'You murderers!'
'Murderers? That's hardly appropriate. We haven't murdered anyone here, have we? In fact, we are having a conversation... well, a discussion on the terms of your surrender. Quite civilised.'
'It is true your troops have not killed in our city. But we are no fools. We received enough reports from other towns and provinces of your indiscriminate slaughters of any and all who opposed you.'
'Indeed.'
'Indeed? You have your arms up to your shoulders in blood and yet you speak and act so at ease.'
'You have not seen me or any of my troops commit any crime. And yet you fear me. You are trembling on your feet. That is why you had to sit down. There is not one fibre in you that supports you to carry ouy any action against me. But I don't want you to suffer like that. That is why I am going to reveal to you the workings of the Emperor's plan up till now. It is almost completed, anyway. Let me take you out of your self-imposed psychosis: we did not slaughter anyone.'
'We heard many accounts from survivors who fled your advance. We know what you did!'
'Do you? Since when is the word of some people equal to truth? Those were Imperial agents my dear friend, dressed up and bruised up a bit to make it look authentic, spreading fear throughout your city. And you let them right in, destroying the moderate morale your soldiers had. You will be demoted for not recognizing and applying the separation of the demoralized from standing troops in times of crisis.
Anyway, I think only a few dozen opponents of ours were killed in the towns around here, and even less in the province. All military. None in any brutal way. On a large scale, it was quite painless.'
'But I...'
'No. Listen, my man. You and your administrators will be able to verify all that we claim. You will in fact take up functions within this new part of the Empire and carry out administration, taxation, aid to villages, reparations and what not. But that is for tomorrow.
And please learn the lesson of this: people don't tell the truth. Well, they generally do tell you about things as they perceive them, but when some faction in power, or some faction that wants power tells something in a certain way over and over again, you'd better sit down and wonder why they are saying that. What is it they have to gain? Assume the worst about their motives, and if you want the truth, enforce the neutrality of those whose job it is to get the truth.
In your travels, you will encounter many people frightened to death. That is because our campaign of fear mongering has passed through each town and city, telling of how we slaughtered and brutalised the other towns into submissions. Because we do, in fact, control the roads, there was no proof to the contrary. We took the towns one by one without much of a fight. We promised that we would hurt none that did not attack us, and we have kept our promise. We did need to explain to them what we had done. Some were angry, most relieved.
You see, a combat situation is in a larger sense about convincing an enemy that they are defeated. This is not objective, but subjective. One should never be convinced of defeat: the only situation when one is defeated is when one can no longer fight back; that is, death. Because being convinced or not is irrelevant when one is dead, convincing an enemy is a psychological process that had less to do with objective reality than people might think. At the root of many useful strategies lies the realization that this is subjective.
Once one realizes that it is not always necessary to physically defeat an enemy, possible strategies and combat efficiency increase drastically. The Emperor used this understanding to take over whole provinces with cities, populations and armies. The crucial factor proved to be control of information in a region, and therefore its nervous system. This control requires infiltration and isolation of the target. Divide and conquer is useful, and of course one’s information capabilities through an agent network must be superior to the target. With such will to power, physically powerful enemies can be convinced of their defeat by far less application of power.
This tactic won't work from now on, because we have to tell people what really happened, otherwise they will not cooperate, produce or fight for us. They will find out anyway, when commerce and travel restarts. When you take away the reason for people's anger, and they only see that there is new administration... well, things just move on without much of a fuss. There is no support for our political enemies. We are the new Empire, and you are invited to join.
I do pride myself. I was one of those who worked out the plan. I think I will call this... The Battle That Was Not Fought! The Emperor set up the grand scheme off course. His mind is quite irresistible. Amazing what one can do on the scale of population masses once one lets go of truth. Truth is like gravity, it wins in the end. But the Emperor truly gives us the wings.'
'...What goes up must come down.'
'Haha. Yes... Well, you administrators have some things to learn. For instance finding out people's reasons. If a person says something because of a reason, that person is not saying it because it is true. It is said that people want bread and games. That is wrong. People want bread and blood.
Trust me. Look at them: they are like animals. Pigs, snakes, wolves, sheep! Do they deserve power? Freedom? We give them more than enough. We feed them, lead them not as they would lead themselves, into mud and wasteland. We give them food, roof, ourselves as enlightened leaders. Sanitation, provisions, stability, progress. Just not a lot of freedom, because free animals do not do anything else than exist, and we must progress.
Report tomorrow on improving the defence works and trade network. Now, I have other matters to attend to.' And with that he left, leaving the mayor dazed and confused, like a duck hit on the head.
