Warfare Effects Quotes

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In regards to the price of commodities, the rise of wages operates as simple interest does, the rise of profit operates like compound interest. Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.
Adam Smith (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations)
Many Christians... find themselves defeated by the most psychological weapon that Satan uses against them. This weapon has the effectiveness of a deadly missile. Its name? Low self-esteem. Satan's greatest psychological weapon is a gut level feeling of inferiority, inadequacy, and low self-worth This feeling shackles many Christians, in spite of wonderful spiritual experiences and knowledge of God's Word. Although they understand their position as sons and daughters of God, they are tied up in knots, bound by a terrible feeling inferiority, and chained to a deep sense of worthlessness.
David A. Seamands (Healing for Damaged Emotions (Authentic Classics))
If you aren't destroying your enemies, it's because you have been conquered and assimilated, you do not even have an idea of who your enemies are. You have been brainwashed into believing you are your own enemy, and you are set against yourself. The enemy is laughing at you as you tear yourself to pieces. That is the most effective warfare an enemy can launch on his foes: confounding them.
Bangambiki Habyarimana (Pearls Of Eternity)
To effectively combat the devil, you need to pray.
Pedro Okoro (Crushing the Devil: Your Guide to Spiritual Warfare and Victory In Christ)
Emotional warfare is far more effective in this case than open violence.
Cora Reilly (Twisted Pride (The Camorra Chronicles, #3))
The great wars of the present age are the effects of the study of history.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality)
The most effective and enduring form of warfare against liberation is the implanting of material and intellectual needs that perpetuate obsolete forms of the struggle for existence.
Herbert Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society)
Fear is a scheme that the devil uses to great effect. From my personal study, the words “do not be afraid” or “fear thee not” (depending on the Bible translation) appear over one hundred times in the Bible! The message from God is quite clear: we need not be afraid!
Pedro Okoro (Crushing the Devil: Your Guide to Spiritual Warfare and Victory In Christ)
Power doesn’t always roar.... The art of exerting power is an art used in doses - the more hidden it is the more effective.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
It's all about the ripple effects of “wealth creation”. What comes after you make it matters much more than before.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
finally defeat Japanese imperialism only through the cumulative effect of many offensive campaigns and battles in both regular and guerrilla warfare,
Mao Zedong (On Guerrilla Warfare)
As a side effect of modern warfare, we had the peculiar privilege of watching the destruction of our country on television.
Sara Nović (Girl at War)
I dispute the point that nuclear energy is 'clean' and 'cost-effective'. As I recall, when we first harnessed nuclear power it was to drop an atom bomb on a civilian population, not to save the environment. However, you must admit, the victors are never tried for war crimes.
E.A. Bucchianeri (Brushstrokes of a Gadfly (Gadfly Saga, #1))
The National Endowment for Democracy, an agency created by the Reagan administration in 1983 to promote political action and psychological warfare against states not in love with US foreign policy, is Washington’s foremost non-military tool for effecting regime change.
William Blum (America's Deadliest Export: Democracy The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else)
Conduct toward the civil population ought to be regulated by a large respect for all the rules and traditions of the people of the zone, in order to demonstrate effectively, with deeds, the moral superiority of the guerrilla fighter over the oppressing soldier.
Ernesto Che Guevara (Guerrilla Warfare)
Our task over the next few generations is to transform the world of independent states in which we live into some sort of genuine international community. If we succeed in creating that community, however quarrelsome, discontented, and full of injustice it probably will be, then we shall effectively have abolished the ancient institution of warfare. Good riddance.
Gwynne Dyer (War: The New Edition)
Koerver reports another example of delusional thinking within the German navy. Adm. Edouard von Capelle said, on Feb. 1, 1917, “From a military point of view I rate the effect of America coming on the side of our enemies as nil.” Tuchman, Zimmermann Telegram, 139; Koerver, German Submarine Warfare, xxxiii.
Erik Larson (Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania)
Their leader had no real knowledge of warfare or tactics. I was only a stubborn man and that was my greatest advantage in this fight.
Andy Andrews (The Butterfly Effect: How Your Life Matters – The Perfect Inspirational Gift)
Talent attracts capital more effectively than capital attracts talent.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Blitzkrieg was a new and dynamic form of warfare, which applied the power of the tank, the aircraft, and the radio to devastating effect.
John Keegan
6.    There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. 7.    It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on. [That is, with rapidity. Only one who knows the disastrous effects of a long war can realize the supreme importance of rapidity in bringing it to a close. Only
Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
It is necessary to distinguish clearly between sabotage, a revolutionary and highly effective method of warfare, and terrorism, a measure that is generally ineffective and indiscriminate in its results, since it often makes victims of innocent people and destroys a large number of lives that would be valuable to the revolution.
Ernesto Che Guevara (Guerrilla Warfare)
Understanding the OODA loop enables a commander to compress time - that is, the time between observing a situation and taking an action. A commander can use the temporal discrepancy (a form of fast transient) to select the least-expected action rather than what is predicted to be the most effective action. The enemy can also figure out what might be the most effective. To take the least-expected action disorients the enemy. It causes him to pause, wonder, to question.
Robert Coram (Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War)
Many weeks of street fighting ensued. In his defense of Sestius against charges of violence in 56, Cicero described in graphic terms the effects of this gang warfare: “The Tiber was full of citizens’ corpses, the public sewers were choked with them and the blood that streamed from the Forum had to be mopped up with sponges.” To begin with, the cure was worse than the disease and public business once more came to a standstill. However, by the summer Clodius, while by no means defeated, was at least being contained.
Anthony Everitt (Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician)
Baptism, then, is not what produces salvation. It 'saves' in that it reflects a heart decision: a pledge of loyalty to the risen Savior. In effect, baptism in New Testament theology is a loyalty oath, a public avowal of who is on the Lord’s side in the cosmic war between good and evil. ... Early baptismal formulas included a renunciation of Satan and his angels for this very reason. Baptism was—and still is—spiritual warfare.
Michael S. Heiser (The Unseen Realm)
With Hamas now in control of the Gaza Strip, Israel imposed a full-blown siege. Goods entering the strip were reduced to a bare minimum; regular exports were stopped completely; fuel supplies were cut; and leaving and entering Gaza were only rarely permitted. Gaza was in effect turned into an open-air prison, where by 2018 at least 53 percent of some two million Palestinians lived in a state of poverty,24 and unemployment stood at an astonishing 52 percent, with much higher rates for youth and women.25 What had begun with international refusal to recognize Hamas’s election victory had led to a disastrous Palestinian rupture and the blockade of Gaza. This sequence of events amounted to a new declaration of war on the Palestinians. It also provided indispensable international cover for the open warfare that was to come.
Rashid Khalidi (The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017)
Over decades in power, the CCP had constructed a multilayered system for stifling dissent in China based on the Soviet psychological warfare technique of Zersetzung, which translates roughly to “psychological decomposition.”[96] The regime’s threats instill fear of open discourse about reality, resulting in self-censorship. To avoid the cognitive dissonance of this silence, individuals willfully play down the evidence before their own eyes. The collective psychological effects are deceptively enormous.
Michael P. Senger (Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World)
intergenerational warfare has not replaced class warfare. The very high concentration of capital is explained mainly by the importance of inherited wealth and its cumulative effects:
Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century)
terrorism is nothing more than a form of psy­chological warfare, as acts of terrorism have no intrinsic military value aside from their effects on the psyches of the target populations.
Jim Hougan (Sinister Forces—The Nine: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft (Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft (Paperback) Book 1))
The National Endowment for Democracy, an agency created by the Reagan administration in 1983 to promote political action and psychological warfare against states not in love with US foreign policy, is Washington’s foremost non-military tool for effecting regime change. The NED website listed sixty-five projects that it had supported financially in recent years in Ukraine.
William Blum (America's Deadliest Export: Democracy The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else)
George Bernard Shaw once said: “Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.” When liberals make the argument that capitalism is the cause of all of our problems, they are either speaking out of abject ignorance or being totally disingenuous to protect their own political interests. We have not had true free-market capitalism in this country on any wide scale. Where we have had economic successes in this nation’s history, it has been those times when people have done something outside of the government’s involvement. Every single time the federal government has been involved, it has created chaos, waste, and corruption. The historical record is overwhelmingly one of gross incompetence.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Atro had once explained to him how this was managed, how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how the lieutenants could give the privates and the sergeants orders, how the captains... and so on and so on up to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take them from none, except the commander in chief. Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust. "You call that organization?" he had inquired. "You even call it discipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency--a kind of seventh-millennium steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure what could be done that was worth doing?" This had given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfare as the breeder of courage and manliness and weeder-out of the unfit, but the very line of his argument had forced him to concede the effectiveness of guerrillas, organized from below, self-disciplined. "But that only works when the people think they're fighting for something of their own--you know, their homes, or some notion or other," the old man had said. Shevek had dropped the argument. He now continued it, in the darkening basement among the stacked crates of unlabeled chemicals. He explained to Atro that he now understood why the Army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so.
Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)
Education without excellence in techniques means action will not be timely or effective. But techniques without education means tactics will be formulistic, rigid, and predictable to the enemy.
William S. Lind (Maneuver Warfare Handbook)
The multifaceted nature of the strong points of the enemy in this brutal warfare calls for nothing less than a global scale collaborative response that is stubbornly radical, yet humanely civil.
Ray Anyasi (How to Terrorize Terrorism: a more effective answer to global terrorism)
The true goal of all spiritual practices is to keep yourself fooled, to maintain the self-deception, to see what's not and not see what is. That's why the stated goals are always unverifiable and ill-defined: its not about attaining them, its about pursuing them. Who wants to wake up? When we have a little itch that threatens to awaken us in the night, we want to scratch the itch and make it go away. not let it evict us from our slumbers. Same thing here. In this sense. spiritual practice—meditation. for instance—is one hundred percent effective. If a spiritual practice satisfies your urge to do something spiritual. if it makes you think you're making progress. if it scratches your itch without disturbing your slumber, then it's doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing.
Jed McKenna (Spiritual Warfare (The Enlightenment Trilogy #3))
Every negative complex of emotion conceals a conflict, a problem or dilemma made up of contradictory or opposing motives or desires. Self-observation must recover these emotional seeds of the dramatization of life if real control of habits is to occur. Otherwise, mere control of habits will itself become a form of dramatized conflict or warfare with the motives of our lives. Food desires, sex desires, relational desires, desires for experience and acquisition, for rest, for release, for attention, for solitude, for life, for death, the whole pattern of desires must come under the view of consciousness, the aspects of the conflicts must be differentiated, and habits must be controlled to serve well-being or the pleasurable and effective play of Life. This whole process is truly possible only in the midst of the prolonged occasion of spiritual life in practice, since the mere mechanical and analytical attempts at self-liberation and self-healing do not undermine the principal emotion or seat of conflict, which is the intention to identify with a separate self sense and to reject and forget the prior and natural Condition of Unqualified or Divine Consciousness.
Adi Da Samraj (The Eating Gorilla Comes in Peace: The Transcendental Principle of Life Applied to Diet and the Regenerative Discipline of True Health)
In 1870, came the victory of the short-service troops of Prussia over the long-service troops of France, where conscription had but recently been reintroduced in a partial form and as a supplementary measure. That obvious contrast carried more weight into the world than all the other factors which tilted the scales against France. As a result, universal peace-time conscription was adopted by almost all countries as the basis of their military system. This ensured that wars would grow bigger in scale, longer in duration, and worse in effects. While conscription appeared democratic, it provided autocrats, hereditary or revolutionary, with more effective and comprehensive means of imposing their will, both in peace and war. Once the rulp of compulsory service in arms was established for the young men of a nation, it was an obvious and easy transition to the servitude of the whole population. Totalitarian tyranny is the twin of total warfare—which might aptly be termed a reversion to tribal warfare on a larger scale.
B.H. Liddell Hart (The Revolution in Warfare. (Praeger Security International))
The first step in effectively fighting the battle is to get out of God’s way. The second step is to stay out of His way. And the third step is to never get in God’s way again so that the first and second step become completely irrelevant.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The present awful possibilities of nuclear warfare may give way to others even more dreadful. Literally and figuratively, we are running out of room. At long last, we begin to feel the effects of the finite, actual size of the Earth in a critical way. This is the maturing crisis of technology. In the years between now and the beginning of the next century, the global crisis will probably develop far beyond all earlier patterns. When or how it will end—or to what state of affairs it will yield—nobody can say. It is a very small comfort to think that the interests of humanity might one day change, the present curiosity in science may cease, and entirely different things may occupy the human mind. Technology, after all, is a human excretion, and should not be considered as something Other. It is a part of us, just like the web is part of the spider. However, it seems that the ever-accelerating progress of technology gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity, a tipping point in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them cannot continue. Progress will become incomprehensibly rapid and complicated. Technological power as such is always an ambivalent achievement, and science is neutral all through, providing only means of control applicable to any purpose, and indifferent to all. It is not the particularly perverse destructiveness of one specific invention that creates danger. The danger is intrinsic. For progress there is no cure.
Benjamín Labatut (The MANIAC)
Conspiracy theories have long been used to maintain power: the Soviet leadership saw capitalist and counter-revolutionary conspiracies everywhere; the Nazis, Jewish ones. But those conspiracies were ultimately there to buttress an ideology, whether class warfare for Communists or race for Nazis. With today’s regimes, which struggle to formulate a single ideology – indeed, which can’t if they want to maintain power by sending different messages to different people – the idea that one lives in a world full of conspiracies becomes the world view itself. Conspiracy does not support the ideology; it replaces it. In Russia this is captured in the catchphrase of the country’s most important current affairs presenter: ‘A coincidence? I don’t think so!’ says Dmitry Kiselev as he twirls between tall tales that dip into history, literature, oil prices and colour revolutions, which all return to the theme of how the world has it in for Russia. And as a world view it grants those who subscribe to it certain pleasures: if all the world is a conspiracy, then your own failures are no longer all your fault. The fact that you achieved less than you hoped for, that your life is a mess – it’s all the fault of the conspiracy. More importantly, conspiracy is a way to maintain control. In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audiences with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove, plot, that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic a renowned Russian media analyst called Vasily Gatov calls ‘white jamming’. And the end effect of this endless pile-up of conspiracies is that you, the little guy, can never change anything. For if you are living in a world where shadowy forces control everything, then what possible chance do you have of turning it around? In this murk it becomes best to rely on a strong hand to guide you. ‘Trump is our last chance to save America,’ is the message of his media hounds. Only Putin can ‘raise Russia from its knees’. ‘The problem we are facing today is less oppression, more lack of identity, apathy, division, no trust,’ sighs Srdja. ‘There are more tools to change things than before, but there’s less will to do so.
Peter Pomerantsev (This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality)
Russia gains by August 13, the US loses; they were the same story, two ends of a seesaw. A new, more effective means of warfare. Instead of taking lives and destroying property, which was the old way, you won by simply changing what people thought about the United States.
Max Karpov (The Children's Game)
PROPAGANDA-A ONE-SIDED WEAPON The asymmetrical situation has important effects on propaganda. The insurgent, having no responsibility, is free to use every trick; if necessary, he can lie, cheat, exaggerate. He is not obliged to prove; he is judged by what he promises, not by what he does. Consequently, propaganda is a powerful weapon for him. With no positive policy but with good propaganda, the insurgent may still win. The counterinsurgent is tied to his responsibilities and to his past, and for him, facts speak louder than words. He is judged on what he does, not on what he says. If he lies, cheats, exaggerates, and does not prove, he may achieve some temporary successes, but at the price of being discredited for good. And he cannot cheat much unless his political structures are monolithic, for the legitimate opposition in his own camp would soon disclose his every psychological maneuver. For him, propaganda can be no more than a secondary weapon, valuable only if intended to inform and not to fool. A counterinsurgent can seldom cover bad or nonexistent policy with propaganda.
David Galula (Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (PSI Classics of the Counterinsurgency Era))
In effect, the human being should be considered the priority objective in a political war. And conceived as the military target of guerrilla war, the human being has his most critical point in his mind. Once his mind has been reached, the "political animal" has been defeated, without necessarily receiving bullets.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA Manual for Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare)
in American corporate capitalism, that when we create a business and grant it the same rights as a human (what 'incorporating' means), while not holding it to any moral restrictions except for "survive at all costs and make your shareholders rich," what you have effectively created is an institutionalized psychopath.
Michael T. Stevens (The Art Of Psychological Warfare: How To Skillfully Influence People Undetected And How To Mentally Subdue Your Enemies In Stealth Mode)
The most successful ruse of neoliberal dominance in both global and domestic affairs is the definition of economic policy as primarily a matter of neutral, technical expertise. This expertise is then presented as separate from politics and culture, and not properly subject to specifically political accountability or cultural critique. Opposition to material inequality is maligned as "class warfare," while race, gender or sexual inequalities are dismissed as merely cultural, private, or trivial. This rhetorical separation of the economic from the political and cultural arenas disguises the upwardly redistributing goals of neoliberalism—its concerted efforts to concentrate power and resources in the hands of tiny elites. Once economics is understood as primarily a technical realm, the trickle-upward effects of neoliberal policies can be framed as due to performance rather than design, reflecting the greater merit of those reaping larger rewards.
Lisa Duggan (The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy)
As Christians we face two tasks in our evangelism: saving the soul and saving the mind, that is to say, not only converting people spiritually, but converting them intellectually as well. And the Church is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task. If the church loses the intellectual battle in one generation, then evangelism will become immeasurably more difficult in the next. The war is not yet lost, and it is one which we must not lose: souls of men and women hang in the balance. For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ Himself, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence. Thinking about your faith is indeed a virtue, for it helps you to better understand and defend your faith. But thinking about your faith is not equivalent to doubting your faith. Doubt is never a purely intellectual problem. There is a spiritual dimension to the problem that must be recognized. Never lose sight of the fact that you are involved in spiritual warfare and there is an enemy of your soul who hates you intensely, whose goal is your destruction, and who will stop at nothing to destroy you. Reason can be used to defend our faith by formulating arguments for the existence of God or by refuting objections. But though the arguments so developed serve to confirm the truth of our faith, they are not properly the basis of our faith, for that is supplied by the witness of the Holy Spirit Himself. Even if there were no arguments in defense of the faith, our faith would still have its firm foundation. The more I learn, the more desperately ignorant I feel. Further study only serves to open up to one's consciousness all the endless vistas of knowledge, even in one's own field, about which one knows absolutely nothing. Don't let your doubts just sit there: pursue them and keep after them until you drive them into the ground. We should be cautious, indeed, about thinking that we have come upon the decisive disproof of our faith. It is pretty unlikely that we have found the irrefutable objection. The history of philosophy is littered with the wrecks of such objections. Given the confidence that the Holy Spirit inspires, we should esteem lightly the arguments and objections that generate our doubts. These, then, are some of the obstacles to answered prayer: sin in our lives, wrong motives, lack of faith, lack of earnestness, lack of perseverance, lack of accordance with God’s will. If any of those obstacles hinders our prayers, then we cannot claim with confidence Jesus’ promise, “Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it”. And so I was led to what was for me a radical new insight into the will of God, namely, that God’s will for our lives can include failure. In other words, God’s will may be that you fail, and He may lead you into failure! For there are things that God has to teach you through failure that He could never teach you through success. So many in our day seem to have been distracted from what was, is and always will be the true priority for every human being — that is, learning to know God in Christ. My greatest fear is that I should some day stand before the Lord and see all my works go up in smoke like so much “wood, hay, and stubble”. The chief purpose of life is not happiness, but knowledge of God. People tend naturally to assume that if God exists, then His purpose for human life is happiness in this life. God’s role is to provide a comfortable environment for His human pets. But on the Christian view, this is false. We are not God’s pets, and the goal of human life is not happiness per se, but the knowledge of God—which in the end will bring true and everlasting human fulfilment. Many evils occur in life which may be utterly pointless with respect to the goal of producing human happiness; but they may not be pointless with respect to producing a deeper knowledge of God.
William Lane Craig (Hard Questions, Real Answers)
Universal peace-time conscription was adopted by almost all countries as the basis of their military system. This ensured that wars would grow bigger in scale, longer in duration, and worse in effects. While conscription appeared democratic, it provided autocrats, hereditary or revolutionary, with more effective and comprehensive means of imposing their will, both in peace and war. Once the rule of compulsory service in arms was established for the young men of a nation, it was an obvious and easy transition to the servitude of the whole population. Totalitarian tyranny is the twin of total warfare —which might aptly be termed a reversion to tribal warfare on a larger scale.
B.H. Liddell Hart
Given the profound alienation of modern society, when combat vets say that they miss the war, they might be having an entirely healthy response to life back home. Iroquois warriors did not have to struggle with that sort of alienation because warfare and society existed in such close proximity that there was effectively no transition from one to the other.
Sebastian Junger (Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging)
warfare would be waged west of the Mississippi as it had been earlier against the Abenakis, Cherokees, Shawnees, Muskogees, and even Christian Indians. In the Civil War, these methods played a prominent role on both sides. Confederate regular forces, Confederate guerrillas such as William Quantrill, and General Sherman for the Union all engaged in waging total war against civilians. The pattern would continue in US military interventions overseas, from the Philippines and Cuba to Central America, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The cumulative effect goes beyond simply the habitual use of military means and becomes the very basis for US American identity. The Indian-fighting frontiersmen and the “valiant” settlers in their circled covered wagons are the iconic images of that identity. The continued popularity of, and respect for, the genocidal sociopath Andrew Jackson is another indicator. Actual men such as Robert Rogers, Daniel Boone, John Sevier, and David Crockett, as well as fictitious ones created by James Fenimore Cooper and other best-selling writers, call to mind D. H. Lawrence’s “myth of the essential white American”—that the “essential American soul” is a killer.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History, #3))
There was another reason why the dollar's hegemony grew: the intentional impoverishment of America's working class. A cynic will tell you quite accurately that large quantities of money are attracted to countries where the profit rate is higher. For Wall Street to exercise fully its magnetic powers over foreign capital, profit margins in the United States had to catch up with profit rates in Germany and Japan. A quick and dirty way to do this was to suppress American wages. Cheaper labour makes for lower costs, makes for larger margins. It is no coincidence that, to this day, American working class earnings languish below their 1974 level. It is also no coincidence that union-busting became a thing in the 1970s, culminating in Ronald Reagan's dismissal of every single unionised air traffic controller. A move emulated by Margaret Thatcher in Britain who pulverised whole industries in order to eliminate the trade unions that inhabited them. And faced with the Minotaur's sucking most of the world's capital into America, the European ruling classes reckoned that they had no alternative but to do the same. Reagan had set the pace. Thatcher had shown the way. But it was in Germany and later across continental Europe that the new class war - you might call it universal austerity - was waged most effectively.
Yanis Varoufakis (Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism)
Although these firms deploy units that are often much smaller in manpower relative to their client’s adversaries, their effectiveness lies not in their size, but in their comprehensive training, experience, and overall skill at battlefield judgment, all in fundamentally short supply in the chaotic battlefields of the last decade.14 Utilizing coordinated movement and intelligent application of firepower, their strength is their ability to arrive at the right place at the right moment. The fundamental reality of modern warfare is that in many cases such small tactical units can achieve strategic goals.
P.W. Singer (Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs))
Now when the Pharisees heard it [that Jesus had delivered a man possessed by a blind and mute spirit] they said, “This fellow does not cast out demons except by Beelzebub, the ruler of the demons.” (Matthew 12:24) The Pharisees made a terrible accusation! They said, in effect, “He can cast out demons because He is in league with the ruler of the demons.” Jesus answered them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand. If Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand? (Matthew 12:25–26)
Derek Prince (Pulling Down Strongholds (pocket size): Mighty Weapons for Spiritual Warfare)
But the greatest danger could spring from the chaos of a dysfunctional democracy, compounded by relentless party warfare, which, Washington warned, would erode faith in the effectiveness of self-governance and open the door to a demagogue with authoritarian ambitions. 'The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.
John P. Avlon (Washington's Farewell: The Founding Father's Warning to Future Generations)
Grant believed that generous terms were essential to pacification. In Grant's eyes, the surrender was a triumph of right over wrong: proof of the moral and material superiority of the North's free-labor democratic society over the South's slave-labor autocratic one. Grant's hope, in extending clemency, was to change hearts and minds--to effect Confederate repentance and submission. In Lee's view, by contrast, the United States' victory was one of might over right, attributable to brutal force, not to skill and virtue. Although Lee rejected the option of guerrilla warfare as impractical and dishonorable, he did not admit moral defeat or counsel submission.
Elizabeth Varon (Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South)
This crucial functional role for alcohol and other intoxicants is slowly gaining wider acceptance in the anthropological community. 131 Proponents of the beer before bread hypotheses rightly emphasize how the increased cohesiveness and scale of intoxicant-using cultures would give them a distinct advantage in competition with other groups, allowing them to cooperate more effectively in work, food production, and warfare. 132 The inexorable pressure of cultural group selection would, in this way, encourage and disseminate the cultural use of intoxicants in the manner that we actually observe in the historical record, and that is completely inconsistent with any hijack or hangover theory of intoxication.
Edward Slingerland (Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization)
Richard and I seemed really to be at the end of our rope, for he had done what he could for me, and it had not worked out, and now he was going away. It seemed to me that he was sailing into the most splendid of futures, for he was going, of all places! to France, and he had been invited there by the French government. But Richard did not seem, though he was jaunty, to be overjoyed. There was a striking sobriety in his face that day. He talked a great deal about a friend of his, who was in trouble with the U.S. Immigration authorities, and was about to be, or already had been, deported. Richard was not being deported, of course, he was traveling to a foreign country as an honored guest; and he was vain enough and young enough and vivid enough to find this very pleasing and exciting. Yet he knew a great deal about exile, all artists do, especially American artists, especially American Negro artists. He had endured already, liberals and literary critics to the contrary, a long exile in his own country. He must have wondered what the real thing would be like. And he must have wondered, too, what would be the unimaginable effect on his daughter, who could now be raised in a country which would not penalize her on account of her color. And that day was very nearly the last time Richard and I spoke to each other without the later, terrible warfare. Two years later, I, too, quit America, never intending to return.
James Baldwin (Nobody Knows My Name)
Religious intolerance is an idea that found its earliest expression in the Old Testament, where the Hebrew tribe depicts itself waging a campaign of genocide on the Palestinian peoples to steal their land. They justified this heinous behavior on the grounds that people not chosen by their god were wicked and therefore did not deserve to live or keep their land. In effect, the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian peoples, eradicating their race with the Jew's own Final Solution, was the direct result of a policy of religious superiority and divine right. Joshua 6-11 tells the sad tale, and one needs only read it and consider the point of view of the Palestinians who were simply defending their wives and children and the homes they had built and the fields they had labored for. The actions of the Hebrews can easily be compared with the American genocide of its native peoples - or even, ironically, the Nazi Holocaust. With the radical advent of Christianity, this self-righteous intolerance was borrowed from the Jews, and a new twist was added. The conversion of infidels by any means possible became the newfound calling card of religious fervor, and this new experiment in human culture spread like wildfire. By its very nature, how could it not have? Islam followed suit, conquering half the world in brutal warfare and, much like its Christian counterpart, it developed a new and convenient survival characteristic: the destruction of all images and practices attributed to other religions. Muslims destroyed millions of statues and paintings in India and Africa, and forced conversion under pain of death (or by more subtle tricks: like taxing only non-Muslims), while the Catholic Church busily burned books along with pagans, shattering statues and defacing or destroying pagan art - or converting it to Christian use. Laws against pagan practices and heretics were in full force throughrout Europe by the sixth century, and as long as those laws were in place it was impossible for anyone to refuse the tenets of Christianity and expect to keep their property or their life. Similar persecution and harassment continues in Islamic countries even to this day, officially and unofficially.
Richard C. Carrier (Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism)
Governments such as that of the United States that draw sharp distinctions between warfare and law enforcement and between domestic and overseas legal authorities will experience great difficulty, and may find it impossible to act with the same agility as irregular actors who can move among these artificial categories at will. Capabilities that combine policing, administration, and emergency services, backed up with military-style capabilities so that police can deal with well-armed adversaries—capabilities traditionally associated with constabulary, gendarmerie, carabinieri, or coast guard forces—may be more effective against these hybrid threats than civil police forces alone, and less destructive than unleashing the military.
David Kilcullen (Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla)
The monstrous effects on Korean civilians of the methods of warfare adopted by the United Nations — the blanket fire bombing of North Korean cities, the destruction of dams and the resulting devastation of the food supply and an unremitting aerial bombardment more intensive than anything experienced during the Second World War. At one point the Americans gave up bombing targets in the North when their intelligence reported that there were no more buildings over one story high left standing in the entire country … the overall death toll was staggering: possibly as many as four million people. About three million were civilians (one out of every ten Koreans). Even to a world that had just begun to recover from the vast devastation of the Second World War, Korea was a man-made hell with a place among the most violent excesses of the 20th century.
Reg Whitaker (Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945-1957)
We treat politics as a sport, political parties as the teams we root for, and political leaders as our favorite sports stars. But we forget that politics is not an entertainment sport. In sports, rivalry between fans of opposing teams is "Them vs Us", but in politics such rivalry becomes "Us vs Us". Political outcomes have far greater effect on our life than sports outcomes. In a democracy, "we, the people" are supposed to be the kings, not the pawns. We are the examiners and watchdogs of the political system, not the fans. We should step back from our blind loyalty to a party, and start taking an educated stand. Instead of forming our opinions based on hearsay and emotions, we should form our opinions based on hard facts. The time has come to stop being loyal to any political party, and start being loyal to our country and its betterment.
Shon Mehta
Law in seventeenth-century Maryland forbade the use of the words “papist” (Catholic) or “round-head” (Puritan), fighting words in the Old World whose effects were muted here by methods still familiar to us. We learned early to live with diversity, at least by the standards of the time. It is useful to remember that the terrible Thirty Years War (1618–1648) was fought among European Christians during the early period of European settlement in America, and that New En gland was largely populated by British Protestant refugees of religious oppression and warfare in Protestant Britain. What might look like homogeneity in nostalgic retrospect was felt and acted upon as intolerable difference justifying enormity in these cultures of origin. Our national ancestors generally managed, by the standards then prevailing, to avoid encouraging the same conflicts here.
Marilynne Robinson (When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays)
The qualities of a successful military strategist will change from person to person, but there are a central few that all of them need. These include, above all else, strategic judgment, but also stamina, interpersonal skills and a feel for people; an ability to energize, inspire and motivate; the ability to communicate effectively orally and in writing; a degree of personal presence and charisma; a sincere love of servicemen and women; an ability to be tough when needed, but also compassionate when that is appropriate; fortitude in the face of adversity and the capacity to stay calm in the midst of chaos; an ability to deal with setbacks, missteps and mistakes; a sense of what leadership style is required to bring out the best in those immediately below, and also for the organization collectively. A great strategic leader also needs to be able to foresee how a conflict will end.
David H. Petraeus (Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine)
Looking at a situation like the Israel-Palestine conflict, Americans are likely to react with puzzlement when they see ever more violent and provocative acts that target innocent civilians. We are tempted to ask: do the terrorists not realize that they will enrage the Israelis, and drive them to new acts of repression? The answer of course is that they know this very well, and this is exactly what they want. From our normal point of view, this seems incomprehensible. If we are doing something wrong, we do not want to invite the police to come in and try and stop us, especially if repression will result in the deaths or imprisonment of many of our followers. In a terrorist war, however, repression is often valuable because it escalates the growing war, and forces people to choose between the government and the terrorists. The terror/repression cycle makes it virtually impossible for anyone to remain a moderate. By increasing polarization within a society, terrorism makes the continuation of the existing order impossible. Once again, let us take the suicide bombing example. After each new incident, Israeli authorities tightened restrictions on Palestinian communities, arrested new suspects, and undertook retaliatory strikes. As the crisis escalated, they occupied or reoccupied Palestinian cities, destroying Palestinian infrastructure. The result, naturally, was massive Palestinian hostility and anger, which made further attacks more likely in the future. The violence made it more difficult for moderate leaders on both sides to negotiate. In the long term, the continuing confrontation makes it more likely that ever more extreme leaders will be chosen on each side, pledged not to negotiate with the enemy. The process of polarization is all the more probably when terrorists deliberately choose targets that they know will cause outrage and revulsion, such as attacks on cherished national symbols, on civilians, and even children. We can also think of this in individual terms. Imagine an ordinary Palestinian Arab who has little interest in politics and who disapproves of terrorist violence. However, after a suicide bombing, he finds that he is subject to all kinds of official repression, as the police and army hold him for long periods at security checkpoints, search his home for weapons, and perhaps arrest or interrogate him as a possible suspect. That process has the effect of making him see himself in more nationalistic (or Islamic) terms, stirs his hostility to the Israeli regime, and gives him a new sympathy for the militant or terrorist cause. The Israeli response to terrorism is also valuable for the terrorists in global publicity terms, since the international media attack Israel for its repression of civilians. Hamas military commander Salah Sh’hadeh, quoted earlier, was killed in an Israeli raid on Gaza in 2002, an act which by any normal standards of warfare would represent a major Israeli victory. In this case though, the killing provoked ferocious criticism of Israel by the U.S. and western Europe, and made Israel’s diplomatic situation much more difficult. In short, a terrorist attack itself may or may not attract widespread publicity, but the official response to it very likely will. In saying this, I am not suggesting that governments should not respond to terrorism, or that retaliation is in any sense morally comparable to the original attacks. Many historical examples show that terrorism can be uprooted and defeated, and military action is often an essential part of the official response. But terrorism operates on a logic quite different from that of most conventional politics and law enforcement, and concepts like defeat and victory must be understood quite differently from in a regular war.
Philip Jenkins (Images of Terror: What We Can and Can't Know about Terrorism (Social Problems and Social Issues))
APRIL 10 BREAK THE CURSE OF WITCHCRAFT AND SORCERY MY CHILD, I have loved you with an everlasting love, and because I love you, I have turned the curses of witchcraft and sorcery from the enemy into a blessing for you. I will help you according to My mercy, that you may know that it was by My hand that I have blessed what the enemy has cursed in your life. I will stand at your right hand and save you from those who condemn you. You will be a blessing to those among whom you were cursed. I am determined to do good to you and your household. Do not fear. But speak the truth to your neighbor, and give truth, justice, and peace to all you meet. PSALM 109:28–31; ZECHARIAH 8:13–16 Prayer Declaration Father, in Your name, I break and release myself from all spoken curses and negative words spoken against me by others, and I bless them. No evil curses of witchcraft or sorcery will have any effect upon my life, for You have broken the curse and have turned it into a blessing for my life through Your precious Son, Jesus.
John Eckhardt (Daily Declarations for Spiritual Warfare: Biblical Principles to Defeat the Devil)
Leaders, some of whom are politicians in this book while others are soldiers, must be able to master four major tasks.2 Firstly, they need comprehensively to grasp the overall strategic situation in a conflict and craft the appropriate strategic approach – in essence, to get the big ideas right. Secondly, they must communicate those big ideas, the strategy, effectively throughout the breadth and depth of their organization and to all other stakeholders. Thirdly, they need to oversee the implementation of the big ideas, driving the execution of the campaign plan relentlessly and determinedly. Lastly, they have to determine how the big ideas need to be refined, adapted and augmented, so that they can perform the first three tasks again and again and again. The statesmen and soldiers who perform these four tasks properly are the exemplars who stand out from these pages. The witness of history demonstrates that exceptional strategic leadership is the one absolute prerequisite for success, but also that it is as rare as the black swan.
David H. Petraeus (Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine)
The term terrorism is widely misused. It is utilized in its generic sense as a form of shorthand by governments and the media and is applied to a variety of acts and occurrences that approximate terrorism in form but not in substance or, worse yet, that have no real resemblance to terrorism at all. Terrorism, if nothing else, is violence, or threats of violence, but it is not mindless violence, as some observers have charged. Usually, when employed in a political context, it represents a calculated series of actions designed to intimidate and sow fear through-out a target population in an effort to produce a pervasive atmosphere of insecurity, a widespread condition of anxiety. A terrorist campaign that causes a significant threshold of fear among the target population may achieve its aims. In some instances, terrorism is potentially a more effective, especially from a cost-benefit perspective, strategy that conventional or guerrilla warfare, however, the goal of terrorism is not to destroy the opposing side but instead to break its will and force it to capitulate.
Neil Livingstone
If there was any consistency to his opinions, it was the consistent lack of consistency, and if he had a worldview, it was a view that proclaimed his lack of a worldview. But these very absences were what constituted his intellectual assets. Consistency and an established worldview were excess baggage in the intellectual mobile warfare that flared up in the mass media’s tiny time segments, and it was his great advantage to be free of such things. He had nothing to protect, which meant that he could concentrate all his attention on pure acts of combat. He needed only to attack, to knock his enemy down. Noboru Wataya was an intellectual chameleon, changing his color in accordance with his opponent’s, ad-libbing his logic for maximum effectiveness, mobilizing all the rhetoric at his command. I had no idea how he had acquired these techniques, but he clearly had the knack of appealing directly to the feelings of the mass audience. He knew how to use the kind of logic that moved the great majority. Nor did it even have to be logic: it had only to appear so, as long as it aroused the feelings of the masses.
Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)
Conflict can be seen as time-competitive observation-orientation-decision-action cycles. Each party to a conflict begins by observing. He observes himself, his physical surroundings and his enemy. On the basis of his observation, he orients, that is to say, he makes a mental image or “snapshot” of his situation. On the basis of this orientation, he makes a decision. He puts the decision into effect, i.e., he acts. Then, because he assumes his action has changed the situation, he observes again, and starts the process anew. His actions follow this cycle, sometimes called the “Boyd Cycle” or “00DA Loop.” If one side in a conflict can consistently go through the Boyd Cycle faster than the other, it gains a tremendous advantage. By the time the slower side acts, the faster side is doing something different from what he observed, and his action is inappropriate. With each cycle, the slower party’s action is inappropriate by a larger time margin. Even though he desperately strives to do something that will work, each action is less useful than its predecessor; he falls farther and farther behind. Ultimately, he ceases to be effective.
William S. Lind (Maneuver Warfare Handbook)
The Russian goal was to quickly harness the power of personal access that social media gives and craft metanarratives and distribute in such a way that the enemy population can be turned against their own government. Opinion polls, news coverage, and street talk can be shifted by changing the perception of the populace. Social media not only weaponizes opinion, it gives the attacker the ability to act as puppeteer for an entire foreign nation. Two Russian information warfare officers wrote a treatise describing the combat effects of weaponized news and social media: “The mass media today can stir up chaos and confusion in government and military management of any country and instill ideas of violence, treachery, and immorality, and demoralize the public. Put through this treatment, the armed forces personnel and public of any country will not be ready for active defense.”1 Additionally, the Russians make no distinction between using these activities in wartime and “peace.” The Russian Federation will deploy information warfare and propaganda persistently in a constant effort to keep adversaries off balance. When it comes to information warfare, such distinctions of peacetime and wartime fade away.
Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West)
Although there is no precise word for it in Japanese, a sort of "vicarious seppuku" was practiced during the Sengoku Jidai (The Era of Warfare) with the aim of saving the lives of many by the sacrifice of one life, often that of the most responsible person. For example, when Hideyoshi was warring with Mori Motonari, he decided to try to effect a reconciliation with the latter. At that time, Hideyoshi had under siege one of Mori's castles, which was commanded by Shimizu Muneharu. Hideyoshi offered to spare the rest of the garrison if Lord Mori would have Shimizu commit seppuku, to which Mori agreed. Connected to this episode is a moving example of junshi: On the eve of Shimizu's seppuku, his favorite vassal Shirai sent a request that Shimizu visit his room. When Shimizu arrived, Shirai apologized for having his master visit his humble quarters and explained that he had wanted to reassure his master that seppuku was not difficult and that he, Shimizu, should not be concerned about what he would have to do on the morrow. So saying, Shirai bared his abdomen to show that he himself had completed the act of seppuku only a moment before Shimizu's arrival. Shimizu gave Shirai his deepest thanks for his loyal devotion and assisted him in kaishaku, i.e., he beheaded him with his sword.
Jack Seward (Hara-Kiri: Japanese Ritual Suicide)
Atro had once explained to him how this was managed, how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how the lieutenants could give the privates orders, how the lieutenants could give the privates and sergeants orders, how the captains... and so on and so on up to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take them from none, except the commander in chief. Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust. "You call that organization?" he had inquired. "You even call it discipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency—a kind of seventh-millennium steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure what could be done that was worth doing?" This had given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfare as the breeder of courage and manliness and the weeder-out of the unfit, but the very line of his argument had forced him to concede the effectiveness of guerrillas, organized from below, self-disciplined. "But that only works when the people think they're fighting for something of their own—you know, their homes or some notion or other," the old man had said. Shevek had dropped the argument. He now continued it, in the darkening basement among the stacked crates of unlabeled chemicals. He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, manliness, or fitness entered in.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Once people believed her careful documentation, there was an easy answer—since babies are cute and inhibit aggression, something pathological must be happening. Maybe the Abu langur population density was too high and everyone was starving, or male aggression was overflowing, or infanticidal males were zombies. Something certifiably abnormal. Hrdy eliminated these explanations and showed a telling pattern to the infanticide. Female langurs live in groups with a single resident breeding male. Elsewhere are all-male groups that intermittently drive out the resident male; after infighting, one male then drives out the rest. Here’s his new domain, consisting of females with the babies of the previous male. And crucially, the average tenure of a breeding male (about twenty-seven months) is shorter than the average interbirth interval. No females are ovulating, because they’re nursing infants; thus this new stud will be booted out himself before any females wean their kids and resume ovulating. All for nothing, none of his genes passed on. What, logically, should he do? Kill the infants. This decreases the reproductive success of the previous male and, thanks to the females ceasing to nurse, they start ovulating. That’s the male perspective. What about the females? They’re also into maximizing copies of genes passed on. They fight the new male, protecting their infants. Females have also evolved the strategy of going into “pseudoestrus”—falsely appearing to be in heat. They mate with the male. And since males know squat about female langur biology, they fall for it—“Hey, I mated with her this morning and now she’s got an infant; I am one major stud.” They’ll often cease their infanticidal attacks. Despite initial skepticism, competitive infanticide has been documented in similar circumstances in 119 species, including lions, hippos, and chimps. A variant occurs in hamsters; because males are nomadic, any infant a male encounters is unlikely to be his, and thus he attempts to kill it (remember that rule about never putting a pet male hamster in a cage with babies?). Another version occurs among wild horses and gelada baboons; a new male harasses pregnant females into miscarrying. Or suppose you’re a pregnant mouse and a new, infanticidal male has arrived. Once you give birth, your infants will be killed, wasting all the energy of pregnancy. Logical response? Cut your losses with the “Bruce effect,” where pregnant females miscarry if they smell a new male. Thus competitive infanticide occurs in numerous species (including among female chimps, who sometimes kill infants of unrelated females). None of this makes sense outside of gene-based individual selection. Individual selection is shown with heartbreaking clarity by mountain gorillas, my favorite primate. They’re highly endangered, hanging on in pockets of high-altitude rain forest on the borders of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There are only about a thousand gorillas left, because of habitat degradation, disease caught from nearby humans, poaching, and spasms of warfare rolling across those borders. And also because mountain gorillas practice competitive infanticide. Logical for an individual intent on maximizing the copies of his genes in the next generation, but simultaneously pushing these wondrous animals toward extinction. This isn’t behaving for the good of the species.
Robert M. Sapolsky
CYBERPOWER is now a fundamental fact of global life. In political, economic, and military affairs, information and information technology provide and support crucial elements of operational activities. U.S. national security efforts have begun to incorporate cyber into strategic calculations. Those efforts, however, are only a beginning. The critical conclusion...is that the United States must create an effective national and international strategic framework for the development and use of cyber as part of an overall national security strategy. Such a strategic framework will have both structural and geopolitical elements. Structural activities will focus on those parts of cyber that enhance capabilities for use in general. Those categories include heightened security, expanded development of research and human capital, improved governance, and more effective organization. Geopolitical activities will focus on more traditional national security and defense efforts. Included in this group are sophisticated development of network-centric operations; appropriate integrated planning of computer network attack capabilities; establishment of deterrence doctrine that incorporates cyber; expansion of effective cyber influence capabilities; carefully planned incorporation of cyber into military planning (particularly stability operations); establishment of appropriate doctrine, education, and training regarding cyber by the Services and nonmilitary elements so that cyber can be used effectively in a joint and/or multinational context; and generation of all those efforts at an international level, since cyber is inherently international and cannot be most effectively accomplished without international partners.
Franklin D. Kramer (Cyberpower and National Security)
Harvard University biologist David Haig has spent the last few years systematically debunking the notion that the relationship between a mother and her unborn child is anything like the rose-tinted idyll that one usually finds on the glossy covers of maternity magazines. In fact, it is anything but. Pre-eclampsia, a condition of dangerously high blood pressure in pregnant women, is brutally kick-started by nothing short of a foetal coup d’état. It begins with the placenta invading the maternal bloodstream and initiating what, in anyone’s book, is a ruthless biological heist – an in utero sting operation to draw out vital nutrients. And I’m not just talking about baby Gordon Gekkos here – I’m talking about all of us. The curtain-raiser is well known to obstetricians. The foetus begins by injecting a crucial protein into the mother’s circulation which forces her to drive more blood, and therefore more nourishment, into the relatively low-pressure placenta. It’s a scam, pure and simple, which poses a significant and immediate risk to the mother’s life. ‘The bastard!’ says Andy. ‘Shall we get some olives?’ ‘And it’s by no means the only one,’ I continue. In another embryonic Ponzi scheme, foetal release of placental lactogen counteracts the effect of maternal insulin thereby increasing the mother’s blood sugar level and providing an excess for the foetus’s own benefit. ‘A bowl of the citrus and chilli and a bowl of the sweet pepper and basil,’ Andy says to the waiter. Then he peers at me over the menu. ‘So basically what you’re saying then is this: forget the Gaddafis and the Husseins. When it comes to chemical warfare it’s the unborn child that’s top dog!’ ‘Well they definitely nick stuff that isn’t theirs,’ I say. ‘And they don’t give a damn about the consequences.’ Andy smiles. ‘So in other words they’re psychopaths!’ he says. BABY
Andy McNab (The Good Psychopath's Guide to Success (Good Psychopath 1))
Only after the nation had been herded into suburbs for over a decade were perceptive critics like Lewis Mumford able to see the type of person the housers were trying (and succeeding) to engineer. The suburbs fostered what Mumford called “compulsory mobility,” which was more controlling than the compulsory stability of being forced to live within the medieval city’s walls, because it limited the possibility of human interaction much more dramatically. And without the possibility of contact that is not managed for commercial or other purposes congenial to those who want to control him, man is reduced to the most vulnerable form of individual life and political impotence. The sprawling nature of the suburb was itself a form of control. “Sprawling isolation,” according to Mumford, “has proved an even more effective method of keeping a population under control” than enclosure and close supervision because it dramatically limits the possibility of human interaction and the unpredictable and uncontrollable flow of information that goes with it. Modern forms of social control depend on controlling the flow of information, not on constant supervision. By limiting the options to choosing a Ford over a Chevy or Coke over Pepsi, the people who control the flow of information channel behavior into certain acceptable patterns while at the same time promoting the illusion of freedom of choice. By inhibiting direct contact, the suburb allows information to be “monopolized by central agents and conveyed through guarded channels, too costly to be utilized by small groups or private individuals.” As a result, “each member of Suburbia becomes imprisoned by the very separation that he has prized: he is fed through a narrow opening: a telephone line, a radio band, a television circuit.*! Here Mumford is articulating, without being specific about it, one of the prime goals of psychological warfare, namely, the prohibition of unauthorized communication among subject peoples. Mumford goes on to say that “this is not . . . the result of a conscious conspiracy by a cunning minority” but his disclaimer is less persuasive than the picture of social control he paints. If, one wonders, this system has not been put into effect by conscious design, how did it get there? Is it possible to have social control without social controllers?
E. Michael Jones (The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing)
The United States could not win the war if blacks continued as sharecroppers down South. The South was not an important area either politically or economically as far as the internationalists were concerned. (“The white South,” Myrdal wrote, “is itself a minority and a national problem.”) It was important only as a source of much-needed labor, at a time when most white southerners concurred because they no longer needed them to chop or harvest cotton and considered migration a simple solution to their biggest social problem. The foundations which did the thinking for the internationalist ruling class quickly realized that that flow of labor into the factories of the industrial North was impeded less by the system of political segregation in the South than by what they would eventually term the de-facto housing segregation in the North, which meant, in effect, the existence of residential patterns based on ethnic neighborhoods. The logistics problem facing Louis Wirth and his colleagues in the psychological-warfare establishment was not so much how to move the black up from the South — the wage differential and the railroads would accomplish that — but rather where to put him when he got there. Northern cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia were essentially an assemblage of neighborhoods arranged as ethnic fiefdoms, dominated at that time by the most recent arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe as well as the Irish and Germans. As Wirth makes clear in his sociological writings, any group that has this kind of cohesiveness and population density had political power, and the question in his mind was precisely whether this political power was going to be used in the interests of the WASP ruling elite, who needed these people to fight a war that had nothing approaching majority support among ethnics of the sort Wirth viewed with suspicion. This group of “ethnic” Americans posed a problem for the psychological-warfare establishment because it posed a problem to the ethnic group that made up that establishment. This group of people constituted a Gestalt - ethnic, Catholic, unionized, and urban - whose mutual and reinforcing affiliations effectively removed them from the influence of instruments of mass communication which the psychological-warfare establishment saw as critical in controlling them. If one added the demographic increase this group enjoyed — as Catholics they were forbidden to use contraceptives — it is easy enough to see that their increase in political power posed a threat to WASP hegemony over the culture at precisely the moment when the WASP elite was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with fascism. It was Wirth’s job to bring them under control, lest they jeopardize the war effort.
E. Michael Jones (The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing)
Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki's plan. Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust. After a few thousand years, one new language developed - Hebrew - that possessed exceptional flexibility and power. The deuteronomists, a group of radical monotheists in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., were the first to take advantage of it. They lived in a time of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, which made it easier for them to reject foreign ideas like Asherah worship. They formalized their old stories into the Torah and implanted within it a law that insured its propagation throughout history - a law that said, in effect, 'make an exact copy of me and read it every day.' And they encouraged a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled substance... [and] gone beyond that. There is evidence of carefully planned biological warfare against the army of Sennacherib when he tried to conquer Jerusalem. So the deuteronomists may have had an en of their very own. Or maybe they just understood viruses well enough that they knew how to take advantage of naturally occurring strains. The skills cultivated by these people were passed down in secret from one generation to the next and manifested themselves two thousand years later, in Europe, among the Kabbalistic sorcerers, ba'al shems, masters of the divine name. In any case, this was the birth of rational religion. All of the subsequent monotheistic religions - known by Muslims, appropriately, as religions of the Book - incorporated those ideas to some extent. For example, the Koran states over and over again that it is a transcript, an exact copy, of a book in Heaven. Naturally, anyone who believes that will not dare to alter the text in any way! Ideas such as these were so effective in preventing the spread of Asherah that, eventually, every square inch of the territory where the viral cult had once thrived was under the sway of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. But because of its latency - coiled about the brainstem of those it infects, passed from one generation to the next - it always finds ways to resurface. In the case of Judaism, it came in the form of the Pharisees, who imposed a rigid legalistic theocracy on the Hebrews. With its rigid adherence to laws stored in a temple, administered by priestly types vested with civil authority, it resembled the old Sumerian system, and was just as stifling. The ministry of Jesus Christ was an effort to break Judaism out of this condition... an echo of what Enki did. Christ's gospel is a new namshub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone. That is the message explicitly spelled out by his sermons, and it is the message symbolically embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles went to his tomb hoping to find his body and instead found nothing. The message was clear enough; We are not to idolize Jesus, because his ideas stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed among all the people.
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
This affords a reason why God suffers his dear children to fall into temptation, be cause he is able to outshoot Satan in his own bow, and in the thing wherein he thinks to outwit the Christian to be above him.  God will not only be admired by his saints in glory for his love in their salvation, but for his wisdom in the way to it.  The love of God in saving them will be the sweet draught at the marriage-feast, and the rare wisdom of God in effecting this, as the curious workmanship with which the cup will be enamelled.
William Gurnall (The Christian in Complete Armour - The Ultimate Book on Spiritual Warfare)
Warfare effectively brought the antimalarial campaign to a halt as medical personnel were conscripted and as the collapse of the international supply of quinine deprived the movement of its chief tool.
Frank M. Snowden III (Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present)
And George Kennan, at the age of ninety-three, warned that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” He feared it could be the beginning of a new cold war, and in this he was prophetic. Kennan knew that empires do not vanish into thin air.
Tim Weiner (The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020)
American intelligence knew little about Iraq, and much of what it knew was wrong. The CIA didn’t begin to imagine that Saddam could be overthrown and then operate from underground, nor did it foresee the insurgency that followed, and the ripple effect of that fighting, inspiring jihadists across the Middle East and North Africa. The consequences of that ignorance have been immense. Roughly half a million people have died, including fifteen thousand American combatants and contractors, in the name of the war on terror. Estimates of the financial toll run from $3 trillion to $6 trillion; in today’s dollars, World War II cost about $4 trillion. And in Iraq, the only winners of the war have been Iran, whose military commanders gained political power and prestige in Baghdad while working with jihadists to kill American troops, and Russia, which has forged a regional alliance of convenience with the Iranians.
Tim Weiner (The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020)
Larry Diamond, a prominent American political sociologist, wrote in January 2015. “There is a growing sense, both domestically and internationally, that democracy in the United States has not been functioning effectively.” Voter turnouts were sinking. The cost of election campaigns was crushing. The role of dark money in politics was surging. Public trust in government was fading. Comity, courtesy, the consideration that the other person might have a point, were dying. Conspiracy theories were trending. Talking heads were shouting. Everyone was arguing with everybody
Tim Weiner (The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020)
With the end of the American Revolution, ambitious European and American planters and woud-be planters flowed into the lower Mississippi Valley. They soon demanded an end to the complaisant regime that characterized slavery in the long half century following the Natchez rebellion, and Spanish officials were pleased to comply. The Cabildo - the governing body of New Orleans - issued its own regulations combining French and Spanish black codes, along with additional proscriptions on black life. In succeeding years, the state - Spanish (until 1800), French (between 1800 and 1803), and finally American (beginning in 1803) - enacted other regulations, controlling the slaves' mobility and denying their right to inherit property, contract independently, and testify in court. Explicit prohibitions against slave assemblage, gun ownership, and travel by horse were added, along with restrictions on manumission and self-purchase. The French, who again took control of Louisiana in 1800, proved even more compliant, reimposing the Code Noir during their brief ascendancy. The hasty resurrection of the old code pleased slaveholders, and, although it lost its effect with the American accession in 1803, planters - in control of the territorial legislature - incorporate many of its provisions in the territorial slave code. Perhaps even more significant than the plethora of new restrictions was a will to enforce the law. Slave miscreants faced an increasingly vigilant constabulary, whose members took it upon themselves to punish offenders. Officials turned with particular force on the maroon settlements that had proliferated amid the warfare of the Age of Revolution. They dismantled some fugitive colonies, scattering their members and driving many of them more deeply into the swamps. Maroons unfortunate enough to be captured were re-enslaved, deported, or executed.
Ira Berlin (Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves)
Angst may have replaced fear and physical pain in modern societies, yet, without depreciating the merits of traditional society or ignoring the stresses and problems of modernity, this change has been nothing short of revolutionary. People in pre-modern societies struggled to survive in the most elementary sense. The overwhelming majority of them went through a lifetime of hard physical work to escape hunger, from which they were never secure. The tragedy of orphanage, child mortality, premature death of spouses, and early death in general was inseparable from their lives. At all ages, they were afflicted with illness, disability, and physical pain, for which no effective remedies existed. Even where state rule prevailed, violent conflict between neighbors was a regular occurrence and, therefore, an ever-present possibility, putting a premium on physical strength, toughness, and honor, and a reputation for all of these. Hardship and tragedy tended to harden people and make them fatalistic.
Azar Gat (War and Strategy in the Modern World (Cass Military Studies))
Up to 95 percent of the original Native American population, estimated at roughly twenty million people, disappeared after the invasion of European colonizers. While there was direct violence toward Native Americans, many of these deaths can be attributed to the introduction of smallpox. Smallpox is a virus that is spread when one comes into contact with infected bodily fluids or contaminated objects such as clothing or blankets. The virus then finds its way into a person's lymphatic system. Within days of infection, large, painful pustules begin to erupt over the victim's skin. In school curriculums, this has often been taught as an unfortunate tragedy, an accidental side effect of trade, and therefore a reason to claim that the Europeans did not commit genocide. However, in recent years, many historians have recognized that the spreading of smallpox was an early form of biological warfare, one which was understood and used without mercy from at least the mid-1700s. Noted conversations among army officials include letters discussing the idea of "sending the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes" and using "every stratagem to reduce them." Another official, Henry Bouquet, wrote a letter that told his subordinates to "try to Innoculate [sic] the Indians, by means of Blankets, as well as to Try Every other Method, that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race." They followed through on their plan, giving two blankets and a handkerchief from a Smallpox Hospital alongside other gifts to seal an agreement of friendship between the local Native tribes and the men at Fort Pitt, located in what is now western Pennsylvania.
Leah Myers (Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity)
Commanders have to remember that a lesson is not learned when it is identified, only when it has been incorporated in the big ideas, communicated effectively and actually implemented.
David H. Petraeus (Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine)
Vietnam was thus one of the most tragic cases of successive strategic leaders not correctly performing the four tasks of strategic leadership – to get the big ideas right, to communicate them effectively, to oversee their implementation and to determine how to refine them and do it all again – at
David H. Petraeus (Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine)
The enemy loves my busyness because he knows what "busy" really means: "Being Under Satan's Yoke." It's not a glamorous distraction, but it's highly effective in removing me from the front lines of spiritual warfare.
Kim Meeder (Encountering Our Wild God: Ways to Experience His Untamable Presence Every Day)
If now -- and this is my idea -- there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing, and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation. Such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would have required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace. We should get toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is temporary, and threatens not, as now, to degrade the whole remainder of one's life. I spoke of the "moral equivalent" of war. So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until and equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way. But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time, of skilful propogandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities. The martial type of character can be bred without war. Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound everywhere. Priests and medical men are in a fashion educated to it, and we should all feel some degree if its imperative if we were conscious of our work as an obligatory service to the state. We should be owned, as soldiers are by the army, and our pride would rise accordingly. We could be poor, then, without humiliation, as army officers now are. The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as part history has inflamed the military temper.
William James (The Moral Equivalent of War)
There is absolutely no indication that, faced with the need to learn more effective methods of siege warfare, the Spartans adapted.
Myke Cole (The Bronze Lie: Shattering the Myth of Spartan Warrior Supremacy)
When you are going through a dark time, one side effect can be to forget the power and the goodness of God. When God isn’t doing what you think He should, it is easy to focus on the problem, and it suddenly becomes larger than the solution—which is God Himself.
Kristen Smeltzer (Who Do You Say I Am?: Overcoming the Spirit of Identity Theft)
Church growth is 60% prayers and 40% methods and principles, according to Dr. Yonggi Cho - the Pastor of the world largest church. There must be deliberate, systematic prayer warfare strategy. We are dealing with well organized, structured enemy with levels and layers of satanic authorities. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Eph 6:12). The Guerilla Warfare structure headed by Satan is comprised of the following levels - Principalities, Powers, Rulers of Darkness, Spiritual Wickedness in High Places. CITY-TAKING PRAYER STRATEGIES To effectively check mate, confront, preempt and demobilize this satanic structure, the following prayer strategies are recommended. The aim of the strategy outlined below is to uproot the gates of the enemy from every stratum of our community and households and to actually take the battle to the gates of the enemy.
Albert O. Aina (10 Healthy System for Healthy Church Growth)
Cold reading is a subset of what we call the "Barnum effect." Named after circus tycoon P. T. Barnum, it's where you make a general, hazy statement that could apply to almost anyone that someone will personalize as if it were specific to them.
Michael T. Stevens (The Art Of Psychological Warfare: How To Skillfully Influence People Undetected And How To Mentally Subdue Your Enemies In Stealth Mode)
You can not be an effective psychological combatant and still cherish beliefs in hard religion, pseudo-science, or superstitions. Belief in these things make your targets more vulnerable; you should be exploiting them, not falling for them yourself.
Michael T. Stevens (The Art Of Psychological Warfare: How To Skillfully Influence People Undetected And How To Mentally Subdue Your Enemies In Stealth Mode)
Most famous for his work the Art of War, Sun Tzu is credited for creating empathetic warfare, whereby understanding an enemy would inevitably lead to their defeat. The book is a treatise on the formation, equipping, training, and leading of an army. Sun Tzu’s work delves into many non-military aspects of life, as he believed that knowledge was the most effective weapon
Henry Freeman (The History of China in 50 Events (History by Country Timeline #2))
It has been my experience that when I am having difficulties with someone in my home through their rebellion or whatever, the most effective way of dealing with the situation is to get on my face before the Lord and ask Him to deal with me. Almost always, the Holy Spirit shows me some area of my life that is not totally pleasing to Him. As I deal with that area, I find that the Lord is then free to deal with the problem in the other person’s life without my ever having to talk to them.
Rebecca Julia Brown (Prepare for War: A Manual for Spiritual Warfare)
The leveling effects of fairness concerns were significantly mediated by regime type. In World War I, the democracies of the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada were prepared to “soak the rich,” whereas more autocratic systems such as Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia preferred to borrow or print money to sustain their war effort. The latter, however, later paid a high price through hyperinflation and revolution, shocks that likewise compressed inequality. Especially during World War I, before a common template for funding mass mobilization warfare had been established, the mechanisms of leveling therefore varied considerably between countries.
Walter Scheidel (The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World Book 69))
The Project for the New American Century praised a 1992 strategic white paper that Wolfowitz had written for Cheney, back when Cheney had been Defense Secretary during the first Iraq war, stating, ‘The Defense Policy Guidance drafted in the early months of 1992 provided a blueprint for maintaining U.S. pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.’ That 1992 policy paper was ordered buried by Bush. It became far too hot, after a copy was leaked to the New York Times in early 1992. It had called for precisely the form of preemptive wars, to ‘preclude’ a great power rival, that George W. Bush made official as U.S. National Security Strategy, the Bush Doctrine, in September 2002. Cheney and company now restated that 1992 imperial agenda for America in the post-Cold War era. They declared that the U.S. ‘must discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership, or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.’ The PNAC group were not content only to dominate the earth, where they proposed Washington create a ‘worldwide command and control system.’ They also called for creation of ‘U.S. space forces’ to dominate space, and effect total control of cyberspace, as well as to develop biological weapons, ‘that can target specific genotypes and may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.’ Biological warfare as a politically useful tool? Even George Orwell would have been shocked.
F. William Engdahl (A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order)
Often, genuine relief from diabolical attacks can be attained by making a good sacramental Confession, praying daily deliverance prayers, fasting, and leading a sacramental life. These are effective, proven remedies. All levels of demonic affliction require such remedies.
Kathleen Beckman (Family Guide to Spiritual Warfare: Strategies for Deliverance and Healing)
But why does this all matter? Why is the math of arrows and swords relevant to understanding why you might have a boss, a boss’s boss, and a boss’s boss’s boss at work? For a simple reason: as ranged weapons became more common, the dynamics of warfare started to dramatically favor societies with more soldiers. If a few hundred people got together and formed an army under the rule of a single chief, egalitarian bands of twenty to eighty members just couldn’t compete. And when humans get together in larger groups, flat societies become impossible. Put enough people together, and hierarchy and dominance always emerge. It’s an ironclad rule of history. Some people had to learn this the hard way. Bands that stubbornly stuck to the old ways of flat society started to get wiped out by those who joined together and embraced chiefs. Plus, on the battlefield itself, having leaders (generals) with formal power over their soldiers was much more effective than a ragtag bunch of soldiers making their own decisions. It was the opposite of the !Kung hunting rituals. To win a war, you didn’t want to insult your best and bravest. You needed to elevate your best fighters, not cut them down to size.
Brian Klaas (Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us)
Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world. —1 JOHN 4:4, KJV
David Hernandez (25 Truths About Demons and Spiritual Warfare: Uncover the Hidden Effects of Demonic Influence)
Demolishing Strongholds: Effective Strategies for Spiritual Warfare.
John Paul Jackson (Needless Casualties of War)
civil wars look entirely different today. Those who wage war against their governments in the twenty-first century tend to avoid the battlefield entirely; they know they will almost certainly lose in a conventional war against a powerful government. Instead, they choose the strategy of the weak: guerrilla warfare and terrorism. And, increasingly, domestic terror campaigns are aimed at democratic governments. Terror can be effective in democracies because its targets—citizens—have political power: They can vote against politicians who are unable to stop the attacks. The Provisional IRA, Hamas, and the Tamil Tigers all believed that the more pain they inflicted on average citizens, the more likely governments would be to make concessions to the terrorists in exchange for peace. Either way, extremists benefit: They either convince the incumbent leader to pursue policies more favorable to the extremists (no gun control, stricter immigration policies), or they convince enough voters to elect a more extreme leader who is ideologically closer to them. Terror is also surprisingly easy to pull off in democracies, where there is more freedom of movement and less surveillance. There are also numerous constitutional constraints against labeling domestic groups terrorists, giving them more leeway than foreign terrorists would have.
Barbara F. Walter (How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them)
Anytime you feel yourself starting to become overwhelmed with either information or feelings, you need to be able to stop. It doesn’t matter whether the conversation involves a minor discussion about breakfast or a major debate about selling the house. The mechanism for stopping a conversation that’s becoming overheated is extremely simple. It can be contained in a one-sentence agreement both parties accept. Here it is: Either party can ask to stop a discussion at any time for any reason. What that means is that whenever you ask to stop talking about something, the other person is obligated to stop talking and give a simple “Okay.” No further discussion occurs, not even “I just need to finish my thought” or “Why can’t I just explain . . . ?” When I suggest this idea to argumentative couples, their typical reply is, “Oh, great. My spouse will shut me up all the time. I’ll never be able to talk about anything that matters to me.” In actual practice, though, that rarely happens. Even the most out-of-control couples have demonstrated that when the people involved have in place a solid agreement to stop talking, both people benefit. That’s because when either person can ask to stop talking when he or she feels overwhelmed, and finds that request respected, each person can begin to trust—often for the first time in years—that bringing up a potentially difficult topic will not automatically escalate into all-out verbal warfare.
Carl Alasko (Say This, Not That: A Foolproof Guide to Effective Interpersonal Communication)
spirit of monopoly…the great enemy of Democracy…The passing events of the day show how immense a power is exercised by corporations. They are weapons in the hand of the Money Power, capable of being wielded with dreadful effect, in its warfare with the Producing Power.
Adam Wasserman (A People's History of Florida 1513-1876: How Africans, Seminoles, Women, and Lower Class Whites Shaped the Sunshine State)
This discussion of war then lays the foundation for an understanding of change as a process and as an essential component of military affairs. Militaries must change to cope with the changing environment in which they function. The U.S. Army has a robust process to guide change in its combat developments community. Change is also present in the business world, as industry seeks a competitive advantage in order to survive and prosper. The present transformation initiatives in the U.S. Department of Defense seek to maintain the U.S. dominance in military capability in the world and to exploit the opportunities afforded by new technologies and concepts of organization and warfare that use those technologies. The future of military requirements remain a challenge to define. The transformation process tries to define that future and the capabilities needed in order to maintain the security of the United States. Yet enemies of the United States and its allies also seek to predict and mold this future to their advantage. The rise of Islamic fundamentalists or radicalism has changed the global security environment. Western nations must prepare to defeat this threat that is not really new but has risen to new levels of ferocity and lethality. Regardless of the changes in technology, organizational and operational concepts, and external or internal threats, people remain a constant as the crucial element in war. People make decisions to use military and other elements of national power to impose the will of a nation on another group or nations. People also comprise the military services and man the component systems within the services. Any study of war and warfare must address the impact that people make on the conduct of war and the effects of war on people. The political process always includes people. To paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, war is a continuation of that political process. Leaders who make a decision to fight and those who lead those soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines into battle must not forget that people implement those decisions and are the object of any offense or defense. Protecting the citizens of the United States is why the nation maintains military forces.
John M. House (Why War? Why an Army?)
The history of warfare has always been a struggle between measures and countermeasures, and so it will be with asymmetric warfare. During the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. offset strategy incorporated modern information technology in its weapons to offset the numerical superiority of the military forces of the Soviet Union. The strategy has come to be known as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). After the effectiveness of the new RMA weapons was convincingly demonstrated in DESERT STORM, nations potentially hostile to the United States began to seek "offsets to the offset strategy," i.e., countermeasures to America's RMA weapons. Since they are not able to copy U.S. weapons (indeed, even our technically advanced allies have been slow to do so), they are led to the development of asymmetric warfare techniques. More specifically, they seek to develop RMA weapons; their objective is to give the United States pause before it uses its superiority in conventional weapons. The Department of Defense must, therefore, take steps to reduce the vulnerability of its RMA systems to these asymmetric measures.
Ashton B. Carter
By investing more in health care up front, Thornhill’s model predicts, Western countries might not have to spend so much on warfare later—and may ultimately reduce human suffering far more effectively. A
Kathleen McAuliffe (This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society)
The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a special unit of the North Carolina-based Special Operations Command (SOCOM), existed before Rumsfeld, but its mission, profile, and budget dramatically expanded during his tenure as secretary of defense in the Bush administration. It effectively became Rumsfeld's clandestine service. JSOC operatives did not necessarily wear uniforms, dispensed with many aspects of normal military protocol, and adopted secrecy as their byword. Consequently, the boundary lines laid down in 1947 were breached on both sides: the CIA got its own army and air force, and the Pentagon got its own CIA.
Scott Horton (Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America's Stealth Warfare)
Vast populations in parasitic hot zones are without hospitals, doctors, drugs, or surgical equipment. Meanwhile, often directed at the very same underserved regions, wealthy countries are throwing billions of dollars into campaigns aimed at containing wars ignited by ethnic hatred and religious intolerance, not to mention dealing with the refugee crises and other tragedies this violence has spawned. By investing more in health care up front, Thornhill’s model predicts, Western countries might not have to spend so much on warfare later—and may ultimately reduce human suffering far more effectively.
Kathleen McAuliffe (This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society)
Sexual differentiation begins approximately six weeks after conception, when in male children the gonads are formed and begin to manufacture male hormone, which has a profound effect on the future development of the embryo. In the female, on the other hand, the ovaries are not formed until the sixth month, by which time the greater size, weight, and muscular strength of the male is already established. This is the biological basis of the sexual dimorphism apparent in the great majority of societies known to anthropology, where child-rearing is almost invariably the responsibility of women, and hunting and warfare the responsibility of men. These differences have less to do with cultural `stereotypes' than some fashionable contemporary notions would have us believe. While it is true that at all ages males and females have far more in common than they have differences between them, there can be no doubt that some differences exist which have their roots in the biology of our species. Jung was quite clear about this. Again and again, he refers to the masculine and the feminine as two great archetypal principles, coexisting as equal and complementary parts of a balanced cosmic system, as expressed in the interplay of yin and yang in Taoist philosophy. These archetypal principles provide the foundations on which masculine and feminine stereotypes begin to do their work, providing an awareness of gender. Gender is the psychic recognition and social expression of the sex to which nature has assigned us, and a child's awareness of its gender is established by as early as eighteen months of age.
Anthony Stevens (Jung: A Very Short Introduction)
In General Gray’s mind, the Corps needed to change how it would do business in this new battlespace. The impetus behind this initiative can be found in the post-Vietnam analysis of the effectiveness of the American campaign in Southeast Asia. Couple this with the bombing of the Marine 24th Amphibious Unit, Battalion Landing Team, HQ Barracks, Beirut, Lebanon in 1983, and it was obvious that serious and immediate battlespace changes needed to be implemented. 14
Anthony Piscitelli (The Marine Corps Way of War: The Evolution of the U.S. Marine Corps from Attrition to Maneuver Warfare in the Post-Vietnam Era)
Forrest had about 4,000 cavalry with him, composed of thoroughly well-disciplined men, who under so able a leader were very effective. Smith’s command was nearly double that of Forrest, but not equal, man to man, for the lack of a successful experience such as Forrest’s men had had. The fact is, troops who have fought a few battles and won, and followed up their victories, improve upon what they were before to an extent that can hardly be counted by percentage. The difference in result is often decisive victory instead of inglorious defeat. This same difference, too, is often due to the way troops are officered, and for the particular kind of warfare which Forrest had carried on neither army could present a more effective officer than he was.
Ulysses S. Grant (Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant: All Volumes)
The League of Nations Covenant (which specifically endorses the Monroe Doctrine) represents the global extension of this hegemony. The US did not join the League, but American economic power underwrote the peace settlement and, eventually, in the Second World War, US military power was brought to bear to bring down the jus publicum Europaeum and replace it with 'international law', liberal internationalism and, incipiently, the notion of humanitarian intervention in support of the liberal, universalist, positions that the new order had set in place. On Schmitt's account, the two world wars were fought to bring this about – and the barbarism of modern warfare is to be explained by the undermining of the limits established in the old European order. In effect, the notion of a Just War has been reborn albeit without much of its theological underpinnings. The humanized warfare of the JPE with its recognition of the notion of a 'just enemy' is replaced by the older notion that the enemy is evil and to be destroyed – in fact, is no longer an 'enemy' within Schmitt's particular usage of the term but a 'foe' who can, and should, be annihilated. Schmitt
Louiza Odysseos (The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War and the Crisis of Global Order (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory Book 24))
The weapon was one of the variants of the standard SAS sniper rifle, the British-made Accuracy International PM — Precision Marksman — or L96A1. Designed for covert operations, the rifle Dekker had chosen was the AWS, or Arctic Warfare Suppressed, model. The name was a hangover from the days when the manufacturer produced a modified version for the Swedish armed forces, a move which spawned several different models generically known as the AW range. The stainless-steel barrel was fitted with an integrated suppressor which reduced the sound of a shot to about that of a standard .22 rifle. It was a comparatively short-range weapon, because of the subsonic ammunition, effective only to about three hundred yards in contrast to other versions and calibres of the rifle, some of which were accurate at up to a mile. Both the stock, its green polymer side panels already attached, and the barrel were a tight fit in the case, each lying diagonally across its interior. He pulled them both out, fitted and secured the barrel, and lowered the bipod legs mounted at the fore-end of the machined-aluminium chassis to support it, while he completed the assembly. Then he took a five-round magazine out of the recess in the briefcase, along with an oblong cardboard box containing twenty rounds of 7.62 x 51-millimetre rifle ammunition.
James Barrington (Manhunt (Paul Richter, #6))
But there’s something about the story of Salem that makes it a Rorschach test for our own vision of history. Some people look back on it as a story about repressed sexual hysteria. Some think it was all about the tensions between the settlers and the Indians. Others see slightly subliminated class warfare. Whatever happened, it was soaked in issues of gender. Women were the beginning and end of the Salem witch-hunt, the first accusers and the bulk of the accused. If seventeenth-century New England was a place full of women with personalities that were stronger than the society around them was prepared to accept, the witch craze can easily be interpreted as a story that began with teenage girls in crisis who stumbled on a very bad but effective way of trying to take control of their unhappy environment.
Gail Collins (America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines)
Unconfessed sin gives demonic spirits a foothold or ground against a believer. Holding ground is a phrase used by demons to explain their ability to exercise limited control over a place, space, territory, or specific area of a Christian’s life. Once a person is willing to confess his sins and ask God to cancel the ground held against him, the battle is relatively simple. The believer has in effect given an eviction notice to an unwanted renter or swatted a bloodsucking leech. God, who is omnipotent, has no problem enforcing the eviction notice for an individual who submits to Him with clean hands and a pure heart.
Karl I. Payne (Spiritual Warfare: Christians, Demonization and Deliverance)
called counter command-control warfare: just knowing that you’d been hacked, regardless of its tangible effects, was disorienting, disrupting. Meanwhile,
Fred Kaplan (Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War)
In a Vedic text known as the Samarangana Sutradhara, there is mention of manned rockets and their means of propulsion. In the Samara Sudradhara we find mention of the use of biological weapons, each of which produced a specific effect. The Samhara debilitated its victims by attacking the motor center of the brain, Moha caused blockage of nerve impulses, resulting in complete paralysis. In the Chinese Feng Shen Veni we find similar descriptions of germ warfare, and again reference is made to specific weapons causing specific results. Indian philosopher Aulukya discussed the miniature solar system within the atom, molecular construction and transformation, and and Theory of Relativity two thousand eight hundred years before Einstein.
Michael Tsarion (Atlantis, Alien Visitation and Genetic Manipulation)
where should one focus the study of contemporary phenomena? The nomothetic social scientists were located primarily in the same five countries as the historians, and in the same way studied primarily their own countries (or at most they made comparisons among the five countries). This was to be sure socially rewarded, but in addition the nomothetic social scientists put forward a methodological argument to justify this choice. They said that the best way to avoid bias was to use quantitative data, and that such data were most likely to be located in their own countries in the immediate present. Furthermore, they argued that if we assume the existence of general laws governing social behavior, it would not matter where one studied these phenomena, since what was true in one place and at one time was true in all places at all times. Why not then study phenomena for which one had the most reliable data—that is, the most quantified and replicable data? Social scientists did have one further problem. The four disciplines together (history, economics, sociology, and political science) studied in effect only a small portion of the world. But in the nineteenth century, the five countries were imposing colonial rule on many other parts of the world, and were engaged in commerce and sometimes in warfare with still other parts of the world. It seemed important to study the rest of the world as well. Still, the rest of the world seemed somehow different, and it seemed inappropriate to use four West-oriented disciplines to study parts of the world that were not considered “modern.” As a result, two additional disciplines arose.
Anonymous
the Greeks are credited with the invention of democracy only on condition that its link with that rather exceptional type of massacre based on the phalanx is glossed over—that is, with the invention of a form of line warfare that replaces skill, bravery, prowess, extraordinary strength, and genius with pure and simple discipline, absolute submission of each to the whole. When the Persians found themselves facing such an effective way of waging war, but one that reduced the life of the foot soldier in the phalanx to nothing, they rightly judged it to be perfectly barbaric, as did so many of those enemies whom the Western armies were to crush subsequently
Anonymous
Boyd got the idea for “O-O-D-A” loops (he used dashes indicate that the steps are not distinct, but flow into each other) from observing the effects of jerky, unexpected, and abrupt maneuvers in air-to-air combat. After deciding that it was his quick OODA loops that allowed him to fight this way, Boyd defined “agility” in these terms: A side in a conflict or competition is more agile than its opponent if it can execute its OODA loops more quickly. This generalizes the term agility from air-to-air combat and from warfare in general. It also turns out to be equivalent to the definition floated in chapter II, the ability to rapidly change one’s orientation, since it is orientation locking up under the stress of competition and conflict that causes OODA loops to slow and makes one predictable, rather than abrupt and unpredictable. Speed, that is physical velocity, may provide an important tactical option, but it is not The Way.77 In fact, speed increases momentum, which can make one more predictable.
Chet Richards (Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business)
Frequent Mass attendance, then, is an effective weapon of our warfare.
Paul Thigpen (Manual for Spiritual Warfare)
When a state's armed service is given a mission to intervene in a Fourth Generation conflict, its first objective must be to keep its own footprint as small as possible. This is an important way to minimize the contradiction between the physical and moral levels of war. The smaller the state’s physical presence, the fewer negative effects it will have at the moral level.
William S. Lind (4th Generation Warfare Handbook)
Despite their differences in wealth, the framers were careful to avoid anything resembling class warfare, keeping any idea of wealth redistribution out of the Constitution. Many of the framers were familiar with the deleterious effects of class warfare, which was prominent throughout Europe. They hoped that a more egalitarian atmosphere would characterize American culture. They envisioned a country where people would rise and fall based on their abilities and contribution rather than their pedigree. To that end, they put aside their socioeconomic differences and worked together.
Ben Carson (A More Perfect Union: What We the People Can Do to Reclaim Our Constitutional Liberties)
EO soon realized that it had discovered a growth industry. Word of mouth spread about its effectiveness and, by 1991, the firm had started running operations outside of South Africa. These initial efforts included: mine security efforts; infiltrating and penetrating organized crime smuggling syndicates; and operations for a South American government (rumored to be Colombia), conducting clandestine counter drug raids that it termed “discretionary warfare.
P.W. Singer (Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs))
The perfect and genuine faith is that which daily acknowledges the works (i.e., facts) that the Lord has accomplished. The meaning of claiming is to acknowledge daily all that the Lord has accomplished for us, that is, to acknowledge that all these accomplishments are effective in us. Then,
Watchman Nee (The Christian Life and Warfare (The Collected Works of Watchman Nee Book 1))
He employed a weaponized pathogen, a virus with a short half-life sprayed onto a surface he knew his target would touch, in this case the door handle of his target’s personal vehicle. It was genetic warfare, the next evolution of chemical warfare. Half as messy as a snipper bullet but twice as effective, it left no trace after the virus’s half-life expired.
Vincent Amato (Disclosing the Secret)
Valiant warriors of Ha-Ran-Fel–and brave and noble allies who have joined us–our hour has come! We stand at the threshold: For some, the threshold of eternity; for others, the threshold of a new era. The malignancy spawned in the east now snakes its tendrils across our land to bind us. . .to choke and extinguish us. . .and to replace our young with its own. It comes not with the conventional weapons of warfare, but with magic and devilry. It comes without honorable rules of engagement, for this is not a fair fight. We know nothing of witchcraft or conjuring demons. We cannot hope to defeat such evil with what we know. But some among us will find the way with what lives in their hearts. They will effect the enemy’s destruction. From them will victory spring! For those who fall, the light of heaven will shatter the darkness of death! Those who live will see the dawning of a new day, a glad day, a day of peace and freedom! They will multiply and grow mightier than any who ever lived before! WE FIGHT!! King Ruelon’s final speech.
Sandra Kopp
Valiant warriors of Ha-Ran-Fel–and brave and noble allies who have joined us–our hour has come! We stand at the threshold: For some, the threshold of eternity; for others, the threshold of a new era. The malignancy spawned in the east now snakes its tendrils across our land to bind us. . .to choke and extinguish us. . .and to replace our young with its own. It comes not with the conventional weapons of warfare, but with magic and devilry. It comes without honorable rules of engagement, for this is not a fair fight. We know nothing of witchcraft or conjuring demons. We cannot hope to defeat such evil with what we know. But some among us will find the way with what lives in their hearts. They will effect the enemy’s destruction. From them will victory spring! For those who fall, the light of heaven will shatter the darkness of death! Those who live will see the dawning of a new day, a glad day, a day of peace and freedom! They will multiply and grow mightier than any who ever lived before!” “WE FIGHT!!” King Ruelon’s final speech.
Sandra Kopp (Warrior Queen of Ha-Ran-Fel (Dark Lords of Epthelion #1))
{Hamilton] did not reach Alexandria until the afternoon of March 26, and this meant he had barely three weeks in hand. The job that lay before the General was, in effect, nothing less than the setting up of the largest amphibious operation in the whole history of warfare... In fact the only operation that could be compared with this lay thirty years ahead on the beaches of Normandy in the second world war; and the planning of the Normandy landing was to take not three weeks but nearly two years.
Alan Moorehead (Gallipoli)
Wikipedia: Beaver Wars The Iroquois effectively destroyed several large tribal confederacies, including the Mohicans, Huron (Wyandot), Neutral, Erie, Susquehannock (Conestoga), and northern Algonquins, with the extreme brutality and exterminatory nature of the mode of warfare practiced by the Iroquois causing some historians to label these wars as acts of genocide committed by the Iroquois Confederacy.
Wikipedia Contributors
A good strategy is effective no matter what the opponent does.
Eric Engle (Cold War II? China, America, Global Strategy, and the New Cold War (Quiz Master China: Political Economy, Diplomacy, & Strategy))
One of the most effective strategies in the warfare for information is giving out false information. By feeding people wrong information, you gain a powerful advantage. While spying gives you a third eye, misinformation puts out one of your enemy’s eyes.
Millionaire Mind Publishing (Summary: The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene | Key Ideas in 1 Hour or Less)
Age of Propaganda (2001), social psychologists and authors Anthony Pratkanis and Eliot Aronson argue that fear based content is most visually and rhetorically effective when: 1. It scares the hell out of people i.e., its existential. 2. It offers a specific recommendation for overcoming the fear-arousing existential personal or tribal threat. 3. The solution or recommended action presented by the trusted authority figure is easily perceived as reducing the imminent existential threat. 4. The viewer believes that he or she can fight the threat and can personally perform the recommended action.
Tobin Smith (Foxocracy: Inside the Network’s Playbook of Tribal Warfare)
In an interview om WNYC in 2015, Willliam Arkin, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, national security expert, and the author of Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Prefect Warfare, compared the military's compulsive data-collecting with unmanned drones to our collective addiction to our smartphones. "You can't just stop yourself from checking your e-mail or texting," Arkin said. "And that's the world of drones in a nutshell." Are we using our phones like drones? Compulsively checking on one another? And when we don't like what someone has to say, or perhaps how they look, dropping destructive speech bombs whose after-effects we never have to see in person?
Nancy Jo Sales (American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers)
The human imagination, as Emma Goldman pointed out, has the power to make ideas felt. Goldman noted that when Andrew Undershaft, a character in George Bernard Shaw’s play Major Barbara, says that poverty is “the worst of crimes” and “all the other crimes are virtues beside it,” his impassioned declaration elucidates the cruelty of class warfare more effectively than Shaw’s socialist tracts.
Chris Hedges (Wages of Rebellion)
The Scripture tells us that the fervent prayer of righteous believers has great power in its effects (see Jas 5: 16). That’s why, when Our Lord Himself taught us how we should pray, He included the petition: “Deliver us from evil”—which can also be translated, “Deliver us from the Evil One,” that is, from the Devil.
Paul Thigpen (Manual for Spiritual Warfare)
Naval Warfare: For surface vessels and even submarines there was much continuity between the First and Second World Wars. The battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines of the 1939-45 period were generally bigger, faster, and better armed than their 1914-18 predecessors but not fundamentally different. Indeed, they had not changed much since the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Yet naval warfare was nevertheless transformed by the introduction of aviation. Fleets that were once built around battleships came to be built around aircraft carriers instead. Aircraft proved superior not just to conventional surface ships but also, in the Battle of the Atlantic, to submarines as well. German U-boats preying on Allied shipping were foiled through a variety of means including convoying of merchants ships and the use of radar and sonar. But the weapon that proved most effective was an aircraft dropping depth charges. The dispatch of long-range B-24s equipped with the latest radar to patrol the North Atlantic in 1943 helped to turn the tide against the U-boats. The proliferation of small escort carriers also allowed air cover for convoys even in the middle of the ocean. Submarines proved more effective in teh Pacific, where the vast distances precluded effective patrolling by aircraft and where the Japanese did not devleop the types of advanced antisubmarine techniques employed by the Allies in the Atlantic. U.S. submarines took a heavy toll on Japanese merchantmen and warships alike once they managed to fix the problems that bedeviled their Mark 14 torpedo early in the war. "A force comprising less than 2 percent of U.S. Navy personnel," naval historian Ronald Spector would write of U.S. submariners, "had accounted for 55 percent of Japan's losses at sea." The torpedo, whether launched by submarines, surface ships, or airplanes, proved the biggest ship-killer of the war.
Max Boot (War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today)
But as the document of record – read over years by millions around the world – graphically showing what nuclear warfare truly looks like, and what atomic bombs do to humans, “Hiroshima” has played a major role in preventing nuclear war since the end of World War II. In 1946, Hersey’s story was the first truly effective, internationally heeded warning about the existential threat that nuclear arms posed to civilisation. It has since helped motivate generations of activists and leaders to prevent nuclear war, which would likely end the brief human experiment on earth. We know what atomic apocalypse would look like because John Hersey showed us. Since the release of “Hiroshima,” no leader or party could threaten nuclear action without an absolute knowledge of the horrific results of such an attack.
Lesley M.M. Blume (Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World)
A newly-released series of video documentaries — The Labour Files — based on material leaked from Britain’s Labour Party revealed how the right-wing within the party mortified the former party leader, the far-left Jeremy Corbyn, costing him his position. The documentary uncovers Israel’s role in orchestrating the departure of Corbyn who had been a vocal proponent of Palestinian rights. Evidence reveals that the Israel Lobby within the Labour Party — supported by other pro-Israel camps in Britain — campaigned against the left-wing Corbyn, accusing him of antisemitism. The right-wing party establishment manipulated these allegations to its own political advantage, which eventually led to the election of the pro-Israel Keir Starmer as party leader in 2020. While the future course of Labour’s left wing is uncertain, one thing is for sure — Israel is an apartheid regime. The Zionist lobby has been using hybrid warfare techniques to procure worldwide legitimacy for Israel’s illegal actions in Palestine. As the Labour Files reveal, Israel has waged a war of fabricating narratives and counter-narratives. In this sort of warfare with limitless bounds, the only positive that can be drawn is that everyone is a soldier. At a time when great powers have given in to the deceptive Israel lobby and no Muslim state is in any position to challenge Israeli advances in Palestine using conventional methods, we need to focus on building our capacity to effectively counter the Zionist narrative. With the right-wing ex-Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, set to return after elections next month, the plight of Palestinians will only exacerbate. It is high time we stopped blatantly labelling one another as ‘Yahoodi Agents’ and started educating ourselves. The least we can do for Palestinians is continue exposing the pro-Israel elements engaged in the widespread dissemination of Zionist propaganda.
Shawez Ahmad
The delibarate placing of the highest intellectual gifs and achievement at the service of the lowest human instincts is a phenomenon with which the twentieth century is acquainted on a scale never previously attained. And whether the instinct be fear (the main defensive one) or revenge possessed (the main offensive ones) makes little difference in the end, so readily do they pass into one another. It is no recent discovery that brain as well as brawn is esential to the efficient figher. The Trojan Horse is the perennial symbol of that truth, and it is appropriate that Shakespeare put on the lips of Ulysses an encomium on the “still and mental parts” of war. But it remained for war in our time to effect the total mobilization of those still and mental parts. The ideological warfare that precedes and precipitates the physical conflict (cold war as it has significantly come to be called); the propaganda that prepares and unifies public opinion; the conscription, in a dozen spheres, of the nation’s brains; the organization of what is revealingly known as the intelligence service; but most of all the practical absorption of science into the military effort; these things, apart from the knowledge and skill required for actual fighting, permit us to define modern war, once it is begun, as an unreserved dedication of the human intellect to death and destruction.
Harold Clarke Goddard
The deliberate placing of the highest intellectual gifs and achievement at the service of the lowest human instincts is a phenomenon with which the twentieth century is acquainted on a scale never previously attained. And whether the instinct be fear (the main defensive one) or revenge possessed (the main offensive ones) makes little difference in the end, so readily do they pass into one another. It is no recent discovery that brain as well as brawn is esential to the efficient figher. The Trojan Horse is the perennial symbol of that truth, and it is appropriate that Shakespeare put on the lips of Ulysses an encomium on the “still and mental parts” of war. But it remained for war in our time to effect the total mobilization of those still and mental parts. The ideological warfare that precedes and precipitates the physical conflict (cold war as it has significantly come to be called); the propaganda that prepares and unifies public opinion; the conscription, in a dozen spheres, of the nation’s brains; the organization of what is revealingly known as the intelligence service; but most of all the practical absorption of science into the military effort; these things, apart from the knowledge and skill required for actual fighting, permit us to define modern war, once it is begun, as an unreserved dedication of the human intellect to death and destruction.
Harold Clarke Goddard
The deliberate placing of the highest intellectual gifts and achievement at the service of the lowest human instincts is a phenomenon with which the twentieth century is acquainted on a scale never previously attained. And whether the instinct be fear (the main defensive one) or revenge possessed (the main offensive ones) makes little difference in the end, so readily do they pass into one another. It is no recent discovery that brain as well as brawn is esential to the efficient figher. The Trojan Horse is the perennial symbol of that truth, and it is appropriate that Shakespeare put on the lips of Ulysses an encomium on the “still and mental parts” of war. But it remained for war in our time to effect the total mobilization of those still and mental parts. The ideological warfare that precedes and precipitates the physical conflict (cold war as it has significantly come to be called); the propaganda that prepares and unifies public opinion; the conscription, in a dozen spheres, of the nation’s brains; the organization of what is revealingly known as the intelligence service; but most of all the practical absorption of science into the military effort; these things, apart from the knowledge and skill required for actual fighting, permit us to define modern war, once it is begun, as an unreserved dedication of the human intellect to death and destruction.
Harold Clarke Goddard
The deliberate placing of the highest intellectual gifts and achievement at the service of the lowest human instincts is a phenomenon with which the twentieth century is acquainted on a scale never previously attained. And whether the instinct be fear (the main defensive one) or revenge possessed (the main offensive ones) makes little difference in the end, so readily do they pass into one another. It is no recent discovery that brain as well as brawn is essential to the efficient figher. The Trojan Horse is the perennial symbol of that truth, and it is appropriate that Shakespeare put on the lips of Ulysses an encomium on the “still and mental parts” of war. But it remained for war in our time to effect the total mobilization of those still and mental parts. The ideological warfare that precedes and precipitates the physical conflict (cold war as it has significantly come to be called); the propaganda that prepares and unifies public opinion; the conscription, in a dozen spheres, of the nation’s brains; the organization of what is revealingly known as the intelligence service; but most of all the practical absorption of science into the military effort; these things, apart from the knowledge and skill required for actual fighting, permit us to define modern war, once it is begun, as an unreserved dedication of the human intellect to death and destruction.
Harold Clarke Goddard
In terms of voting rights for males, some of these documents were strikingly democratic. Again, Mexico serves to make the point. In the years immediately before independence, what became this territory had officially been governed in accordance with the constitution of Cádiz, which, as we have seen, excluded most Blacks from active citizenship. But, in 1821, the Mexican warlord General Agustín de Iturbide eliminated these racial restrictions and expanded the local franchise. He ‘effectively enfranchised every man over eighteen who had employment of any kind’.
Linda Colley (The Gun, the Ship and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World)
Given the recent remarkable advances in artificial intelligence, scouting will probably involve “algorithmic warfare,” with competing AI systems plowing through vast amounts of data to identify patterns of enemy behavior that might elude human analysts. Identifying enemy operational tendencies may also aid commanders in employing their forces more effectively, similar to the way the introduction of operations research aided the allies in identifying effective convoy operations during the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II.30 AI could potentially assist efforts to develop malware, which could be used to erase or corrupt enemy scouting information, including the enemy’s AI algorithms themselves. If these efforts are successful, enemy commanders may lose confidence in their scouts, producing a “mission kill,” in which much of the enemy’s scouting force continues to operate but where its product is suspect.
Andrew F. Krepinevich (The Origins of Victory: How Disruptive Military Innovation Determines the Fates of Great Powers)
Philosophically, contention can be seen as the dialectical unity of polar energies bringing together opposed forces that need to and must be reconciled if life is to continue. It is not something to be feared or avoided—people seeking balance and harmony must embrace the process of contention. The I Ching also teaches that contention is related to the concept of impermanence, that struggle is constant and that it is only the form of contention that changes over time…. How to fight against colonialism? There is, as one conceivable path, a well-established spectrum of contention that is rooted in the experience of peoples all over the world. Conflict is contention taken to its limit; war is conflict taken to the extreme—always considered as a last resort and and in just cause, but always the end result nonetheless. This idea of struggle, founded on the base power of violence, is in fact a cycle of futility. Feelings of pride rise and the people, who begin to assert themselves, raising voices in protest, causing disruption, eventually acting violently against injustice, causing inevitable counter-violence, spurring warfare, repression, and again, subjugation (whether the subjugated become the powerful matters little as the cycle of violence’s continuation is guaranteed). This is repeated perpetually in cycles of conflict between human communities until it is broken by the establishment of a peaceful coexistence that follows the transcendence of the psychological, spiritual, and socio-economic bases of the relationship between the peoples who were in conflict. The transcendence can happen when the critical period of heightened attention caused by a disruption of normality opens the door to new understandings before it is shut again in the closed-minded and hard oppositional environment that accompanies violence and counter-violence’s march to subjugation of one of the parties in the relationship. … we must protect ourselves from violent attack and survive in a physical sense, but we should have faith in the power of our ideas and in our abilities to communicate her ideas without resorting to the mute force of violence to bring our message to people.We should seek to contend, to inform our agitating direct actions with ideas, and to use the effects of this contention to defeat colonialism by convincing people of the need to abandon the cycle of subjugation in conflict enjoying us in a relationship of respect and sharing.
Taiaike Alfred
For this reason, it is to be expected that one or more nation-states will undertake covert action to subvert the appeal of transience. Travel could be effectively discouraged by biological warfare, such as the outbreak of a deadly epidemic. This could not only discourage the desire to travel, it could also give jurisdictions throughout the globe an excuse to seal their borders and limit immigration.
James Dale Davidson (The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age)
Prepare drones," Metatron commanded. Nephilim grabbed her backpack and put it on the ground beside her feet. She opened it and revealed a black metallic cube. It made a soft click as it came to life. Within seconds it enfolded itself and turned into a flying drone—slightly resembling a black firefly—that was about the size of a small eagle. It hovered next to Nephilim's head, humming softly. Each one of the soldiers had unique drones, directly linked to their neural system. Some drones had flying capabilities, others resembled ground predators in the form of insects or mammals. To be able to simultaneously, mentally control a drone during actual combat was difficult, required years of practice, and brought the term multi-tasking to a whole new level. However, once mastered, it was an incredibly effective combat tool. Nephilim held still and waited for the commander to order the assault. She wasn't excited or scared that she was about to go into battle. Her artificially augmented heart didn't beat faster. Her lungs, securely sealed through a silicate membrane from any kind of poison or chemical warfare attack, didn't enhance their pace. Her mind was focused and clear. So were her ice-cold, artificially blue eyes, studying the target area. She came here to do her job, her duty. What she had been created for. The righteous thing. Furthermore, it was something she was very good at. Adriel had stated, prior to leaving Olympias, that they should be back by breakfast. The target area ahead was in shabby condition. Shacks and makeshift houses built in and around the ruins of old, overgrown
Anna Mocikat (Behind Blue Eyes (Behind Blue Eyes, #1))
Prepare drones," Metatron commanded. Nephilim grabbed her backpack and put it on the ground beside her feet. She opened it and revealed a black metallic cube. It made a soft click as it came to life. Within seconds it enfolded itself and turned into a flying drone—slightly resembling a black firefly—that was about the size of a small eagle. It hovered next to Nephilim's head, humming softly. Each one of the soldiers had unique drones, directly linked to their neural system. Some drones had flying capabilities, others resembled ground predators in the form of insects or mammals. To be able to simultaneously, mentally control a drone during actual combat was difficult, required years of practice, and brought the term multi-tasking to a whole new level. However, once mastered, it was an incredibly effective combat tool. Nephilim held still and waited for the commander to order the assault. She wasn't excited or scared that she was about to go into battle. Her artificially augmented heart didn't beat faster. Her lungs, securely sealed through a silicate membrane from any kind of poison or chemical warfare attack, didn't enhance their pace. Her mind was focused and clear. So were her ice-cold, artificially blue eyes, studying the target area. She came here to do her job, her duty. What she had been created for. The righteous thing. Furthermore, it was something she was very good at. Adriel had stated, prior to leaving Olympias, that they should be back by breakfast. The target area ahead was in shabby condition. Shacks and makeshift houses built in and around the ruins of old, overgrown industrial premises. The location was partly hidden by the remains of an old Highway bridge, its old asphalt cracked, with weeds growing everywhere, and some of its circling sidearms had collapsed. The ancient roads and self-made paths were covered with mud. It had been raining a lot, as it almost always did in this area. This was only one of the reasons why any sane person would never understand that people actually chose to live here. The small settlement was surrounded by some archaic plantations and little fields, hidden in between old buildings. Everything here was designed to stay unnoticed, to not be found. And yet they had been discovered. Eventually, all of them were. Metatron was right. These subjects here were completely oblivious of what was coming their way. Only a few guards were on duty, sitting on two of the old chimneys of the facility. They would have no chance to spot the attacking troops before sharpshooters took them out. After that, they would ambush those that remained in their sleep. Standard procedure, requiring a minimum of time, resources, and casualties. Nephilim's scanner showed one hundred twenty-six human life forms in the settlement. There wouldn't be any left when the sun rose in less than an hour. *** Jeff woke up from a bad dream. He couldn't remember what it was he had dreamt, but it had left him with this uneasy feeling
Anna Mocikat (Behind Blue Eyes (Behind Blue Eyes, #1))
Loving ourselves is frontline social justice work. Audre Lorde said: “Caring for myself is not an act of self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” And bell hooks wrote, “I have seen that we cannot fully create effective movements for social change if individuals struggling for that change are not also self-actualized or working towards that end.” Without loving ourselves, our other efforts to love fail. When asked why we should practice radical care for ourselves, Angela Davis responded: “Longevity.” “As we struggle, we are attempting to presage the world to come,” she said. “If we don’t start practicing collective self-care now, there is no way to imagine, much less reach, a time of freedom.” That means finding ways to breathe life into the world we want, here and now.
Valarie Kaur (See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love)
Even taking Sanderson’s pessimistic estimate as correct, does this mean that Léopold’s rule “killed” 500,000 people? Of course not, because, in addition to the misplaced personalization of long-term population changes, the rubber regions, as mentioned, experienced both population increases and declines. Even in the latter, such as the rubber-producing Bolobo area in the lower reaches of the Congo river, population decline was a result of the brutalities of freelance native chiefs and ended with the arrival of an EIC officer. More generally, the stability and enforced peace of the EIC caused birth rates to rise near EIC centers, such as at the Catholic mission under EIC protection at Baudouinville (today’s Kirungu). Population declines were in areas outside of effective EIC control. The modest population gains caused by EIC interventions were overwhelmed by a range of wholly separate factors, which in order of importance were: the slave trade, sleeping sickness, inter-tribal warfare, other endemic diseases (smallpox, beriberi, influenza, yellow fever, pneumonia, dysentery, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and venereal disease), cannibalism, and human sacrifice.
Bruce Gilley (King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.)
In effect, baptism in New Testament theology is a loyalty oath, a public avowal of who is on the Lord's side in the cosmic war between good and evil. But in addition to that, it is also a visceral reminder to the defeated fallen angels. Every baptism is a reiteration of their doom in the wake of the gospel and the kingdom of God....Early baptismal formulas included a renunciation of Satan and his angels for this very reason. Baptism was-and still is-spiritual warfare.
Michael S. Heiser (The Unseen Realm)
I believe that patrilineal descent is far more common than matrilineal descent in the ethnographic record because warfare and intergroup conflict have been a chronic political condition in human history... [T]he more important advantage that patriliny confers on groups of males who are closely related... is that they tend to be able to cooperate more effectively and reliably in times of conflict... If anthropologists have learned anything from 150 years of studying tribesmen it is that closeness of kinship is a good predictor of social solidarity, cooperation, and amity.
Napoleon A. Chagnon (Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists)
The Chinese view of warfare shaped China’s military operations and tactics, especially how the high command made war decisions, finalized various objectives, executed battle plans, and evaluated combat effectiveness.
Xiaobing Li (The Dragon in the Jungle: The Chinese Army in the Vietnam War)
To write the history of neighborhood strife during this period of time without describing the efforts of people like Louis Wirth and his collaboration with the psychological warfare establishment during World War II, or the American Friends Service Committee and their work in both Philadelphia and Chicago, or Paul YIvisaker and his creation of the Gray Areas grants for the Ford Foundation and their subsequent takeover by a quintessential establishment figure like McGeorge Bundy, or Leon Sullivan, one of the players created by the Ford Foundation, and his collaboration with Robert Weaver while head of the Federal Housing Administration, is to tell less than half of the story. It is to do a remake of King Kong without the gorilla. It is also a bad example of whiggish history, a genre depressingly familiar to anyone who has done any reading in the conventional accounts of the sexual revolution and the civil rights movement, where effects have no causes and actual people making actual decisions in actual rooms are replaced by broad historical forces and Enlightenment melodramas like the triumph of liberation over bondage and light over darkness.
E. Michael Jones (The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing)
This too has been made into a movie very effectively. [One in 1971 and one in 1992.] In Chapter 17, you will read about how there was unusual interest in this story by our biological warfare folks.
Robert M. Wood (Alien Viruses: Crashed UFOs, MJ-12, & Biowarfare)
Women serving as nurses and ambulance drivers in WWI also experienced shell shock, but they were typically not diagnosed or treated for their symptoms. If they were diagnosed, the diagnosis was hysteria, and they were immediately discharged from the war. Officials in France, Belgium, England, and the United States considered women of less value than combat soldiers and so made less effort to treat or retain them. In addition, when doctors thought about war trauma, they didn’t include interpersonal trauma that occurred outside of combat, such as sexual violence and the trauma of witnessing the effects of warfare. Yet women were exposed to just as much violence, if not more, than many men. Nurses had to care for horrific injuries and participate in surgeries, including amputations for men with gangrene. A Canadian military nurse, M. Lucas Rutherford, wrote that among all the conditions, shell shock was the most distressing and difficult to treat because the afflicted soldiers were often unreachable, unable to communicate.28
Roy Richard Grinker (Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness)
Across a broad range of species—chimpanzees, walruses, lions, elk, mice—larger males and groups of males invariably win physical confrontations with each other, but that is not the case with humans. It is a quality entirely unique to humans that a smaller entity, like the Montenegrins, could defeat a larger one. Were this not so, freedom would effectively be impossible: Every group would be run by a single large male, and the world would be dominated by fascist mega-states, like the Ottomans, that could easily crush insubordinate populations. But that’s not what the world looks like. Large armies—or people—are stronger than small ones but usually slower and less efficient. This is true at every scale, from open warfare to street corner fistfights. Because the outcome of any human conflict cannot be predicted with certainty, the powerful often end up having to negotiate with the weak, and those negotiations invariably revolve around freedom.
Sebastian Junger (Freedom)
The gospel preached is the instrument which God useth for the effecting of it.  ‘I am not ashamed,’ saith the apostle, ‘of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation,’ Rom. 1:16.  It is the chariot wherein the Spirit rides victoriously when he makes his entrance into the hearts of man—called therefore ‘the ministration of the Spirit,’ II Cor. 3:8.
William Gurnall (The Christian in Complete Armour - The Ultimate Book on Spiritual Warfare)
Above all else, the sinking of Force Z demonstrated that the dominance the battleship had enjoyed in naval warfare had finally come to an abrupt end. For almost half a century, the battleship had reigned supreme as the arbiter of victory at sea. Throughout its life the torpedo had been a relatively ineffective weapon, and one which could be countered with relative ease, but which was now becoming increasingly effective when used by destroyers and submarines. Also, a new generation of aircraft had entered service which had the speed, capacity and agility to launch highly effective torpedo attacks. The torpedo bomber was a weapon that had finally come of age. What this battle demonstrated was that relatively cheap, mass-produced aircraft, if flown with skill and daring, and used in sufficient numbers, could prove more than a match for a hugely expensive battleship. So, 10 December 1941 marked a real historical milestone. In geopolitical terms, the sinking of Force Z signalled the imminent end for the British defence of Singapore – its surrender to the Japanese in turn marking the start of the disintegration of the British Empire. In the field of military and naval history, that date marked something of equally momentous importance. It was the day when the battleship ceased to be the dominant arbiter of naval power. In effect, 10 December 1941 marked the death of the battleship.
Angus Konstam (Sinking Force Z 1941: The day the Imperial Japanese Navy killed the battleship (Air Campaign))
WHAT IS LIFE ? I DO NOT KNOW , AND INDEED NOBODY DOES ; BUT WHEN I WRITE I DEPEICT LIFE AS IT APPEARS TO ME IN MY REVERIES AND FRENZIES ! TO ME THIS AND ONLY THIS IS LIFE ! EVERYTHING ELSE DOES NOT REPRESENT LIFE TO ME , MORE ESPECIALLY , WHAT MAN HAS DEFINED TO BE LIFE : SPURIOUS INTELLECTUALISM AND ITS DOGMATA WORKING ITS WAY EVER UP , THE EFFECT OF WHICH ARE THOSE SKYSCRAPERS AND THE PEOPLE EMBODYING THEM : ALIENATION , INDIFFERENCE , INSENSIBILITY ! INSENSIBILITY TO ANYTHING THAT IS ALIVE , CONSEQUENTLY WHAT IS ''UP '' OR HAS THE SEMBLANCE OF BEING '' UP '' , IS DOOMED TO REMAIN '' DOWN '' FOR EVER , TO ME THAT IS A CRIME - FOR EXAMPLE , LOOK AT PUTIN , AND HIS CURRENT CAMPAIGN OF WARFARE : ONE CRAZY PERSON , AND HE IS ONLY ONE PERSON WHO COULD EASILY BE TOPPLED ! BUT WHY ISN'T HE TOPPLED THEN ? BECAUSE HE IS SURROUNDED BY THE SAME KIND OF PEOPLE ANYWHERE : NOTHING BUT CRAZIES ! AND CRAZIES ARE THE GUARDIANS OF HUMAN REALITY TOGETHER WITH ITS RATIONALITY AND MORALITY ! ! AND WHAT IS TRUE OF PUTIN , IS TRUE OF ANY POLITICIAN ! ANY MORE QUESTIONS ON LIFE ? IT IS GETTING DAMP HERE ! I HAVE TURNED MYSELF INTO A SEAGULL WINGING OFF , ABANDONING THE OBSTINACY OF LIFE TO YOU WHO KNOW ABOUT IT ! AND IF YOU TAKE NO CARE OF LIFE , HOW CAN YOU TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES ? AND DO YOU CONSIDER THAT YOUR MARVELLOUS SUPERSTARS THAT YOU CRAVE AND ADMIRE SO MUCH ARE FARING ANY BETTER THAN YOU ARE ? DO THEY TAKE CARE OF LIFE ? HAVE THEY NOT SPOILT THEMSELVES AFTER SPOILING LIFE ? SIMPLE QUESTIONS , WHERE ARE THE ANSWERS , YOU SHOULD ´BE ABLE TO FURNISH THEM , BEING THOSE WHO KNOW OF LIFE !...
LUCIA SPLENDOUR
WHAT IS LIFE ? I DO NOT KNOW , AND INDEED NOBODY DOES ; BUT WHEN I WRITE I DEPEICT LIFE AS IT APPEARS TO ME IN MY REVERIES AND FRENZIES ! TO ME THIS AND ONLY THIS IS LIFE ! EVERYTHING ELSE DOES NOT REPRESENT LIFE TO ME , MORE ESPECIALLY , WHAT MAN HAS DEFINED TO BE LIFE : SPURIOUS INTELLECTUALISM AND ITS DOGMATA WORKING ITS WAY EVER UP , THE EFFECT OF WHICH ARE THOSE SKYSCRAPERS AND THE PEOPLE EMBODYING THEM : ALIENATION , INDIFFERENCE , INSENSIBILITY ! INSENSIBILITY TO ANYTHING THAT IS ALIVE , CONSEQUENTLY WHAT IS ''UP '' OR HAS THE SEMBLANCE OF BEING '' UP '' , IS DOOMED TO REMAIN '' DOWN '' FOR EVER , TO ME THAT IS A CRIME - FOR EXAMPLE , LOOK AT PUTIN , AND HIS CURRENT CAMPAIGN OF WARFARE : ONE CRAZY PERSON , AND HE IS ONLY ONE PERSON WHO COULD EASILY BE TOPPLED ! BUT WHY ISN'T HE TOPPLED THEN ? BECAUSE HE IS SURROUNDED BY THE SAME KIND OF PEOPLE ANYWHERE : NOTHING BUT CRAZIES ! AND CRAZIES ARE THE GUARDIANS OF HUMAN REALITY TOGETHER WITH ITS RATIONALITY AND MORALITY ! ! AND WHAT IS TRUE OF PUTIN , IS TRUE OF ANY POLITICIAN ! ANY MORE QUESTIONS ON LIFE ? IT IS GETTING DAMP HERE ! I HAVE TURNED MYSELF INTO A SEAGULL WINGING OFF , ABANDONING THE OBSTINACY OF LIFE TO YOU WHO KNOW ABOUT IT ! AND IF TAKE NO CARE OF LIFE , HOW CAN YOU TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES ? AND DO YOU CONSIDER THAT YOUR MARVELLOUS SUPERSTARS THAT YOU CRAVE AND ADMIRE SO MUCH ARE FARING ANY BETTER THAN YOU ARE ? DO THEY TAKE CARE OF LIFE ? HAVE THEY NOT SPOILT THEMSELVES AFTER SPOILING LIFE ? SIMPLE QUESTIONS , WHERE ARE THE ANSWERS , YOU SHOULD ´BE ABLE TO FURNISH THEM , BEING THOSE WHO KNOW OF LIFE !...
LUCIA SPLENDOUR
And as head of state, he could certainly not abjure warfare or disband his army. He realized that even if he abdicated and became a Buddhist monk, others would fight to succeed him and unleash more havoc, and as always, the peasants and the poor would suffer most. Ashoka’s dilemma is the dilemma of civilization itself. As society developed and weaponry became more deadly, the empire, founded on and maintained by violence, would paradoxically become the most effective means of keeping the peace.
Karen Armstrong (Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence)
Commenting further on connections between AIDS and biological warfare, Dr. Yamaguchi adds his voice to the chorus of those who find it hard to believe the orthodox explanation that the disease started with monkeys. It is much easier, he says, to think that it was developed in Fort Detrick as part of their ongoing biological warfare program, after which it somehow leaked out. A researcher at Fort Detrick was said to have remarked to the effect that, within ten years, the U.S. would have developed a biological weapon that would be more devastating than anything to date. Just ten years after that statement, the first AIDS case appeared. The Fort Detrick origin, says Yamaguchi, is a much more scientifically realistic explanation.
Hal Gold (Unit 731: Firsthand Accounts of Japan's Wartime Human Experimentation Program)
MAY 1 I HAVE DEFEATED THE PRINCE OF THIS WORLD MY CHILD, BY the death and resurrection of My Son, Jesus, He has made you alive together with Him, and He has nailed your sins to His cross. He has disarmed all principalities and powers and made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them. Therefore do not forget that you no longer walk according to the course of this world or according to the demands of the prince of the power of the air. But through the grace of My Son, you have been saved through faith, and He has defeated all the powers of the prince of this world from having any effect on your life. Therefore rise up in faith and power, and when the prince of this world attempts to harass you, say, “Sit down, for your rule will collapse, and you will be carried away captive because of the power of my great God in me.” COLOSSIANS 2:15; EPHESIANS 2:2; JEREMIAH 13:18 Prayer Declaration Jesus, You have cast out the prince of this world and defeated him. You spoiled principalities and made an open show of them. Because of Your great power within me, I bind the power of the air in Your name. I bind the principalities and powers in my region in the name of Jesus, and I command the principalities to come down. The power of God at work in me has made the demands of the prince of this world of no effect in my life.
John Eckhardt (Daily Declarations for Spiritual Warfare: Biblical Principles to Defeat the Devil)
During the Cold War, the US Government conducted a number of highly unethical experiments on their own citizens. In one, they placed blowers on schools and low-income housing projects in St. Louis to disperse zinc cadmium sulphide, a fine fluorescent powder. They told the residents that they were testing experimental smokescreens to use should the city be invaded, however the real reason was that that layout of St. Louis was very similar to some Russian Cities, and the US were interested to know how effective chemical warfare would be against them. Despite the powder being supposedly harmless, there remains to this day abnormally high incidences of cancer in the city. In another experiment, in 1955 the CIA released the whooping cough virus over Tampa, Florida without telling anyone, so they could see how quickly it would spread; they got their data, and twelve innocent civilians died.
Jack Goldstein (101 Amazing Facts)
Free-Play Training The next step that you, the commander, take is to make virtually all training free-play. The best way to train your unit is to replicate the conditions of combat as closely as possible. The best method for doing so is free-play training. One of the salient features of war is that it is a clash of opposing wills. Training that does not incorporate this will not be effective in preparing units for combat. On the rare occasions that troops get the opportunity to act freely as “aggressors” during current training exercises, they unleash their creativity and often cause great difficulty for their opponents. The philosophical goal for training light infantry is to make this “aggressor” mindset the mindset of your men all the time.
William S. Lind (4th Generation Warfare Handbook)
Fortunately, there is a simple tool that can help meet this complex challenge: the grid. The Grid Physical Mental Moral Tactical Operational Strategic By using the grid to evaluate every proposed mission before it is undertaken, it is often possible to avoid the sorts of contradictions and unwanted second-order effects that bedevil actions by state militaries in Fourth Generation wars. How can you do that? By asking what the effects of the mission are likely to be in each of the nine boxes. Let’s consider three examples, looking just at the basics.
William S. Lind (4th Generation Warfare Handbook)
Empathy and integration permit effective cultural intelligence, which is to say, becoming able to understand how the society works. In Fourth Generation war, virtually all useful intelligence is human intelligence (HUMINT). Often, such HUMINT must both be gathered and acted on with stealth techniques, where the state’s actions remain invisible to the local population. As in Third Generation war (maneuver warfare), the tactical level in Fourth Generation conflicts is reconnaissance-driven, not intelligence-driven. The information state militaries need will almost always come from below, not from higher-level headquarters.
William S. Lind (4th Generation Warfare Handbook)
Walter was among the American expeditionary forces gassed with high explosive projectiles northwest of Toul, on April 3, 1918, in the course of intense shelling that lasted through the night. How much damage he sustained is hard to say. By 1918, after more than three years of chemical warfare, troops were equipped with gas masks with charcoal filters, and there were relatively few casualties. In some accounts, Walter attributed the loss of his lower front teeth to the gassing, which also altered his voice, giving it a wizened, reedy quality that he would exploit so well for comic effect and adapt when he had to play characters older than himself. On This Is Your Life, when Ralph Lindsey mentioned they took “a little shot of mustard gas,” Walter cut him off: “We’re not going to talk about that.” The two men fought together in four major campaigns in 1918: Aisne (May 27–June 16), Champagne-Marne line (July 15–18), Saint-Mihiel (September 12–15), and Meuse-Argonne (September 26–November 11). At Aisne, the Germans bombarded the Allied line with four thousand artillery pieces, and seemed to be winning until the American expeditionary forces arrived and counterattacked.
Carl Rollyson (A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan (Hollywood Legends))
It was Lippmann who gave us the concept of the “stereotype” (1922), which was basically a continuation of the Jungian concept of the archetype (1919) by other means. To Lippmann, the world outside our borders exists in a different space, consciously, from our own. We develop notions about life in those countries, their cultures, attitudes, and values, without ever go­ing there. Yet, their political situation affects our own; they exert a political influence—either through trade, communications, or transportation—on life in our own country even though we live in a constant state of unawareness of those countries, cultures, politics. The effect of these forces on us is invis­ible, but real. We then develop mental images—stereotypes—of the citizens of these countries, and it is upon the stereotypes that we act. The stereotypes determine our actions and reactions; like the stereotypes of the Islamic fun­damentalist, the Vietcong revolutionary, the Red Peril, they are easy targets, and the stereotype communicates a specific message, is, in terms familiar to the deconstructionism of Derrida, a text. Stereotypes can be created, and manipulated, by the gurus of mass com­munication and psychological warfare. Stereotypes are culturally-loaded and therefore not “value neutral.” We make snap judgments based on the nature of the stereotype; in the hands of the psy-war expert, a stereotype does not contain much complexity or depth. The idea is not to make the target think too clearly or too profoundly about the “text” but instead to react, in a Pav­lovian manner, to the stimulus it provides.
Jim Hougan (Sinister Forces—The Nine: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft (Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft (Paperback) Book 1))
On minimizing office politics: “Sack incurable politicians. Crusade against paper warfare.” On morale: “When people aren’t having any fun, they seldom produce good advertising. Get rid of sad dogs who spread gloom.” On professional standards: “Top men must not tolerate sloppy plans or mediocre creative work.” On partnership: “Top Management in each country should function like a round table, presided over by a Chairman who is big enough to be effective in the role of primus inter pares.
Kenneth Roman (The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising)
The work was to be done ‘by undercover men, spies and saboteurs, who, if caught, would be neither acknowledged nor defended by their government’. They would be working outside the law and were to borrow their tactics from guerrillas and gangsters like Michael Collins in Ireland and Al Capone in America. In signing up for Section D, they were effectively signing away their lives.
Giles Milton (Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler's Defeat)
Haig and his colleague General Robertson’s commitment to trench warfare—in the belief that conscripted soldiers were too untrained to do anything other than stand in a line and walk forward—had a devastating effect on the casualty lists.
M.J. Carter (George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I)
The violent injunctions of the Quran and the violent precedents set by Muhammad set the tone for the Islamic view of politics and of world history. Islamic scholarship divides the world into two spheres of influence, the House of Islam (dar al-Islam) and the House of War (dar al-harb). Islam means submission, and so the House of Islam includes those nations that have submitted to Islamic rule, which is to say those nations ruled by Sharia law. The rest of the world, which has not accepted Sharia law and so is not in a state of submission, exists in a state of rebellion or war with the will of Allah. It is incumbent on dar al-Islam to make war upon dar al-harb until such time that all nations submit to the will of Allah and accept Sharia law. Islam's message to the non-Muslim world is the same now as it was in the time of Muhammad and throughout history: submit or be conquered. The only times since Muhammad when dar al-Islam was not actively at war with dar alharb were when the Muslim world was too weak or divided to make war effectively. But the lulls in the ongoing war that the House of Islam has declared against the House of War do not indicate a forsaking of jihad as a principle but reflect a change in strategic factors. It is acceptable for Muslim nations to declare hudna, or truce, at times when the infidel nations are too powerful for open warfare to make sense. Jihad is not a collective suicide pact even while "killing and being killed" (Sura 9:111) is encouraged on an individual level. For the past few hundred years, the Muslim world has been too politically fragmented and technologically inferior to pose a major threat to the West. But that is changing.
Jake Neuman (Islam: Evil in the Name of God)
Senior figures in the War Office and Admiralty decided that sinking German ships would be more cost-effective than building British ones.
Giles Milton (Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler's Defeat)
Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward. The relative ease of using negative emotions for the purposes of addiction and manipulation makes it relatively easier to achieve undignified results. An unfortunate combination of biology and math favors degradation of the human world. Information warfare units sway elections, hate groups recruit, and nihilists get amazing bang for the buck when they try to bring society down.The unplanned nature of the transformation from advertising to direct behavior modification caused an explosive amplification of negativity in human affairs. We’ll return to the higher potency of negative emotions in behavior modification many times as we explore the personal, political, economic, social, and cultural effects of social media.
Lanier, Jaron
YOUNG HAD BEEN AT ZERMATT climbing with Herford during the soft summer of 1914, when all of Europe glowed with weather so beautiful and fine that it would be remembered for a generation, invoked by all those who sought to recall a time before the world became a place of mud and sky, with only the zenith sun to remind the living that they had not already been buried and left for dead. Stunned by a mix of emotions—horror, incredulity, morbid anticipation, fear, and confusion—Young returned to London to find “the writing of madmen already on the wall.” He recalled, “I attended the peace meeting in Trafalgar Square, the last protest of those who had grown up in the age of civilized peace: and then the dogs of war were off in full cry.” Forty years later, near the end of his days, he would write, “After the hardening effects of two wars it is difficult to recall the devastating collapse of the structure of life, and all its standards, which the recrudescence of barbarous warfare denoted for our generation.
Wade Davis (Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest)
This almost miraculous performance was due to the working of the balance of power, which here produced a result which is normally foreign to it. By its nature that balance effects an entirely different result, namely, the survival of the power units involved; in fact, it merely postulates that three or more units capable of exerting power will always behave in such a way as to combine the power of the weaker units against any increase in power of the strongest. In the realm of universal history balance of power was concerned with states whose independence it served to maintain. But it attained this end only by continuous war between changing partners. The practice of the ancient Greek or the Northern Italian city-states was such an instance; wars between shifting groups of combatants maintained the independence of those states over long stretches of time. The action of the same principle safeguarded for over two hundred years the sovereignty of the states forming Europe at the time of the Treaty of Minster and Westphalia (1648). When, seventy-five years later, in the Treaty of Utrecht, the signatories declared their formal adherence to this principle, they thereby embodied it in a system, and thus established mutual guarantees of survival for the strong and the weak alike through the medium of war. The fact that in the nineteenth century the same mechanism resulted in peace rather than war is a problem to challenge the historian. The entirely new factor, we submit, was the emergence of an acute peace interest. Traditionally, such an interest was regarded as outside the scope of the state system. Peace with its corollaries of crafts and arts ranked among the mere adornments of life. The Church might pray for peace as for a bountiful harvest, but in the realm of state action it would nevertheless advocate armed intervention; governments subordinated peace to security and sovereignty, that is, to intents that could not be achieved otherwise than by recourse to the ultimate means. Few things were regarded as more detrimental to a community than the existence of an organized peace interest in its midst. As late as the second half of the eighteenth century, J. J. Rousseau arraigned trades people for their lack of patriotism because they were suspected of preferring peace to liberty. After 1815 the change is sudden and complete. The backwash of the French Revolution reinforced the rising tide of the Industrial Revolution in establishing peaceful business as a universal interest. Metternich proclaimed that what the people of Europe wanted was not liberty but peace. Gentz called patriots the new barbarians. Church and throne started out on the denationalization of Europe. Their arguments found support both in the ferocity of the recent popular forms of warfare and in the tremendously enhanced value of peace under the nascent economies.
Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time)
Theoretical and experimental physicists, working on problems of esoteric intellectual interest, provided the knowledge that eventually was pulled together to make the H-bomb, while mathematicians, geophysicists, and metallurgists, wittingly or unwittingly, made the discoveries necessary to construct intercontinental ballistic missiles. Physicists doing basic work in optics and infrared spectroscopy may have been shocked to find that their research would help government and corporate engineers build detection and surveillance devices for use in Indochina. The basic research of molecular biologists, biochemists, cellular biologists, neuropsychologists, and physicians was necessary for CBW (chemical-biological warfare) agents, herbicides, and gaseous crowd-control devices… Anthropologists studying social systems of mountain tribes in Indochina were surprised when the CIA collected their information for use in counterinsurgency operations. Psychologists explored the parameters of human intelligence-testing instruments which, once developed, passed out of their hands and now help the draft boards conscript men for Vietnam and the U.S. Army allocate manpower more effectively. Further, these same intelligence-testing instruments are now an integral part of the public school tracking systems that, beginning at an early age, reduce opportunities of working-class children for higher education and social mobility
Bill Zimmerman
Owing to the surreptitious nature of their movements, they have very strong concealment, create widespread damage because of their extreme behavior, and appear unusually cruel as a result of their indiscriminate attacks on civilians. All of this is also broadcast through real time via continuous coverage by the modern media which very much strengthens the effects of terrorism. When carrying out war with these people, there is no declaration of war, no fixed battlefield, no face-to-face fighting and killing, and in the majority of situations, there will be no gunpowder smoke, gun fire, and spilling of blood. However, the destruction and injuries encountered by the international community are in no way less than those of a military war.
Qiao Liang (Unrestricted Warfare: China's Master Plan to Destroy America)
All these things represented an intense visual shock to the entire world, including the Iraqis, and it was from this that the myth about the unusual powers of the U.S.-made weapons was born, and it was here that the belief was formed that “Iraq would inevitably lose, and the U.S. was bound to win.” Obviously, the media helped the Americans enormously. We might as well say that, intentionally or otherwise, the U.S. military and the Western media joined hands to form a noose to hang Saddam’s Iraq from the gallows. In the “Operational Outline” that was revised after the war, the Americans took pains to suggest that “the force of the media reports was able to have a dramatic effect on the strategic direction and the scope of the military operations,” while the newly drafted field manual FM10O-6 (Information Operations) goes even farther in using the example of the media war during the Gulf War. It would appear that, in all future wars, in addition to the basic method of military strikes, the force of the media will increasingly be another player in the war and will play a role comparable to that of military strikes in promoting the course of the war.
Qiao Liang (Unrestricted Warfare: China's Master Plan to Destroy America)
Epidemics also feed on “the news”. I recall hearing of germ warfare experiments performed in the 1940’s. Two towns were chosen. One town was “bombed” with leaflets, the other was not. Then days later the biological weapon was deployed. The town that was warned succumbed in high percentages. The town without warning had a very low incidence of infection and the weapon had poor military effectiveness. So thanks cable news, 24/7 coverage in advance of flu season really helps the public, Not!
T.C. Randall (Forbidden Healing, The Curiously Simple Solution to Disease)
Right in his website, there is an 11-page article entitled, ‘Trading as Mental Warfare’. In this article, Steenbarger explains how trading, like the battlefield, offers an environment typified by risk, danger, and uncertainty, rewarding the efficiency of mental processing. The successful trader is one who can rapidly observe market conditions, orient himself, integrate information into effective decisions, and quickly act upon those decisions
Andrew Aziz (Mastering Trading Psychology)
Kennedy refused throughout his presidency to commit U.S. combat forces to Vietnam. “JFK saw the U.S. support for Vietnam as strictly limited to helping the Vietnamese help themselves,” McNamara later said. Kennedy never deviated from this position, even as the situation in South Vietnam steadily deteriorated during his three years in office. He had always been dubious about the effectiveness of Western military power on the Asian mainland. He knew from the Bay of Pigs the limits of what the generals recommended. He understood the basic principle of guerrilla warfare: that the object was not killing enemy soldiers, but winning the allegiance of the people—that the solution in Vietnam was fundamentally political, not military. He never accepted the premise that the United States should save South Vietnam at all costs and he never made an unqualified commitment to maintain its independence. If the South Vietnamese were not capable of defending themselves, “he thought it impossible to do so with U.S. military forces,” said McNamara. He went on: “At the time of Kennedy’s death, I think he was very concerned about the dominoes. But when he got to a point where he had to choose between the risk of the dominoes falling and adding 400,000 men,” McNamara surmised, “he wouldn’t have done it.” Perhaps Bobby Kennedy, who knew the president better than anyone, put it best. “Nobody can say for sure what my brother would actually have done, in the actual circumstances of 1964 or ’65. I can’t say that, and even he couldn’t have said that in ’61. Maybe things would have gone just the same as they did. But I do know what he intended. All I can say is that he was absolutely determined not to send ground units.
Brian Van DeMark (Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam)
The more general realization of the role of Capitalism in history has been accompanied by a second change, which, if equally commonplace, has also, perhaps, its significance. "Trade is one thing, religion is another": once advanced as an audacious novelty, the doctrine that religion and economic interests form two separate and co-ordinate kingdoms, of which neither, without presumption, can encroach on the other, was commonly accepted by the England of the nineteenth century with an unquestioning assurance at which its-earliest exponents would have felt some embarrassment. An historian is concerned less to appraise the validity of an idea than to understand its development. The effects for good or evil of that convenient demarcation, and the forces which, in our own day, have caused the boundary to shift, need not here be discussed. Whatever its merits, its victory, it is now realized, was long in being won. The economic theories propounded by Schoolmen; the fulminations by the left wing of the Reformers against usury, landgrabbing, and extortionate prices; the appeal of hard-headed Tudor statesmen to traditional religious sanctions; the attempt of Calvin and his followers to establish an economic discipline more rigorous than that which they had overthrown, are bad evidence for practice, but good evidence for thought. All rest on the assumption that the institution of property, the transactions of the marketplace, the whole fabric of society and the whole range of its activities, stand by no absolute title, but must justify themselves at the bar of religion. All insist that Christianity has no more deadly foe than the appetitus divitiarum infinitus, the unbridled indulgence of the aquisitive appetite. Hence the claim that religion should keep its hands off business encountered, when first formulated, a great body of antithetic doctrine, embodied not only in literature and teaching, but in custom and law. It was only gradually, and after a warfare not confined to paper, that it affected the transition from the status of an odious paradox to that of an unquestioned truth.
Tawney. R.H.
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Propaganda: "Regular diplomatic officials tend everywhere to view propaganda with distaste and scepticism. The profession of diplomacy induces a weary detachment, foreign to all political enthusiasm and ex parte pleas." — George F. Kennan, 1958 Propaganda: "A thorough understanding of the limitations of the propaganda gun is as essential as knowing the range of a piece of artillery is to its firing. ... Propaganda can enhance the results of good policies and diplomacy and can mitigate the effects of bad policies and poor diplomacy, but it cannot be a substitute for either policy or diplomacy or indeed exist without them." — Charles W. Thayer, 1959 Propaganda, diplomacy and: "Alone, propaganda has no creative force. It cannot forge alliances with our friends or spark revolutions to annihilate our enemies. But as the handmaiden of diplomacy, as an extension of the diplomat's arm, it can ... significantly [further] ... international interests." — Charles W. Thayer, 1959 Diplomacy, abuse of: "Diplomatic institutions ... are designed for the business of adjustment. The abuse of diplomacy within its accustomed connections with power and interests is one thing: the damage is limited and usually reparable. But the misuse of diplomatic institution as vehicles for propaganda and subversion, or for the championing of political righteousness and ideological warfare, is quite another, and can be more seriously damaging because it is more nearly an inversion than an abuse of diplomatic method and can inhibit real dialogue between certain states altogether." — Adam Watson, 1983
Chas W. Freeman Jr. (The Diplomat's Dictionary)
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The desire of the righteous shall be granted.” To the same effect is the other text, “Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.” There is a great breadth in this text, “Ye shall ask what ye will and it shall be done unto you.” The Lord gives the abider carte blanche. He puts into his hand a signed check, and permits him to fill it up as he wills.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Spurgeon on Prayer & Spiritual Warfare: Harnessing the Power of Prayer and Faith to Overcome Spiritual Battles (Grapevine Classic Books) (The Best of Spurgeon: Devotionals for Christians))
Indeed, there was very little time for any of the matters which Hamilton had to attend if he was to honour his undertaking that the attack would be launched by the middle of April. He did not reach Alexandria until the afternoon of March 26, and this meant he had barely three weeks in hand. The job that lay before the General was, in effect, nothing less than the setting up of the largest amphibious operation in the whole history of warfare
Alan Moorehead (Gallipoli)
And chaos ensued. Housemore suspected that chaos had probably been Finch’s goal. He was a seasoned strategist who was known to admire the tactics of figures from Sun Tzu to Napoleon—seizing every opportunity to enhance the effectiveness of field operations by layering in psychological warfare whenever possible. “Psyops” was a bloodless, low-risk, extremely effective way to weaken the opposition. Disrupt. Destabilize. Disorient. An enemy distracted by chaos made poor decisions and was easier to manipulate.
Dan Brown (The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon, #6))