Previous chapters at the bottom.
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Our cultivation of this moment in history has been decades in the making. Allow me, in the next few letters, to recount the exquisite process by which we have prepared America over these past fifty years for such a moment as this, a moment in which our master might bring such a petition to the Enemy.
As you know, we have labored long to persuade both sides of the political chasm that they alone possess righteousness and that the other side embodies evil. Each side believes it is the party of righteousness and the other the height of wickedness.
At first the cleavage was milder, less hostile. But these creatures are admirably pliant in tribal things. “My side is good, your side is evil,” they want to believe. And from that tidy prejudice follow our two best servants, self-righteousness and blind defence. Defend my side; vilify the other.
We can rouse the extremes on either side to bloodshed, as you well know. In Cuba, Russia, and China, the frenzy came from the left. In Germany, Brazil, and Egypt, it rose from the right. At times, ideology hardly matters. We simply awaken the hunger for power itself, as in Haiti, where chaos needed no banner. In the end, that is what it is always about -- the lust for power -- whichever flag happens to fly over the carnage.
Nevertheless, dressing up the quest in the costume of justice often helps sow the seeds for revolt.
Here in America, it has required careful cultivation to bring the nation to its present fever of division. The dominant culture has enjoyed such liberty that it has taken decades of labor to persuade its majority citizens they are, quite to the contrary, shackled.
In the early days of the Republic, we found it easy enough to stir up violence against those from other lands -- most profitably against the Africans. Yet how disappointing it was that the oppressed themselves seldom returned the favor on any grand scale. Their patience, or what the Enemy called "long-suffering," was a constant impediment to our cause.
In these later days, the faction they call "liberal" has busied itself with the rights of the overlooked and promoting peace. They have dragged into the light the status of women and the difficulties of those we have labored so diligently to keep invisible to the comfortable. In the 1960s, they passed deplorable legislation in favor of those we so delightfully persecuted for so long -- laws it has taken us till now to begin to unravel.
Still, we have managed to convince a great many of them that the Enemy does not exist. Frustratingly, many of them -- with great contradiction I might add -- continue to promote His causes. They no longer believe His Book, but they continue to ride its fumes, as we have said.
One fissure, above all others, has given us the master key to division -- the unborn. The right could hardly parade its virtue in the open defense of prejudice or abuse. But what a moral treasure it was to let them style themselves as defenders of children! Nothing serves our purposes better than moral advantage in the hands of the self-righteous.
For the part of the liberals, many truly wished to safeguard the welfare of mothers and those in desperate straits. Yet we gifted them the most ruinous of slogans: "My body, my choice." What a lovely ring of self-service! It has allowed us to paint them as wickedly selfish, wanting to gratify their own pleasures without accountability.
Did their opponents truly care for the unborn? Some, of course, did. But for many it was a splendidly theoretical devotion -- championing lives unseen requires no actual labor. It costs only a ballot cast for the candidates they desired all along. Over the years we have trained them well. They believe they could never vote for another party and be true to the Enemy.
You and I know it was not so at the beginning. Many in the South changed their colors on the issue when it proved politically expedient. Did they pour their zeal into caring for the children who were born or adopt the unwanted they had so loudly defended? Few did. Their charity, as you know, typically stops at the moment of birth. Once a child has drawn breath, it passes under that blessed maxim that the worthy prosper and the suffering merely reap what they have sown.
It took scarcely a decade for this issue to harden the divisions that had long lain beneath the surface under different excuses. In terms of the Enemy's values, they were not wrong to prize life, of course. But we subtly moved them to prize their party more. One group soon convinced itself that the liberals were murderers of children, and that every Democratic politician was steeped in evil. For their part, they gave blind loyalty to anyone who wore their colors. No other moral question need be entertained -- ironically for a cause the Book itself never names. Meanwhile, many causes of central urgency in the Book could be ignored.
This principle was the linchpin in sowing their present discord, and we have exploited it with exquisite success. I shall recount, in later letters, how the scheme has continued to mature.
Your devoted nephew,
Wormwood
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Previous chapters
- 1 -- The Operations
- 2 -- The Veil Technique
- 3 -- The Fog
- 4 -- Hard Hearts
- 5 -- Focus on Feelings
- 6 -- Blinding Indignation
- 7 -- Spiritual Inoculation
- 8 -- The Fumes of the Enemy
- 9 -- Moral Inversion
- 10 -- Reliable Race
- 11 -- Misdirection
- 12 -- The Very Elect
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