If you wanted revenge.
If you felt the humiliation of your motherland intensely, and you wanted retribution but you couldn’t tackle the problem head-on, what would you do?
You can’t send soldiers in to kill them–have them kill themselves. Pour funding into an organization that advocates for a firearm free-for-all and doesn’t have to disclose its doners. Send spies. Hope this organization is staffed by silly old men. Better if they are also arrogant misogynists: old fools underestimate pretty girls.
There is nothing wrong with being an opportunist: all you are trying to do is stir the shit, you don’t have to have standards about which shit you’ll stir. When anti-Muslim sentiment is at a high, remind everyone that you’re brutal in your dealings with Muslim separatists in your country. When anti-immigrant, or when anti-brown-immigrant rhetoric is bubbling up, parade your country around as the last bastion of whiteness. Feminism, incels, chemtrail truthers, QAnon, radicals, grifters, all the lonely, lonely people. Fill up an office building with people to look for stirable shit online. When the technology develops, add bots to the mix.
Anti-vaxxers are the opportunity no one predicted, but what an opportunity they present: kill more of your enemy through preventable disease. The population is softer and easier to manipulate than you could have hoped, and fear travels like fire.
You don’t have to write the story, you just have to nudge it along a little. The psyops is damn near free: you don’t have to choose. Nudge everything. You don’t have to be good to win this game, you just have to be present at every opportunity.
Probably didn’t see the flat-earther’s coming back around, but if you can’t get them to kill their own children, or each other, or themselves, then you can make them look monumentally stupid.
Be the devil. No need to come up with anything new, just take the opening, the opportunity to sneak in and amplify, encourage, enrage.
There are so many opportunities.
You don’t have to court a traitor over decades, you just have to convince someone with the know-how that attacking your government is patriotic. Hell, you don’t even have to do the convincing, just a few provocateurs placed in dark-web chatrooms and eventually one of them will convince himself.
Let the politicians see the advantages. After all, you share a certain appreciation for oligarchy, for the good life. Doesn’t matter which lie they choose to believe:
Your country is a bastion of gun support.
It isn’t.
Your country defends religious tradition.
It doesn’t.
Your country champions free speech.
Ask your political opponents about free speech.
Your country specializes in white folk.
Well, one out of four isn’t bad.
The first rationalization is the hard one. Everything after comes easy. Politicians and patriots just need the pastiche of some cause or another. I had to do it to fight the woke mind virus. But the pastiche is only necessary for as long as it takes to get comfortable with selling out in exchange for liberal tears.
In the novel version of this story, you are a true believer without hope. You’ve accepted that your beloved motherland will never recover. You’ve accepted that no one will ever know that you orchestrated a similar fate for your old enemy. It is enough that you know you brought ruin even if it brought you no profit.
In this version, you believe nothing. Love nothing. If you answered as you feel, this is about nothing. Give a man a billion-dollar compound, and he can still only occupy one room at a time; can only shit on one toilet at a time; can only sleep on one mattress at a time.
Sometimes it is enough that the other guy is paying, it isn’t necessary that he pay you.
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