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The Enemy and How I Helped to Fight it

I came; I saw; I left no trace

It’s a political satire, but one that is universal in its message, and touches on many aspects of politics, logic and Objectivist philosophy.

I originally wrote this story as a way to digest the many things I learned by reading the Neo-Tech material my father had previously bought. I believe it serves as a pseudo-mathematical proof that the Hizbullah and similar organizations are as irrational as they can be.

Now it has a sequel in the works: The Road to Heaven is Paved with Bad Intentions.

• Hebrew HTML (Read Online)

• English HTML

  • EPUB eBook - (free download).

  • Raw HTML - (view online without style and formatting).

Sources

• The Sources of the Story - in Hebrew and English - in a Mercurial repository on bitbucket.org.

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License (or at your option a greater version of this license). Year of copyright is 1997.

Sources of Inspiration

• My Guide to Neo-Tech - The philosophical foundation behind the story, which is a recommended read anyway you look at it.

• The Bastard Operator from Hell - Strangely enough, that’s the story that most inspired me to write this one. It probably would make little sense if you are not familiar with UNIX concepts.

• Kafka’s The Metamorphosis - I studied this story in high school, and it also proved of some inspiration to the story.

• John Allen Paulos - a mathematics professor who wrote two books about the connection between mathematics and philosophy and humour. Both are very recommended reads, and The Enemy is littered with Mathematical Logic exits.

• Joey Tribbiani from the Television show Friends - I enjoyed watching Friends after I graduated from high school, and retrospectively I can say that Joey was my favourite of the three boys. I believe the character of the ex-Member of the Organisation drew a lot of inspiration from Friends’ Joey: they are both naïve and innocent, they both have a positive sense of life, and they both pretend to be more stupid than they really are.

  The fact that Joey is a traditional sitcom “stupid-guy” character while the ex-Member is an ultra-intelligent and ultra-intellectual know-it-all, is relatively negligible.

Thanks and Acknowledgements

• Tal for saying the very first version of the story (which was much shorter than the existing one and ended up being discarded) was not too good, and for passing some critique on the first chapter of the second version which the current version is based on. (Along with his younger brother.)

• Alexey from “Smart Link” - for reading an early version in Hebrew, and giving some comments.

• Omer Zak - for reading and commenting on an early draft of the story.

• Miriam Erez Translations - for providing many useful grammar, punctuation, and syntax corrections to the Hebrew version of the story.

Resources

• An entry in my weblog about the history and motivation of this story.

See Also

• “How Israel is Responsible for the War with the Hizbullah”

• “Define Zionism” - an essay I have written which criticises Israel’s constitutional discrimination.