Chapter 8. With Enemies Like This, Who Needs Friends?

After the interview with the intelligence agency, I decided to continue my tour of the Enemy’s country with the emphasis on collecting important intelligence information in indirect means. I started my intelligence work in a visit I conducted the next day’s morning in one of the water parks of the country. I always wanted to visit a place like that and to amuse myself in it, and I assumed I can conduct some serious espionage over there. I continued with guided tours in the main cities and in the ancient cities, a visit to the theme park, and meals at fancy restaurants. One of the most dangerous espionage missions I took was a guided tour for expert hikers that included cliff‐hanging. Of course the rest of the tourists that participated in the tour could have done the same intelligence work I did, but they were not aware of the great intelligence potential that it had.

After I completed all those missions, I possessed a large amount of intelligence information about the Enemy. The only fact that could shadow the success of my mission was that that information was not substantially different from the information I had before I visited its country. In any case, all those missions exhausted me and I decided to continue in the tour in a less intensive pace. As a result, I decided that I would just tour the cities of the country in my own pace, without a defined cause.

So, I had the opportunity of visiting various places, most of which were completely mundane for the locals, but still pretty interesting for a stranger. Thus, for instance, I was present in a political assembly of one of the country’s political parties. I saw the leader of the party give his speech to the loud voice of the encouragement calls of those present. I decided to try my arithmetical skills in calculating the sum of the independent opinions of those present in the crowd, but even I realised that it was hard for me to work with such low numbers. After I had to change the digital precision three times during the calculation of the sum of the first ten independent opinions, I realised it would be too hard for me.

However, I managed to make it up to myself on this failure during that tour. Two days after that, I visited one of the universities there and noticed a sign that announced a large seminar that took place there that day: “‘Out of the north an evil shall open’: a symposium regarding the political status between us and the Occupier and the Country”. I decided it was something I had to be present in, and so I immediately bought a ticket for that and went into the lecturing hall.

I noticed that one of the lectures was already in session, and the professor who lectured was just explaining why the present situation made it difficult on signing a normalisation treaty between the Enemy and the Occupier. I found a vacant seat and sat there. To my side, sat a young man that wrote notes in a notebook he held in his hand. I assumed he was a student. After a few minutes he turned his look towards me and then his face enlightened from surprise. “Wait a second,” he said “You look familiar. Are you by any chance a famous person? Wait a second, aren’t you the ex‐Member of the Organisation?”

“The answer to the first question is ‘Yes’.”

“So you’re not the ex‐Member of the Organisation?”

“I wouldn’t have deduced it from what I said.”

“So you are the ex‐Member?”

“That’s not something that is derived from what I said either. Sometimes it just amazes me… ”

But he did not stay to hear the rest of the sentence, but rose up and advanced towards the aisle. He probably identified me with confidence, or alternatively assumed I’m the only man in the world, who might answer in such a cryptic way. He hurried to the front of the hall where he spoke with some of the organisers of the study day. After they consulted between them quietly, one of them went on the stage and whispered something to the lecturer. The lecturer stopped lecturing, pondered for a moment and then said: “Gentlemen, I was informed right now that the ex‐Member of the Organisation, that as we all know is visiting our country now, is at the moment present in this hall. Due to the important part he took in shaping the political status we are discussing today, I ask him to get on this stage and present us his opinion regarding the Organisation and the political state that prevails in the Country.”

And so I rose and advanced toward the stage to the hand‐clapping of the audience in the hall. After I went on the stage, the professor shook my hand, presented me with the microphone and went off the stage himself. I rose my hand to silence the hand‐clapping, waited until they stopped and started to speak:

Before I begin with my speech, Id like to announce that, for the duration of the speech, I will accept Aristotle’s Organum. The reason for that is that otherwise I’ll be able to prove any statement as well as its opposite statement. Therefore, since in this case all the possible statements are true, I could finish the speech at this moment, since there’s no use for me to prove them.

As we all know, while the Occupier disabled the activity of all the other terrorist organisation that were active in my country for a long while, and the weaponry that they possessed was given to the army, the state of the Organisation had never been better. Why in that case does the Occupier gives it such a broad freedom of action? The reason for that is that the Organisation is not a national organisation in the full sense of the word or even in half its sense. In fact, it is an organisation that fulfils the philosophy of the Supporter, that strictly opposes the Enemy, but does not have an interest to struggle against the Occupier.

If not for the desire of the Occupier to force the Enemy into a normalisation treaty, the Organisation would not have survived in its current form either. Thus, out of being subordinate to an external political force, one can say that the Organisation is an alien corn in the political map of my country. But I, on my part, don’t find any bad in the integration of foreign interests in local politics. Allow me to quote on the subject one of the most important people of our generation: “Some say: ‘Whatever you can do on your own, you can do best.’ I disagree with them”.

Because when you let others meddle in your own business, you slowly lose control on what you are doing and what happens to you. In a slow but methodical way, one loses track of his original intentions, one feels that one more and more does not understand why he is doing what he is doing… or for what or for whose sake he is doing it. And then he gets the feeling that nothing is under his responsibility, and that he is in fact a vassal of the external factor. And that is, from experience, the most liberating feeling in the world, which is accompanied by feeling a complete freedom from responsibility or from the need to decide the future on your own.

Some will say this liberty will soon be over in a ruin, but this liberty, as short as it will be, is a liberty without peer. Or as this great man once said: “Consciousness allows any conscious individual to make his own decisions, but he is most at ease when he is not making use of his consciousness.”.

Which brings me to the next point: do the members of the Organisation, as members of my people, have a solid reason to fight the Enemy? Vengeance alone was never considered a good reason by any reasonable man, and if their desire is to cause you to get out of the security‐zone you are now controlling, then their struggle against the Enemy doesn’t seem too effective. Most of the politicians in your country are united in their opinion that it has to be kept as long as the tension goes on, and also most of the military people support this. For all that, it is possible, that if there will be peace in the south of my country for an extended time, the Enemy will agree to withdraw from it, out of knowing that it will not hurt the security of those living close to the border.

Therefore, unless the Organisation had been motivated by the philosophy of the Supporter, he would have changed his manner of activity a long time ago. But since he is subjected to the Supporter, he continues with it without a change.

Another issue that should be discussed is how much the members of the Organisation are willing to endanger themselves in their struggle against the Enemy. That same person, who is in my opinion one of the most influential men today, tends to say: “A fearful and senseless person can take actions that only the bravest person will take, but he usually does not understand why he is taking them.”. Imagine a group of members of the Organisation who infiltrate the Enemy’s lines in the hope of killing its soldiers. Such infiltration would be presented as fanatical by you and as full of courage by the Organisation itself. However, it should be remembered that behind every such ´fanatical´ action there is a hierarchy of commanders and sub‐commanders, a line of comrades that support and encourage, a whole lot of national and ´ideological´ preachers who give flaming speeches against the Enemy (even though they, usually, are not involved in the physical activity against him), and a mass of citizens that support this activity and is content with it. All the weight of this pyramid is placed above the unit of the members of the Organisation that flies like a cork out of a bottle and walks towards its death. Taking all this scenario into consideration, the question being raised is how “fanatical” they really are.

Naturally their decision did not involve much thought, at least not in the direction that they understand that they are walking towards their death. Or as the same great man once commented: “If a terrorist stopped and took ten minutes to think about his actions, he would lose his sanity.”. I’m not saying the members of the Organisation are terrorists, but, in my opinion, this statement applies to them too.

The question you are most concerned by is probably: what is going to happen in the northern border of your country. About that, allow me to quote that same influential person once more: “I agree with the head mystics in our time. Despite the logical and practical difficulties, predicting an event, is apparently not so difficult after the event had occurred.”

The possibility exists that the Supporter will understand that the Organisation is useless (at least objectively), and a waste of resources that are anyhow missing to the Supporter’s country. Moreover, it causes the spoiling of the relationship between it and the countries of the second part of the world, that detest ´terrorists´, not to mention the big banks who hold his debts. As of today, the only obstacle that stops the Supporter from reaching this realisation is the fact that it rejects Aristotle’s Organum.

Another possibility that your country have is to try to arrange economical sanctions on the Occupier, so it will stop the activity of the Organisation. However, heads of countries are not content to harm the economical activity of the countries by such sanctions, even if their trade with the Occupier is limited. As for large private corporations — it’s hard for me to believe that one can convince enough of them to ostracise the Occupier enough for it to harm his economy in a significant way. Moreover, every company is afraid its competitors will take this opportunity to try and make a profit on its account.

There is the option of withdrawing from the security zone. Yet, this action does not guarantee the cease of the military activity of the Organisation at all, and could bring to an escalation, because there will be a more realistic danger of harming the lives of citizens who live close to the border. The acceptance of my proposal could solve the problem for you. Still, there isn’t a full guarantee that it will not be rejected if the heads of the Organisation will find a way to bypass it, and therefore you should not count on it.

The most practical and fast way to terminate the activity of the Organisation is, perhaps, to sign a normalisation treaty with the Occupier. However, the Occupier has its own conditions, that if the Enemy accepts them, its security in the northern border will decrease significantly. Since the power of the Occupier is ten times greater than the Organisation’s, one can understand why your country does not rejoice to sign a normalisation treaty with it, while accepting all the conditions that are inferred from it.

Indeed, it is extremely difficult to deal with the Organisation, which is, in my personal opinion, one of the most interesting organisations of its kind in the current century, if not in the entire history. I do not think I have ever heard about an operational militant organisation that so realises the well‐known sentence: “Give me liberty or give me death”. The only shadow to my admiration, is that, in their case, they constantly prefer the second alternative.

To sum up, it can be clearly seen that dealing with the Organisation, even though it doesn’t endanger the very existence and proper functioning of the Enemy’s country, is difficult and problematic. This evil that is open from the north — no one knows when it will close.

Does anybody have any questions?

I saw that some people from the audience raised their hands and I gave the permission to speak to a student that sat in front.

“I just wanted to ask”, she addressed me, “who said all the sentences you quoted?”

“Why, I said them!”

“Were you also the first who said ‘Give me liberty or give me death’?”

“Oh no! That was Patrick Henry, one of the leaders of the American Revolution.”

I saw there were no further questions and so I got off the speaker’s stage to the sound of the hand‐clapping of the audience. After I shook the hands of the professors who organised the study day, and stayed to talk with them a little, I went on my way.

The next day I saw a picture of me giving the speech in the university appear in the front page of the main newspapers, and from what I understood, a videotape of the lecture was distributed to the various broadcasting networks in the world. I thought about claiming percentage off the profit to myself, but eventually I reached the conclusion that the profits from the book, that will naturally include the speech, will compensate for the anguish.