Tuesday, April 20, 2021
When The Wicked Perish, There Is Joyful Shouting
Sunday, April 18, 2021
From D to D, Chapters 6 and 7: A Rut By Any Other Name
The most effective indirect approach is one that lures or startles the opponent into a false move so that, as in jiu-jitsu, his own effort is turned into the lever of his overthrow.
And from Gene Sharp,
Even in military conflicts, argued Liddell Hart, generally effective results have followed when the plan of action has had "such indirectness as to ensure the opponents' non-readiness to meet it." It is important "to nullify opposition by paralyzing the power to oppose"...
In other words, don't get stuck in ruts that someone else has dug for you.
Sunday, April 4, 2021
From D to D, Chapters 6 & 7: What You Do With What You Have
Grand strategy is the conception that serves to coordinate and direct the use of all appropriate and available resources (economic, human, moral, political, organizational, etc.) of a group seeking to attain its objectives in a conflict. Grand strategy, by focusing primary attention on the group’s objectives and resources in the conflict, determines the most appropriate technique of action (such as conventional military warfare or nonviolent struggle) to be employed in the conflict. In planning a grand strategy resistance leaders must evaluate and plan which pressures and influences are to be brought to bear upon the opponents. Further, grand strategy will include decisions on the appropriate conditions and timing under which initial and subsequent resistance campaigns will be launched. (Emphasis added.)
Wednesday, March 31, 2021
Working Like A Dog
Those who follow this blog will have noticed that I was unable to write a post for last weekend. The title of today's post explains why. I suddenly find my occupational skills to be in very high demand - which is a good thing as it helps me to buy groceries! However, I will try to have a post for this coming weekend. In the meantime, here is a link to a fascinating article exposing the actual basis of the 2020 profits of the Tesla corporation. The linked source, along with others, points out that Elon Musk's company has been unable to this day to be profitable on its own by selling its own cars. The only thing that has helped the company post profits recently is the selling of carbon credits. This is interesting, because Musk has built a PR campaign over the last year to portray himself as a smart, cutting-edge businessman and intellectual. (See this also.) Beware of celebrity culture; you know the old warning about all that glitters...
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
Link - Arab Tyrant Manual podcast with Jamila Raqib
Kawaakibi Foundation is an accelerator for thinkers and doers, with a focus on the future of liberty in Muslim communities and in the Arab world. Our work causes headaches and sleepless nights for tyrants and terrorists.
We envision a world free from tyranny, terrorism, and foreign intervention; one in which society trumps the state, extremism and illiberalism have no appeal, and individual rights are sacrosanct.
We don't do traditional activism - our projects are innovative and radical. We develop cutting-edge research and apply new methodologies and a rigorous theory of change to the root causes of problems. That's why our small team have caused headaches to the world's worst tyrants.
Sunday, March 21, 2021
From D to D, Chapter 6 (Continued): Grand Strategy
Grand strategy is the conception that serves to coordinate and direct the use of all appropriate and available resources (economic, human, moral, political, organizational, etc.) of a group seeking to attain its objectives in a conflict. Grand strategy, by focusing primary attention on the group’s objectives and resources in the conflict, determines the most appropriate technique of action (such as conventional military warfare or nonviolent struggle) to be employed in the conflict. In planning a grand strategy resistance leaders must evaluate and plan which pressures and influences are to be brought to bear upon the opponents. Further, grand strategy will include decisions on the appropriate conditions and timing under which initial and subsequent resistance campaigns will be launched.
As tactics is an application of strategy on a lower plane, so strategy is an application on a lower plane of 'grand strategy'. If practically synonymous with the policy which governs the conduct of war, as distinct from the permanent policy which formulates its object, the term 'grand strategy' serves to bring out the sense of 'policy in execution'. For the role of grand strategy is to co-ordinate and direct all the resources of a nation towards the attainment of the political object of the war - the goal defined by national policy.
All states have a grand strategy, whether they know it or not. That is inevitable because grand strategy is simply the level at which knowledge and persuasion, or in modern terms intelligence and diplomacy, interact with military strength to determine outcomes in a world of other states with their own “grand strategies.
- First, it must be a high-level description which lays out general goals and methods, and does not descend too deeply into specifics (avoiding "getting down into the weeds", as they say). As Guy Kawasaki says, a mission statement with a couple of dozen points is very unwieldy!
- Second, it must be open to revision at first as the organizers engage in dialogue with the people whom they seek to organize. For instance, the organizer may discover during the listening and asking questions phase of his or her work that there are things that are very important to the people being organized which were missed by the organizer in the first conception of the vision of tomorrow.
- Third, the vision of tomorrow must serve to motivate people to give of themselves and their resources to a cause which involves their entire people and not just the wishes of the organizers.
- Self-sufficient, both individually and collectively (1 Thessalonians 4:11-12);
- Fully equipped to fulfill our ontogeny;
- Expert in producing beautifully good work to meet necessary needs (Titus 3:14);
- A people who can no longer be oppressed.
- We will organize our own mutual aid networks. (A potluck, NOT a free lunch!)
- We will organize our own education.
- We will organize our own training to create experts in community organizing and strategic nonviolent resistance.
- We will begin to use our collective power strategically to deny our oppressors any payoff from their oppression.
- "Defining and Teaching Grand Strategy - Foreign Policy Research Institute", Timothy Andrews Sayle
- "Defining Grand Strategy," Peter Layton
- "Grand Strategy," Wikipedia
- "It Was Grand, But Was it Strategy? Revisiting the Origins Story of Grand Strategy", David Morgan-Owen
- "Strategy and Grand Strategy: What Students and Practitioners Need to Know", Tami Davis Biddle
- "What Is Grand Strategy? Sweeping a Conceptual Minefield", Rebecca Friedman Lissner
Sunday, March 14, 2021
Солнечный свет
- Support of the emerging fascist government of Italy
- Support of General Franco's successful overthrow of the Spanish government
- A series of relatively bloodless military victories against militarily inferior neighbors. These military moves were made under the pretext of answering the call for help made by supposedly oppressed German minorities and sympathetic partisans in these countries.
- From page 306 of Liddell-Hart: "To prepare the way for his offensive, he [Hitler] sought to find influential adherents in the other country who would undermine its resistance, make trouble in his interest, and be ready to form a new government compliant to his aims. Bribery was unnecessary - he counted on self-seeking ambition, authoritarian inclination, and party-spirit to provide him with willing and unwitting agents among the ruling classes." (Emphasis added.)
And in his place a despicable person will arise, on whom the honor of kingship has not been conferred, but he will come in a time of tranquility and seize the kingdom by intrigue...And after an alliance is made with him he will practice deception, and he will go up and gain power with a small people... (Daniel 11:21, 23; see also Daniel 8:23-25)
Could Putin then be "da man"? может быть; кто знаете?
- The Revanchism of the Third Rome (Part 1)
- The Revanchism of the Third Rome (Part 2): The Role of Russian Orthodoxy
- The Revanchism of the Third Rome: Symphony's Chords
- The Revanchism Of The Third Rome, Part 4: Caesar's 21st Century
- The Black Hole At The Imperial Center
- No Strangers to Самовлюбленность
- The Tearing of the Fig Leaf Dress
Monday, March 8, 2021
φρόνιμος καί ἀκέραιος
This week I find myself very busy with the kind of work that pays the bills, so I decided yesterday to postpone the next post in my series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy. Writing those posts involves a fairly heavy amount of research, and while I do not mind the research (indeed, it is what makes for good posts!), I am crunched for time at least this week, and possibly next week as well.
Saturday, March 6, 2021
The Potemkin Doctors
Sunday, February 28, 2021
From D to D, Chapter 6 (Continued): Spending Wisely
- The purpose of strategy is "to diminish the possibility of resistance [by your opponent]." This is achieved by choosing a course of action which your opponent is not ready to meet.
- The perfection of strategy is to achieve a decision "without any serious fighting."
- Clausewitz said that "All military action is permeated by intelligent forces and their effects." Liddell-Hart comments that "Nevertheless, nations at war have always striven, or been driven by their passions, to disregard the implications of such a conclusion. Instead of applying intelligence, they have chosen to batter their heads against the nearest wall."
- Instead of "battering his own head against a wall," the strategist's aim "is not so much to seek battle as to seek a strategic situation so advantageous that if it does not of itself produce the decision, its continuation by a battle is sure to achieve this."
- Therefore, the aim of strategy is to dislocate one's opponent - whether psychologically or logistically. This occurs as the resisters pursue the opponent's line of least resistance, which on a psychological level is the same as pursing the opponent's line of least expectation.
- One of the best ways of dislocating your opponent is to pursue a course of action which has multiple possible objectives. By doing so, you increase your chances of achieving at least one or more of these objectives, while at the same time you put your opponent into a dilemma, as he will not know which of your objectives to guard against.
- "The more strength you waste the more you increase the risk of the scales of war turning against you" - in other words, the more strength you waste, the greater the chance that you will lose!
- "Do not throw your weight into a stroke whilst (or, for us Americans, "while") your opponent is on guard."
Friday, February 26, 2021
The Organizer's Story of Self
One key element of building an effective liberation struggle is the ability of organizers to spread and reproduce their own cognitive liberation in the people they are trying to organize. A key to this spread is the organizer's "Story of Self." Learning to tell an effective story of self - the telling of that moment or choice point in a person's life which pushed them to become an organizer - is a challenging exercise.
I just finished participating in an online practice session in which participants worked on crafting and honing their "Stories of Self." I heard some beautiful and concise examples of people illustrating their own activizing moments, their own choice points. As for myself, I think I illustrated my own choice point well enough, but I took too long to do it. (We are supposed to take only two minutes!) My story needs some more work...
Sunday, February 21, 2021
From D to D, Chapter 6 (Continued): The Role of Cognitive Liberation In Strategic Thinking
"It is also just possible that some democratic movements do not plan a comprehensive strategy to bring down the dictatorship, concentrating instead only on immediate issues, for another reason. Inside themselves, they do not really believe that the dictatorship can be ended by their own efforts."
"The emergence of a protest movement entails a transformation both of consciousness and of behavior. The change in consciousness has at least three distinct aspects. First, "the system" - or those aspects of the system that people experience and perceive - loses legitimacy. Large numbers of men and women who ordinarily accept the authority of their rulers and the legitimacy of institutional arrangements come to believe in some measure that these rulers and these arrangements are unjust and wrong. Second, people who are ordinarily fatalistic, who believe that existing arrangements are inevitable, begin to assert "rights" that imply demands for change. Third, there is a new sense of efficacy; people who ordinarily consider themselves helpless come to believe that they have some capacity to alter their lot."
But it is to be noted that these changes in consciousness are much more likely to happen among people who regularly associate with each other in groups than among isolated individuals.