I’m going to teach you how to dismantle a nation, in doing so I hope you take this process and use it to save your own. Perhaps it is a bit more satire than I usually write, but I believe the message is important and can be done so by holding up a reversed mirror. So please humor me as I play the devil’s advocate.

To dismantle an enemy Sun Tzu advised, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” To dismantle a nation is to rage war on it, whether subtly or openly the same tactics should be employed. To destroy a nation you must do three things; destroy the nation’s sense of unity, destroy the nation’s ideals and what they stand for, and destroy the nation’s ability to sustain itself. Sure you could win a battle against a nation and genocide it, but that’s destroying the country. The country is simply the land and government, the nation is the soul of the country, I want to destroy its soul, not break its body. If I only break its body, they’ll never stop fighting.

“In every generation, the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms.” This is a quote from leaders of the Easter Rising in 1171. In 1921 Ireland was made an independent state. Ireland was never conquered as a nation, it was simply taken over. Brute strength is far from enough.

To destroy it, let’s start with killing the unity, once its gone you’ll find the rest falters rather quickly. Firstly, you need to kill the trust in an institution, religion included. This is a decently easy task because there is always immorality somewhere, all you have to do is point it out. The difficulty is finding a way to point it out that doesn’t result in it getting fixed, because a truly healthy society will respond to finding something rotten by tossing it out and making something better. 

The solution here is to divide the nation into an ‘Us vs Them’ Two groups should do the trick, naturally, there will be a lot of groups trying to make the world better, so what you need to do is lump them into sides. Take two groups, say the Trees or the Seas, they’re big prominent groups, people recognize them, and they’ll have a reputation. So, start by lumping similars together. The Shrubs aren’t with the Trees, but consider them on the plant side rather than the water side. Suddenly, if someone starts hating the leader of the Trees, then their opinions on the Shrubs are tainted as well.

Even though initially the Trees and Seas might get along and respect each other, and both are good things on their own, their incompatibilities can be used to poison both. Point out how the salt that Seas have kills trees, how Trees can’t survive if left in the Seas, and how they’re incompatible. Sure they don’t have to be opposites, and can co-exist just fine, but they need something to dissuade alliance, so let their differences thrive. Twist their different goals into opposing ones, even if they don’t hurt the other, and make sure that when Trees win the Seas feel like they’ve lost. Losing leaves a sour taste, no one likes to lose.

This will take subtlety at first but over time they’ll be divided enough that the fact both are good or have good in them will be lost in the idea of ‘the other made me lose’. As this happens, they’ll start to point out the misdeeds of the other side, no longer constructively but destructively. No one likes to be yelled at, so when the other side yells their solutions will fall on largely deaf ears. When the Seas point out that the Trees are hurting the sand of the Deserts, the Trees won’t see it as advice anymore, they’ll see it as defamation from their opponents.

When neither side refuses to listen to the genuine concerns of the other, they’ll rot. They’ll rot so deeply that eventually, the decay will show to those not stubbornly rooted. The generation that stood with Trees when they were at their best, might not see the rot, they’re used to it after all. Indeed, what’s a slight odor when the Seas are far worse?

Over time, so deeply will the opposition be between the two that the original vision of both is lost. It’s no longer a matter of which leader is the best for the Trees, it’s which leader will defeat the Seas. At this point, anyone not firmly rooted in either will distrust both at best and utterly hate both and most. Quite simply, unity is dead. This is wonderful, they won’t turn to each other for support or to help fix things. The Trees will try and be better oceans than the Seas, and the Seas will try and be better forests all before trying any of what made the other good to begin with. The Trees and Seas have become enemies and have lost their vision of a healthy world.

Next on my list to kill is the ideals of a nation. When both your groups have rotted to this point, very often their implementations of their ideals are as corrupt as they are. Pick at that wound, find something unspeakably evil, and expose it. Let the blame fall on whoever, but let there be blame. This injustice must be fixed, Trees and Seas will agree albeit with different methods. While they fight over how to let the solution let it simmer. Let something horrible pass by word of mouth often enough to either become the new normal or be villainized beyond recognition.

Both our successes, I can thrive in both very well. If the evil becomes normalized, I’ve won. I can retire from that goal and proceed to another. If it becomes villainized beyond recognition (or a lesser version of that) I can give justice a simple nudge too far. Take the Palmer raids, as an example during the American ‘Red Scare’. A genuine problem was found, terrorist attacks against political opponents. Palmer’s solution was to begin a huge multi-citied raid and capture over 1,600 people with the goal of deportation. Almost 70% were later considered innocent and their deportation was canceled. That’s over a thousand people who were wrongly arrested. The constitutionality and violation of civil rights were harshly criticized.

This is also a win for me, while the action was later deemed far too extreme America did not learn from it. Later in 1942, the United States sent over 112,000 people to what it called relocation centers. Almost 70,000 of these people were citizens. Nearly all of them were given a 48-hour notice to get their affairs in order or be removed by force. If these people couldn’t make arrangements for care to be given to their homes, businesses, or pets, they simply lost them. These people were sent there because they were of Japanese descent. It wasn’t until 1988 that some restitution for their injustices was given with 20,000 dollars given to each person involved (53 thousand in today’s currency).

While the country condemned these actions after the fact, they proved the failure of ideals. Any good man or woman in the decision-making process could object to these actions and perhaps stop them. But that didn’t happen. As the saying (attributed to Edmund Burke) goes, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” When these breaches of all things moral and good happened, either good men did nothing, or there simply were no good men making decisions. Both are victories to me. Both are cases where the ideals of the nation were ignored and desecrated. If I get enough of these over time, then the ideals are seen to have died long before the country looked down and saw their own fall.

If the original ideals are seen to have died, it’s now up to me to replace them. Give the country something to strive for since its original goals appear long forgotten. And I will do just that. I will give them ideals as sweet as nightshade and as beautiful of lies as I can weave. Ideals that have enough good and decency in them to spin the illusion of nourishment. These ideals shall be my terrible and swift sword to ending decency.

My last objective is to kill its ability to sustain itself, and all the tools have already fallen in place. The Trees and the Seas are so far at each other’s throats that they can’t begin to grasp the simple truths that can save them. They smell rot and decay but don’t see that it’s not just their enemies but their own. The forests have rotted and the fish have all died. The two sides can tell something wrong but have abandoned reason in their pursuit of victory. Their new policies will take on the form of drawing more to themselves than genuinely helping. The corrupt ideals and the making of foes in every corner have already won me this battle, I simply need uninterrupted time to watch my glorious design take root.

I have made myself the ruler of rules, look on my works ye powerful and weep, I cannot fail. And yet, hope that imperishable light evades death still. While I have set the nation to burn, I cannot stop its extinguishing. After all, good men and women can still stand and do something. They can still stop me, but they have to try. The old ideals though forgotten and worn can be brought back still. My great division can be mended, if not on a country’s scale, then a community’s. My great evils can be opposed by anyone, and even if I succeed in bringing them about, I cannot kill everyone trying to lighten and soften my cruel blows.

Persistent virtue can end me still, I can rave as the god of destruction I am, and yet, these simple, small, insignificant acts of virtue towards fellow man, regardless of their beliefs and background can ruin me. So, if you want to save your nation, start by making your community better, start by making one person feel loved. Make one person feel valued, and let it spread til the rot has burned away and the fish have been born anew.