No Justice, No Peace

Day 2,744, 09:01 • Published in Japan Nigeria • by Madame Yang

eJapan has reached an impasse. Everyone agrees: without national unity, the country cannot hope to move forward and witness the reclamation of it's former greatness. The population has split fairly evenly into two great hostile camps and neither is willing to cooperate with the other. It would seem that we have a pretty cut-and-dried case of both sides being more or less equally at fault here.

Or do we? Does not one side have their boot pressed firmly upon the throat of the other? Does not the government maintain a dictatorship that declares itself openly hostile to half of the country? Do they not literally deny the existence of a legitimate opposition, proclaiming any citizen who does not march in lockstep with them to be either a traitor or the multi account of a traitor? Are these the conditions for negotiation?

Nobody can suggest any sort of equivalence between the attitudes of these two sides while one holds all the cards. The dictatorship has removed any and all political recourse; the only weapon remaining to the opposition is their refusal to submit. If the ruling clique is to continue to claim that they desire peace and reconciliation, they will have to prove it. The ball is in their court; they can show us that they are serious by taking the necessary steps. That is to say, by restoring democracy. Lately, the opposite course has been preferred. Personal attacks against prominent opposition leaders have started leaking into the publications of official government organizations (which had so far remained unsullied by such disgusting displays of partisanship) along with fetishistic slogans and images that have no business being in an article from any ministry. This pronounced drop in standards can only be expected to continue in the face of zero administrative accountability.

The DNP-CtG-TLS gang are wont to excuse their behavior by pointing out that they were not the first to attempt a coup d'etat, merely the first to achieve success at one. Thus, as Thrasymachus asserted to Socrates, justice ought to be understood as the advantage of the stronger. We have been allowed plenty of time to enjoy a regime founded upon such principles - a regime that only really knows how to bully those weaker than itself. The senseless attack on little eBelgium is essentially our government's domestic policies in macrocosm. The misery of the eJapanese situation is now being exported. Perhaps we should be regarding it as a cultural exchange?

Again, in a conflict between two people where one is bound and being throttled by the other, the onus for ending it lies upon the one doing the throttling. Our fellow citizens in the DNP-CtG-TLS coalition can end this civil war whenever they want simply by dissolving the dictatorship. Reopen the dialogue, reinstate democracy. If they do not, they can only expect the continued refusal of the opposition. No justice, no peace! All we can do now is remind them.

~ Madame Yang