in the name of justice

by Kim Farleigh

Suburb A called Suburb B-ite existence a “plague.” Expletives scorned in A proliferated amongst the “uncultivated” B’s. This, said the A’s, epitomised “B barbarism.”

By claiming that B’s are “animals,” A politicians received donor money. Why obstruct easy profit? 

When litter unexpectedly “polluted” suburb A’s normally pristine streets, Suburb A’s leading newspaper, The Erudite Browser, claimed: “B Louts Commit Litter Heresy.” The EB didn’t disclose its source. Why bother? If the ignorant love believing, print what they want to believe. Source disclosure threatens the euphoric indignation that the ignorant adore. Promoting joyous detestation and blissful “certainty” sells newspapers.                  

Because B’s “lurked” in Suburb A in dirty areas denied municipal services, A politician, Klaus Ariel Dewburger, howled before his white-shirted supporters: “A final solution is required! Justice must reign!” 

His supporters linked their index-finger and thumb tips to make the A Homeland Brotherhood triangle of Purity, Perseverance and Procreation.  

Klaus’s hawk eyes exuded certitude's sharp lustre. His proportions led “pussy, left-wing, woke wimps” to call him “the Wailing Whale of Blubbering Blubber.” 

“Roadblocks will be erected to stop B filth from polluting our sacred territory,” said his friend, Zealot Von Hoffenheim, from the ruling Association For Democratic Allegiances.

Thin-lipped Zealot was short and bony. His savage eyes reflected “charisma.” AFDA blasted ahead in the polls.   

Klaus retorted with: “B vermin must be eradicated from our God-given land. Avoiding B eradication would constitute treason against our hallowed ascendents who secured our agreement with the Almighty that this land is ours. Our suburb is His kingdom on Oith, (he was from New Jersey), we his blessed souls. No subspecies shall pollute our holy blood.”

The gap in the polls closed. AHB television stations showed huge masses in white shirts with blue armbands producing the “triangle of Godly justification.” Historians later claimed that Klaus hypnotised the masses. Others said the masses were already bewitched “by the gift of crushing logic to reach convenient conclusions.” 

The AFDA roadblock policy stemmed arrivals from suburb B, but not because of insulting border interrogations, but because the A’s assumed that the B’s were “animals perfect for hunting practice,” the A’s attitude signalling that B’s faced violence for entering territory that the B’s forefathers had previously cultivated for millennium before armed A’s appeared from around the world believing they had been there on mass before, fantasy justifying robbery and murder.  

Being attacked for driving a B-registered vehicle was now likely. The A’s, loving belief, thought the B’s had fallen from the sky, the A’s convinced that God had done this to test A faith in their “heavenly leader.” The A’s, believing they knew everything, while knowing nothing, had the self-ordained importance to give God a personality. If God existed he probably thought: “I favour freaks with steel-wool beards!? Me?! What fucking universe are they from!?”        

“Don’t go there!” a B-suburb politician screamed on TV in response to the A’s belligerence. “We must prepare for war!”

His weapons-manufacturing brother, Dave, sold arms to B's who hunted ducks on the lagoons west of suburb B.

“They eat the sleazy duck!” Klaus yelled at a rally.

Klaus, who secretly imported B duck, had become so vast because of his consumption of the “tasty boid” that he wobbled while denouncing the duck’s “heinous existence.” Duck consumption was banned in A religion.

“The duck causes dissolution!” bellowed Klaus before massed “white shirts.” “Truth,” creating robotic replicas, made secular A cynics so rich those cynics could influence politics in every suburb on earth.

Future historians referred to this antlike conformity as “the rise of nationalism.”

A future publisher advised a future historian that the following wasn’t propitious for literary success: “The A-B war demonstrates that people are bipedal amoebas, living under delusions of knowledge, although that insults amoebas that don’t confuse infantile fantasies with reality.”

“Change it, Bill,” the publisher said, “to: The charismatic cult of personality drove people into patriotic fits in which sensibilities got distorted by the magnetism of manipulative genius.”

Bill smiled and said: “How about: The dream of nationalistic glory, manipulated by malign brilliance, created a hysteria that only intelligent outcasts on society’s fringes could resist?”

“Bill, Bill, Bill,” the publisher replied, patting Bill on the back, “that’ll magnify sales. The readers’ll believe they're the fringe.”

A-B tension erupted into violence when Roberto “Bobbie” Capricious, a cavalier B photojournalist and writer, entered suburb A to investigate B repression in Aville. It wasn’t just Bob’s curly locks and film-star looks that stunned the border guards, but his claim that curiosity and the unexpected unearthed “irresistible gems of attraction.” 

The borders guards, confused by such “weird” concepts, let him through. They wanted to see this airy-fairy thing called curiosity be revealed for what they believed it was: “pretentious garbage,” for, as all A purists “knew,” independent thinking implied insanity. “Clonehood” indicated nous, fingertip uniting in Suburb A during public gatherings exposing “the A’s vast intelligence.”  

Before Bob left, his lover, Gloria Fabulosa, asked: “Bob, darling,” (she was an actress), “do you think this is a good idea?”

“How can I resist the hunt for knowledge?” Bob retorted. “If I resisted at this crucial moment of our illustrious history, what would happen to the Capricious Cult of Curiosity that scythes down the wasteland weeds of propaganda to reveal the orchards of truth?”

Gloria, like thousands of others, adored Bob’s “poetic” vision.

“So true,” Gloria replied, gripped by the cult’s “mesmerising messages of momentous magnitudes.” (That was on Bob’s website).

In Suburb A, Bob and his crew saw “ant nests” of white shirts with blue armbands, the A symbol amid those colours symbolising purity in heavenly eternity.

Bob's cameraman recorded “creatures hatched from the same prehistoric egg.”

Such was AHB’s success in distorting reality that the A’s believed they were genetically superior “to B terrorist infidels.”

Klaus’s Genetic Supremacy Limited produced AHB clothes. As Minister of Finance in Zealot’s cabinet, (Strange: Klaus was Zealot’s main political opponent; “democracy” has fascinating mutations, doesn’t it?), Klaus stopped other companies from manufacturing “national apparel.” Monopolies benefitting Klaus were “gifts from God.” When saying that his teeth shone like pearls polished by “the cleaning agent of purifying profit.”

Bob and his crew entered a A-suburb gas station. Petrol was much cheaper in Suburb A than in Suburb B because the A’s had stolen all of the B’s oilfields when “reobtaining what had originally been stolen from the A’s.” Given that few A’s had ever been to those places before the theft, this demonstrated just how creative “history” can be.

Bob’s driver entered the station ahead of a car whose bonnet displayed a blue A. A blue-and-white pennant waved on that car’s aerial that captured signals from God. By convincing yourself of your universal importance, you could hear those signals.

The A driver believed in one law–God’s law–a law man created to justify stealing and killing with impunity. Imagine the freedom inherent in stealing and killing without judicial threat. Who wouldn’t hear those signals?!

That God-fearing A driver pulled a pump from a woman’s hands when he saw the licence plates on Bob’s car. He raced from the pump stand, hose stretching across the station, his eyes like peeved mica amid storming steel-wool. He sprayed Bob’s car and ignited it with a lighter. Flames engulfed the car. Black smoke swirled skywards. In what they later called The Day of the Long Hoses, the cameraman, holding a pump, sprayed the car behind Bob’s. Trying to throw a lighter, the cameraman got restrained by gas-station employees. Youths in another car attacked Bob and his crew. The woman who had had the pump ripped out of her hands shrieked; she was going to miss her hairdressing appointment! The shimmering slithers of her blue irises beamed hysterically amid smeared mascara. People pulled up and attacked the B “terrorists.” Bob, clutching a satellite phone, while wearing sunglasses, died possessing objects that confirmed his coolness before danger, his reputation as a fearless truth-seeker sealed eternally. 

Suburb A TV claimed: “Vigilant patriots eliminated petrol-bomb terrorists.” Bob “Baby-Face” Capricious, with his film-star looks, was no longer going to entertain big-eyed beauties with tales of his daredevil exploits. A border guard said: “He ‘satisfied his curiosity.’ How about that shit?”

Border guards are border guards because they love hating differences.

Because Bob became a B symbol of resistance, Dave saw his chance in the clothing industry. T-shirts showing Bob’s face proliferated. Pressure to denounce injustice increased “Bobbie Caps” T-shirt sales.

“Two months of war,” Dave told; Mike, his brother, in a spa in suburb C, “and we can retire in the Caymans.”

Their gold necklaces glistened in the bubbling water.

“To the Brits," Mike said, “for creating man’s finest invention – tax havens.”

Mike set to work.

“We must avenge the death of that symbol of tolerance, Roberto Capricious,” he told television audiences. “If we allow ourselves to wilt before unprovoked aggression, how will history judge us?”

Viewers applauded rapturously. Free will without seeing consequences invigorates the naive. Why should B’s be aggressed by human-rights’ detesters? (Do human rights exist?)

“Every citizen,” Mike spouted, “must arm to defend our rights as freedom-pursuing citizens of suburb B.”

Gun sales soared. Hot with righteous vindication, and the joy of destructive free will, someone fired the first shot across the border, striking someone’s enormous arse. The target’s size meant that the sniper couldn’t miss. Doctors “scaled fat mountains” to remove the slug, one saying: “We found a needle in a butt stack.”

People, freeing their base instincts from a dungeon called morality, yelped: “Terrorists can strike at any time. We must strike first.”

Describing unprovoked attacks as preventive actions constituted “justice,” enabling the powerful to override intra-suburb law. Some “radicals” even said, responding to this PA claim: “The bastards do whatever they fucking well like and call it whatever they fucking well want!”

My God – what a dreadful attitude towards “legitimate prevention!” What “radicals!”   

Bobbie Caps T-shirts became the B-army uniform. Weapons and clothes sales grew so large on both sides of this “complicated issue” that unemployment disappeared, inspiring commentators to claim that war helps economies.

“Kick-ass outbreaks,” one high-ranking A officer said, “kick recession butt.”

The Erudite Browser believed that this “military genius should be given the Noble Prize for Economics for his eloquence on ‘pulverising for profit’.”

Dave and Mike made enough money to disappear to the Caymans. They laughed when the Secretary-General of The United Suburbs, Xavier Rainbow-Delight, called for an immediate ceasefire. Rainbow-Delight had light-brown skin and African features. Exuding humiliated nobility, Rainbow secretly believed that “the chances of a ceasefire matched those of the next Mozart being a monkey.” His chief negotiator, Hans Fly-About, alternating between suburbs A and B, rose daily from sandbagged basements to say: “Constructive negotiations are proceeding.” But not around here, Hans thought.

Rising from sandbagged bunkers to spout clichés was Han's speciality. He did it without guffawing. Looking like an accountant with a right hand soldered to a leather briefcase, his hair like a wig hewn from satin and silk, he excelled at cliché production.

“It’s fantastic,” Klaus said, “how Hans keeps a straight face.”

Dave and Mike ran into Klaus in the restaurant of a five-star hotel in the Caymans. Klaus was eating Peking duck in plum sauce. 

“Five million armband at fifty a hit,” Klaus said, “kinda adds up. And don’t forget the shoits. You two babies didn’t do too bad yahselves, eh?”

“Mike,” Dave said, “revolutionised marketing by calling Bobbie Caps the Robert Capa equivalent of Che Guevara. Marketing experts now call that a tipping point.”

“It damn well nearly tipped me off my seat,” Klaus replied. “I almost died laughing.”

“Bob,” Mike quipped, smiling, “did die.”

“And for a great cause,” Klaus replied, grinning.

Klaus’s smile matched his stomach for width, his head like a shrunken cranium above his metre-wide shoulders.

“To great causes,” Mike said, raising his glass.

They tapped glasses in celebration of “man believing anything.”

“This duck,” Klaus said, “rivals the boids you babies sold from those lagoons.”

“You were our best client,” Mike said. “Remember: From the Lagoon to the sea, Suburb B will be free. Well, at least, for Dave and I. Better than nothing, hey?” 

Although looking like an eagle, Mike had a charming voice, his smile a dazzling shower of fluorescence. His hair fell like dank cloth from the fish-belly-coloured part that dissected his head.

“And the client,” he added, grinning with horrible luminosity, “is always right.”

“Hear, hear,” Klaus said, glass raised. “To braindead belief,” he added, clinking Mike and Dave’s glasses.

“Is it true,” Mike asked, “that it was you who claimed that Suburb A was the place where JC will return if Suburb A remains pure; and on a white horse brandishing a sword like the one used in Stars Wars that he intends to use to kill non-believers?”

“Yep,” Klaus replied, “it was me. I can tell yar, I’d had a few when I came up with that one. I even thought: Christ, will I get away with this? When I did, I thought: Fuck me, those idiots really do believe anything! Fortunately, they don’t even know logic exists!”

The luminosity beaming off Mike’s face bathed the restaurant in supernova light.

Then Klaus’s face exuded stunned surprise while belching: “Zealot! Christ, man, take a seat.”

“Gentlemen,” Zealot said, “I wish to propose a toast – to the British.”

“Hear, hear,” the others said, reverent towards “man’s greatest achievement – the holy British tax haven.”

“Where else can one guarantee the protection of one’s hard earnt cash but in a British tax haven?” Klaus asked, his smile’s radiance detected by low-orbit satellites. “Are there institutions holier than British tax havens? Places more spiritually enhancing? Obviously not!”

“Hear, hear…..” came a chorus of rapturous approval.

Klaus bowed towards “The Mecca of Money” – The Isle of Man – the restaurant’s clients rising and applauding, raising their glasses towards that “heaven on earth.”  

Photo of Kim Farleigh

BIO: Kim Farleigh has worked for NGO's in Greece, Kosovo, Iraq, Palestine and Macedonia. He takes risks to get the experience necessary for writing. He also likes painting, art, bullfighting, photography and architecture, which might explain why this Australian lives in Madrid. He has received 235 acceptances from over 100 different literary magazines.