Sweet Revenge, An Underfable

         Sweet Revenge

         An Underfable

         Once upon a time a woman, enraged by her ex-lover’s betrayal, conjured up the spirit of Sweet Revenge. The demon offered her three visions of the future.

         The first vision was violent, brutal, and lethal. The woman rejected this gory spectacle with fear and horror, but not without regret. The demon diplomatically approved of her choice. It said politely, “Death’s too good for him.” 

         The second vision was vicious, sneaky and underhanded. In it, she engineered her ex’s exposure, downfall, and humiliation. The woman called this an improvement, but still somehow dissatisfying. The demon acknowledged that many of its clients complain of depression afterwards. It suggested, “Let’s try the high road.”

         In the third vision, she was at an awards ceremony. The speakers praised her intelligence, generosity, and strength of character. After the ceremony, at the reception, he showed up. His clothes were old, his shoes were worn. She greeted him, but spontaneously forgot his name.

         The woman smiled at the demon. She said, “Good.”

         Moral:  Living well is the best revenge.

World War Revisionism, a Satire

          I wrote the following in to a Holocaust revisionist website, back in 1997.

          Yes, it is satire. For instance I deliberately misspelled ‘memorabilia’ – or to be precise, I deliberately kept a misspelling that I made by accident! I threw in a ‘ditto, ditto’,  just for fun. Just as fun was the frenetic style and the flawed logic. Scarequoting the horrors of war was black humor, and also harsh witness. If I was going to defend a false proposition, then I’d better play unreliable narrator!

          One of the deniers wrote back to politely ask me not to write again. He had enough of my logic. To reciprocate the honor I delete his email address.

*************

Subj:  World War Revisionism

Date:  01/08/97

To:     XXXXXXXXXXXXX

The next logical step after Holocaust revisionism...

Why should any proud white man accept the liberal media’s accusation that Europeans fought TWO WORLD WARS? Indeed, why believe that either war occurred AT ALL? What a scandal that would be! How shameful, how discrediting! For Caucasian people to commit such mad deeds would damage the entire race’s claim to moral leadership!

Fortunately, the whole mess is deniable. World Wars? What World Wars? What solid evidence does anybody anywhere have that either of those conflicts ever happened? Photographic evidence? That can be faked; and a vast “Memoriabilia” industry has a clear financial interest in maintaining the “World War” myth. Battlefields? Ditto. Bombed‑out buildings? Ditto, ditto. What’s more, if you go looking, you just won’t find those flattened European cities. Rebuilt during the intervening decades, says the liberal media; but how much simpler to say that those wars never occurred in the first place!

One nice thing about World War Revisionism is that it neatly eliminates, not only the Holocaust, but also the Nuclear Bomb. For what proof exists, aside from “world war” documents, that the United States has ever exploded a nuclear bomb over a city? Or even that those devices exist?

Show me one “proof” that nuclear weapons exist; one “historical document”, one “eyewitness report”, one “atrocity photograph”, one “deathbed confession”, one “mass grave”, a single “traumatized survivor”: and I will show you “proof” that there were World Wars. And if you accept THAT much, why, I could also show you equally valid forensic “proof” (using other well‑publicized documents, reports, photographs, confessions, graves, and survivors) that there was Nazi genocide!

Why deny one story but not the other? Why not deny both, and solve two problems?

World War Revisionism; it’s the only logical solution.

************

Where empires go to die

             Consider the following quote, from Eugene Robinson in 2010:

             “In Afghanistan, momentum has become a substitute for logic. We're not fighting because we have a clear set of achievable goals. We're at war, apparently, because we're at war.”

             What a strange compulsion! But there is precedent; others have found themselves unwittingly fighting in Afghanistan for no apparant reason. The Soviets, the British, and on back to Alexander the Great. Some have demolished Afghanistan, but none have subdued it; yet that impossible goal keeps getting sought. Again, why such a strange compulsion?

             Afghanistan itself is a strange place. Poor, ignorant, backwards, lawless and tribalist, yet somehow these opium farmers can't be subdued. How do they do it? Maybe it's their unifying xenophobia; maybe it's the diagonal terrain; and maybe the place just isn't worth conquering.

             For whatever reason, the place has a reputation as a "graveyard of empires"; why then do empires keep going there? By any rational calculation, it's not worth the trouble. It isn't even worth the trouble in terms of macho posturing. What is the source of this imperial self-destructiveness? Why seek defeat?

             I theorize that these conquerors unconsciously desired defeat. Their empires were weary of existing, and sought collapse. Empire consciously defies defeat; it prides itself on its eternal-winner status; but pride is a sin and eternity is not for mortal man; so time reverses desire, and defeat acquires the glamour that victory used to have. Such masochistic feelings must be denied, but they survive unconsciously and find expression as perverse compulsion.

             Defeat for an empire is victory for humanity as a whole; so imperial self-destruction has its virtues. But Thanatos, the death-wish, is hard to witness at close range; not every society can successfully host such acting-out. Afghanistan is one that can. It is where empires go to die.

Proposition 007: A Modest Proposal

Proposition 007: A Modest Proposal

“Privatize the Licence to Kill!”

This is the ultimate centrist proposal; it respects both the energies of the free market and the authority of the state.

Any citizen may buy a license to kill at their neighborhood police station. The fee is 100% of the applicant’s earthly goods. The “100% fee” sets the rich and the poor on an equal footing, and ensures that crime shall not pay. It is the “bribe” to ensure that the cops “look the other way”.

“Poaching” (unlicensed killing) is punishable by confiscation and the death penalty. “Fee evasion” (money hiding) is punishable by confiscation and life imprisonment.

Free licenses and military hardware for veterans. Similar benefit programs for volunteer community service workers.

All applicants shall, with the assistance of a State-appointed legal secretary, fill out Form #39-54Q, Section 23, pages 17-96, in triplicate. “Crimes of Passion” applicants must consult psychosexual counselors.

The intended target is given 24 hours notice, and access to military hardware. No legal action is taken whichever one dies. Third parties off limits.

This legalized bribery system is the PAC principle, as applied to violent crime. It brings homicide under social control by uniting laissez-faire market efficiency with official government regulation. This proposal is centrist thinking at its finest.

On Forever Wars

Recently my wife Sherri, noting the mass escape of hundreds of Al Qaeda prisoners from Abu Ghraib, wondered out loud why there is not more of an uproar about this in the American media. The royal baby and Weiner’s weiner attracted more attention. Sherri asked, why?

I replied that my favorite right-winger, Jerry Pournelle, had a similar perplexity. He wrote, on his blog: “We had good strategic reason to go into Afghanistan and throw out those who had harbored our enemies; and to make it plain that if they went back to harboring our enemies we would be back. Then we should have left. Instead we stayed. I do not know why.”

My answer to him, and also to her, is that the American military is not in the business of winning wars. It is in the business of forever waging wars. To win a war, in the usual sense, is to enforce a peace on the victor’s terms; but to the American military-industrial complex, war is peace, and peace on its terms means a bigger and better war. Therefore the pointless bases in Afghanistan, and the indifference to the release of hostile warriors onto the field. Ending the war is not a pressing concern.

          This is, of course, corruption. Pournelle and his friends wrote to blame the civilian leadership;  I grant their critique, but I add that the line between civilian leadership and the high command is blurred, due to the famous ‘revolving door’ between military, industry and politics. None are immune to careerism.

The problem is systemic; it goes beyond individual agendas. You see, a forever-war has an agenda of its own. It wants to go on forever.

          Forever-wars arise by accident and live on mushy plans and sliding objectives. Mission creep is the mission. It’s always six months until success. This endless snafu is not on purpose; it’s an evolved accident. Were the mission to be accomplished, then the organization will be disbanded; therefore the only long-surviving organizations are those whose missions are somehow never accomplished. It is a process of Darwinian natural selection; do not seek intelligent design in it. No-one plans the mess, nor seeks it, but somehow nobody has any incentive to get out.
          It’s a delicate balance. If a war is too obviously lost, then it ends; if it’s too obviously won, then again it ends. Therefore to survive, a forever war cannot ever be lost nor won. Endless lethality is its immortality; war is peace.  

Forever-warfare would be a successful business model, except for one small flaw: forever-warriors cannot ever win, but other warriors can.