The classic manual on all of this is, of course, that magnificent (if brutal and cynical) book by Clausewitz On War, which can be usefully supplemented by Machiavelli’s marvellous advice in The Prince, as well, nowadays, many manuals put out by your Departments of War (sorry, we should have said of Defence).
Let us remind you of a few of their central bits of advice, things like: act first, constant preparation and arms stockpiling, strike mercilessly, be prepared, iron and fire, deception and lying and so on.
So this is how you should behave in Christ’s wars. It was how we treated the heathen Saracens in the Crusades, how we exterminated the Albigensian heretics, how we destroyed the savages around the globe who opposed your glorious kingdoms. There is no room for scruple in these matters.
If all this is true of ordinary wars, imagine how much more it is the case in a religious war against civilization’s enemies. These enemies will use any tactics against you. Even if, as yet, their attacks have been limited (the whole twin towers was less than a month’s civilian death toll in Iraq), we must not be lulled, for they would kill many times that number if they could, and rejoice at the carnage. Even if the amount of death and destruction you have brought down upon them is many times more than what they have done to you, do not relent. Even if they have not done many of the things which they could have done with ease; poison the water systems, spread plagues, bomb nuclear plants, you should still speak angrily of them as ‘totally unscrupulous’. You must continue to describe them as utterly ruthless and as using all means against you. Then you are justified in whatever methods you like.
Tuesday, 30 January 2007
Sunday, 28 January 2007
3:4 How to persuade people of the huge danger of the enemy.
So far we have mainly concentrated on individual Evil Ones (terrorists) or small cells and networks within your nations. Unfortunately, however, these servants of Satan even come to control a whole nation or state with all its weapons. In that case you must adopt another strategy. What you must do is to attack and destroy that state, depose the Evil Ones, and put in people more to your own liking. Your enemies call them ‘puppets’, but we think you should just call them ‘friends of democracy’.
Though these members of the ‘Axis of Evil’ are infinitely less powerful than your nations, you can fairly easily persuade your populations that they are a real and present threat if you follow a few well tried techniques.
One technique you can adopt was well illustrated by a recent example. A country was known to be a nest of evil people led by an evil dictator. He must therefore, you knew, be plotting against you. He must be aping (a useful animal adjective) your ways and trying to stockpile weapons. These weapons must be really dangerous, carrying mass destruction with them. They must be far more dangerous than anything that had hitherto been discovered, despite extensive searches and a kind of electronic surveillance unprecedented in history. The evil intentions were enough to allay any doubts in your populations.
Obviously in this case you must have known, with your immensely sophisticated surveillance and intelligence and billions of pounds of advice, that there was no certainty that weapons existed or that they were to be deployed. But if you had told your populations that while there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, they must nevertheless attack the servants of Satan because they were an evil-intentioned people (and held much of the world’s precious oil reserves which Christ’s Kingdom needed), the response would have been luke warm. So you used all the approved techniques instead.
You exaggerated the threat, told partial truths (that weapons were battlefield only, for example, was omitted), exaggerated, made vague claims. In a court of law you have to tell ‘truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’. But this is not a court of law. By telling partial truths, by being as someone once described a former instance ‘economical with the truth’, and by mixing in untruths and exaggerations, it became impossible for the population to disentangle things. So people in fear and trust partly sanctioned the act of invasion, though even in this situation the majority were still unconvinced.
When all this (in effect) lying about the reasons for the war was revealed afterwards with the total absence of the grounds for fear, or even the links to the supposed ‘enemies’ who had attacked you earlier, you sensibly changed history. You claimed that the real reason was not the declared one at the time. It was really to rid the nation of a tyrant, to ‘liberate’ people so that they can be more like us. You should force them to accept your ‘values’, as one of you recently put it, and to abandon theirs. Since the powerful control history, might is right, this quelled criticism to a large extent.
The lesson from this is that after the event, even if it can be shown that the attack was mistaken and leads to disaster, do not apologize. Do not admit mistakes, or if you do, blame it on some technical mis-information you received. Much better to change history after the event to fit what happens. Go on the offensive. Say to people, ‘Do you want to bring XX’ back again? The threat of the return of Farmer Jones is the trump card used again and again in Orwell’s Animal Farm and is unanswerable. Your critics are put in an impossible position. They cannot say they liked the particular thug or tyrant, but if they lamely say that this was not why you went to war, it sounds a bit feeble.
Though these members of the ‘Axis of Evil’ are infinitely less powerful than your nations, you can fairly easily persuade your populations that they are a real and present threat if you follow a few well tried techniques.
One technique you can adopt was well illustrated by a recent example. A country was known to be a nest of evil people led by an evil dictator. He must therefore, you knew, be plotting against you. He must be aping (a useful animal adjective) your ways and trying to stockpile weapons. These weapons must be really dangerous, carrying mass destruction with them. They must be far more dangerous than anything that had hitherto been discovered, despite extensive searches and a kind of electronic surveillance unprecedented in history. The evil intentions were enough to allay any doubts in your populations.
Obviously in this case you must have known, with your immensely sophisticated surveillance and intelligence and billions of pounds of advice, that there was no certainty that weapons existed or that they were to be deployed. But if you had told your populations that while there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, they must nevertheless attack the servants of Satan because they were an evil-intentioned people (and held much of the world’s precious oil reserves which Christ’s Kingdom needed), the response would have been luke warm. So you used all the approved techniques instead.
You exaggerated the threat, told partial truths (that weapons were battlefield only, for example, was omitted), exaggerated, made vague claims. In a court of law you have to tell ‘truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’. But this is not a court of law. By telling partial truths, by being as someone once described a former instance ‘economical with the truth’, and by mixing in untruths and exaggerations, it became impossible for the population to disentangle things. So people in fear and trust partly sanctioned the act of invasion, though even in this situation the majority were still unconvinced.
When all this (in effect) lying about the reasons for the war was revealed afterwards with the total absence of the grounds for fear, or even the links to the supposed ‘enemies’ who had attacked you earlier, you sensibly changed history. You claimed that the real reason was not the declared one at the time. It was really to rid the nation of a tyrant, to ‘liberate’ people so that they can be more like us. You should force them to accept your ‘values’, as one of you recently put it, and to abandon theirs. Since the powerful control history, might is right, this quelled criticism to a large extent.
The lesson from this is that after the event, even if it can be shown that the attack was mistaken and leads to disaster, do not apologize. Do not admit mistakes, or if you do, blame it on some technical mis-information you received. Much better to change history after the event to fit what happens. Go on the offensive. Say to people, ‘Do you want to bring XX’ back again? The threat of the return of Farmer Jones is the trump card used again and again in Orwell’s Animal Farm and is unanswerable. Your critics are put in an impossible position. They cannot say they liked the particular thug or tyrant, but if they lamely say that this was not why you went to war, it sounds a bit feeble.
Friday, 26 January 2007
3:3 Create fear, distrust and division
You yourselves should trust nobody, whether individuals or countries. Treat even your friends with suspicion, for human nature is deeply corrupted through the Fall of Man from grace. Assume the worst motives lie behind people’s actions. Strike before you are struck – the great advice of Machiavelli and Clausewitz and Stalin. Assume that your own populations are driven by base motives (fear, greed, ambition) and appeal to them. You will not often be disappointed.
Try to divert attention from your plans by filling people’s minds with distractions. Divide your critics and rule them. Sow fear and distrust in everyone so that they can not form into solid opposition to you.
Here you are very wise to have talked about ‘a war on terrorism’, for the weapon of the threat of terrorism is one of the very most successful in history. Whenever the terrorists strike, ratchet up your political powers so that your weapons are stronger. Fear is a powerful emotion and most people will surrender their liberties if they fear for their lives. And of course, tell them that it is a temporary loss, which will be restored, since both their dependence on you will be increased and they may be able to rationalize away their losses and face the temporary discomforts with hope that perhaps things will get better again ‘after the war’.
Even if there are few or no actual attacks, you can easily keep the population in anxiety and even terror. You can spread reports of ‘credible sources’ which have reported ‘heightened activity’ among your enemies. Of course you cannot reveal any of the details as this would strengthen your enemies – so people just have to trust in you, so you can make up what you like, especially as there are always people out there who want to feed you with bits and pieces to justify alerts.
Take some practical steps. From time to time suddenly swoop down on ‘suspects’, arresting them in dawn raids, make sure the press is there, try to make sure they look tired and dishevelled (and preferably of a different race) for the photos. Lock them away without explicit charges. Hunt around for evidence. Mostly you will find nothing, in which case you may, if you have not tidied up your legal system sufficiently, finally be forced to release them. But that will be months later and few will notice that nothing happened. People will just remember the vigorous measures you took against likely Evil persons. This will lead to confidence in your measures, gratitude to you, and relief at disasters potentially averted. If anything really does happen afterwards elsewhere, you can point to your active measures which, unfortunately, did not quite work.
Other methods are worth using. For instance, suddenly close off parts of cities, station tanks outside airports, divert planes at the last moment, suggest that vital information of an imminent attack has been discovered and you need to raise the threat level to a high point on whatever scale you have.
We cannot emphasize enough that the great enemy to your cause is complacency. After a period of nothing particular happening, your followers may start to accept that life is full of risk, that the enemy is not as fierce or ubiquitous as you allege. They may even wonder whether the huge sacrifices you ask, the heavy taxes, the surveillance, the loss of liberties, are really justified. At this point you should inspire them with fear and terror.
If things get really quiet and complacent, try to provoke the Evil Ones into attacking you. An assassination of a few of their supposed leaders, or some ‘collateral damage’ of women and children killed when you bomb or blast your way into one of their miserable refugee camps should do the trick. After all, it is better that a few innocent people on their side should suffer in the process than that the whole momentum of your crusade should falter and people begin to ask whether the war you are fighting is largely of your own making.
Try to divert attention from your plans by filling people’s minds with distractions. Divide your critics and rule them. Sow fear and distrust in everyone so that they can not form into solid opposition to you.
Here you are very wise to have talked about ‘a war on terrorism’, for the weapon of the threat of terrorism is one of the very most successful in history. Whenever the terrorists strike, ratchet up your political powers so that your weapons are stronger. Fear is a powerful emotion and most people will surrender their liberties if they fear for their lives. And of course, tell them that it is a temporary loss, which will be restored, since both their dependence on you will be increased and they may be able to rationalize away their losses and face the temporary discomforts with hope that perhaps things will get better again ‘after the war’.
Even if there are few or no actual attacks, you can easily keep the population in anxiety and even terror. You can spread reports of ‘credible sources’ which have reported ‘heightened activity’ among your enemies. Of course you cannot reveal any of the details as this would strengthen your enemies – so people just have to trust in you, so you can make up what you like, especially as there are always people out there who want to feed you with bits and pieces to justify alerts.
Take some practical steps. From time to time suddenly swoop down on ‘suspects’, arresting them in dawn raids, make sure the press is there, try to make sure they look tired and dishevelled (and preferably of a different race) for the photos. Lock them away without explicit charges. Hunt around for evidence. Mostly you will find nothing, in which case you may, if you have not tidied up your legal system sufficiently, finally be forced to release them. But that will be months later and few will notice that nothing happened. People will just remember the vigorous measures you took against likely Evil persons. This will lead to confidence in your measures, gratitude to you, and relief at disasters potentially averted. If anything really does happen afterwards elsewhere, you can point to your active measures which, unfortunately, did not quite work.
Other methods are worth using. For instance, suddenly close off parts of cities, station tanks outside airports, divert planes at the last moment, suggest that vital information of an imminent attack has been discovered and you need to raise the threat level to a high point on whatever scale you have.
We cannot emphasize enough that the great enemy to your cause is complacency. After a period of nothing particular happening, your followers may start to accept that life is full of risk, that the enemy is not as fierce or ubiquitous as you allege. They may even wonder whether the huge sacrifices you ask, the heavy taxes, the surveillance, the loss of liberties, are really justified. At this point you should inspire them with fear and terror.
If things get really quiet and complacent, try to provoke the Evil Ones into attacking you. An assassination of a few of their supposed leaders, or some ‘collateral damage’ of women and children killed when you bomb or blast your way into one of their miserable refugee camps should do the trick. After all, it is better that a few innocent people on their side should suffer in the process than that the whole momentum of your crusade should falter and people begin to ask whether the war you are fighting is largely of your own making.
Tuesday, 23 January 2007
3:2 Should the Inquisition and Media Censorship be re-introduced?
All this is a good start, but much more is needed. When we faced the terrorism of the witches we had a much more tightly controlled situation. The Holy Office of the Inquisition had to licence every book or article that was published in the Christian World. There was a list of banned books. Anyone found with such a book in their house could be imprisoned and tortured. Writers and publishers were imprisoned and spies observed what was being said in drinking places and universities.
Some people think that this was just a medieval system. But when the philosopher the Baron de Montesquieu wrote his works in the middle of the eighteenth century, he had to publish them outside France to avoid the censor, and he recounts how he had nightmares at the thought that Inquisition spies might pounce on him. If it was a good enough system to last four hundred years, until a couple of centuries ago, it is good enough for today.
Indeed, the techniques never really ceased. These were the methods renewed and refined by Joseph Stalin in his iron control and elimination of millions of his citizens. In this current menace of your times, we would strongly recommend that you set up a ‘Czar’ (we believe this is the fashionable term in Britain, a ‘Chief’ in America perhaps), something similar to the Inquisitor General. They should have almost unbounded power in the areas of thought and media. They should co-ordinate the battle against contrary messages being aired. They should head a new bureau of thought police, the successor to the Holy Office of the Inquisition. They could monitor universities, schools, the media.
This was always done in conventional wars in the past in some way or another, and now that you are at war again, it is an urgent necessity. The papers are particularly to be scrutinized and their sources should not be protected, nor their editors have independence, for who knows what their links with the Evil One is.
After all, who do these critics and questioners think that they are? You are appointed by Heaven, not by your population. The people should trust and revere you. Their doubts, inspired by the Devil, are not only treasonable but sacrilegious. This is beginning to be realized. We heard a Russian minister rightly remark of some foreign diplomat who dared to question his government’s annihilation of the people’s of one of its satellites and the predictable backlash, that to discuss this policy was ‘blasphemous’. The State had spoken, God’s will was revealed, and you should bow down.
Some people think that this was just a medieval system. But when the philosopher the Baron de Montesquieu wrote his works in the middle of the eighteenth century, he had to publish them outside France to avoid the censor, and he recounts how he had nightmares at the thought that Inquisition spies might pounce on him. If it was a good enough system to last four hundred years, until a couple of centuries ago, it is good enough for today.
Indeed, the techniques never really ceased. These were the methods renewed and refined by Joseph Stalin in his iron control and elimination of millions of his citizens. In this current menace of your times, we would strongly recommend that you set up a ‘Czar’ (we believe this is the fashionable term in Britain, a ‘Chief’ in America perhaps), something similar to the Inquisitor General. They should have almost unbounded power in the areas of thought and media. They should co-ordinate the battle against contrary messages being aired. They should head a new bureau of thought police, the successor to the Holy Office of the Inquisition. They could monitor universities, schools, the media.
This was always done in conventional wars in the past in some way or another, and now that you are at war again, it is an urgent necessity. The papers are particularly to be scrutinized and their sources should not be protected, nor their editors have independence, for who knows what their links with the Evil One is.
After all, who do these critics and questioners think that they are? You are appointed by Heaven, not by your population. The people should trust and revere you. Their doubts, inspired by the Devil, are not only treasonable but sacrilegious. This is beginning to be realized. We heard a Russian minister rightly remark of some foreign diplomat who dared to question his government’s annihilation of the people’s of one of its satellites and the predictable backlash, that to discuss this policy was ‘blasphemous’. The State had spoken, God’s will was revealed, and you should bow down.
Saturday, 20 January 2007
3:1 The need for intolerance and hate
The battle against the Empire of Evil is ultimately about winning hearts and minds. It is a bitter fight against a deadly and cunning foe who will try to undermine and seduce your peoples. So you must give a great deal of careful thought as to how you are going to make them aware of what you know – the great danger they face and their need to trust in you.
You are entering a new phase of civilization. For most of the last five hundred years your governments and educators assumed it was part of their task to whip up hatred of your enemies. The Holy Roman Church thundered constantly against the threats of Satan and his Evil Empire and the terrors of sin and damnation . The art systems of the world portrayed the Devil and the terrors of Hell. The ideology taught all right-minded citizens that the world was divided into the Godly (us) and the heathens and idolaters (them). It was your mission to either convert or destroy them.
Unfortunately, after the Second World War, a rapid weakening of this black and white vision occurred. You were encouraged to tolerate, even to like, people of other races and creeds. Multi-culturalism, cultural relativism, artistic and intellectual exchanges, even inter-racial marriages and mixing of blood were encouraged. All this confused the simple message.
All was not lost, however. Your schools, sporting contests, national histories, the media, all portrayed the enemy (then the Soviet Union) as Evil and malicious. You should fight them in your war games, your sports competitions, your arms races and, if necessary, with real bullets and bombs. ‘Better dead than red’ was a popular motto, and a good one since red is the colour not only of Communism, but of the Devil. Yet gradually standards have slipped and you seemed to be on the brink of ‘going soft’ on the enemy. So you need to bring back a proper educational and training system for the emergency of your times.
You should instruct all your schools to use text-books which do not prevaricate about this issue. They should praise the glories of your civilization, the great role of your religion, the major victories which your forces have won, the inventions you have made. If information has to be given about other countries, those who are currently your enemies should be portrayed in a negative light.
In your sports you should teach children fervently to support your own teams. We heard of a major British politician who suggested that those who did not support the British cricket or football teams were unpatriotic and should, perhaps, be repatriated to their country of origins since their hearts were not wholly with us. We applaud this frank and logical approach, which might be applied more widely to support for local food, music, religion and other parts of culture. We are glad to hear that ‘oaths of allegiance’ and a ‘nationalist ceremony’ are being introduced for foreigners in some of your countries. Also that training courses in your local traditions are becoming compulsory. It is a pity you cannot change the colour of the skins of immigrants, but at least you can change their hearts and minds.
You are entering a new phase of civilization. For most of the last five hundred years your governments and educators assumed it was part of their task to whip up hatred of your enemies. The Holy Roman Church thundered constantly against the threats of Satan and his Evil Empire and the terrors of sin and damnation . The art systems of the world portrayed the Devil and the terrors of Hell. The ideology taught all right-minded citizens that the world was divided into the Godly (us) and the heathens and idolaters (them). It was your mission to either convert or destroy them.
Unfortunately, after the Second World War, a rapid weakening of this black and white vision occurred. You were encouraged to tolerate, even to like, people of other races and creeds. Multi-culturalism, cultural relativism, artistic and intellectual exchanges, even inter-racial marriages and mixing of blood were encouraged. All this confused the simple message.
All was not lost, however. Your schools, sporting contests, national histories, the media, all portrayed the enemy (then the Soviet Union) as Evil and malicious. You should fight them in your war games, your sports competitions, your arms races and, if necessary, with real bullets and bombs. ‘Better dead than red’ was a popular motto, and a good one since red is the colour not only of Communism, but of the Devil. Yet gradually standards have slipped and you seemed to be on the brink of ‘going soft’ on the enemy. So you need to bring back a proper educational and training system for the emergency of your times.
You should instruct all your schools to use text-books which do not prevaricate about this issue. They should praise the glories of your civilization, the great role of your religion, the major victories which your forces have won, the inventions you have made. If information has to be given about other countries, those who are currently your enemies should be portrayed in a negative light.
In your sports you should teach children fervently to support your own teams. We heard of a major British politician who suggested that those who did not support the British cricket or football teams were unpatriotic and should, perhaps, be repatriated to their country of origins since their hearts were not wholly with us. We applaud this frank and logical approach, which might be applied more widely to support for local food, music, religion and other parts of culture. We are glad to hear that ‘oaths of allegiance’ and a ‘nationalist ceremony’ are being introduced for foreigners in some of your countries. Also that training courses in your local traditions are becoming compulsory. It is a pity you cannot change the colour of the skins of immigrants, but at least you can change their hearts and minds.
Friday, 19 January 2007
2:5 When should you move on down the list and who should be added?
How do you know when to move on from one act of ‘regime change’ to the next? Here there are two major criteria. One is the degree to which your actual mission is accomplished. If you attacked to kill certain people who had the effrontery to laugh at us or condemn us, to put in a government that will allow us to build a pipeline, to build bases and control oil wells, you can say that the mission is achieved when these things are effected. Mission accomplished and you can move on to the next.
Moving on will probably be sensible because your attack often causes intractable side-effects; a rise of internal violence, a rash of criminality, a boom in illegal activity such as opium production. It would be unfair to expect us to prepare for all these possibilities or to do all the mopping up. Yet your critics often go on about the chaos have brought, so it is good to give people something else to think about. So distract their attention by moving on to the next country on the list and people will soon forget your promises not to give up on them.
Fortunately attention spans are short, memories poor, the current war is enough to fill the media. So move the battle on and give a sense of success, movement forward, progress, a rolling, serious, concerted and planned brushing back of evil. No one likes stagnation. So God speed and keep the Crusades moving forward with further ‘successes’.
*
When you run out of people on the ‘A’ list, start to move on to a ‘B’ list, which are the reserves for attack, but which currently you deal with in a different way. You know that you are already starting to work on this. The second list are the countries you would like to undermine, weaken or perhaps crush because you know they will threaten your supremacy in the future, but you cannot do so as yet by conventional means. The most obvious on this list is China. So you need to continue to pour weapons into Taiwan, encourage Japan to break its post-war commitment to non-aggression, try to spin up negative stories about China, keep out as many Chinese as possible, build up the central Asian border states, send your spy planes over, try to use import tariffs to dampen down China’s exports.
All this will hopefully needle, undermine, threaten, destabilize China, as you did with the Soviet Union, but without actually attacking it militarily which would be futile and dangerous. Currently this approach applies mainly to China, but it might soon have to be what you do to India as well. And if Japan ever stopped being as subservient and accommodating to us, and asserted some independence, or switched loyalty from us to China, you would have to put it on the ‘B’ list.
Another point about the lists is that they help us to prioritise action. You work down a list. Just knowing they are on your list is useful in combating your enemies. It will cause fear, and perhaps defiance, which will further justify your attacks. So you pick them off one by one.
Then there is the question of who should decide on the list. Clearly this cannot be left to the United Nations. To start with, the ‘United’ suggests that that body would be averse to an approach that tries to destroy or re-model sovereign states on the basis of the self-interest of another sub-group of states. The most that organization ever comes up with is largely useless sanctions, even if they occasionally, as in South African apartheid, have some effect. Furthermore, some of the greatest ‘rogue states’ are members of the United Nations. Others have friends there. They would be unlikely to support their own destruction.
So the list making must be a matter for the leaders of the top ‘free’ countries – namely you. Of course if some other nations, for instance Pakistan or Vietnam, decided to make such a list and unilaterally attacked another neighbouring country that would be totally despicable and unacceptable. The exception, of course, is Israel, which has a special licence to invade its neighbours pre-emptively because of its beleaguered position and history.
Moving on will probably be sensible because your attack often causes intractable side-effects; a rise of internal violence, a rash of criminality, a boom in illegal activity such as opium production. It would be unfair to expect us to prepare for all these possibilities or to do all the mopping up. Yet your critics often go on about the chaos have brought, so it is good to give people something else to think about. So distract their attention by moving on to the next country on the list and people will soon forget your promises not to give up on them.
Fortunately attention spans are short, memories poor, the current war is enough to fill the media. So move the battle on and give a sense of success, movement forward, progress, a rolling, serious, concerted and planned brushing back of evil. No one likes stagnation. So God speed and keep the Crusades moving forward with further ‘successes’.
*
When you run out of people on the ‘A’ list, start to move on to a ‘B’ list, which are the reserves for attack, but which currently you deal with in a different way. You know that you are already starting to work on this. The second list are the countries you would like to undermine, weaken or perhaps crush because you know they will threaten your supremacy in the future, but you cannot do so as yet by conventional means. The most obvious on this list is China. So you need to continue to pour weapons into Taiwan, encourage Japan to break its post-war commitment to non-aggression, try to spin up negative stories about China, keep out as many Chinese as possible, build up the central Asian border states, send your spy planes over, try to use import tariffs to dampen down China’s exports.
All this will hopefully needle, undermine, threaten, destabilize China, as you did with the Soviet Union, but without actually attacking it militarily which would be futile and dangerous. Currently this approach applies mainly to China, but it might soon have to be what you do to India as well. And if Japan ever stopped being as subservient and accommodating to us, and asserted some independence, or switched loyalty from us to China, you would have to put it on the ‘B’ list.
Another point about the lists is that they help us to prioritise action. You work down a list. Just knowing they are on your list is useful in combating your enemies. It will cause fear, and perhaps defiance, which will further justify your attacks. So you pick them off one by one.
Then there is the question of who should decide on the list. Clearly this cannot be left to the United Nations. To start with, the ‘United’ suggests that that body would be averse to an approach that tries to destroy or re-model sovereign states on the basis of the self-interest of another sub-group of states. The most that organization ever comes up with is largely useless sanctions, even if they occasionally, as in South African apartheid, have some effect. Furthermore, some of the greatest ‘rogue states’ are members of the United Nations. Others have friends there. They would be unlikely to support their own destruction.
So the list making must be a matter for the leaders of the top ‘free’ countries – namely you. Of course if some other nations, for instance Pakistan or Vietnam, decided to make such a list and unilaterally attacked another neighbouring country that would be totally despicable and unacceptable. The exception, of course, is Israel, which has a special licence to invade its neighbours pre-emptively because of its beleaguered position and history.
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