“What if someone had put a bullet in Adolf Hitler’s head before he rose to power in 1933? Can you look at all the people displayed on the clock’s circumference without having feelings of hatred aroused, of wanting at least one or two of them dead?!”
This imagines an online game played on the Dark Web using cryptocurrency. Twice/day—when the hour and minute hands synchronize position at 12—whichever one of the World’s Most Hated People—drawn from websites like these 1, 2, 3, etc—has had their bounty bid to the highest level will become a contract available to the world’s most cold-blooded assassins!
WARNING! No players under the age of 21. All Bidding players automatically have their name added to the Target List. Historical experience suggests extreme uncertainty in determining who should remain among the living and who should be removed by violence. This game explicitly promotes non-violent means of achieving change, progress and justice.
History
This piece grew out of discussions over the years with 2 friends (who shall remain anonymous), as we sat helplessly watching people with enormous and unchecked financial, resource-control or political power wreak havoc on everything from a planetary to personal scale, with more and more wealth consolidating at the top, and more and more people pushed into a miserable existence as the planet’s ecology collapses.
“Why,” we wondered, “was it always the case that the control came from the top down, and with the only individual power—at the ballot box—being chiselled away by corruption and mistrust in the mechanics of democracy, everyone feeling helpless? There are a handful of people fucking things up…think of how much better it would be if they were killed off by assassins! All it would take is 2 or 3, and several of their super yachts set on fire to put the fear in them, and maybe then we could have a better world!”
Of course we all know far too well that violence begets violence, and one person’s devil is another person’s angel, and once you get a game like this up and running, maybe one of your “Saints” becomes a target. That said, we’re left wondering if there’s some way to put the fear into those who maul the planet and its people and induce responsible behavior? I suppose not, and the rich will get richer selling us commodities and pain relief as the planet burns up.
Here’s the original story that inspired this work:
He did not perceive anything because he was dead…
Just a bright flash…
The sudden death of the big boss, however had obviously nothing natural in sight of the butchered pulsing hole of what was a clean shaved and luxuriously after-shaved face a moment before.
The two massive dark suited men, with exposed headset, kept on moving another couple of second before noticing the sudden amputation of their employer.
A late draw of useless guns followed a quick panoramic scrutiny, a few barked words preceded some incredulous responses …
At the exact same time two almost identical scenes took place around the world, Monsanto had just lost its head in a triple simultaneous blood bath.
A month later it was the turn of Lehman Brothers…
It was not a coincidence nor a targeted revenge but a genuine anarchist vendetta.
These attacks were the first of a long series that swung the business world into the worst existential crisis in its history … A crisis linked to fear.
For the first time in history, they were no longer innocents falling but grands of this world, famous or infamous, having in common to be the most cynical bastards the world would know or know posthumously.
They fell in number, in sets of three precisely despite the enhanced protections.
Finance, politics, oil, pharmaceutical, weapons, drugs, mafia, sex: there was no exception, bastards could be found everywhere.
The executions were systematic, implacable and impeccable in execution.
The absence of evidence seemed to indicate some divine performance worthy of celestial and discreet archangels…
The pedigrees of these motherfuckers appeared out in the open thé next day on the Official Vatican Network, for some mysterious reason.
The biggest “bastardicide” of human history had just begun …
Context
Annually, more than 3,500 children and teens (ages 0 to 19) are shot and killed, and 15,000 are shot and wounded—that’s an average of 52 American children and teens people every day. And the effects of gun violence extend far beyond those struck by a bullet: An estimated three million children witness a shooting each year. Gun violence shapes the lives of the children who witness it, know someone who was shot, or live in fear of the next shooting. [1]
Bodycount. Doom Eternal. Wolfenstein. Deathloop. Aliens vs Predator. Shadow Warrior 2 . Bulletstorm. Bioshock Infinite. Back 4 Blood. Shooter games are a core component in the lives of many teens (boys and girls), and after 100 or 500 or 1,000 virtual splatter-spray killings, an anesthetization to violence occurs.
Angel Assassins plays off this, but bumps it up a level with the notion that players can actively bid on and drive up the bounty on the current selection of The World’s Haters and/or Most-Hated, with contracts released every 12 hours to contract killers. Sound far-fetched? It isn’t: this is the procedure for getting rid of environmentalists, labor organizers, dissidents and journalists.
A former soldier with the US-trained special forces units of the Honduran military asserted that (Berta) Caceres’ name was on their hitlist months before her assassination. As of February 2017, three of the eight arrested people were linked to the US-trained elite military troops: two had been trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA, the former School of the Americas (SOA), renamed WHINSEC, linked to thousands of murders and human rights violations in Latin America by its graduates.[2]
Payments are often made through untraceable cryptocurrency, and payment power is consolidated in the hands of the regime, resource extraction company or officials being bribed by same to maximize extraction and profits with a minimum of oversight.
Could the people of an authoritarian regime level the playing field—in the same way that political campaigns counteract the influence of donors with deep pockets by gathering small amounts from millions of The Little People”? It’s a nice thought at first take, but it doesn’t work for a multitude of reasons: violence begets more violence, the likelihood that this game could be harnessed by the powerful against the powerless, that a participant would be guilty of murder, etc.
Maybe it’s better just to make sure all the crew is safely ashore and set a superyacht on fire!
Bilgin Super Yacht Fire in Mallorca [3]