Editor’s Note: This text is available to read in the original Portuguese and in English translation. Scroll down to read in English, and click here to read in Portuguese.
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In short: it was the war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness. All of them Sons-of-Bitches.
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Deposition given by an historian from the Taedos’ Ministry of Propaganda: I made a mess of it when the time came to tell the story, I ended up telling it differently from what had actually happened. I made a mess, mistook two names, one date and one place, so it ended up being different from what had happened because I mistook one name, two dates and two places. I ended up mixing some things, changing a name for a date, a place for a quote. I promise I won’t mess up again. I will pay attention so that, when it’s time to tell the story, it will be just as it happened. I mean, promises are serious things, so I only kind of promise, since sometimes, when it’s time to tell the story, a better word pops into my head and I end up telling it differently from what happened. What I can really promise is not to change too much, just some insignificant names, some minor date or place. Really, I promise to change very little. I think, though, that it might be better to not promise even that. One of our own historians has given a similar deposition—the only differences are some two names, a date and a place.
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The Taedos were our neighbors, a fact that swayed public opinion in favor of the war. Behind this apparent paradox—a paradox since there are those who cultivate good will among neighbors, those who might even invite neighbors for a barbecue—was a great strategy. Sociological studies of the time revealed the perception that a neighbor made for an ideal enemy. The evident proximity of living in the same neighborhood proved to be a clear advantage when shooting and bombing on target. Some called this a lazy idea. But soon the sociological studies were replaced by the militaristic studies, which showed that this supposed advantage in fact worked both ways. This served to show us that to consider a neighbor as the ideal enemy was not so much a lazy idea as much as a, well, another type of idea altogether.
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A hero will never rest while on his chest there is still room for a medal. This worked so well that we had to update it: A hero will never rest even when on his chest there is no longer room for medals because we can always overlap them
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A Taedo weapons manufacturer was producing more arms than their army needed, so he came to our army to try and push us their surplus. We made quite a deal. We would buy their extra weapons on the condition that 20% of everything they sold to the Taedos had a manufacturing defect. He got so enthused with the idea that his counter offer was 25%.
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Leaders from various countries offered themselves as mediators in trying to end our war against the Taedos. One of them, I can’t remember if he was English or French, though I quite remember a rather strong German or Japanese accent, managed to bring together both our and the Taedos’ representatives for a peace talk. But the discussions on how to hold the meetings postponed the actual start of the negotiations. The argument about the shape of the table lasted seven years. The matter of the backrest on the chairs took another long while. Years and years over who would get to sit near the window. Such were the delays that, when the talks started, the war had already ended and maybe it was time to start another—since peace was already within reach and the talks had already begun. I don’t recall which war that was—we had nine wars against the Taedos, as many wars as there are Beethoven symphonies. I have obliterated the fact that there have been nine wars and am simply telling it as one single war. If one war causes trouble, imagine nine. Beethoven failed to consider that.
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A good portion of the war’s history was written before the war even started. Neither we nor the Taedos were crazy enough to enter a conflict without some precautions.
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Let’s pretend this is a movie. It’s not happening to you at all. This argument made the war more bearable for a lot of people. That bombing around the corner was just a movie, just a neighbor with his TV playing excessively loud. Dead family members and friends were just actors who had left this plot but, after the war, would be back in other movies. It would have caused trouble after the war, but by then it was enough to pretend you had nothing to do with it.
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How did the war begin? This question has troubled historians ever since the very beginning of the war. Many were the stories about which episode provoked the declaration of war—according to some historians it happened in unison. Both sides, in a perfect duet, went: war!! (With two exclamation marks, in order to avoid further conflicts). But historians who are partial to official history have solved this question by picking one of the many episodes which could have provoked the war and turning it into the dogmatic beginning of the war. At times it interested us to claim to have started the war, sometimes it didn’t. When it did, we espoused the claim that a general slipped on a banana peel and recognized among the laughter the distinct accent of a Taedo.
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Our prime-minister once said: It is in the nature of war to end in death, though we are making war in search of peace. However, there are many dead, too, in times of peace. It is in the nature of peace to end in death, for when we are at peace, we have war in mind. The queen did not like this and had the prime-minister’s speechwriter killed.
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Allies are always a problem. They don’t understand that it’s not their war. The role of an ally is to provide soldiers, arms and money. They may also, when the war is over, carry the trophy around for a bit, allow their soldiers to loot for, let’s say, six hours, and then take part in the reconstruction, though nothing over 5%. The ally is just hitching a ride. During the war against the Taedos we had allies who didn’t know their place. One ally took it so far as to suggest they should give opinions on strategy, claiming military knowledge. And sent a list of military tomes they had at their national library. Allies are like that, they think they are so important, don’t even dream they can someday become enemies. Allies are potential enemies. There are all those unresolved issues from those allied days and there you find good reasons to start a war. The Taedos were our allies in many wars, both before and after the war against the Taedos.
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The Taedos invented a joan of arc of their own and sent the girl to the front. She returned after the war was over. Married, three kids.
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The news on TV always had a soft spot for mothers, since images of women crying for their dead children were a good way to end news footage about bombings, attacks, battles, explosions, firing squads… They decreased the martial tension and prepared the viewer for the commercial break. This was true, though, only for part of the war, because we adopted a clever solution—later copied by the Taedos—in order to avoid the damage caused by these crying episodes being broadcast on television—and it was serious damage, since all those tears were starting to convince a lot of people that the war should end so that the mothers wouldn’t have to suffer so much. The solution was really simple: the mothers were also sent to war. They started fighting and therefore no longer had the time to cry for their children, they didn’t even know where their children were. There were even some cases where the children stayed home while the mothers went to war, according to a news segment exhibited right before the commercial break.
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We shared a border with the Taedos and this made for lots of excitement during the war. Excitement on account of the rather varied geography along the border. We were separated from them, at one point, by a river, at another by mountains, and at yet another by a bay; we were separated by roads, cities, barbed wire fences, and also by countries so small that it was like there was nothing between us and the Taedos but an imaginary borderline—no offense meant to those other countries by calling them imaginary, it is not a good time to start a war over that. But the most delicate of borders with the Taedos was the one on the desert, somewhere out there, no one knew exactly where. The desert ended up being good for military exercises. For example: we waited for a long time for the Taedos to invade us through the desert. We waited for them, they never came and, because of that, whenever we look at the desert, even after the end of the war, we keep imagining that, since they haven’t come by desert… maybe the tartars will come. So, we are waiting for the tartars. And also making use of the opportunity to wait for the barbarians, since they might be an answer. Two things can fit a single space of waiting. Or three things. We are also waiting for Godot.
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On our national civic calendar, V-Day falls a week before the Taedos’ V-Day does on their national civic calendar.
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Officials treated soldiers as enemies. This was guaranteed to work.
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The only influence here from the Napoleonic wars is the Gallicism in the title.
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We were not the first ones to change the date of a revolution. Many Histories have done this before. But we changed it out of an understandable necessity: to make schoolchildren’s lives easier when they cracked open their History books. The revolution had happened in ‘11. But what intensity does the Revolution of ‘11 have? No one can deny that the Revolution of ‘44 is more powerful, more consistent, more believable. Our historians trial-tested ‘22 and ‘33, but the Revolution of ‘44 doesn’t even need an exclamation mark to mark it as exclamatory, and thus ‘44 it became. This story has no Taedos in its cast of characters. It is in this Journal only because it goes right into another story, this one with Taedos in their usual supporting roles. We changed the feast of Our Lady of Whatsername—our patron saint—for an even simpler reason than the historical necessities of the ‘44 Revolution. The first apparition of Our Lady of Whatsername took place during a ministerial meeting, when she made some suggestions for the improvement of our country. One of these suggestions was to finish off the Taedos in order to open up new commercial prospects, to take over their businesses. This ministerial meeting and apparition had taken place on April 1st, but we later changed it to August 13th. Why August 13th? That was also Her Lady’s suggestion, offered to the president while he was in the bathroom, shaving his beard. The saint said to him: August, 13th. There was never any doubt about the date since, even in the rather emotional state of having just faced the apparition of Our Lady of Whatsername, the president had, in his bathroom, while shaving his beard, the presence of spirit, the self-control, the historical awareness to write down the date on the first piece of paper he put his hands on. This is made clear in all of our History books, except for where he found the pen. Our Lady of Whatsername never showed herself again, not even to claim her ministerial wages.
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A terrible hail fell during the war, though it fell only on our side, and caused much damage. Two Taedo generals wanted to claim for themselves the credit for the destruction. One alleged he performed a rain dance that caused the phenomenon. The other claimed to have asked God to make it hail, and to have had his request granted. We do not know how this story ended between the generals, as the Taedos did not let the details become known. All I know is that one of our own generals took it upon himself to do both things, the rain dance and the request to God, but his wish was not granted with hail. Instead the Taedos, damn them, had the sunniest week ever. Many of the Taedos we killed had impressive suntans.
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It took us a while to grasp the idea. The Taedos suddenly started building pyramids. They went mad, we thought. Or maybe they would use the pyramids to launch missiles from. Now, whenever we go to their territory to do some tourism, we finally understand it, we are even a bit proud of it: those magnificent pyramids were built by us, by our prisoners of war, imprisoned by the Taedos. There’s a sort of pride about it.
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The Conscription of Cowards. It was a good way to increase our troops. But for the cowards to enlist, a campaign was necessary in order to show that cowardice was really just an easy way towards heroism. When immobilized, the only possible movements a soldier could do were to chitter, piss himself, cry in fear, and, without enough courage to move, face the enemy. Thus were formed the coward battalions, and this scene would repeat itself: immobile soldiers frozen with fear stood their ground and ended up facing the Taedo enemy with bravery. There are thousands of instances of recorded bravery, though it has never surpassed what one would call a moderate level of bravery.
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Some guy showed up at our armed forces and offered a copy of a Taedo document that contained all of their military tactics. He asked for a lot of money in exchange. Our army said that this was an issue for the intelligence agency and the agency, considering how much money he wanted, informed the guy that buying secret documents was actually the purview of the ministry of war. The minister was the most upfront of them all. He said the office was financially unstable and told the guy to go sell that copied document to the president, or the prime-minister, or the king or queen, or whoever was on duty. The guy must have set that document on fire. But that doesn’t mean the story ends there. They all had the same idea—the chief of the armed forces, of the intelligence agency, the war minister, the president, the prime-minister, the king and queen. The very same idea: they created a fake Taedo document and sold it to themselves.
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We had a stretch of border on the south—or maybe the north—which was really unguarded, a quagmire we had no interest in populating. The area was very hard to protect—or not. The Taedos knew this—or not—and we had intelligence that an offensive would come from there—or not. It was necessary to protect that border on the north, or maybe it was the south. It was during a patriotic celebration at the Army Museum that someone came up with the idea. We transferred one of the museum’s most precious jewels—the Quintain Battalion—which we used to teach children about ancient warfare—or not—to that unguarded front. With those wooden-mannequin soldiers on the border, the Taedos kept waiting for our invasion. Why won’t they move?, the Taedos said, it must be psychological warfare, the Taedos said, they won’t last long standing still like that, the Taedos said, they look like statues, the Taedos said. This lasted for a few years. The Taedos tell the story with a few variations.
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We had so many prisoners of war that we didn’t know what to do with them all. There were more Taedos imprisoned by us than there were free Taedos over there. We ended up finding a good solution for both sides: we sold the prisoners back to the Taedos. We used the same price charts from the old slavery days. The number of prisoners was so high we didn’t even entertain the thought of just receiving the payment and not delivering the goods.
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The war started to grow boring. It became necessary to create interesting novelties. We created new, more daring designs for the tanks’ panels. New colors for the nuclear warheads (acqua, ochre, desert sand). A new rifle model every year. Bombs with pyrotechnics set to an orchestrated soundtrack. Airplanes dropping color-coordinated bombs so they could be better seen on TV. Flame-throwers in popper bottles. Thematic hand grenades: the four seasons, the five senses, the four elements (at one point a fifth element was considered, money, but by then the thematic hand grenades were on their way out, it wasn’t worth it). This scheme to generate interest back into the war worked because the Taedos understood the gravity of the situation and also took up the idea.
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Everyone remembers how the peace negotiations first stalled when discussing the shape of the table. Then on the issue of who would sit close to the window. There was also no understanding about what time to schedule the coffee break. The talks ended up happening over a round table in a windowless room with no catering. And what was meant to be a drag dragged on. But not for long enough. Suddenly it dawned on us that the armistice talks were going in a dangerous direction and the representatives on both sides didn’t quite understand the spirit of a peace summit. Before the worst happened, we joined with the Taedos so that we could put an end to all of that before they could put an end to all of this. The Taedos provided the cannon and we provided the ball. The location where the peace negotiations were taking place ceased to exist. The meeting during which that site turned into a target has passed into History as the Gate to the Beyond.
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The Taedos were very backwards, they only learned about writing through the Very New Testament. And even that happened by chance, thanks to the passengers of an unidentified flying object shaped like a saucer that landed on a plantain field.
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The Taedos had the practice of praying for their dead. Every afternoon at six o’clock they gathered together to pray. It made things simple for us. All we needed was to find where this meeting was taking place and then bomb it. Still, the Taedos insisted on continuing their prayers every day at six o’clock. Each bombing only gave them more reason to keep praying. They called this free will.
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There were petitions both for and against the war. The biggest argument in favor of the war was the divine origin of all martial states. Pacifists would yell slogans that it was love we needed, not war. As if it weren’t possible to make love during war.
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There was no missile crisis. A bilateral attempt was made in order to create suspense and lift up both of our media out of an economic crisis, but it did not work because negotiations only went as far as one of the sides having to play the bad guy. Neither we nor the Taedos wanted to play that part, and so the missile crisis was canceled. The media got out of their economic crisis by diversifying their activities into loansharking.
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Make war, it’s not like you’ve got anything better to do. Our propaganda worked so well that even the Taedos copied it—without asking for our permission, the bastards.
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Our Social Security system did not consider being a soldier during wartime as counting towards retirement. If the soldier thought his time on the front counted as work then he could go to the Taedos and ask them for his pension.
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Eventually the war grew old and boring. It was time for it to be over. Maybe we could take it up again later, who knows. Anyway, one day we all became fed up with the war. It didn’t sell any more newspapers, it wasn’t reported on the news, and some radio stations seemed to have forgotten we were even at war with the Taedos. Instead, they would report the record-breaking numbers of our agricultural production. For God’s sake, it was time for the war to be over. However, you can’t simply end a war like that, without a probable cause. No, something symbolic, even historic must happen in order to end a war, like the assassination of a duke, a baron, a prince or a prime minister. Now that would be an adequate end to a war, an incident where humanity would surpass all other issues. So we made a deal with the Taedos: we would assassinate a duke, a baron, a prince and a prime minister and use their deaths as reasons to end the war. We contributed a duke and a prime minister, they collaborated by contributing a baron and a prince—we each killed our own to save time. Some other strong memories about that period were the many record-breaking numbers of our agricultural production.
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Once, the Taedos’ air force attacked a chicken farm. They thought it was an arms manufacturing plant. Some twelve thousand chickens died that day. The Taedos deny it, though we know it happened, we even have the numbers to prove it: they killed exactly 12,033 chickens. What bothered the Taedos most about this incident was that we started observing one minute of silence every day in honor of the chickens. According to them, it was a mockery, but to us it was a sincere way of remembering all of the lives lost in that odious chickenslaughter.
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“Who’s winning the war?”
“We are!”
“We are!”
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Our soldiers invaded Taedo territory from the north. Riding bicycles. The Taedos were so humiliated by this show of contempt that there wasn’t even a battle. They preferred to spend their time trying to deny the news that our soldiers had invaded their territories riding bikes. They decided to pay back the humiliation, but ended up only plagiarizing us: they invaded our territory from the north. Riding camels. We were so humiliated by their complete contempt—attacking us with camels?—that we preferred to spend our time trying to deny the news that the Taedos had invaded our territory riding camels.
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It was determined by law that, in order to make communications more expedient in times of war, the word “battle” could now be written or pronounced with only a single “t”. These are the sort of attitudes that help us to win the war, said the Army’s spokesperson. Does the same rule apply to your butt? said the spokesperson for Grammar.1 2
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The Army took care that all soldiers’ families remained as stable and normal as possible while they were away fighting the war. This prevented their life stories from becoming movies produced by the Taedos.
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One of our most bellicose-friendly activists wrote a book defending peace. It was called, of course, The Art of Peace. Some copies must still exist in some library or Army museum. On the cover you see a cannon; from its mouth protrudes a flag with the word bang written on it. Next to the imprint you can read, only by squinting, that all profits from the sale of the book would be used in buying ammunition to kill Taedos. Some people are still fooled by the small print.
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The conscription notice was delivered by telegram, post, phone, e-mail, fax and in person. The officer who knocked on my door was missing an arm and both legs. He informed me of what I already knew by telegram, post, phone, e-mail and fax: the narrator of this journal had been called on to fight in the war. The officer told me it had been only fifteen days since he himself had returned from the front and that now he was employed in bureaucratic services. With a certain drama, he told me he was living proof that there was a chance you might come back alive from the front. My conscription would come sooner or later. Eventually someone would have thought about it, maybe even me. I boarded the train for the front wondering what sort of bureaucratic service would await me when I came back. In fact, it was writing the Journal of the War Against the Taedos, though I didn’t know it at that point.
I took the train while my fiancée stood on the platform, waving me goodbye. I did not have a fiancée, but there was a law demanding that every soldier on his way to the front must have a fiancée waving him goodbye from the platform. If the soldier did not have a fiancée, it was the government’s job to provide one. Mine was actually very cute.
The train ticket was very clear. Destination: FRONT. Front. As simple as Paris, New York, Rome, Mars. Presumably it was a one-way ticket for economic reasons; to buy a round-trip might be a waste of money. The instruction booklet told me to get a return ticket if necessary. It also gave other important information. Objective of Journey: KILL TAEDOS. Faced with that, I wondered if the appropriate reaction to my mission would be: hurray! or fuck! I patriotically opted for hurray! The booklet also told me of the advantages of having fast food in the trenches, how to clean up my butt without toilet paper and what to write home about (it already came with a pre-written letter, all we needed was to fill in the names). On the last page of the flyer there was3
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We captured a Taedo spy. It was while being lightly beaten up that he gave us the following testimony: Since I was a little boy, whenever they asked me “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I would say “I want to be a spy.” That’s the only reason I’m here, ok? Can you stop with the beating now?
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Our general—who always plagiarized Churchill—never compiled his speeches into a book. Churchill had already done that for him.
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One of our secret service staff once forgot his briefcase on the backseat of a taxicab. His defense: In every single war someone from the secret service has to forget his briefcase on the backseat of a taxicab—have you never seen a war movie?
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“Which side were you on during the war?”
“The arms industries’… Is there any other side?”
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During the time in the war when we were a monarchy, we brought down the king. We preferred to have a queen, just like the Brits—they had a queen at the time. Another king took the throne, but he had his own preferences, he was a republican and so during that period of the war we became a republic. But the monarchists still had power and, with the help of the Taedos, they brought down the president and reinstituted the monarchy, this time with both king and queen. Then the queen organized a coup, dethroned the king and brought back the republic. Etc.
This note on politics is necessary so that no one, in reading this journal that mentions kings, queens and presidents, might think the Historian is confused. The confusion, in this case, belongs to History.
1 The words were actually war and ass, which both had double t’s in the language of the writer of this Journal. The translation was made with two words with double t’s in Portuguese so that it made sense. (Translator’s Note)
2 The above footnote is not actually a Translator’s Note, but an authorial joke. The original was written in Portuguese and not translated from an imaginary Taedan language. This is the actual Translator’s Note. (Actual Translator’s Note)
3 The reader of the original text is also left wondering what was on that last flyer page… (Translator’s Note)
