I left the old man and moved toward the back of the carriage where John Paul was sitting on his own, next to a window covered with iron bars.
“Iron bars, eh? You did well to find a carriage like this,” John Paul said, staring out the window. He lifted up his bound hands and pointed at the scenery that was drifting by. “Look, that billboard there.”
I only managed to catch a glimpse before it flitted by: some writing in what I suppose would be called gothic script, with a heavy, angular font. It was superimposed over a realistic if somewhat old-fashioned painting of soldiers.
“I came up with that,” John Paul said. “The grammar of genocide isn’t always dependent on the content of the message. You can sneak it into the most innocuous of everyday conversations, if you want to. But it’s best if you can incorporate it into slogans and propaganda, like on that billboard back there. There grammar is at its most concentrated form. You can embed the grammar into sentences in different ways, with different degrees of concentration, but stirring messages like the one on that billboard really give you the opportunity to lay it on nice and thick and dense.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I said.
“I have this little theory. Consider this. It’s not political extremism that leads to genocide. Rather it’s the need to prepare for genocide that makes people express their opinions in terms of political extremism.”
“What the hell? You’ve got it all fucked up,” I said.
“If by ‘fucked up’ you mean that I have my cause and effect the wrong way around, then yes, I agree with you. But then again, I’m sure you’ll agree with me that the fact that all it takes is a few words for people to systematically start murdering each other is also ‘fucked up,’ as you put it.”
The Lord of Genocide shrugged.
Amber clouds hovered over the paddy fields outside. A pillar of light appeared in the distant forests, a Jacob’s Ladder. Were there more massacres going on over there, perhaps? Was God sucking up the souls of the innocent victims with a straw of light? The vista looked almost like a caricature—surely if there was a god up there waiting at the top of that, it would have been the one from Monty Python.
Time was nothing to me anymore. If you’d asked me what time of day it was I would only have been able to describe it as being “battle time.” A no-man’s land where your sense of time and emotion was masked by your BEAR. I found myself being drawn into the rhythm of the train, which made this already endless and timeless period stretch out even further and simultaneously pass in an instant. It was like wading through jelly, and yet completely normal and natural at the same time.
I was drawn back into the carriage by another piece of Hindu India agitprop out of the window. John Paul noticed that I was looking at it and spoke.
“You’ll notice how the picture to go with the slogan is rooted in the socialist realism school? I’ve noticed that beyond a certain point, right-wing and left-wing extremists alike tend to share the same aesthetic sensibilities, or should I say lack of—”
“You really are something else, aren’t you,” I interrupted calmly. “You fucking piece of shit. I’m not just talking about your genocides either. Even your friends over there, the fundamentalist nuts, you’ve been laughing at them while you used them as tools for your own ends.”
“And you can’t abide my looking down on them?” John Paul asked.
“Not just looking down on them—looking down on them and manipulating them into killing each other. At least they have the integrity to get their own hands dirty.”
“Yes. The problem is that I’ve committed myself to more than I could possibly do with my own little pair of hands. Unfortunately I just don’t have the time to busy myself with the manual labor. But I do accept responsibility for everything they do,” John Paul said.
“They’ll be standing trial soon,” I said. “The ICC will see they take their share of the blame. But not you. You’re different.”
“Back to the National Military Establishment for me?”
“Exactly. And after that, even I don’t know.”
I stopped speaking to try and read John Paul’s reaction. Nothing. He didn’t show anything. No fear. No resignation.
After a little while, John Paul spoke again. “I’m thirsty. Could you get me a glass of water?”
“How about a glass of ‘quit your bitching or I’ll slap you with another KO pad,’ ” I said.
“How hospitable of you. I think I’ll pass.”
“Where’s Lucia?”
“Not here.”
“I know she’s not here, you fuck. That’s why I’m asking you where she is.”
John Paul shrugged. “How is that question relevant to your duty?”
“Maybe it’s not.” I felt myself getting more agitated, and my voice grew deeper and colder. “Maybe I just want Lucia.”
“And you’re prepared to kill as many children as it takes to get to her,” he said.
I looked at John Paul. It was ironic. This was the first time John Paul had ever revealed anything approaching a human emotion. Sure, that emotion might have been animosity toward me. And it did make me angrier still. But there was also a little part of me that was … relieved?
“Sure, it’s tough. But I was just doing my job.”
I tried to give as bland an answer as I could, but it made John Paul laugh out loud.
“Tough? You’re lying, and you know it. I know all about the emotion regulation that you go through before battle. So that you can kill children without worrying, either before or after. You don’t even feel any guilt as you pull the trigger. I’m right, aren’t I?”
I didn’t say anything.
“And ‘I was just doing my job’? Please. Have you any idea how many ordinary people, people who wouldn’t hurt a fly in their day-to-day lives, have used that as an excuse to commit the most cruel and brutal acts imaginable? The Nazis who sent the Jews to the gas chambers were ‘just doing their job.’ The East German border guards who shot their own countrymen dead for trying to cross the Berlin Wall were ‘just doing their job.’ Just doing your job, eh? Well, if everyone ‘just did their job’ then we wouldn’t have any need for soldiers or bodyguards. Jobs exist to paralyze the human conscience. Where did capitalism come from? The Protestant work ethic: do your job, save money, and God will be pleased with you. A job is a form of religion. The only thing that varies from person to person is how pious they are. Most people actually understand this on some level. They just don’t want to admit it to themselves.”
“What about you?” I said. “You don’t seem to have any problem with your job of traveling around the world and massacring everyone!”
“Absolutely. Absolutely. You see, we’re not so different, are we, you and I?”
“Fuck off!”
“But we are! I admit that I only cast the spell, of course. I don’t pull the trigger or light the fuse myself. I have no direct involvement on the front lines. And what about you? Are you directly involved when you’re in battle? Really directly involved? When you shoot and kill the children that are charging you? Do you feel the mixture of relief and guilt and revulsion that any normal person would feel? Or do you feel flat? Does your optimized emotional state wipe everything out and keep you calm and distant? Let’s be honest with each other. You might be physically taking part in battle, but you’re not really there. Something’s missing. I’m sure the same goes for all your comrades too. You kill enemies right in front of your own eyes and yet you never feel the accompanying emotions or reactions. You wonder whether the intent to kill was ever really yours. You start to doubt whether you can take ownership of the deaths that you cause.”
Bull’s-eye. This man in front of me had hit the nail on the head, and I hated him for it. It bothered me that he could be so calm. He was so untroubled by the scene around him that it was almost as if he had been Photoshopped into the picture.
“That’s right, isn’t it?” he continued. “You don’t want your work to trouble you, so your emotions are adjusted away, nice and simple. Factory workers wear protective gloves, and you wear a protective shroud for your heart. Or allow someone else to shroud it for you, at least. You allow yourself to feel nothing for other people’s lives, not even for the lives of young children. In my book that’s a far more cruel thing to do than the actual act of killing.”
“Who the fuck are you to lecture me about cruelty?”
“Fine, fine, so let’s agree to disagree. But let me tell you an interesting fact. The way that the grammar of genocide works on your brain is not all that different from the emotional regulation process that you go through before battle.”
“Yeah? Well, we’re different from them,” I hissed, pointing at the Hindu India mob in the center of the carriage. “Our BEAR treatment is defensive. It’s designed to protect us. It heightens our self-preservation instincts, that’s all. We don’t start performing stupid rituals where we cut off the arms of children just for fun.”
“No, you’re not that different. Defense and offense are just two sides of the same coin. The grammar of genocide takes effect by regulating the function of the brain that relates to conscience. Not so different from your so-called BEAR treatment, right? The grammar of genocide modifies your conscience, guiding it in a particular direction. It’s no different from what you do to yourselves to prevent any residual altruism from surfacing, so that you can kill children unimpeded. It’s about suppressing the activity of certain modules in the brain. The only real difference is that you use technology to do it, where as I draw on the primordial power of language.”
“Sure, our counselors told me all about how people are basically good. Sounded like holier-than-thou bullshit to me.” I smiled ironically.