A Letter From Wormwood

Gall Program Manager East of Eden

My Dear Gall:

It is with great satisfaction we here at Headquarters are reading your reports. We hunger for correspondence like yours from the other young demons, but we are inevitably disappointed; they all seem like such amateurs compared to you. Don't think for one moment in mortal time your work goes unnoticed. In fact we have a gala planned for you when you return at the end of the century, or sooner if things continue to work out so swimmingly.

Your activities have reached the lowest circles here, and it is with great pride I can report that Numero Uno thinks your use of false conversion and the subsequent civic religion in this struggle very wise indeed. You have been especially successful in deluding the hardhearted into believing they've had "born again" conversion experiences, "Gott mit uns," you sly devil! This is so wonderfully traditional, and is often overlooked by our young Turks" and it hasn't really been done so successfully since Simon de Montfort's Albigensian Crusade, and Oliver Cromwell's Irish slaughter, Bravo! Who says you can't continue winning with the tried and true methods? The basics I've always said, we need to stick with the basics!

There's such a delicious irony when you think that what we did with atheism in the last century you are doing with theism in this century, hooray! Never do these predominantly "powerful" humans with an unrestrained mean streak finds such a wonderful rationalization for killing than when they can convince themselves they are doing it for "You Know Who," saving civilization and all that. Not to mention an oil well or two, eh? Heh, heh. I love you man!

We here at Hq. particularly adore the photo's you have been enclosing with your very informative letters. We are heartened with the increase of "collateral damage." The photographs of the young children are especially endearing. Keep them coming, we are all suckers for them; we're just a bunch of sentimental old fools.

You are doing a wonderful job keeping such controversial items out of the mainstream media. News coverage has been cleverly sanitized and packaged for the "Homeland." How did you overthrow the "free press" so easily? Just a few years ago they were wailing and gnashing their teeth over another war; Vietnam, but the committee pointed out that in those days your Region's armed forces were fighting Marxist/Leninists there, and the mainstream media were big fans of those two, as are we.

One could conclude that they are merely dovish on wars they don't approve of, and hawkish on those they do approve of, according to their owners’ and editors’ ulterior ideologies, and it is certainly not a generous impulse of patriotism. Au contraire, we can conclude that you had skillfully corrupted the press way before Vietnam, you scoundrel!

When you return for some much needed rest and recuperation we would like you to put together a manual for future training purposes. We would particularly like you to emphasize the manipulation of the aggressor's population, as in the tactic you call "softening them up," i.e., your patient, well planned corruption of their souls through their colossal affluence. We here at Hq. find that so resourceful. It has been lying fallow since the Roman Empire, yet you have resurrected it (pardon my French) in such a creative manner and with such massive moral destruction, and now physical destruction as well, via their risk-free military technological preeminence. Ah, absolute power!

Your precept that the more spiritually slothful a society becomes, the more they need some sort of supercilious mission to re-enforce their feelings of self-righteousness, wow! That certain caveats are necessary; it must be an "armchair" endeavor to be undertaken by others, at no personal sacrifice or discomfort to themselves, and it must have at least a scrap of circumstantial raison d'être to reinforce their overweening pride with the necessary "virtue." Numero Uno calls it "just folks bread and circuses," and you understood this from the beginning, you devil you. Oh how you knew, you ingenious fellow, that a deceitful government could play such a population like a fiddle!

I must admit, I am envious when I reflect on all you've accomplished in so short a time, Gall. I have trod the same paths as you, although in the last century, and I too accomplished much, (under the tutelage of a fine Administrator) but not in recent memory have we regarded such a pusillanimous massacre, and destruction of an already (oh so skillfully) disarmed and destitute society. You are a fox!

Here at Hq. we fairly salivate with the hopeful aroma of incense mixed with cordite in the wind. May we dare perceive the final hour, and to envision the nightmare of things to come?

Wishing you further success, and hurry home!

Cordially, Wormwood Program Administrator One Napalm Way Acheron Crossing, Hades 666

cc: Screwtape

April 9, 2003