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Lev Navrozov Archive
Monday, January 21, 2008

For Sun Tzu's art of war, the Western mind is an easy mark

Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.

The two world wars of the 20th century involved Germany, that is, a Western country, developed scientifically and technologically, as were her opponents. On the other hand, China missed out on the “industrial revolution” of the West, and even on the Soviet “industrialization.” However, just as Stalin was an ally of Germany, Putin is an ally of China.

Hitler was so brave as a soldier in WW1 that he received decorations that were intended for officers only. As an outstanding soldier in WW1, he assumed that to defeat the outside world in a war was more pleasant and easier than to preserve for an infinitely long time his domination of Germany.

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Stalin, on the other hand, feared war as he feared any physical danger — pathologically. His dream was to establish the world domination in alliance with Hitler. Thus Hitler personified to him not the extreme danger of world war, but the safety of their joint world domination. He proposed to Hitler to let his army pass through the territory of Stalin’s Russia to India and conquer it. He regarded all espionage data about Hitler’s preparations of war against him, Stalin, as Churchill’s attempts to provoke a war between Hitler and Stalin and thus compel Hitler to alleviate his military pressure on Britain. When Hitler’s troops began military operations against Stalin’s Russia, Stalin’s order was not to respond to these diabolical provocations of Churchill’s agents within Hitler’s troops.

At Stalin’s secret conference in Moscow, when Hitler’s troops reached the city and could take it without trouble, Stalin told his top subordinates to leave Moscow (himself, he could leave it at any time by secret subway) and said that he was waiting for the Soviet Far Eastern and Siberian troops. Hitler missed his chance to take Moscow and hence finally lost the war. After his Moscow defeat, Hitler secretly ordered that his subordinates should begin the extermination of Jews on their own without mentioning his knowledge of it. In this way (known by criminal gangs as “loyalty sealed by blood”) he intended to prevent the betrayal of him to the English-speaking countries, since his subordinates themselves would be perceived by the English-speaking as the guilty perpetrators of the heinous massacre.

Now the 20th century is strategically over. The strategy of the China dictatorship proceeds not from that of Hitler or Stalin, but from Sun Tzu, the Chinese author of “The Art of War,” who lived more than two millennia before them. Hitler declared war on Stalin’s Russia and then on the United States, for a war was understood in Europe as a duel between noblemen — knights leading their soldiers. Nothing was more absurd for Sun Tzu, who viewed a war as a surprise killing by an assassin of his victim before the latter could understand what was going on.

A study, published by “The Literature and Arts Publishing House” of the People’s Liberation Army in Beijing in 1999, is entitled by its two authors, Chinese military men, “Unrestricted Warfare.” Their list of Westerners none of whom “have successfully mastered war” starts with Hitler: he forbade the development of chemical and biological weapons, and his attitude to the development of nuclear weapons was anything but ardent. What about the annihilation of Jews? Well, that was not an act of war, but “an improvement of the race,” about which Hitler allegedly knew nothing.

The art of war, according to Sun Tzu, is not bravery in which Hitler distinguished himself in WW1 as a soldier and in WW2 as commander-in-chief when he came to the Moscow area to stop personally under Soviet bullets the panicky retreat of his troops being routed by the Soviet Far Eastern and Siberian armies. The art of war, according to Sun Tzu, is cunning, deception, misinformation, surprise. In Europe, the military commanders were aristocrats who brought the art of duel into the art of war. In China, what was all-important is the result of the war, not the noble aristocratic beauty of the duel. Sun Tzu’s war does not differ from thievery, which is based on concealment, not challenges and other aristocratic rules.

The 21st century opens new avenues of concealment and deception, since new weapons are not linked with the general technological basis as they were in the 20th century, when the tanks emerged from an armed car and a tractor, or bombers and fighter planes emerged from civilian aircraft. True, U.S. nuclear bombs of 1945 came from a special military Manhattan Project, based on nuclear research in laboratories, but those in charge of them had never meant them as research in new weapons. The use of nuclear power as fuel was not thought of either. Also, contributing factors to the creation of the Manhattan Project were Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States, his actual wars of aggression, and the rumor (supported by Einstein in his letter to Roosevelt of Aug. 2, 1939) that Hitler was developing the nuclear bomb.

In other words, the development of weapons moved away from the general scientific-technological basis. In the USA that happened as a result of Hitler’s aggressions, but in Stalin’s Russia, the breakaway was a matter of Stalin’s and his successors’ will. In Russia, the output of steel rose from 3.1 million tons in 1917 to 161 million tons in 1986, as against 75 million tons in the USA and 38 million in the FRG. On the other hand, “shortages” of consumer goods made of steel were observed in civilian trade, especially outside Moscow.

In a dictatorship, the development of new weapons (as were nuclear weapons in the USA in 1940–45) may account for any percentage of the country’s production. China may have many Manhattan Projects developing — no, not nuclear — but post-nuclear super weapons.

Incidentally, the U.S. Manhattan Project and its bombs showed what Sun Tzu preached as the ideal war. Let us forget that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor as well as everything that had happened before the two U.S. nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan. The latter (by no means a pacific country) surrendered unconditionally (despite all of its suicidal kamikazes).

Well, China can enact a similar Sun Tzu’s play in the USA, but with post-nuclear super weapons. The nuclear blow of the USA entailed many nuclear deaths, but politically benefited Japan, which became democratic as a result of its unconditional surrender. But China is a dictatorship, not a democracy, and its victory over the West may lead to the total annihilation of the population of the West to stop the West’s involuntary seduction of the Chinese into a rebellion against their dictatorship, which may collapse as it nearly did during the Tiananmen rebellion with its replica in the Square of the U.S. Statue of Liberty, or as the Soviet dictatorship did collapse in 1991 with whatever result for Russia in the 21st century.


Lev Navrozov can be reached by e-mail at navlev@cloud9.net.

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