This is not easily done. To even begin serious work on this project you first have to be a Prime Minister with a solid mandate. Then you need to have the covert support of a world power that is vested in this design. And lastly you have to be a very dedicated, hardworking individual, not lulled into inaction by the belief that if you left the country on auto pilot, it would destroy itself. You need to be on the job yourself. Like a punch drunk boxer the country may have reached a state in which it can neither stand straight up, nor get nor get clean knocked out. If it is in such a state, it will have to be you who will be required to put the reeling country down and out of its misery.
To destroy the country the very first essential is for you to ensure that you are neither disturbed nor distracted when you have embarked on this exercise, because this is a task of both concentration and skill. You have to know the value of loyalty and must surround yourself with people whose loyalty you can utterly swear by. Obviously, the pool that you can draw such loyalists from is your own family. So, draw them and deploy them in every vital nerve center of government, and proceed with them as a team dedicated to the great goal in mind. Just do not bother if you are accused of behaving like a king. The more you behave like this, the more your underlings will grovel at your feet, the stronger will be the image you project, and the more your people will fear you. And that is where you’d like to be. Any nobility you have should rest only in your words. Your actions should be ruthless, and stupid.
But the country is too large and just one family’s human resource pool will be unequal to the task of providing you with the numbers required. You therefore must draw people from the bureaucracy as well. When making your choice make certain that you choose the sharp of mind and servile of manner i.e. the type who are born to please and won’t mind selling off their grandmothers to reach and stay in your good graces. To ensure they stay there, allow them their pound of flesh. Free loyalty is a mark of sincerity, and sincerity is to be suspected. And remember whomever else you choose, just do not let your favour settle on a self-respecting officer. Such a person is a huge risk. He may have dormant germs of honesty which are often closely allied to patriotism. And patriotism in any form is poison for your design.
If you can do this in your first couple of months, you will have successfully built yourself the right platform from which to launch your second phase. You now have to secure yourself against any possibility of losing power, so make your position unassailable. Immediately start by destroying the police, making it a personal force to be used effectively against your own people. Take a leaf out of Hitler’s book. Stuff this force with thugs who are totally loyal to you, and will demonstrate this loyalty by breaking, without the slightest compunction, the bones of people who dare agitate for their rights. Never forget, your downfall begins where their rights start. This is the first lesson of “democracy” which you and your loved ones must imbibe early. The trick is to keep hollering about democracy but keeping the rabble, who were stupid enough to vote for you, in their place. For if they had deserved anything better, they would not have voted for you to begin with.
Next, you go for the judiciary. The system of selection to the ranks of higher judiciary is so wonderfully flawed that you can infiltrate any number of squint-eyed, black-hearted, venal ignoramuses into the system, and then groom them all the way into CJs. And if you are careful with your selection, before you know it, you are likely to have the same majority on the benches that you have in parliament. And what a feeling of smugness that should give you!
But for the while you are accomplishing the above, remember that countries are best destroyed, by destroying their economies. And economies cannot be destroyed by ham-fisted policies and extravagance alone. Plunder of national wealth is the most effective force multiplier you need to invoke. The multiple advantages of this are, that not only does this lead to hollowing out the country whose destruction you wish, but it simultaneously spreads injustice and bad governance throughout the land, which in turn, hastens the fall of a state like nothing else will; while at the same time you end up enriching your family and yourself in the process.
But as you thieve from your people, do not forget to align the members of parliament on your side, because they are yet another phalanx that has the capability of removing you from power. Yet this you cannot accomplish through sweet talk and smiles alone. You have to get them invested in the project by making them partners in theft. Unless you assuage their hunger, they will be conspiring with the army to get rid of you. Each one of them is exactly like you, a bunch of grasping blackguards nurtured on years of theft and plunder. In short, they are your natural allies. Just lift slightly the lid of the till for them and see how they wag their tails and slurp at your heels. Whores masquerading as leaders of the people.
But your own greed will counsel otherwise. It will suggest to you that sharing with them will make you poorer. Yet look at this the other way. Put a value on being able to commit theft without unnecessary disturbance, and you will grasp the advantage in sharing. And besides, when you have to loot the entire country, know that there is enough in it to make the whole lot of you rich beyond imagination. Just think. Only half the population is living below the poverty line. Imagine how many thousands of the privileged have been enriched by these poor masses to get themselves to their present level of wretchedness, and how many years it has taken them to do so. And you may have no more than a tenth of those years to live anyhow, yet you still have a full half of the population left to you to impoverish and despoil! Looked at it this way, wouldn’t you say that the future looks terribly bright for you and your little ones, despite the need to share the loot with members of the opposition, which your largeness of heart has managed to make “friendly”? Besides, won’t this go down for times to come as your original contribution to the theory of trouble-free governance and democracy?
The huge incidental advantage of committing theft in partnership with the parliamentary opposition is that now you can amend the constitution the way you want. Through these amendments you can make certain that no matter how future elections go, you or your partners-in-theft will remain in power and will keep making hay. And nothing can give you a better guarantee of continued plunder with total immunity, than this arrangement.
You are now nearly there, and your goal is within easy reach of achievement, but your greatest hurdle still remains in place. You have neglected the dismantling of the army. Your idiotic advisers must surely have advised you to start this project by first dealing with the army, and to do so by your favoured technique of giving a dog a bad name, and then trying to hang him. This is exactly how this should not be done–remember what happened the last few times you attempted this?
And don’t take the other route either, of trying to bribe a general whom you don’t know sufficiently well. The last time you tried this, the general merely ended up suggesting where you should stuff the BMW keys that you sent him. The next general may go further and actually end up completing the stuffing, which may not be a great deal of fun.
Next time you want to proceed with trying to subvert the army, please don’t go looking for an army chief who will be loyal to you. Remember when a general becomes an army chief, he does not need to be loyal to anybody, and almost his first temptation to dispense with someone is a stuffed Prime Minister. So, pick a general who has a reputation for corruption. And having elevated him, do not go to him with the offerings yourself. Send in a contractor, an industrialist, or a real estate thug. After he has taken the bait, spread the cancer to those around him. Once they know you have the Chief eating out of your hand, they will be more amenable to following suit. But never forget that once you have corrupted the general, don’t ever think that you can take him for granted by treating him like your chief secretary. Remember, corrupted or not, he is still the general, and he still has his 111 Brigade, which he may be itching to put to use, especially when he sees the kind of lolly you are making.
After this general retires, make sure that the reputation of his replacement stinks worse than your own. If per chance you make a mistake, and promote an honest one, you will have undone most of your hard work. The army is a huge, tardy, monolith, and slow of change. You will need a succession of rotten Chiefs to ensure that the rot reaches so far and deep that it cannot be easily reversed. And just when the putrefaction has set in well and proper, you may think that you have completed your task, and can fold your hands and rest. Just don’t even think about it. It is the army which is really holding this country together, not “democracy” or the constitution, which you have already screwed up anyway. So, when you have successfully subverted the army there is no time for you to rest. This is the time for you to pack up and leave because any day now, a whole lot of shit will hit the fan, and you don’t want to get caught up in it, though no one will have deserved this more than you.