‘Transparency’ is not how Sun Tzu and China’s PLA approach war

Reading Lev Navrozov is like reading works of another Russian: Solzhenitsyn’s GULAG Archipelago – not cheerful, but something that you really NEED to know about to be on the lookout against.

The less the potential target of an attack knows about the attacker’s future war, the better this is for the attacker strategically. To “declare war” is the top of Western strategic absurdity. However, even Hitler was European enough to declare war on Stalin’s Russia (with some delay) and on the United States (in 1941). He also forbade the development of chemical and bacteriological weapons. In the post-Roman Western Europe the top military officers were aristocrats who did not kill their enemies as criminals did and do, but challenged them to a duel. Hence the declaration of war-the challenge to a duel.

On the other hand, Sun Tsu, the Chinese strategist of the 4th century B.C., believed that war should begin not like a European aristocrat’s challenge of another European aristocrat to a duel, but like a sudden strike (on the head) by a criminal (stealing from behind) with his bludgeon (shashou jian). The beginning of a war should be its victorious end.

The book “Unrestricted War,” written by two high-ranking officers of the “Chinese Liberation Army” and published officially by the military press in Beijing in 1999, says: “Regardless whether we are talking about Hitler, Mussolini, Truman, Johnson, or Saddam, none of them have successfully mastered war.”

Navrozov’s warnings are directly aimed at us NOW, and we had best be about our business to look to our defenses, or we could end up in deep, deep…yogurt…indeed. This analysis is complex, historically driven, and sobering. It bears some real thought.