Hey, you. Yes, I mean you. Answer me this - do you think the exact same way as me? Do we share the same opinions and ideals? Do we believe in the same things and have faith in the same things and love the same things? Do we both believe in the same type of people?
Oh. We don't? In that case...
I intend fully to kill you. I'm going to shoot you with an enormous gun; perhaps in the face, perhaps in the chest, straight through your black, empty heart. But, then again, you don't believe the things I believe - you don't have a heart. You’re an evil bastard. So instead of just killing you, I'm going to wipe out your entire family. Oh yessir, without a doubt. Maybe a massive bomb, that'll work wonders. I'll drop bombs all over them, and I'll watch as your family dies. I'll break the necks of your siblings and I'll swing your children by their legs to smash their heads against brick walls. I'll rape and torture the adults and, when I'm done doing that, I'll cut them into itty bitty pieces, wondering which screams I enjoyed more - from the forced sex, from the abuse, or from the slow and painful death I'm inflicting now.
Now I realize that that isn't enough. I can't just get rid of you. You're merely a branch of the problem. To cut down the tree, I will need to rid myself of every single person of your race, creed, religion, accent, etc. Because you're EVIL! You're out to destroy everything that I hold dear, everything that I have deemed holy. You are the enemy, and so is anyone that is different from me. But I can't take on an entire group on my own. I have to get more people. So now I have friends and comrades. These people will go with me. We'll break into your homes at night, rob you of your possessions, leave you to starve, burn your home down while you're still inside. Isn't pillaging wonderful when you're the one doing it? Scorched earth policy never looked so tempting. Aww, what the hell? SWOOSH! Up in flames go your homestead and every possession you ever had. Why are you looking at me like that, with tears and a gaping mouth? You're the enemy. We're following orders. Our cruelty isn't really us - we're just sheep bleating away and doing as we're told, we're just the puppets acting out these mad maladies. It's our commanding officers who tell us what to do. But they wouldn't need to instruct such harsh measures if you hadn't been daemons.
Then I'll come home. I return to my natural land, full of people who look, act, speak, and think like me. They cheer for me, throw flowers, kiss me, hold me, spout praise and adoration. I look into eyes whose lashes are laced so gently with tears of glory. I listen to the songs they sing in my honour. I listen to them tell me they, too, would gladly have died for my cause. Indeed? But they don't know the truth of it. The pounding of the guns so loud that you think your heart might explode in your chest. The acrid scent of gunpowder mixed with rotting bodies. But that's not what gets me. Do they know? Do they know that I've murdered and raped and tortured and do they know that I've felt individual vertebrae popping in the necks of pudgy children as I twisted their heads round the wrong way. I wonder if they know that I've felt the blood splatter onto my face because I HAD to cut her neck to silence her because she was driving me mad with her screaming, she wouldn't stop! I wonder if they know that I listened to the screams of the family as they melted inside their own home was we burned it down and simultaneously cooked and enjoyed our sumptuous meal which we wouldn't have had unless we'd stolen it from the soon-to-be corpses first. Do they know any of this? No. Things like that don't get reported until years and years later. By then no one cares anymore to listen to the woes of a strange girl with a different life entirely bewailing her lot of raising the child of a different man because he raped her all those years ago when there was a war on. These people don't know the types of things that really happen, feeling the kickback on your weapon and knowing that somewhere in the distance a man is dying because of you, a man you've never met, a man that might have a family and loved ones. But that doesn't matter, does it? And it doesn't matter that these people will never know the horrible things you've done, the atrocities you were willing to commit in the names of your various banners, each and every one of them.
And if they did know, would they care? If they could look in your eyes and see what really lives there, if they could touch you and feel the heat of those flames beneath your skin, would it make any difference to them? Would it change their respect for you? No. Why is that, do you reckon? Because they learned the same things that you learned - that was the ENEMY. They were BAD and they HAD to die, otherwise our entire world as we know it would have been in peril. We had to insult and demean them, we had to ruin their lives and their home otherwise they'd have come for us. It was a pre-emptive strike. These people love you because you've saved them. Does it matter that you killed children, raped people, stole from the innocent (but none of them are innocent, they are the ENEMY), destroyed homes and families and lives, does any of that really matter? You're a glorified person and those memories of what you did needn't bother you anymore (if they ever did) because you're here now surrounded by people who adore you in spite of or because of those things. There are people here, now, who would die defending you. People who will die loving you.
There are even people here at home who would dream of robbing others here at home of their free speech because they think that people who disagree with you shouldn't be allowed to have their say. Not that we were fighting for freedom of speech or anything…
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