What are the Sketches?
Conversely, would-be conquerors have stressed the value of infiltration and subversion as a means of softening the victim society prior to conquest. Members of the intelligence community will remember the writings of Sun Tzu in his 500 B.C. classic, The Art of War. In stressing The Art of War from within, Sun Tzu observed that supreme art in warfare is not winning every battle. He felt the supreme art was in getting the enemy to surrender without having to fight the battle.
It is of special interest to read the words of Marcus Tullius Cicero regarding the danger of internal subversion. In a speech to the Roman Senate, as recorded by Sallust, Cicero said:
"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious.But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the plague."
As any good student of history knows, we are not blazing new trails in our happenings. The wreckage of other ages and civilizations is about us to remind us of follies and the nature of our enemies.
In a war-weary Twentieth Century, people of good conscience yearn for peace. "Peace" is, of course, a wonderful word, having by itself an almost healing quality.
Unfortunately for us, however, communist semantics is something far too few people understand, and this includes people who are thought of as experts and specialists in foreign policy and the academe. To a Marxist-Leninist the term "peace" is both a tactical term and an objective.
Peace as a goal means Communist world control. But peace as a tactic means the temporary exclusion of military means of conflict, and reliance on "non-violent" means of conflict, by no means non-violent or peaceful, particulary what the intelligence community calls covert action. This includes all the techniques of secret political warfare to subvert and undermine non-Communist governments. It means propaganda, infiltration and subversion; it means the use of covert agents of influence who form a sort of fifth column to manipulate public opinion and policy; it means economic warfare; it means the use of terrorism to provoke overreaction and undermine public confidence in the ability of the government to protect its citizens. Imagine, all of this in the name of "peace"!
As a final reminder in this review of the dangerous folly of disarming before a powerful enemy, or turning our nations' armed services over to a world government, let's turn to the world of verse. In Kipling's "The Gods of the Copybook Headings", we read:
"When the Cambrian measures were forming, they promised perpetual peace,
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would
cease.
But when we disarmed they sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: 'Stick to the Devil you know.' "
Rudyard Kipling ~ Complete Collection of
Poems
Visit these Sketches of the Left:
Chipping away at
US Sovereignty
