The Art of the Smoke War.

Congratulations are in order to Junican, who has won the BMJ's prize of a year's subscription to Smoker-Bashing Monthly.

The BMJ still don't get it. They call us 'pro-tobacco blogs' but that is not what we are. We're just smokers. We are not 'pro tobacco'. We are 'pro being left the hell alone'. We have no interest in turning non-smokers into smokers like some kind of yellow-fingered vampires or Marlborg Collective.

I've just had an image of the Marlboro Cowboy with one of those Borg arms, which includes an ashtray, a rolling machine and a lighter. Must find time to fire up Paint Shop later. 'Come to Marlboro Country. Resistance is futile'.

No, we aren't interested in 'recruits'. We are not interested in making everyone live their lives the way we choose to. We are not interested in forcing non-smokers to smoke, we are not even interested in forcing them to be anywhere near us while we smoke, despite the smokophobe insistence that 'we want to smoke everywhere'. We don't want access to your house so we can blow smoke into your child's cot. We don't want all of the train or all of the bus or all of the pubs and restaurants. Smokers are around 20-25% of the population. How about 20-25% of the pubs, train carriages etc? No? Of course not. That would be letting the Untermensch think they might actually be human and the spiteful smokophobes could never stomach that.

Smokers are not the ones demanding compliance and demanding you live your lives as instructed. We are the opposite of that. We are, in fact, fighting that.

Nobody pays us to get all frothy-mouthed and wild-eyed about the medical profession, which seems to have amended the Hippocratic Oath with the words 'except smokers, drinkers and fat people', which tells us all our NI payments were in vain, it was just a protection racket after all, and that they will stand by and watch us die unless we live our lives as they dictate. We don't need to be paid to be angry about that, as a moment's reflection should make clear to anyone with half a brain.

I can only suggest that each member of the BMJ select a brain from their formalin-pickled collection and have it installed in place of their own. It is certain to be in better working order than what they have now and, unless they have Hitler or Stalin in their collection, it could not possibly be more vicious.

Should I ever require the attention of a doctor, and be ordered to assimilate or be left to die, he/she (and everyone within bellowing range) is going to hear about the Hippocratic Oath and how modern medicine has abandoned it, along with all pretence of scientific enquiry, in preference to witchcraft and hyperbole and outright lies.

I bet I'll never be able to get an appointment once they read this. But then what would be the point? I could go in there with erysipelas and it would be classed as smoking related. I'd be better off with a homeopath or an acupuncturist or even a man in a big mask with bells on his ankles who shakes a gourd full of dried peas at me and howls. The modern medical profession is now so bound up with smoking, drinking and waist size that they have forgotten the existence of bacteria and viruses. Smoking causing inner ear infections? Would you trust any oaf who believed that kind of nonsense with something as complex and potentially dangerous as cancer treatment? No, go for the gourd and dried peas guy. At least he won't give you a suicide pill to shut you up.

He also won't demand you pay for his services in advance, under threat of force, and then tell you to get lost when you need those services because you aren't wearing the right kind of hat.

So, can anything legal be done about this dismissal of the medical oath? Probably not. It's been changed so many times that it's not what we thought it was any more.

Perhaps the most drastic change to the Hippocratic Oath is this: it has degenerated over the ages from a solemn binding treaty where the physician takes full responsibility for his conduct to a meaningless formal adherence to tradition where doctors no longer have to worry about deities striking them down for malpractice (let alone being penalised for deviance from the oath).

It doesn't mean anything any more. If they want to watch you die, they can, and then they can say it was your own fault for smoking/drinking/eating or wearing the wrong kind of hat. We can't use that against them in law, but we can use it in public. The medics might have abandoned their original oath but the public think it still matters.

Legal redress might, however, be possible through NI contributions. These, we are told (yes, I know it's a lie and it's really just another income tax) are collected from us - by force - to pay for our pensions and for any future NHS treatment we might need. Fighting on the tobacco tax won't work. That's just tax. National Insurance, we are led to believe, is specifically to pay for pensions and NHS. Almost everyone in the country thinks that's true.

So, if we are forced to pay this - we'll go to jail if we don't - but when the time comes when we need to use the service we've paid, for, we are told we can't, then we have a case. It's simple extortion. A protection racket. Pay up or we'll beat you up, but don't ever try to make a claim.

Keep in mind that our opponents have no interest in being truthful. They are not under an illusion, they know they are lying and they know it's a propaganda war. Smokers keep responding with facts, but facts are dull. Stories are more interesting because all they need is plausibility, not truth. Try this one. Stories can be filled with sensational claims that capture the imagination. When you get into the statistics and the original research, you can root out the lies, but few will wade through a scientific paper. They are deadly dull. I've written a few myself and the rules are the precise opposite of those for writing stories. They must be impersonal, detached and passive. Facts only, and dry, non-excitable discussion. Well, the antismokers get a bye on facts but real scientists don't.

We need more than the truth. We need imaginative propaganda. We also need to be utterly merciless. Forget the tobacco companies, we'll get no help from them. They don't care how much they are fined, they just pass the costs on to us. Far from being paid by them, we are paying their fines for them. The bastards who rely on us for their income have abandoned us, which is why I am buying seeds in the Spring.

So, let's make the point on blogs and message boards and newspaper articles that denying treatment to specific groups because of lifestyle choices violates the Hippocratic Oath. Keep doing that, and sooner or later, one of their idiot drones will reveal that the Hippocratic Oath has been abandoned. That will have far more effect. If we say it, they'll scoff. It will take a reveal from one of their own to do it. We can force that to happen.

The same thing with NI. Pick and pick at it and sooner or later, one of those the lower drones trust will reveal that NI does not pay for anything specific, it's just another income tax. We can force that too.

Not so much in blogland, where few tread. In the pages of the Express or the Telegraph or better yet, in the high blood pressure world of the Daily Mail. If it can be made to happen in the Guardian, well there'll be a collective intake of breath from the tax-avoiding lefties on there because they already know all this and we're not supposed to tell anyone.

If we can get someone like the BMJ to confess that the Hippocratic Oath no longer carries any penalty for letting patients die for fun, or that NI doesn't pay for NHS treatment but is just more income tax, it will carry far more weight with the sheeple than anything we could ever say.

The enemy has no sense of humour and no sense of irony, but has an absolute sense of superiority. We can make them reveal the truth by letting them be superior because they think it will make them look clever.

They are dogmatic. They believe themselves to be absolutely in the right. 'The science is settled' is their line. They are cast iron. Banging your head on cast iron only achieves a sore head.

Try bending it, slowly, and what happens?