The Secret International Persecution Program

The Secret International Persecution Program

Written on 10 September 2026.

A person can be affected by decisions without knowing everything that led to them. He sees what somebody does, but he may not know what that person has been told, what assumptions have been made or what accusation he is supposed to answer. If he knew, he might understand the situation quite differently.

This is what I find interesting about the expression the secret international persecution program as a symbolic description of civilization. I am using the expression as a metaphor, not as a claim that one hidden organization directs events against particular people. The question is how its separate parts can describe ordinary arrangements that sometimes become instruments of injustice.

Following the program

Civilization behaves in some ways like a program. You do certain things, avoid other things, follow procedures and receive something in return. There are conditions, rewards and consequences. Most of the time we call this ordinary life.

A person goes to work, follows instructions and gets paid. He has a schedule, responsibilities and limits on what he can do. To someone accustomed to employment, this may seem obvious. Of course you follow the program. That is what you are paid to do.

Even the employer follows requirements imposed by customers, contracts, expenses and competition. The person giving instructions is also responding to demands placed upon him.

Someone who does not work and lives on sickness or disability benefits encounters another part of the same civilization. His contact with it may involve assessments, forms and administrative decisions. He has not stepped outside the system. His livelihood depends upon a different part of it.

I think this can affect how people understand society. One person thinks mainly about keeping a job. Another thinks about how an authority assesses him. The arrangement that feels ordinary to one person may appear quite strange to another.

The international part is also fairly straightforward. Trade, communication and information cross borders. Somebody can publish an accusation in one country and have it repeated in another. Hostility can spread without everybody involved receiving instructions from the same place.

Civilization is not one computer program with one programmer. It contains competing interests and people who disagree. But similar rules and incentives can produce similar behaviour in different places.

What remains hidden

A public institution does not conduct every conversation in public. Its existence can be known while parts of its work remain unknown to the person affected. You can know the official procedure without knowing every assumption being made as it is applied.

Consider a hypothetical assessment. The person being assessed knows what he submitted and what he was asked. The people conducting it may also have reports, previous notes or interpretations that he has not seen. If an important statement is wrong, he may be unable to correct it until he knows what it says.

This does not mean that every assessment contains a hidden accusation. It means that the ability to understand and answer a case depends partly upon knowing what the case actually is.

The same problem can occur between individuals. Somebody may believe he has a card in his back pocket: something he has heard, something he thinks you did or something he believes gives him an advantage. You hear his words without knowing the premise behind them. You may think you are discussing one thing while he thinks the conversation concerns something else.

Sometimes the explanation is deliberate concealment. Sometimes it is a misunderstanding, poor communication or an assumption nobody thought to explain. Those possibilities matter. Something being unknown to you does not establish that it is being maliciously hidden from you.

But where an accusation really is concealed, the difficulty is clear. How do you answer what you have never been told?

The Art of War

Sun Tzu discusses the advantage of deception and concealment in The Art of War. In Lionel Giles's translation, chapter I states:

All warfare is based on deception.

Later in the same chapter:

These military devices, leading to victory, must not be divulged beforehand.

These are statements about warfare. In chapter VI, Sun Tzu also explains how concealing the intended point of attack can force an opponent to divide his preparations between several possible locations.

The connection I see is that information can change a person's ability to respond. If one side knows what it intends to do while the other side does not, the uncertainty itself can provide an advantage.

That does not make every private conversation an act of warfare. Nor does a military book establish what any institution or individual intends. But it explains why secrecy can be useful when a situation really is adversarial. Concealment can be part of how an action succeeds.

There is also a difference between protecting private information and withholding the substance of an accusation from the person expected to answer it. Both may involve information not being disclosed, but their purposes and consequences can be very different.

When the procedure carries injustice

Having to work, follow a rule or accept an unpleasant decision is not automatically persecution. Procedures can serve useful purposes. But a procedure can also carry a false accusation, discriminatory treatment or somebody's personal grievance.

An institution does not have to invent an entirely new system to do something unjust. The existing system may be sufficient. What looks like an ordinary case from behind a desk can involve another person's livelihood, reputation or freedom.

Secrecy can make such an injustice harder to challenge. If a decision depends upon a mistaken claim, keeping that claim out of view also keeps it away from correction. The person affected may spend his effort answering the wrong question because he has not been shown the real one.

This is where I think the title has meaning as a metaphor. The program is the arrangement of rules and responses. The international part is the reach of modern civilization. Persecution occurs when those arrangements are used unjustly against somebody. The secret part can be the information withheld within that particular process.

But the words cannot prove their own application. Missing information remains missing information. It cannot tell us, by itself, what fills the gap. A specific claim of wrongdoing still needs evidence, and similar behaviour does not by itself establish coordination.

The truth shall make you free

Jesus said:

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

— John 8:32 (KJV)

In this passage he speaks about freedom from sin, and he continues:

If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.

— John 8:36 (KJV)

The passage concerns the freedom Christ gives. It should not be reduced to a promise that obtaining a document will solve every earthly problem.

Still, there is a practical distinction between knowing what is true and trying to live inside somebody else's unexplained version of events. Knowing the actual allegation can allow you to answer it. Learning that a supposed threat has no evidence can also free you from spending your life preparing for it. Either way, the truth matters more than maintaining an interpretation.

Nor does understanding an unjust situation require winning acceptance from everybody involved. Where participation is voluntary, leaving can be a complete decision. A person can attend to his practical needs and decline further involvement in an abusive setting.

You do not need to know every private conversation before deciding how much of your life to give to a particular group. Seek the facts that matter for an actual decision. What remains unknown does not have to become your life's work.

References

AI Disclosure: Parts of this page may have been created, edited, or assisted by artificial intelligence tools (such as ChatGPT or other language models). All AI-assisted content is reviewed by a human before publication. For questions, contact the site administrator.