We’ve Won!

“We’ve won. Without exploding a bomb. Without firing a bullet. Without sending a tank in the streets. We’ve won.”

“Yes, we’ve won. God himself has sent us this virus. All glory to him!”

“Hallelujah! God save America. God protects the Serbs. God and the Croats. Le Dieux et mon Droit. Et cetera. No need to display my linguistic abilities.”

“We’ve always known: everything is based on fear. Fear is the mother. And the father. Install fear into the population and all those supposedly freethinking citizens will suddenly be smaller than a speck of dirt.”

“Yes, we knew. But instilling fear into citizens has historically been a hard discipline. A human being, for some unknown reason, has a tendency to rebel when a masked, armed, uniformed policeman knocks on his door. How to convince that poor human being that this masked policeman is in fact his only protector, his ultimate refuge and his last defense against a danger that would most certainly destroy him?”

“Yes, in the past we had to come up with all sorts of techniques. We had to invent enemies. Luckily, there were always plenty of choices: from Black People and American Indians to all sorts of Indigenous People, from the Jews and disobedient women to dubious men, all the way to these new migrants, those Hispanics and Africans and Syrians and Palestinians, whatever the hell they’re called, all those marginal characters, all those losers, all those unnecessary, sub-human beings whose monetary value is negative and who, subsequently, just by existing, drain resources from those who deserve them. And that is Us. Always Us. Never Them.”

“Yes, there has always been and there will always be plenty of “enemies”. The discipline of singling them out and naming them has never been too hard. I know if was a long time ago, but do you remember our successful Balkans experiment? Do you remember the Serbs, the Croats and all the other Balkans’ riff-raff? Literally overnight, good neighbors became bitter enemies. The war in Yugoslavia was, after all, one of our greatest successes. We shouldn’t forget that. That’s where our glorious march began. Our march on the whole world. But at the time, in fact throughout the whole history, we had to employ the media, the big and expensive propaganda machine, in order to convince the citizens that their neighbor who was lending him flour yesterday was now, thanks to his genetic predispositions, plotting to kill him in his sleep. We had to engage in the demanding and costly discipline of rewriting history, of reinterpreting existing historical narratives and recasting the historical cast of good guys and bad guys (and an occasional gal!). This was hard work. And now, with the virus, everything became so easy. So smooth.”

“Yes, our axe fell into the honey, to quote the saying of our favorite tribes, those Balkans’ tribes that, surprisingly, took such a strong liking to us, against all odds. “Liking” is not even the right word; I would almost dare to say: they truly, sincerely LOVED us!”

“Yes, you’re right: those tribes have proven themselves to be an extremely fertile ground for our global experiment. I suggest that we build them all a monument.”

“Agreed. In every new state that came out of the old, doomed land of Yugoslavia, we’ll raise a monument as a token of our appreciation. These Balkans’ peoples have truly been the exemplary lab mice. They fell immediately, all of them. Without a peep of dissent. One for all, all for one. As if we had invented them ourselves!”

“Yes, those primitive tribes were in fact surprisingly clever! They knew very well that the arc of history does not bend towards justice, as that dangerous loser Dr. Martin used to claim. They understood that it’s actually the opposite: the arc of history bends towards injustice.”

“So true. Injustice is the new Justice, so to say. Something like: thirties are the new sixties.”

“Somebody will accuse us that we have produced this virus ourselves. But we didn’t’. Our word of honor! The virus came directly from God. Which means that God himself is on our side. And on the side of our ideas about the world, the new world. The new justice. The new order.”

“Yes, absolutely. We got support from the highest place. God is obviously not a democrat. He’s like us. He too has always required total obedience and absolute subservience. He too has always punished every attempt at questioning the proscribed truths, every act of rebellion against the authorities. When I remember the times of Inquisition and all those ravishing, sparkly stakes with suspicious women burning on them, my face draws into a smile. If only we could be teleported back to those times!”

“It will happen, don’t you worry! Our best brains have been working on it for years. We’ve already spent billions of dollars and trillions of Euros on this project, the project that was secret until recently but is now proudly public: the project of turning back in time. We won’t make only America great again, taking her back to the splendid time of slavery and genocide. Soon, all citizens of the world will wear the red baseball cap with the inscription “Make the World Great Again”. And women and their cats will burn at stakes again. And the poor and the tanned will simply be eliminated from the face of the Earth. And not because, as our enemies would happily accuse us, we had “cruelly exterminated” them, but, elegantly, because of the mighty virus! The poor and the brown will suffocate in their overcrowded concentration camps where we had previously (and wisely!) locked them up. And anyway, there are too many people on this planet. Who to eliminate? The brown, the poor and the old, of course. This time it will be simple. And clean. It will be a tidy operation led by our ultimate Fuhrer, God, and not the armed street thug gangs as in the romantic, exciting times of Adolf’s. This time nobody will complain. This time we will the undisputed saviors. This will be a “beautiful” future, as our man in the White house likes to say. And there will be law and order again in the world.”

“By that time, however, “The World”, the one that we know, is probably going to be finished, just as it deserves. Before the end, however, we will shelter in place in our bunkers, the bunkers we diligently prepared ahead of time, decorating them with love and taste. In our bunkers we will plan for a better, whiter, richer and more refined world. The World of the Winner.”

“And what about that riff-raff in the Balkans?”

“We won’t forget them. Oh no, don’t get me wrong, of course we won’t send them medical equipment and such! Let the virus devour them; they don’t deserve anything better! They don’t belong with us, the Winners. They were only the experimental lab mice. But, still, we will build monuments in all their new little states. The monuments for the mice. Let them have some fun before they all kick the bucket. Let them think they’re important. Some of them still remember the worn out anti-fascist slogan from the WWII: “Death to fascism – freedom to the people.” Well.. on all our new monuments there will be a slightly different inscription:

“Death to the people – freedom to fascism.”