Salvation for Nine-Ninety Nine; service tax extra

I love Tuesdays, they are closer to Fridays than Mondays; I hate Sundays, they are farthest from the next drinking binge….unless Monday is declared a holiday. Either way, you hate drinking alone; I’d much rather be just alone rather than drunk and alone.

When you're alone, then you think of conquest.

If you were to mount a conquest on a defiant nation, how would you do it? Let’s say that you had all the arms at your disposal, and you had the power of an army that was ten times larger than the small nation’s army? Would you conquer through war? That’s the easy way out. Let’s make it even easier – the small army is filled with monks with visions of an ancestor who tasted nirvana and would aid them in salvation. Salvation would be achieved through sticks and stones against tanks and guns – bloody quick way to achieve salvation, if you ask me.

So you take to war – and win, and grab land.

But supposing you were confronted with a bunch of people who believed that their ancestor would eventually aid them in their salvation? Minor point, isn’t it? That you win land but can’t enslave the people because of their beliefs in a long-dead folk-hero?

What would you do next? You’d buy them out, of course.

But you couldn’t win over these senior members of the society. So why not wait for their extinction? You could propagate your values through school….powerful way out.

But then, all that would happen is that kids would grow up hating you because they are still poor. So you can give out alms; that would make life easier for one and all. Perhaps you could raise alms through taxes. So now you have poor, drunk folks – who think their folks were crazy to believe in a folk-hero; how backward. How perfect for the conqueror. But that’s the funny part; who is the conqueror? By the time the kids grow up and figure out that they hate the “old ways”, the original conqueror is long gone.

Who were we fighting against? Who are we fighting now?