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Zy turned to Olaf again. "You did the right thing when you quit."
He told us, that ironically, it was Olaf's idea that got the thing going. Zy said, that since they had no military force at their disposal on Gribbork, and reasoning with the people seemed hopeless, their think tank had to find a clever way to do what needed to be done to make the hard choices. "In this department," said Zy, "Olaf excelled."
Zy said that the scientists on Quian had already attempted to use reason as a means to get their people to scrap all the nuclear weapons they had created, but they had failed miserably. In response to that, as Zy told us, Olaf had reminded the think-tank-people of an ancient principle in the martial arts, a technique that is used which re-directs an opponents strength against himself. Zy said, this is how the idea was born to employ the people's own resources against their nuclear war capabilities. "Nothing needed to be brought in from outside the planet. No one needed to be forced to do anything. It seemed like an ideal plan, it shouldn't have failed!"
"What did go wrong?" Wendy wanted to know moments later.
"Everything!" Zy replied. "For starters, we had become the oligarchy. We thought like an oligarchy, we behaved like an oligarchy, and we acted like one. By this, everything was doomed. Everything we touched turned to dust."
Zy told us that their plan provided for a three tiered approach. The challenge was correctly recognized as something tremendously tricky and not totally certain. "A grand approach was called for," he said. "The first priority was to discredit the nature of their weapons technology. This was accomplished by distorting it as something evil and dangerous to life and happiness."
"Surely, that's what it was," Wendy interjected, "wasn't it?"
Zy sighed, "that's what we thought, too. We failed to realize that technologies are an outcome of intelligent awareness of fundamental principles. If one discredits this, one discredits the very soul of an intelligent people. One destroys their identity from within. Then, what has one got left with which to counter the force of nuclear weapons?"
"The discrediting part wasn't hard, even though it was wrong," Olaf interjected. "Their military had insisted that nuclear weapons technology was essential, that it was stupid wanting to disarm. If anyone had cheated in the process, that person would instantly become ruler over the others - a fate worse than death, as the people saw it. And so the people were easily convinced to fear their technology, since they couldn't be convinced to fear the power structures that would abuse their technological capabilities. Attacking technology in such a setting was like feeding milk to babies. They cheered! They destroyed their technologies. They destroyed nuclear power too. They demonized everything nuclear. In they end they feared the nuclear technology itself. We had won!"
"Discrediting technology wasn't the only stupid thing we did," said Zy. Zy told us that the Quian military insisted that nuclear weapons would have to remain. "'they are needed,' they said. Their situation had become so urgent," said Zy, "that if a single person as much as sneezed, the entire planet would have been incinerated. The military said that they needed the deterrent effect that these unacceptable weapons had."
"For this reason," said Olaf, "a second front was required. The logic was simple," he said. "If the military didn't want to give up its weapons voluntarily, then we thought that the physical economy needed to be destroyed that supported these weapons." Olaf paused and shook his head. "This was an awesome task," he said softly. "We were to kill this giant economy?" He paused again. "But we did it by discrediting technologies, science, education, love, honor, culture, and so on" Olaf continued. "When we were finished they had nothing left. They had no pride, no functional infrastructures, and no functional development platforms that could have rebuilt their economies. Everything had been destroyed by shifting the focus from physical production for the support of society onto individual financial gain by which the wealth of society was drained away, like into a bottomless pit. We introduced greed-based economics. We had learned this from Adam Smith. The process had been used successfully on Earth to destroy the American economy. We felt that since it worked so spectacularly on Earth, we could rely on it to work just as well on Quian, and it did. We gave the people dreams of wealth that and a few trinkets of property that were derived from looting the productive society to its deepest levels. All that they had left after we were done, were their nuclear weapons and a whole range of terrible conflicts that nobody possessed the means to confront with any kind of sense of reality."
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Stories about
Sex
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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