There's something beautiful about bullies.
They disguise narcissism as sacrifice.
Sell themselves as messiahs
prepared to take a bullet for the greater good,
then spend years
convincing you there's a war to begin with.
A war so urgent,
so existential,
you must empty every last bullet
before the enemy even reaches for a weapon.
Because proximity is dangerous.
The closer people stand to one another,
the greater the chance they discover
there were no bullets,
no guns,
no grenades.
More importantly,
no enemies.
Bullies build enemies the way children build dollhouses:
with imagination.
Walls where none existed.
Families that never lived there.
Entire worlds assembled to justify ownership.
Their talent is not violence.
Violence is merely the ribbon on the package.
Their talent is architecture.
They construct a fiction large enough to rent out as reality.
And when someone points at the scaffolding and calls it a lie,
they are offended.
Not because truth hurts.
Because outrage has a far better return on investment.
A wounded ego can always masquerade as a wounded cause.
And before you notice,
your messiah becomes your martyr.
The martyr who took the bullet so you wouldn't have to.
Never mind that nobody fired.
Never mind that the battlefield was mostly carpentry.
Never mind that every corpse was produced by people trying to survive a war they had only heard about.
That is the genius of bullies.
They do not conquer reality.
They recruit enough witnesses to outnumber it.
And once a lie acquires a census, it begins applying for citizenship.
Soon, the fiction has borders.
Flags.
Anthems.
Heroes.
Traitors.
Heretics.
Infiltrators.
Every successful enemy eventually becomes public infrastructure.
And that is the problem.
Because a story built upon enemies requires enemies to survive.
The supply must never stop.
Sooner or later, all the strangers are gone.
Sooner or later, the circle tightens.
The traitor.
The heretic.
The infiltrator.
The unbeliever.
The insufficiently loyal.
Eventually, the only enemy left inside the story
is the author.
And so they are buried
in the very grave
they dug for somebody else,
still insisting,
through the settling dirt,
that the revolution succeeded.
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