One of the tasks I made for myself in working on Divine Horizon was to write an inciting speech by fictional Cardinal al-Rashid. It was a great assignment for myself in studying speech pathology, what works linguistically and what doesn't, and great speeches both in history and in fiction. Below is my first pass at writing this speech, which Cardinal al-Rashid gives in Damascus just prior to being assassinated. It draws heavily from Charlie Chaplin's Great Dictator speech.
My brothers! My brothers, my sisters, and my children. I stand before you today to tell you that I would we could disband. I don’t want to lead armies. I don’t want to send my sons and daughters to war. We don’t want to hate and despise one another, it is not the way of good men and good women. There is room in the world, room enough for everyone.
I am a man of cloth before you. It is not, it cannot be the business of a man in cloth to take up steel.
But as long as there are men, and women of greed, men and women of hate, there must be arms. There must be arms and armies of the righteous to face down greed, to face down hate. Machines have made us hate! Machines and machinery. Machines are being operated by people, and while people were made and given right to love, machines were made to be used. Here is the center of our folly, for now our machines, our machinery, these...things, are being loved, and people are being used!
My children, we have developed speed, but we cannot traverse the world. We are closed to one another, and the world has folded in on itself.
We see more machines than people.
Our knowledge, our intelligence, it has made us cold, and hard.
We think we know what lies behind these shells of steel and iron.
But we do not, we have no kindness, no gentleness for one another.
Life has become violence, and we are losing grip upon it all.
Right now my voice reaches millions, millions of men and women who are isolated in metal shells living machine-lives! They are children! Victims of the system making men and women torture and imprison one another! They are slaves to a binary operative, an idea of father, or son, but never both, never meeting, never together.
I am a man of the cloth before you today, right now. But I am renouncing this cloth, and taking up the steel. I take it up that we might purge darkness! That we might renounce sin, and drive out the evil of greed, of hate, of despair from men’s hearts!
Take up your weapons brothers, sisters! Take up your machines that we might fight against darkness. Today, and every day, tomorrow, and forever! We war against hate!
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