts of things about his or her activities have been already revealed by another named person, and ask him to make counter-accusations against that person. You have, of course, made this up, but the technique often softens people up, puts them in a state of constant anxiety, undermines any resolve they have to hold out against you.
Yet while you are to be commended on adopting methods which were also used so effectively by Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao in their successful ferreting out of traitors, you still, to us at least, seem to pull your punches a bit.
While children were encouraged to destroy their parents and other adults in Satanic child abuse cases, as in our time, we have not heard so much about their use in anti-terrorism cases. Perhaps they are herded up and tricked or tortured into revealing their parents’ activities. Or perhaps you just bomb and shoot them as part of ‘collateral damage’ to a suspected person’s imprisonment, thus deterring future traitors in a form of collective retribution which was a mainstay of most States through history. Yet we would urge you that you should look into better use of children’s evidence. They often have their grievances and in their mixture of fact and fantasy, it is very easy to get them to say what you like with strong suggestions and leading questions. We recommend this to you as a tried and tested method.
The need to force confessions
Then there is the question of how, having got your terrorists in prison, you convict them. How can you prove them guilty so that there can be no question in any one’s mind?
We believe that we adopted the best solution, which was embodied in the heart of the legal system of most of Europe from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. This is to force the accused to confess their guilt, preferably publicly, but at least in a signed confession. This method was clearly first rate, since it is also the one which Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao employed, two great thinkers in this field. For them, and particularly Stalin, confession was essential before a person could be executed by a firing squad.
If you use this method, of course, you need to be able to force a confession. You will know for certain that they are guilty, even if the evidence is nearly always below the level of normal criminal proof, circumstantial and hearsay rather than factual. But we believed that they must be forced to confess this.
So the question of how to prove guilt became quite a narrow technical one. What methods can you employ to cause the most pain and anxiety to a human being without actually killing them? Since this is such an important matter, and one where you have learnt a good deal, though you still seem occasionally a little squeamish, we refer you to the manuals for the torture of heretics which we and others wrote.
The need to change the legal process of trials
We must say, however, that though, in effect, you are using most of the methods which we found so helpful, secretly trying to extract confessions using methods tantamount to torture, your modern new-fangled legal procedures seem to pose considerable obstacles. You have inherited concepts completely opposite to ours. We believed that a person was guilty until proven innocent; some of your lawyers talk about ‘the presumption of innocence’ and ‘innocent unless proven guilty’. Your activists say that a person should be represented by a trained lawyer to stop them being entrapped. They say that a person should have a fair and open trial which the public can attend. They say that a jury, free from political or other pressure, should stand between the accused and the power of the State.
Fortunately you have managed to persuade your people that in view of the fact that you are in a (constant) state of war, these legal provisions should be dispensed with. The right to know what you have been accused of, of being brought to trial rather than lying untried for years, of access to friends, family and legal advice, of being brought before judges who are not part of the State’s direct machine (for example military judges), all of these, we note, have been briskly wiped away or weakened.
Your politicians, who enact overnight new legal provisions, may not have had the time to read through the legislation which give vastly heightened powers to the State and destroy the traditional separation of legal and political power. They can lie easy in their beds, however, for they know that the clumsy old liberties of the citizen are worth suspending for the duration of this war.
The short, quick, way to eradicating your enemies
Even with all this, you seem a little reluctant to go the whole way and return to the fine system we established. Why not return to the clean and efficient method which was good enough for us, our successors and Stalin? Why not simply state that all those you hold will only be executed if they admit their guilt by a signed confession? This looks a very reasonable policy. People will only be punished on their own decision. And then, of course, you can torture them with as refined methods as possible until they confess.
You are very likely to get those confessions. We were pretty successful, but there has been a great deal of research since our time on the best psychological techniques, and refined physical ones which leave no physical mark. Hardly anyone could withstand you for a few months.
If they do resist you for a while, you can easily justify your continued tortures by pointing out that Satan makes witches (and terrorists), particularly obdurate and almost oblivious to pain. In our day, their broken bones and screams of pain only redoubled Satan’s efforts to prevent them from confessing. So, very extreme methods are needed to press and crush out what we know to be the truth. One of your leaders very fairly stated that the people in one of your major prisons were all evil people, even before they had been formally accused, let alone tried. So why do you hesitate?
Always remember the unanswerable argument to anyone who suggests that you should preserve the basic tenets of the post-Enlightenment rule of law. If a terrorist is in prison and knows the whereabouts of a bomb which will explode and kill hundreds of innocent people, is it not right to torture him or her in any way that works in order to potentially save many lives? Better a few people are tortured, if necessary to death, than that hundreds of innocents die. The old adage that it is better that several guilty men go free rather than one innocent man be falsely punished is clearly untenable in the face of terrorism. Pinochet, Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin and your own troops in Algeria, Vietnam and elsewhere soon grasped this point and behaved accordingly. You should never forget it nor succumb to doubts as to whether the system you are erecting is as savage and arbitrary as that of your enemies.
You might learn a little here from some governments which believe in pre-emptive strikes. There was a brief period in the later twentieth century when it was believed that it was wrong for a State to assassinate its believed enemies without trial. Yet in the face of threats this very quickly reversed. You have the ‘smart’ bombs, the helicopter gun-ships. You have the spies and hidden sensors which enable you to ‘profile’ likely suspects. They are vermin and should be assassinated before they even have a chance to raid your chicken yard. And if some of their families and friends and ‘innocent’ civilians are killed in the process, that is unfortunate. But if they will consort with people you know are terrorists, they really cannot complain too much.
A way around some obstacles
If you used this method against all terrorists you would be more effective. Profile them, place them in a network, then torture or kill them. War is not a time to be squeamish. A huntsman who hesitates as the tiger leaps will be dead. The ends justify the means. You must use all means available and those who are part of the ‘collateral damage’ are a necessary cost. Remember, this is a total war. When you hunt animals, you do not always have time or knowledge to avoid other species, their bodies can be discarded. As long as you weed out the vermin.
If, by extreme mismanagement or bad luck, your lawyers obdurately refuse to allow torture to take place on your own homeland, there are many ways to subcontract this work out. Designate certain areas which you control, but are not in your territory, as centres for detention. We believe that this is called ‘extreme rendition’ and that your most powerful leader has recently defended this when it was unfortunately revealed that hundreds of suspects were secretly being held in foreign prisons. Whey people should be squeamish about this, it is difficult to say, for it is a great advantage that they are not subject to your law, though they are in your power. Do the torturing there. Ensure that your judges rule that even if you cannot torture yourself, if others do the job for you, their good work can be used by you. Get them to rule that evidence gained under torture is admissible in your legal system, as long as it was done by someone else. Then send suspects off to centres of excellence in torture methods and wait for the evidence.
The need to strike on the basis of intent rather than action
You will know that one of the pillars of your legal traditions in the past was that a person could only be tried for an offence they had committed, or were obviously about to commit. In the case of witches or now terrorists, this pillar must be pulled down. Just as Thomas Hobbes argued that if a person believed that if a person believed that saying a few words and waving his hat over someone’s head would cause them to die, and then carried out this act, the intention was enough for the State to execute them, so you must act in the same way. If some foolish person has the intention to cause harm, even if they could possibly not do so, they should be severely punished. Furthermore, you should try to guess long-term intent. You cannot afford to wait until a terrorist strikes. The risks are so great that even if people meet in a pub for a chat and talk about what they might do, that is enough to lock them up out of harm’s way. You must strike first even before even the planning has begun.
This means, when combined with the other methods described above, that you can decide that you will order the arrest of an individual who has done nothing very definite, said nothing in itself treasonable, but seems to be somewhat suspect. If possible, enact laws so that they can be held indefinitely, without being told their offence or tried, just in case. The gulags of Stalin or thought trials of Chairman Mao are in this tradition, and we are pleased to see that you have set up a gigantic camp in just outside your normal jurisdiction so that you can continue this tradition. This will mean that anyone who makes any criticism of the government, particularly if they are from an ethnic minority, will realize that this could lead to detention without trial or deportation.
Perhaps the best model was in previous wars. You did it in the Second World War, when thousands of Japanese were herded up and imprisoned in America on the single grounds that they were Japanese. Thousands of suspects were similarly imprisoned without charge or trial in Britain, just in case. The same thing happened in the Vietnamese war. Now that you are permanently at war, this could well become a permanent feature of our landscape. You will find not only that the normal criminal population rises, but that ever greater numbers of persons are arrested, or placed under house arrest in the way they were in South Africa under apartheid. You can do all this in the name of fighting for ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. After all is it not the government’s duty to protect its people, which is paramount and over-rides everything else. Every individual right, including the right to freedom and a fair trial, must be put on one side to guard your citizens from their devious enemies. For what is more important, freedom from being bombed, or the rights of individuals?
The best way to punish the Evil ones
This takes us finally to the punishment for terrorists. Here again you seem a little confused and sometimes even squeamish. These are not just criminals, or even human beings. They are deadly enemies, but not subject to the protection of enemy combatants. They may argue that they are fighting for their homeland, their families, their rights and dignity. These you know are lies, not worth arguing with.
Your enemies, like our witches, are non-human, beasts, whose bodies should be mutilated and their names blotted out from human history. We had a good way of punishing them. We first paraded them in ignominy through our streets, the marks of their shame placed on them in long hats and over-garments with flames on to show they would be burnt. The crowd could scream, or be terrified. We took away all their property and so made their whole family destitute.
Then we tied them to a stake and burnt them alive in front of the crowds. This was called the auto da fé and was a grand carnival or theatrical performance, which entertained, admonished and terrified at the same time. It also ensured that their bodies could not be buried as Christians. They were dust and ashes, blotted out from memory.
We suspect that returning to such a salutary system might meet some resistance in your nations. But at least, for God’s sake, kill them. We know that your are trying to do this. We believe, as we expect you do, that if you continue to panic your populations enough even where the death penalty currently does not exist, the capital punishment for terrorism will be introduced.
If you could also bring in a law to confiscate all their property and to make their names infamous, that would be even better. As for the method of execution, I suppose you will have to settle for the firing squad, lethal injections, noose or electric chair, your preferred methods. More educational methods, like hanging, drawing and quartering, or even burning alive, you have to leave to a braver, more self-confident, past age. Do what you can, in the Name of God.
That it is necessary to forget the past
Your critics may say that one of the tragedies of what is happening in the brave war you are fighting against terrorists is that you have become just as bad as the enemies you have sought to fight. We use their methods and debase the civilization which you claim to be defending. With torture and threat, you defend yourselves by winding up the very freedoms which you say you uphold. It often feels as if minds have grown crooked fighting crooked minds. They say that this has happened before many times, and you are repeating the mistakes.
Such evil doubters say that any serious knowledge of previous battles against so-called evil threats, from the Albigensian heretics (Cathars), through other medieval heretics, witches, Jews, communists under McCarthy and supposed satanic child abusers has shown a consistent pattern. A panic has arisen, sometimes based on complete fantasy, sometimes with a core of real threat which has been vastly inflated. The legal system has been tampered with to make it easier to convict people. A vast conspiracy has been unearthed using the new methods. And then, decades or centuries later, when hundreds of thousands of people in some case have been slaughtered, it is realized that it was the legal methods which then created the supposed objects of the attack.
Witches did not exist. Jews did exist but were not guilty of the crimes they were accused of. Most communists were not part of the plot of which they were accused.. Their numbers and their danger was multiplied immensely once the usual safeguards of the liberty of the citizen were cut away.
Your critics say that the same is true of terrorism. They say it is a nightmare largely caused by the methods used to face it. Just as the Japanese and other interned people were released at the end of the Second World War and found to have been harmless, so, in the future, they say, if we ever escape from this nightmare which has been created out of a conspiracy between you and your opponents, we will discover the same result. We will wonder why so many lives were wasted and anger and resentment increased by what is perceived in many parts of the world as patently unfair treatment for no sensible purpose.
There are indeed many apparent parallels and if people knew of them they might withdraw their backing from you. So in the well tried and established method, erase history. Say that there is no parallel with previous persecutions because the terrorists are something entirely new and more terrible. But best of all, cover over history and experience, or re-write it. He who controls the present also controls the past and hence the future. Imagine away all the past gulags, persecutions, failures, and make a brave new world for peace-loving peoples cleansed of the nightmare of evil.
Saturday, 3 March 2007
5:7 To know everything is to be fore-armed against Evil.
So all we are suggesting is that as the threat from those who wish to subvert your liberties and freedoms increase, the terrorists who are threatening us from every corner, so you have to arm yourselves. Be prepared with prior information. After the attack, it will be too late. Pick up the patterns, the suspicious behaviour, the potential threats so that you can interrogate those involved. The more ways in which you can penetrate the web of deceit that is being woven round us, the better.
Hopefully you yourselves will never be caught up in those webs of corruption and you will have to trust that whose who have access to all this information will be honourable. You cannot afford, at the moment, to worry as to how long this material is held, whether it is regularly checked for errors, how a person knows what is being held on them. States in times of war have to be realistic.
All this electronic and other surveillance is far more efficient and encompassing than the crude methods of spies and intercepted letters we had available when we were advising the Inquisition. You are indeed fortunate. Make use of your new opportunities. And if you ever have any doubts, remember that God sees into your innermost hearts and thoughts. Nothing is hidden from Him.
As His stewards and ministers here on earth, you have the responsibility and the mandate to do the same thing. Not to know everything would be sacrilegious. It is His will. Nothing should be hidden from you. All should be open, for those with nothing to hide will have no fear. As for the files themselves, the only other person who will know of their contents will be the Lord himself – and he knows their contents already. If knowledge is power, complete knowledge is complete power. You will have become, with due humility we hope, as God is to His people.
Hopefully you yourselves will never be caught up in those webs of corruption and you will have to trust that whose who have access to all this information will be honourable. You cannot afford, at the moment, to worry as to how long this material is held, whether it is regularly checked for errors, how a person knows what is being held on them. States in times of war have to be realistic.
All this electronic and other surveillance is far more efficient and encompassing than the crude methods of spies and intercepted letters we had available when we were advising the Inquisition. You are indeed fortunate. Make use of your new opportunities. And if you ever have any doubts, remember that God sees into your innermost hearts and thoughts. Nothing is hidden from Him.
As His stewards and ministers here on earth, you have the responsibility and the mandate to do the same thing. Not to know everything would be sacrilegious. It is His will. Nothing should be hidden from you. All should be open, for those with nothing to hide will have no fear. As for the files themselves, the only other person who will know of their contents will be the Lord himself – and he knows their contents already. If knowledge is power, complete knowledge is complete power. You will have become, with due humility we hope, as God is to His people.
5:6 From identity card to implanted identity chip.
The other great new technology is the identity chip. We call it the chip rather than the old-fashioned card because it is no longer a piece of paper, with all the limitations of that medium. Looked at in one way, it is your own personal sensor. It will contain biological information, the iris of the eye, the finger-print, DNA and this will be enough to make it unique, along with an unique identifier. It will be linked by wireless communication to central computers to all the other files. Critics will say that it is a form of electronic tagging for the whole population and they are, of course, right. But that is not how to present it.
By linking this personal tag to your criminal, medical, educational, tax, employment, census, financial, driving licence and other records, and constantly updating all of these with information from the sensors, the e-mails and phone surveillance, it will be possible to know all about a person. Whenever a State authority wants to check them out, he or she could put the card into a personalized wireless hand-held computer and have access to everything about the suspect . When this is done, the bureau of personal files is complete. The crude bureaucratic surveillance imagined in Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison with open plan and a central watcher, will be as nothing to this. The clumsy surveillance imagined by Huxley and Orwell, or attempted by Stalin and Chairman Mao, will be stone age technology when compared to this bureaucratic control.
And if, for a moment, you worry that all these files will be kept on you too, remember the old saying that ‘those who have nothing to hide, having nothing to fear’. As long as you have never been involved in legal cases, never been seriously overdrawn on a credit card or bank, never had any serious illnesses, have no recessive genes or genetic disorders, have never committed driving offences, never joined any suspect organization, never visited a pornographic web-site, never had any friends who, maybe unknown to you, are involved in suspect activities, never seriously criticized the State, then you have nothing to fear.
By linking this personal tag to your criminal, medical, educational, tax, employment, census, financial, driving licence and other records, and constantly updating all of these with information from the sensors, the e-mails and phone surveillance, it will be possible to know all about a person. Whenever a State authority wants to check them out, he or she could put the card into a personalized wireless hand-held computer and have access to everything about the suspect . When this is done, the bureau of personal files is complete. The crude bureaucratic surveillance imagined in Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison with open plan and a central watcher, will be as nothing to this. The clumsy surveillance imagined by Huxley and Orwell, or attempted by Stalin and Chairman Mao, will be stone age technology when compared to this bureaucratic control.
And if, for a moment, you worry that all these files will be kept on you too, remember the old saying that ‘those who have nothing to hide, having nothing to fear’. As long as you have never been involved in legal cases, never been seriously overdrawn on a credit card or bank, never had any serious illnesses, have no recessive genes or genetic disorders, have never committed driving offences, never joined any suspect organization, never visited a pornographic web-site, never had any friends who, maybe unknown to you, are involved in suspect activities, never seriously criticized the State, then you have nothing to fear.
5:5 The final solution; sniffing people through sensor technology.
Let us introduce you to a solution which lies ahead, if you are prepared to grasp it - sensor technology. Sensors are one side-product of a marriage between robotics and nano-technology. As you know, nano-technology allows tiny machines to be constructed, so small that they are invisible to the naked eye. These can be computers, cameras, medical instruments, many things. They can communicate with each other, and then with a central storage system. These tiny devices will become cheap to produce in bulk and could be spread like seeds all over people’s houses, public arenas or elsewhere.
Already there are trials to set up houses filled with sensors which will recognize human body warmth and movements and adjust the amenities accordingly. For example, a person would find that as they approached their front door the lights, heating, their favourite music or whatever would come on. As they moved around the house, the same thing would happen.
It has been suggested that this would bring families together. An aged mother living in a remote cottage would know that rather than the primitive emergency button she would normally press if she fell, her family three hundred miles away could have on their computer screen a diagrammatic picture of her every movement. As the cameras get better, they could watch her every move. This is on the edge of possibility now. In twenty years it will be a commonplace.
As fatherly guardians of your peoples, you will of course take over the carer’s role. You will watch people’s homes for them. You will be able to step inside every house in the country and watch what is going on, eavesdrop on every sound people make. There are already roadway signs saying ‘We know every person who does not have a TV licence. Be warned.’ Soon they could be supplemented by ‘We know every move which you make, every word you speak, where you go, who you meet, what you eat. Be warned.’
Because of the size and sophistication of the systems, they are immensely powerful and, to all intents and purposes, invisible. The old bugging devices could be discovered hidden in phones or flower pots. The new sensors will be too tiny to discover in this way. The sensors, furthermore, act as networks, they accumulate, compare, stand in for each other if one is damaged or found, and then they forward their accumulated findings to ‘the control’. There your workers will be sitting to sort out the patterns.
Of course in the past and in quieter times people might have demanded some privacy and protection against all of this. But remind them that you are at war. Your enemies are in your midst. Your duty is to ‘smoke them out’. So you must take short-cuts. Make sure that every house is inspected on some pretext and then scatter these invisible sensors round it and wait for the results. And, of course, drop millions of them in foreign countries which you feel may have terrorists.
Already there are trials to set up houses filled with sensors which will recognize human body warmth and movements and adjust the amenities accordingly. For example, a person would find that as they approached their front door the lights, heating, their favourite music or whatever would come on. As they moved around the house, the same thing would happen.
It has been suggested that this would bring families together. An aged mother living in a remote cottage would know that rather than the primitive emergency button she would normally press if she fell, her family three hundred miles away could have on their computer screen a diagrammatic picture of her every movement. As the cameras get better, they could watch her every move. This is on the edge of possibility now. In twenty years it will be a commonplace.
As fatherly guardians of your peoples, you will of course take over the carer’s role. You will watch people’s homes for them. You will be able to step inside every house in the country and watch what is going on, eavesdrop on every sound people make. There are already roadway signs saying ‘We know every person who does not have a TV licence. Be warned.’ Soon they could be supplemented by ‘We know every move which you make, every word you speak, where you go, who you meet, what you eat. Be warned.’
Because of the size and sophistication of the systems, they are immensely powerful and, to all intents and purposes, invisible. The old bugging devices could be discovered hidden in phones or flower pots. The new sensors will be too tiny to discover in this way. The sensors, furthermore, act as networks, they accumulate, compare, stand in for each other if one is damaged or found, and then they forward their accumulated findings to ‘the control’. There your workers will be sitting to sort out the patterns.
Of course in the past and in quieter times people might have demanded some privacy and protection against all of this. But remind them that you are at war. Your enemies are in your midst. Your duty is to ‘smoke them out’. So you must take short-cuts. Make sure that every house is inspected on some pretext and then scatter these invisible sensors round it and wait for the results. And, of course, drop millions of them in foreign countries which you feel may have terrorists.
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