Ellie looked at Terry, and thought for a moment.
Insurgencies were tricky. They were tricky because they meant fighting an enemy hidden in among a civilian population, which usually meant killing civilians, and that was usually a bad idea. It was a bad idea because civilians were also consumers, and tended to stop consuming when they were dead, or being threatened and hurt by a security force, and a slowdown in consumption usually caused a loss of business confidence, and that usually upset shareholders and corporate officials. And that did no-one any good.
Insurgencies were a terrible nuisance, and as long as there had been insurgencies, there had really only been two ways to deal with them. One was to give in, or seem to give in. To make some gesture towards resolving the insurgents’ complaints, and smother the insurgency with kindness. Usually this worked. Usually it was done quite easily by corrupting the insurgency’s leaders, making them part of the system, subverting a few people to subvert a whole movement, since very few people believed in anything so much they couldn’t be bribed to abandon their cause. Kindness was the best way, but sometimes kindness failed, and then the only other way to defeat an insurgency was through unending, unspeakable violence. To overwhelm the insurgency with suffering and horror, overwhelm it even though it was made up of hardened terrorists, by killing and keeping on killing until the suffering became too great for the insurgency to stand. To become utterly brutal.
Brutality was needed because in the end, nothing else worked. Brutality was necessary, and the simplest way to be brutal was to hurt a lot of people. Insurgents and suspected insurgents and insurgents’ families, too. Their friends and neighbors, their customers or clients, or anyone else nearby. In the end, it didn’t especially matter who got hurt, because the point was to cause such widespread suffering that the whole society turned against the insurgency. Because then, deprived of support and encouragement, the insurgency would eventually wither away.
It was callous, but it worked. It had worked in the MidEast, for the most part, to defeat the endless conflicts there, and it was working in Měi-guó, too, as far as Ellie knew.
Brutality was working in Měi-guó because it had to. In Měi-guó, brutality had to be the way. Kindness wasn’t possible, since what the debt-resisters wanted was completely removed from what the debt-recovery corporations could concede. In Měi-guó, unfortunately, the debt-recovery corporations had to be unhesitatingly brutal. When they found insurgents, they arrested whole towns, and killed any who resisted. They burned houses, and sold insurgents’ families into debt-servitude to pay for the damage debt-resisters had caused, and when the debt-resisters’ atrocities were especially awful, when corporate officials were hurt or infrastructure damaged, then the insurgents’ parents or children were usually executed, too.
It wasn’t nice, Ellie had always thought, but it was how such wars had to be fought. It was just what had to be done. And it worked. It created fear. And now, that fear was paying off.
Because of it, Terry was willing to talk to her.