Apr 10, 2026 · 11 min read

Our Real Plan

Congratulations, sir. After years of suffering and death, our people have been liberated and I am proud to serve you.

To start off, you will surely understand that we have a shrinking window of opportunity. The world feels guilty about what was done to our people. Use this guide wisely to make the most of this opportunity, and generations of our people will remember your name.

Step 1: Establish the Narrative

Before we do anything else, we need to build the official story.

Our people’s suffering must become the defining event of our times. Not just any tragedy — the tragedy.

Build museums. Establish memorials. Rename the streets and the cities. The people of the world will never forget what happened to us. Make the suffering we endured sacred, and make questioning it a character flaw.¹

This step is the foundation of everything that follows.

The narrative must contain one immovable claim: Our people’s suffering is unique. Others have suffered, yes. But not like you. Not like us. Not with the same depth, the same cruelty, or the same systematic intent. This distinction is critical. If your suffering is comparable, then your response must be comparable too. If our suffering is unique, our response can be whatever we need it to be.²

Step 2: Define the Threat

We were nearly destroyed. The threat against us was existential. The people who hurt you before could do it again. Their children could. Their neighbours could. Anyone who resembles them, who worships like them, who lives where they lived — all of these are, at minimum, potential threats. Would it not be negligent to assume otherwise?

Yes, the circle is wide. That is not our fault. That is the legacy of what was done to us.

Some other advisors will use words like “vermin” or “infestation.” Do not correct them. We’ve been through a lot. And besides, a threat that breeds and spreads must be described in terms that convey breeding and spreading.

Your speechwriters will find the right register — firm but not theatrical. “Animals” works in private. “Terrorists” works in public. Both describe something you should exterminate rather than negotiate with.

Secure the borders. For self-defence. No reasonable person objects to self-defence.³

Step 3: Manage the Population

There will be people within your borders who are not your people. They were there before you, or they were displaced alongside you, or they simply exist in the wrong place.

Your job is to manage them. Think of it as administrative. Housing policy. Permits. Freedom of movement. Access to water, electricity, employment. Maybe we can call it zoning.⁴

They will have children. The children will have needs — schools, hospitals, space to play. You are not obligated to provide these. You are obligated to provide them for your children. Resources are finite - that’s life.

If they resist the zoning, this is proof that they are a security risk. Adjust their permits accordingly.

If they resist the adjustment, this is an escalation. Respond proportionally. Your proportionality will not be questioned, because you are the victim.

Step 4: Control the Language

Never say “occupation.” Say “administration” or “security presence.”

Never say “collective punishment.” Say “deterrence.”

Never say “settlement.” Say “neighbourhood” or “community.”

Never say “wall.” Say “barrier” or “fence.”

If forced to acknowledge civilian casualties, say “we take every precaution” and “they use their own people as shields.” I wouldn’t expect them to do anything else.⁵

When our soldiers kill children, call their parents irresponsible for allowing them near a conflict zone. The world will nod. Reasonable people protect their children.

Step 5: Manage the Allies

You will have powerful friends. Cultivate them. They supported you during your persecution, and they will support you now, partly from genuine sympathy, partly from guilt, and partly because your security apparatus is useful to their strategic interests.

Your allies will occasionally ask you to calm down or express concern about your methods. This is theatre - never take this seriously. Accept the concern graciously. Change nothing. If pressed, remind them of what was done to you. Show the old photographs. The emaciated bodies. The mass graves. Our dead children.

They will fall silent. What can they say? They let it happen.⁶

Step 6: Planned Maintenance

All good managers know that planned maintenance is cheaper than dealing with breakdowns. The same principle applies here.

Some military planners call it “mowing the lawn.”⁷

What they miss is that “lawn” is something you play soccer on. What we are dealing with is closer to a weed — it spreads underground, surfaces where you least expect it, and grows back faster each time you cut it. Left unmanaged, it will choke everything you will build.

You are not trying to eliminate the weed. That’s impractical and expensive. Rather, we are managing its growth. Every few years it becomes unruly and must be cut back to the root. You have a garden - you know these things.

Sometimes the roots go deep. Sometimes you must take the topsoil. Sometimes you must salt certain areas where the growth is particularly stubborn, so that nothing grows there again.

Of course, you will be criticised for this. Remind the critics of Step 1. Point to the museums. Ask them: what would you do?

They will not have an answer. They never do.⁸

Step 7: Prepare for Resistance

There will be people — even among your own — who object. They will talk about cycles. About becoming what you fought against. About “moral authority.”

Moral authority does not stop a bullet. It does not feed a family. It does not guarantee that your grandchildren will be alive to discuss it.

These objectors will invoke certain names. Mandela, who sat in prison for twenty-seven years and then forgave his jailers.⁹ Gandhi, who had the numbers for an armed revolution and chose to spin cloth instead and stop eating to make a point.¹⁰ They will hold up these men as proof that another path exists.

It does. It is the path of the weak.

Mandela had the mandate. The world would have understood anything he did. Twenty-seven years in prison buys you an enormous leash. He used it to wear a rugby jersey and let his oppressors keep their fancy houses. His country remains, thirty years later, one of the most unequal on earth. His torturers died comfortably in their soft beds.

Gandhi liberated a country through nonviolence and left behind a partition that killed a million people and a border that burns to this day. He was shot by one of his own — a man who understood, correctly, that the mandate had been wasted.¹¹

These people are warnings of what could be. They had the window, and they closed it themselves.

Step 8: Escalate

Eventually, maintenance will not be enough. The weeds will grow faster than you can cut them. The resistance will become organised. The world’s guilt will begin to fade. Younger generations in allied countries — generations who do not remember your suffering — will begin to ask questions.

When this happens, it is time to escalate.

The escalation must always be framed as a response. We did not start this. We’ve never started this. We are responding to a provocation, to an attack, to an existential threat. The language of self-defence scales infinitely. A bullet is self-defence. A missile is self-defence. Levelling a city block is self-defence.¹²

If there are potential militants in a building, the building is a military target. If there are militants in a neighbourhood, the neighbourhood is a military target. If the entire population shelters militants — and they do, because what else would you expect from these animals — then the word combatant becomes meaningless.

Step 9: Deny the Pattern

Academics will draw comparisons. They will say you have become what was done to you. That you are repeating the cycle. That the oppressed have become the oppressor.

Reject this completely. The comparison is obscene. What was done to your people was unique! To compare your security measures to the atrocities committed against you is to diminish those atrocities. They do this at their own risk.¹³

How could the comparisons apply to us? We are different. Our suffering was different, and therefore our response is different, and therefore the rules are different.

Step 10: Never Finish

This is the most important step, and the one I’ve seen most leaders fail to understand.

There is no end state. There is no point at which the threat is neutralised and the lawn stays mowed and the population stays managed and you can stop. The project is permanent. The trauma is permanent. The mandate is permanent.

If you allow the project to end — if you make peace, if you reconcile, if you establish some commission where your enemies describe what they have done and then walk free — you will lose the only thing that makes you special. You will become just another country. Just another people. Ordinary. Comparable. Judgeable by the same standard as everyone else.

This is the thing we cannot allow.

Because the standard, applied to you, would be devastating.¹⁴

Never again.

To us.¹⁵

Footnotes

Multiple countries, across multiple legal traditions, have passed laws governing the discussion of historical atrocities committed against their people. In each case the law was introduced as protection for victims. ↩
The claim of unique suffering is historically common among persecuted peoples — Hutu Power in Rwanda, Serbian nationalists invoking five centuries under the Ottomans, Turkish nationalists after the empire’s collapse. It is also, by definition, available to only one group at a time. ↩
Gregory Stanton presented his model of the Stages of Genocide to the U.S. State Department in 1996 as an eight-stage model; he expanded it to ten stages in 2012. Dehumanisation is Stage 4 — after classification, symbolisation, and discrimination, but before organisation, polarisation, preparation, persecution, extermination, and denial. The canonical example is RTLM radio in Rwanda, which called Tutsis inyenzi — cockroaches — in the months before the genocide. ↩
“Zoning.” ↩
The phrase “human shields” has been invoked by governments across more than a dozen conflicts since 1990 — Sri Lanka, Russia, Syria, Israel, the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, and others — almost always to explain civilian casualties caused by their own munitions. I cannot find a single case in which a government has used the phrase to describe casualties it caused accidentally. ↩
This works. It has worked for decades. The sentence “you let it happen” ends every argument it enters. ↩
The phrase “mowing the lawn” has been used, on the record, by military strategists and political commentators to describe periodic military operations in densely populated civilian areas. The underlying logic — that a hostile population requires permanent maintenance rather than resolution — was called “pacification” by French commanders in Algeria and zachistka (“cleansing”) by Russian commanders in Chechnya. The euphemism is its own genre. ↩
They do, actually. But not loudly enough, and not in time. ↩
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission took statements from over 21,000 victims. Its main hearings ran from 1996 to 1998; its Amnesty Committee continued through 2001. It was, by most credible accounts, the single reason South Africa did not follow the path described in Steps 1 through 9 of this essay. ↩
Gandhi’s ahimsa was not passivity. It was a strategy that made his opponent’s violence visible to the world. He made the British choose between being civilised and being in charge. They could not be both. ↩
Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, delivered a nine-hour statement at his trial explaining why Gandhi had to die. His core complaint was that Gandhi had been too generous to Muslims at Partition — that forgiveness, in other words, was betrayal. The logic is close enough to the logic of this essay that the gap doesn’t matter much. ↩
This paragraph describes a specific, documented pattern of escalation. I have not named the country, though you might have. ↩
Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, told La Repubblica in 1982: “There is a certain analogy. I would not want to push things too far, but… there is a recent Palestinian diaspora that has something in common with the Jewish diaspora of two thousand years ago.” The more famous sentence often attributed to him — “the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis” — was actually written by the journalist Filippo Gentiloni as a gloss on a line from Levi’s novel If Not Now, When?. Levi himself was more careful than his quoters. ↩
This is the only honest paragraph in the essay. ↩
“Never again” is a universal principle. Add “to us” and it becomes tribal. All it takes is two words. Reminds me of: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” ↩

Our Real Plan

Step 1: Establish the Narrative

Step 2: Define the Threat

Step 3: Manage the Population

Step 4: Control the Language

Step 5: Manage the Allies

Step 6: Planned Maintenance

Step 7: Prepare for Resistance

Step 8: Escalate

Step 9: Deny the Pattern

Step 10: Never Finish

Footnotes

Footnotes

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