Bonus question: How many names would one need to right down?
Real bad luck some chud hog like Light Yagami found the Death Note before anyone else did. By killing only criminals reported on in the news, he effectively made himself into a weapon of execution that could be freely wielded by the cops at almost entirely their own discretion. I wish the anime would have explored that idea a bit more, but I'll settle for the very pathetic way Light Yagami got caught by a 12 year old, threw a tantrum, and then died. That was unironically a great ending.
So say a communist found it instead. How much damage could this baby do to the global capitalist nightmare we live under?
Hey, who's to say a magical implement of death wouldn't be very useful for organizing!
Imagine never having to worry about "That Guy" showing up to an org meeting again, no matter how man That Guys you encounter for the rest of your life.
There are just 2,700 billionaires in the world.
And their inheritors
And their inheritors inheritors
And their inheritors inheritors inheritors
Until they're gone.
That's maybe 10k-20k, eliminating the organising class of capitalism. Forcing all of their assets into the possession of the states in which they reside.
Then eliminate the bourgeoise parties, and the bourgeoise party memberships. Leave behind only the socialist parties.
With no bourgeoise class and no political or ideological leadership the right would catastrophically collapse. The only political leadership that would exist would be socialist. The remaining petty-bourgeoisie might try to cobble something together in the chaos but without the existing political infrastructure of the bourgeoise parties it would be a weak mess.
20k to eliminate the bulk of the global bourgeoisie. 15k-200k per country to eliminate the bourgeoise political infrastructure, much much less in countries with lower populations.
The goal here isn't to eliminate reactionaries but to eliminate the political infrastructure upon which they and the right are organised. You do that and you win by being the only ones that could reasonably be considered a viable option.
EDIT: You may need to do something about militaries. Many of them might attempt to assume emergency military rule, being the only ones organised enough to do so. I think a few thousand in each military is probably all you need though, if you end all the commanders and officers then there's nobody capable of doing any organising.
EDIT2: If you started with the countries neighbouring socialist countries then they would flip very easily and successfully with the support of their neighbours, they could happily come in and help provide political infrastructure in the emergency. You could then just paint the map, country by country.
EDIT3: Upon further thought, this is basically the Jakarta Method but applied against the capitalists.
Indonesia will make you cry. I think it is a must read, understanding the extent of their willingness to exterminate communists, proletarian organisers and any and all parts of our political infrastructure to set us back is very important.
You could get rid of every right wing media personality, writer, thinker, and ideologue while leaving the political structure intact. Good luck winning elections when every campaign writer and advertising manager you hire dies of inexplicable exploding head syndrome.
20k to eliminate the bulk of the global bourgeoisie. 15k-200k per country to eliminate
counterpoint: Just kill like, 20 rich racists in ways that leave obviously pro-commie hints.
basically make it look like a :who-must-go: but for Xi, Lula, and everyone else. Just keep their enemies dying until even chuds worship communism, which will be far before 20k deaths
The key here is that you could have people do things before they died according to the in-universe rules. "Capitalist turns all of their companies into workers cooperatives and then dies quickly and painlessly of an aneurysm at the time they would have originally died" times the amount of notable capitalists probably works, but Im also probably forgetting more rules
That would never work. One person can't just turn a massive company into a workers' co-op unless they have insane voting shares like Zuckerberg
And if you try to make them do something that isn't possible, they just skip that part and either complete the other items or get a heart attack
you can get the name of the board, and give all 10 board members the same pre-death instructions about turning microsoft or w/e into a fully unionized co-op.
Yeah, this, although you might have to include a "standby while (author name) finishes writing the next 9 lines and then execute the following:"
You can't just like, kill a bunch of dudes and think things will change but it's pretty good leverage with a huge weakness that it doesn't work if you don't know someone's name. You'd basically need to do normal revolution and keep that death note waaaaaaaaaaay up your sleeve. It makes purges easier and if you have a decently trustworthy cadre it could be used for leverage but you would have to seriously cover your own ass before using it even as leverage, even people on your side don't want to be subject to someone with literal control over whether you live or die.
idk how many CEOs could there be? just keep death noting them until the economy is controlled by huawei and newman's.
Companies usually list their board of directors too right? Could probably just look up a descending list of personal wealth.
Will you do 10,000 names in one night to cause chaos, or will you make it slow and subtle such that no one realizes the deaths are unnatural?
Will you sequentially write down the legal name of everyone who attempts to charge you rent/evict you until it's random heirs and next of kins who need months to figure out nobody is collecting rent on the properties they just inherited?
Will you keep an offline copy of wikipedia so you can research and schedule deaths anonymously offline without NSA type groups being able to determine your IP address looked up all these people exactly 30 day before they died?
What if the US government figures out a death note like situation is happening and anonymizes all leadership/elites?
Will you get the shinigami eyes?
Will you attempt to create a QAnon style Twitter account to put a digital face behind your actions?
But, most importantly, what new side hustles will the Death Note unlock for you?
Will you attempt to create a QAnon style Twitter account to put a digital face behind your actions?
death note part 2 plot confirmed
About 60 million people die each year. You'll give yourself carpal tunnel before you cause enough of a mess for epidemiologists to get suspicious.
It's hard to kill a large number of people who don't already have mainstream news articles or local news articles or wikipedia articles with a Death Note unless you're ordering used high school year books off ebay or using facebook to find local targets in your area.
The QAnon types make conspiracies when nothing happens, the epidemiologists will notice the an increase in notable deaths when the news and data confirm the presumed non-sense by the tin foil hat types.
When two or three celebrities die in the same year/month, people get out the conspiracy theories. They will notice.
Covid gives you perfect cover. "Died suddenly of blood clots". Hell, the GOP's collective refusal to mitigate Covid in any way even makes them like 4x more likely to die compared to Libs, so you can pretty much go hog wild there.
"Elon Musk died today, after a freak strawberry jelly accident" :sicko-yes:
if killing people was all it took, we wouldn't need to have this conversation
So that's the thing, just killing people in real life doesn't work because there is no way to target specific people wielding power this freely and easily. I imagine things change a bit when you acquire a magical weapon like the death note that can also mind control people for a certain amount of time before they die.
without the magic part, you also need to be able to get away with it, or to have active groups explaining why you did it and a positive socialist direction for society to move in since white moderates won't like you offing governors and rich guys like that.
Seriously. Reliably pulling off assassinations IRL is absurdly difficult. Even random truck or gun attacks take a lot of planning and almost inevitably result in your network being compromised and hunted down. Magic assassination book that leaves no evidence for anyone to even realize that an assassination happened? Just figure out how old the target is, pick something off the top 5 causes of death at random, and you can get rid of anybody, forever, and no one will ever know.
Doesn't the death note allow the user to control people for some amount of time before killing them via the written cause of death? Every country, business, and major capitalist organization is suddenly run by devout communists whose sole purpose in life is to rally the masses to global communism. After the time period of control ends, they all explode and their remains mysteriously always splatter into a perfect hammer and sickle shape. Repeat as many times as necessary,
You get about a minute or so pre death I think. Enough fir a jucy suiside note but nothing legally binding.
the actual rule is:
If the cause of death isn't specified, the victim dies of a heart attack in 40 seconds. However, the rule can be delayed for twenty-three days, meaning you can write down "dies by heart attack in [xx] days."
as soon as a new President is elected, write the name down. how long can they keep it going.
If you don't change things fast enough, one problem you could run into is politicians assuming pseudonyms for public life since the Death Note requires you to know both a person's face and real name. That puts the user under a bit of time pressure, but unless you're really obvious you could probably go quite a ways before they find out about this requirement.
What counts as their name? Their birth name? Their legal name? The name people call them buy? Basically; What social sciences department did the gods of death get their masters degree in?
I think it's their birth name because it's clear neither Mello nor L ever actually went by the birth names used to kill them. The Death Note rules are full of arbitrary things like this, most notoriously with the seemingly random time limits on different processes. I guess the king of death just had a very practical mindset in coming up with the death note rules.
a great ending
Agreed! When i was an edgeboy teenager I hated the manga ending and liked the anime better, but looking back now the original nailed it and the anime tried really hard to give Light some Jesus symbolism that was completely out of place.
dude we could win the death tontine and split the booze :xi-pog:
