As we watch the United States burn, real lives and livelihoods of our fellow citizens are being destroyed. A determined enemy is attacking the bonds of civil society, and most of us recognize the danger.
Like momentum in a sporting event, the revolutionaries are emboldened as our institutions fail to redress their bad behavior while the rest of us become demoralized. We need to rise above our trepidations or the nation will collapse.
Some cities and states have done better than others in handling the pandemic and subduing the riots. Officials at all levels have exposed themselves as being against the best interests of the American public by passively encouraging the carnage. That is Aristotle’s definition of a divergent (or perverted) form of government. It might be considered the completion of a century-long degeneration from a republic to a democracy. But the strength of Federalism is on display where the governments have looked over the best interests of the people, so there is hope to ultimately win the war against this enemy.
From Sun Tzu’s Art of War, we know that we must know our enemies as well as ourselves to defeat them. But we are up against the most dangerous of all enemies – the one from within. That not only makes the enemy difficult to recognize, but it casts doubt on our knowledge of ourselves. As Sun Tzu also said, warfare is based upon deception, and we have our hands full.
The first thing to recognize is that the current violence is not random. It is well organized. This is not just an emotional reaction to current events; it is part of a larger plan. Students of military strategy know that the first two concerns of any attack plan are logistics and communications. A well-organized attack plan will first address logistics. It is common knowledge that there are pallets of bricks and stone prepositioned on street corners for the rioters. A good plan will then seek to impact its target’s ability to internally communicate. The rioters have used sophisticated techniques to monitor police actions and communicate among themselves – just as a well-coordinated military attack would.
Who is this enemy?
As with all internal enemies, they are hiding in plain sight. The main technique they have used in the communications realm is what Lenin termed “Aesopian language.”[1] The characteristic of this way of speaking is that outsiders and insiders interpret the spoken words completely differently. It confuses the outsiders but the insiders clearly understand the message. It is the perfect technique to carry out the second phase of attack – disrupting communications. If we look further into all the organizations behind the current convulsion, they are all Marxist-Leninist at their core. They clearly state that in Aesopian language on their websites.
But we need to understand that the true enemy is not just these organizations. The enemy is an ideology that infiltrates and takes over organizations like a cancer, and that is the hardest of all enemies to defeat – especially one that thrives on lying and deception. Nevertheless, these organizations must be taken down, just as the Soviet Union had to be taken down during the Cold War.
When the Berlin Wall came down, we errantly thought we had won the Cold War and defeated Communism. In reality, we had won one battle. Communism lost its stronghold in the Soviet Union, but China was still a communist stronghold. And the Chinese are a much more subtle opponent than the Russians. But China can be recognized as an external, national threat. The United States has always excelled at handling such a threat – once it recognizes the threat. On the other hand, this is not to discount the potential influence of China on the internal threat we face. They share an ideology.
The situation is very similar to what has become known as the “Byzantine Generals Problem” in computer science.[2] The problem occurs when a system malfunctions but the observations give confused signals about what’s wrong. Even worse than the classic problem documented in the original 1982 ACM article, the Aesopian bad actors are purposely sending different messages to different receivers. Identifying the enemy is just the first step in knowing the enemy.
Knowing ourselves is going to require rejecting some of the current concepts in the political sphere that are blatantly bad for the nation. In all probability, they have been instilled by the enemy.
[1] Budenz, Louis Francis. The Techniques of Communism. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1954. pg. 42
[2] Lamport, Leslie, Robert Shostak, and Marshall Pease. “The Byzantine Generals Problem.” Microsoft Research. December 19, 2016. Accessed June 20, 2020. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/byzantine-generals-problem/?from=http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/byz.pdf.
One of the challenges in the last 30 years (since the fall of the Wall) has been how corrupted in mission the credentialed set of Western Civilization has become. The folks who attend the correct colleges, moved among the parties of the cultured elite, sent their children to all of the ‘right’ schools have suborned the spirit of the American people. We’ve been shown over and over in various ways that the folks who claim authority have disdain and hatred in their hearts for the common American principles of liberty and freedom.
As has been said many times, “Capitalism makes the rich powerful, while Socialism makes the powerful rich.” Our collective elites have pulled the strings of the common folk, keeping them focused on the crisis du jour while continuing the destruction of our noble idea. It is up to those of us that can see to lead the blind.
Very thoughtful article.
Too many journalists have been trained in the Aesopian language technique. Sadly, they believe it is the morally right thing to do. Here is an example from today’s New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/opinion/objectivity-black-journalists-coronavirus.html