Ancient wisdom from the 5th century BC that has stood the test of time, is infinitely more valuable for its honest sincerity, than all of that offered by our extant talking heads schooled in the humanities and the pseudo social-sciences combined, The wisest of them all, was Sun Tzu or Master Sun whose 13 Chapters of military methods was translated as the Art of War by Lionel Giles (1910). Why is it so important is that ideas in themselves are worthless, but ideas capable of being reinforced within a given context are priceless, as they become weapons in the art of both peace and war by consummation. Of late Master Sun’s book, ‘The Art of War’ is belatedly on every commander’s reading list, and has been taken up by business schools where one insider described the parallels thus :
‘ Your competitor is like your enemy and you strive to dominate them on the battlefield of commerce’
Taboo-science is scientific analysis applied to social reality that traditionally has been protected or privileged for hundreds if not thousands of years. The smartest minds in human history have done service to kings and emperors to develop strategies to protect their interests at all costs. Monotheism as we know it, has evolved over the past 13,000 years to privilege patriarchy and slave ownership but to hide that reality by creating a ruse that drew attention away from its true geopolitical goals in the hear and now, in order to draw attention away to focus on Heaven and the avoidance of Hell, in a putative afterlife. The creationist notion of the Father and the Creed suggested all of humanity are his slaves and owe a putative ‘Him’ a medieval deference and respect as Lord and Master of the Universe. The art of war is an honest account of how a trusted general used intrigue and artifice to outwit enemies and win every battle in service to his emperor by a rigorous analysis of the facts on the ground.
The key to Sun Tzu’s work ( and possibility’s a later contributor Sun Bin) is that war involves the use of both information and anti-information to maximize ones advantages and minimize one’s risk. Indeed the best outcome Sunzi (Sun Tzu) advocated was simply '“ to subdue the enemy without fighting.” If this is the supreme goal in dealing with external enemies, why would it not also be the goal of a ruler seeking to deal with internal enemies? Indeed, if war and peace is simply a clever use of information to command goals while using anti-information to lure potential opponents off the reality trail into a maze of fantasy, then the goal is consummated by a simple ruse, so long as the authority of the supreme commander is not undermined by weak subordinates. Thus, coercion is universally associated with any ruse, as Sunzi’s parable of the concubines attests:
‘Sun Tzu's parable of the concubines is a well-known story that illustrates his principles of leadership and discipline. According to Sima Qian, King Ho-Lu of Wu wanted to test Sun Tzu's abilities by asking him to train a group of 180 concubines into soldiers. Sun Tzu divided the concubines into two companies and appointed the king's favorite concubines as the company commanders. When he ordered the concubines to face right, they giggled, showing a lack of discipline. Sun Tzu reiterated the command, but the giggling continued. He then ordered the execution of the two favored concubines, despite the king's protests, explaining that if soldiers understood their commands but did not obey, it was the fault of the officers. After the executions, new officers were chosen, and the remaining concubines performed their maneuvers flawlessly.’
The takeaway fact we learn from this parable is that the idea of ‘God’ is unlike the ideas of Santa, of leprechauns, or of the tooth fairy, in that ‘God’ unlike the latter, is a coerced idea that is classed as sacred in order for it to be reified as a metaphysical ’belief’ when superintended by anyone with the delegated power of an absolute ruler.
Readers are encourage to read a copy of the Art of War and reflect on the Communist victories in China and against the French in Vietnam. Their leaders were schooled and followed Sunzi’s methods to victories. The American defeat in Vietnam was guaranteed because of the failure of two presidents to measure the depth of Vietnamese nationalism. It was available in plain sight for them to read coming out of the mouth of none other than Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese leader himself, published as ‘ The Path Which Led Me To Leninism ‘ (Soviet review Problems of the East on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of V.I. Lenin’s birthday, April 1960)
‘What I wanted most to know - and this precisely was not debated in the meetings - was: which International sides with the peoples of colonial countries? I raised this question - the most important in my opinion - in a meeting. Some comrades answered: It is the Third, not the Second International. And a comrade gave me Lenin’s “Thesis on the national and colonial questions” published by l'Humanite to read.
There were political terms difficult to understand in this thesis. But by dint of reading it again and again, finally I could grasp the main part of it. What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness and confidence it instilled into me! I was overjoyed to tears. Though sitting alone in my room, I shouted out aloud as if addressing large crowds: “Dear martyrs compatriots! This is what we need, this is the path to our liberation!” After then, I had entire confidence in Lenin, in the Third International.’
The error that the Americans make and continue to make is that they believe absolute power is sufficient for victory, while Sunzi cautions that “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Giáp learned his lesson from his mistake at the battle of Nà Sản having committed his forces to reckless frontal attacks sustaining heavy losses. ‘At Điện Biên Phủ, he spent months meticulously stockpiling ammunition and emplacing heavy artillery and anti-aircraft guns before making his move. He obtained crucial intelligence on French artillery positions from Viet Minh spies posing as camp laborers. Artillery pieces were sited within well-constructed and camouflaged casemates. As a result, when the battle finally began, the Viet Minh knew exactly where the French artillery pieces were, while the French did not even know how many guns Giáp possessed.. Third, the aerial resupply lines at Nà Sản were never severed, despite Viet Minh anti-aircraft fire. At Điện Biên Phủ, Giáp made it a priority for his gunners to focus on the French runways and aircraft, crippling supply runs and making it impossible for fresh soldiers to be sent in.’
A moment of reflection, considering America’s current war induced debts of 37 trillion dollars, would suggest that nationalist wars of liberation would be very costly to the invading side seeking to oppose them. The transportation of men and materials over vast distances and the longer such wars were sustained using asynchronous warfare tactics by the Vietnamese or Taliban would weaken American resolve in the long run. After the Tet offensive in 1968 the Americans knew, even though they might be the winners of every conventional battle, they would never be able to impose a peace of the victors, because against a determined nationalist enemy, that peace was impossible to attain. All the American losses in manpower and gold could have been avoided by heeding Sunzi’s warning against a protracted war: ‘Their is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare.’ General Giáp had no formal military training but won battles by a meticulous adherence to Sun Tzu precepts. The Vietnamese had fought wars of liberation for more than 10 centuries against neighboring powers, some successful and some not, but their determination and resolve had never been in doubt if one bothered to examine the historical facts.
The American’s insensitivity to nationalist movements was perhaps due to the racial ideas that dominated in the South after the Civil War ended in 1865. Segregation, the disenfranchisement of Black voters. The KKK and Lilly-White movements, and the lynching of blacks colored the thinking of whites that in a zero sum world the presumed exceptionalism of Whites was God’s plan all along, among the white Christian fundamentalists, who had the authority of none other than the great naturalist Linneas himself propounding a theory of racial superiority of Homo Sapiens of the European type over the inferior African type late in his career. When the segregationist laws lasted until the 60s, American rhetoric about spreading freedom and democracy across the globe was a little strange given the thoroughness by which it had been extinguished in their home country. Trump is now exposing the same racist theory by suggesting the genes of immigrants are inferior to that of Americans.
Digging into America own past was the spectre of slavery and thousands of lynchings of black males estimated to number 3500, the exact number is unknown. The words of the song ‘Strange Fruit’ by Abel Meeropol in 1939, captures a paradoxical reality, in the land of putative ‘freedom and democracy’ :
‘ Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
blood on the leaves and blood at the root.
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,
strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.’
Segregation and disfranchisement is best understood as the southern white man’s revenge on blacks for their loss of the institution of slavery in the years following the defeat of the Confederacy. Monotheist religion built the property right protections that included the ownership of male slaves to work the fields and female slaves to serve as concubines to satisfy their owners sexual needs.
John Hartwell Cocke, a general in the War of 1812, an original board member at the University of Virginia, and a close friend of Jefferson's, writes in his journal about the prevalence of sex across the color line. Citing Jefferson's "notorious example," Cocke writes:
"Were [cases of interracial sex] enumerated. . . they would be found by the hundreds. Nor is it to be wondered at when Mr. Jefferson's notorious example is considered."
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation concluded that : the weight of all known evidence—from the DNA study, original documents, written and oral historical accounts, and statistical data—indicated a high probability that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemings, and that he was likely the father of all six of Sally Hemings's children listed in Monticello records—Harriet (born 1795; died in infancy); Beverly (born 1798); an unnamed daughter (born 1799; died in infancy); Harriet (born 1801); Madison (born 1805); and Eston (born 1808). Thomas Jefferson freed all of Sally Hemings's children: Beverly and Harriet were allowed to leave Monticello in 1822; Madison and Eston were released in Jefferson's 1826 will. Jefferson gave freedom to no other nuclear slave family. Although Thomas Jefferson did not free Sally Hemings. She was permitted to leave Monticello by his daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph not long after Jefferson’s death in 1826, and went to live with her sons Madison and Eston in Charlottesville. Other Jefferson societies preferring a childless history disagree with this conclusion, but more compelling is the account of his son Maddison Hennings in 1873 in an interview with a newspaper. His mother became Jefferson/s mistress in France and even though becoming pregnant to him was free in France : ‘So she refused to return with him. To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years. In consequence of his promise, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia’.
The loss of privilege in the South not only resulted in revenge against blacks but a sense of fear out of weakness against other races abroad in hand to hand combat hence an American over reliance on technology. The U.S. military entered the Vietnam War with a belief that its technological superiority, including advanced weaponry and air power, would lead to victory. However, the Vietnamese use of the dense jungle terrain and underground tunnels to their advantage, and understanding of both the terrain and local population mitigated against the effectiveness of search and destroy mission prioritizing firepower and sophisticated weaponry against simple guerrilla tactics. The over-reliance on technology contributed to the U.S. military's difficulties in Vietnam, leading to high casualties, a protracted war, and ultimately, a loss of public support for the conflict. Trying to support the remnants of French Catholic colonial rule in the South of Vietnam had already started before the fall of Diên Biên Phu. It was a disaster not just for France but also for the United States who, by 1954, was underwriting 80% of French expenditures in Indochina.
Containment of the Soviet Union and China was already standard US foreign policy from 1947, so by the time Kennedy took office and as the first Catholic President Kennedy’s increased aid to the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem substantially from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 700 military personnel as well as military and economic aid to the government of South Vietnam. Diem’s repression of Buddhists threatened the stability of his regime. Kennedy increased American aid from an initial 11,000 advisors to 16,000 at the time of his assassination. Diem’s regime was incapable of the required dedication to the US mission against a communist reunification of the North and South. In September of 1963, President Kennedy said in an interview a few months before Diem was killed in a Coup :
"In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam, against the Communists... But I don't agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake... [The United States] made this effort to defend Europe. Now Europe is quite secure. We also have to participate—we may not like it—in the defense of Asia."
The notion of containment can be operationalized as involving variable soft power economic aid or hard power military aid. However during the presidency of Kennedy his affluent advisers introduced an entirely new and dangerous evangelism being brainwashed in the elite schools favored by the ultra rich families.
Kennedy inherited the earlier policy of containment of the Soviet Union that was somewhere between rollback at one extreme and isolationism at the other. A roll back plan in Cuba devised under Eisenhower administration, came to a disastrous end when approved and undertaken by Kennedy at the Bay of Pigs. Fortunately, ww3 was averted by a negotiated compromise, but the open ended notion that the US would ‘pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty’ purely by military power alone, clearly had its limitations, if a zero sum game could not be guaranteed.
Kennedy was clearly on a more activist tack seeking to re-energize the foreign policy establishment so the outstanding historical analysis of Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. urging a cautious restraint was rejected in favor of a cautious escalation in American commitments to support the South Vietnamese. The problem was one of operationalization because Kennan’s idea of containment was increasingly to use soft power to mitigate the social conditions favoring the growth of nationalist movements rather than the hard power use of force against them when redefined by the Hawks as a communist insurgency. Keenan also urged, that if a favorable agreement were possible, then it should be implemented by negotiation. But Keenan more nuanced ideas about containment had arrived too late, not only had they fallen on the deaf ears of the brainwashed anticommunist hawks,like Rostow, but a new more dangerous kind of activism had evolved at Groton, a school favored by the wealthy elites that is best described as ‘ameliorationist-evangelism’.
Alumni of Groton included:
* McGeorge Bundy adviser to Kennedy.
* William Putnam Bundy CIA analyst as a foreign affairs advisor to Kennedy and Johnson.
* President Theodore Roosevelt and his four sons
* Francis Bator – Influenced both Kennedy and Johnson on security and economics.
* Dean Acheson foreign policy advisor to Truman and Head of State.
The brainwashing at the elite Groton school was managed by the schools founder Endicott Peabody, who as headmaster for 65 years, instilled the conditioning he himself received at Cheltenham, England as a young teenager, termed ‘muscular Christianity’. It was a kind of spartan Puritanical Christianity to prepare men for an active life in the military, public or foreign service whereby each had the opportunity to make their mark by ameliorationist-evangelism. The New England Watch and Ward Society (founded as the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice) was a Boston, Massachusetts, organization involved in the censorship of books and the performing arts from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. Peabody became VP of the Watch and Ward activists for ‘Banned in Boston’ rulings on any ‘objectionable’ content found in books, articles, songs, motion pictures and plays.
Needless to say Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry, although it was a commercial success, and was the best-selling work of fiction in America for 1927, it was ‘Banned in Boston’ and other cities, despite satirically raising doubt of the effectiveness of ameliorationist-evangelism in a world filled with personal opportunism and banality.
However, if one has the power to ban everything that is ‘objectionable’ from one’s worldview, then one may arrive at Peabody’s ‘trend of civilization being forever upward.’ One source remarked: ‘By 1901, Muscular Christianity was influential enough in England that one author could praise "the Englishman going through the world with rifle in one hand and Bible in the other" and add, "if asked what our muscular Christianity has done, we point to the British Empire.’ Peabody declaring that "if some Groton boys do not enter political life and do something for our land it won't be because they have not been urged. “
The assassination of Kennedy brought about the presidency of LBJ and the Ultra-hawk Rostow whose creative evolution was the perpetual stream of chronic fantasies about finding a silver bullet- a militarist solution by upping the ante to encompass invasions and the use of nuclear weapons against North Vietnam.
The Taylor-Rostow report of 1961 perceived the war purely in military strategic terms. Fortunately, Sterling Cottrell (State Dept) correctly perceived the difficulty of a foreign power competing with the Vietcong at the village level and said that it was an open question whether the government could succeed, even with U.S. assistance. Thus, it would be a mistake to make an irrevocable U.S. commitment to defeat the communists in South Vietnam. Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs George Ball also saw, based on his earlier work with the French in Indochina, that a small commitment of troops could lead in several years to the need of as many as 300,000 and an American takeover of the war. Thus, he opposed the implementing of Taylor and McNamara recommendations.
The problem that both Kennedy and America faced was the sheer prevalence of the brainwashing of the notion of ameliorationist-evangelism by the highly qualified and connected graduates by the thousands that poured into the military-industrial-complex, into government service and into the mass media. Kennedy was caught in a web that both politically mandated escalation, but risked a catastrophic ww3, if he over-reached.
Kennedy’s death resulted in the worst of all possible world, the alliance between LBJ as president and the utra-hawk Rostow as advisor, McNamara as voodoo statistician, Rusk – an ex-seminarian ‘Lost-Cause’ crackpot, McGeorge Bundy ameliorational-evangelist (graduate of Groton), and chicken-hawk General Wheeler, and body-count fudger Westmoreland, and ‘Hamburger Hill’ Abrams. Americans were off on a mad roller-coaster ride to ultimate defeat. Fortunately, George Ball was also there, and may have had, just enough influence, to prevent an escalation to ww3.
After the Johnston presidency, to orchestrate a war was simply a matter of brainwashing ameliorationist-evangelism into sufficient numbers to garner enough support in advance. In regions where religion and politics made compromise difficult if not impossible in the short term.
Conflicts that had become endemic were fertile ground for a Judeo-Christian strand of amelioration-evangelism where victory was defined as safeguarding democracy for the privileged entity and mandating a repressed spartan gulag for their captives in war.
[ TO BE CONTINUED IN PART II]