davydog

The arms merchants and the generals each had a problem. The arms merchants wanted to increase sales; the generals needed a new mission. Their solution was to conjure up a “need” for a “secure Homeland.”

With help from their friends in media and government, they issued dire warnings of grave “threats” that “terrorists” presented to the “Homeland.” To adequately defend the Homeland, the generals told the people that “we must fight the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.”

Sadly, the Homeland’s inhabitants foolishly overlooked the most glaring flaw in the generals’ argument: killing “terrorists” “over there” will only produce more “terrorists” everywhere. Distracted, self-absorbed, corrupt and cowardly, the people went along with the generals’ plan.

As directed by the generals, the Homeland’s mercenaries ruthlessly slaughtered all “terrorists” they came upon “over there,” aided by chronically burnt-out “kill-machine pilots” back in the Homeland. But for each “neutralized” terrorist, several more would immediately emerge. Eventually the mercenaries and the other hired killers succeeded in killing every single human outside the Homeland, all having converted to “terrorism.”

Outraged that nobody outside the Homeland was left alive to produce their consumer goods, buy their debt and pamper their every whim while traveling abroad, the Homeland’s people focused their wrath on the generals, and on the generals’ friends in the media, government and the arms industry. Naturally the generals considered the peoples’ responses “acts of homegrown terrorism,” and ordered their mercenaries to eliminate these new “internal threats to the Homeland.”

Caught up in their own genocidal fury, the mercenaries not only slaughtered every one of the Homeland’s citizens, but also managed to kill each other. Surveying the carnage wrought as a result of their campaign of “global war on terror,” the generals suddenly felt remorse, followed by anger. They began pointing fingers and blaming each other.

Their recriminations grew more hostile. Suddenly one of the generals reached for a sidearm. The others quickly followed suit, and each shot a colleague in the skull point-blank. Realizing that no other human was left alive, the last general left standing once again reached for her sidearm and quickly shot herself.

At last, the Homeland was secure.