The 33 Strategies of War (84 page)

The basic principle here is that it is easiest to topple a structure--a wall, a group, a defensive mind--from the inside out. When something begins to rot or fall apart from within, it collapses of its own weight--a far better way to bring it down than ramming yourself against its walls. In attacking any group, the lotus strategist thinks first of opening an inner front. Confederates on the inside will provide valuable intelligence on the enemy's vulnerabilities. They will silently and subtly sabotage him. They will spread internal dissension and division. The strategy can weaken the enemy to the point where you can finish him off with a penetrating blow; it can also bring down the enemy in and of itself.

A variation on the lotus strategy is to befriend your enemies, worming your way into their hearts and minds. As your targets' friend, you will naturally learn their needs and insecurities, the soft interior they try so hard to hide. Their guard will come down with a friend. And even later on, when you play out your treacherous intentions, the lingering resonance of your friendship will still confuse them, letting you keep on manipulating them by toying with their emotions or pushing them into overreactions. For a more immediate effect, you can try a sudden act of kindness and generosity that gets people to lower their defenses--the Trojan Horse strategy. (For ten long years, the Greeks battered the walls of Troy to no effect; the simple gift of a wooden horse let them sneak a few men into Troy and open the gates from within.)

The lotus strategy is widely applicable. When confronted by something difficult or thorny, do not be distracted or discouraged by its formidable outer appearance; think your way into the soft core, the center from which the problem blossoms. Perhaps the source of your problem is a particular person; perhaps it is yourself and your own stale ideas; perhaps it is the dysfunctional organization of a group. Knowing the problem's core gives you great power to change it from the inside out. Your first thought must always be to infiltrate to the center--whether in thought or in action--never to whale away at the periphery or just pound at the walls.

If there is someone on the inside whom you need to get rid of or thwart, the natural tendency is to consider conspiring with others in your group who feel the same way. In most conspiracies the goal is some large-scale action to topple the leader and seize power. The stakes are high, which is why conspiracies are so often difficult and dangerous. The main weakness in any conspiracy is usually human nature: the higher the number of people who are in on the plot, the higher the odds that someone will reveal it, whether deliberately or accidentally. As Benjamin Franklin said, "Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead." No matter how confident you may be of your fellow conspirators, you cannot know for certain what is going on in their minds--the doubts they may be having, the people they may be talking to.

A prince need trouble little about conspiracies when the people are well disposed, but when they are hostile and hold him in hatred, then he must fear everything and everybody.

N
ICCOLO
M
ACHIAVELLI
, 1469-1527

There are a few precautions you can take. Keep the number of conspirators as small as possible. Involve them in the details of the plot only as necessary; the less they know, the less they have to blab. Revealing the schedule of your plan as late as possible before you all act will give them no time to back out. Then, once the plan is described, stick to it. Nothing sows more doubts in conspirators' minds than last-minute changes. Even given all this insurance, keep in mind that most conspiracies fail and, in their failure, create all kinds of unintended consequences. Even the successful plot to assassinate Julius Caesar led not to the restoration of the Roman Republic, as the conspirators intended, but eventually to the undemocratic regime of the emperor Augustus. Too few conspirators and you lack the strength to control the consequences; too many and the conspiracy will be exposed before it bears fruit.

In destroying anything from within, you must be patient and resist the lure of large-scale, dramatic action. As Canaris showed, the placement of little wrenches in the machinery is just as destructive in the long run, and safer because harder to trace. Consider the ability to dissuade your opponents from acting aggressively or to make their plans misfire as a kind of battlefield victory, even if your triumph is surreptitious. A few such victories and your enemy will fall apart from within.

Finally, morale plays a crucial part in any war, and it is always wise to work to undermine the morale of the enemy troops. The Chinese call this "removing the firewood from under the cauldron." You can attempt this from the outside, through propaganda, but that often has the opposite effect, reinforcing the cohesion of soldiers and civilians in the face of an alien force trying to win them over. It is much more effective to find sympathizers within their ranks, who will spread discontent among them like a disease. When soldiers see those on their own side having doubts about the cause they are fighting for, they are generally demoralized and vulnerable to more disaffection. If their leaders overreact to this threat by punishing grumblers, they play into your hands, representing themselves as unjust and heavy-handed; if they leave the problem alone, it will only spread; and if they start to see enemies everywhere around them, their paranoia will cloud their strategic abilities. Using an inner front to spread dissension is often enough to give you the advantage you need to overwhelm the enemy.

Authority: The worst [military policy is] to assault walled cities.... If your commander, unable to control his temper, sends your troops swarming at the walls, your casualties will be one in three and still you will not have taken the city.... Therefore the expert in using the military subdues the enemy's forces without going to battle, takes the enemy's walled cities without launching an attack.

--Sun-tzu (fourth century
B.C
.)

REVERSAL

There are always likely to be disgruntled people in your own group who will be liable to turning against you from the inside. The worst mistake is to be paranoid, suspecting one and all and trying to monitor their every move. Your only real safeguard against conspiracies and saboteurs is to keep your troops satisfied, engaged in their work, and united by their cause. They will tend to police themselves and turn in any grumblers who are trying to foment trouble from within. It is only in unhealthy and decaying bodies that cancerous cells can take root.

Any attempt to bend people to your will is a form of aggression. And in a world where political considerations are paramount, the most effective form of aggression is the best-hidden one: aggression behind a compliant, even loving exterior. To follow the passive-aggressive strategy, you must seem to go along with people, offering no resistance. But actually you dominate the situation. You are noncommittal, even a little helpless, but that only means that everything revolves around you. Some people may sense what you are up to and get angry. Don't worry--just make sure you have disguised your aggression enough that you can deny it exists. Do it right and they will feel guilty for accusing you. Passive aggression is a popular strategy; you must learn how to defend yourself against the vast legions of passive-aggressive warriors who will assail you in your daily life.

Gandhi and his associates repeatedly deplored the inability of their people to give organized, effective, violent resistance against injustice and tyranny. His own experience was corroborated by an unbroken series of reiterations from all the leaders of India--that India could not practice physical warfare against her enemies. Many reasons were given, including weakness, lack of arms, having been beaten into submission, and other arguments of a similar nature....... Confronted with the issue of what means he could employ against the British, we come to the other criteria previously mentioned; that the kind of means selected and how they can be used is significantly dependent upon the face of the enemy, or the character of his opposition. Gandhi's opposition not only made the effective use of passive resistance possible but practically invited it. His enemy was a British administration characterized by an old, aristocratic, liberal tradition, one which granted a good deal of freedom to its colonials and which always had operated on a pattern of using, absorbing, seducing, or destroying, through flattery or corruption, the revolutionary leaders who arose from the colonial ranks. This was the kind of opposition that would have tolerated and ultimately capitulated before the tactic of passive resistance.

R
ULES FOR
R
ADICALS
, S
AUL
D. A
LINSKY
, 1971

THE GUILT WEAPON

In December 1929 the group of Englishmen who governed India were feeling a little nervous. The Indian National Congress--the country's main independence movement--had just broken off talks over the proposal that Britain would gradually return autonomous rule to the subcontinent. Instead the Congress was now calling for nothing less than immediate and total independence, and it had asked Mahatma Gandhi to lead a civil-disobedience campaign to initiate this struggle. Gandhi, who had studied law in London years before, had invented a form of passive-resistant protest in 1906, while working as a barrister in South Africa. In India in the early 1920s, he had led civil-disobedience campaigns against the British that had created quite a stir, had landed him in prison, and had made him the most revered man in the country. For the British, dealing with him was never easy; despite his frail appearance, he was uncompromising and relentless.

Although Gandhi believed in and practiced a rigorous form of non-violence, the colonial officers of the British Raj were fearful: at a time when the English economy was weak, they imagined him organizing a boycott of British goods, not to mention mass demonstrations in the streets of India's cities, a police nightmare.

The man in charge of the Raj's strategy in combating the independence movement was the viceroy of India, Lord Edward Irwin. Although Irwin admired Gandhi personally, he had decided to respond to him rapidly and with force--he could not let the situation get out of hand. He waited anxiously to see what Gandhi would do. The weeks went by, and finally, on March 2, Irwin received a letter from Gandhi--rather touching in its honesty--that revealed the details of the civil-disobedience campaign he was about to launch. It was to be a protest against the salt tax. The British held a monopoly on India's production of salt, even though it could easily be gathered by anyone on the coast. They also levied a rather high tax on it. This was quite a burden for the poorest of the poor in India, for whom salt was their only condiment. Gandhi planned to lead a march of his followers from his ashram near Bombay (present-day Mumbai) to the coastal town of Dandi, where he would gather sea salt left on the shore by the waves and encourage Indians everywhere to do the same. All this could be prevented, he wrote to Irwin, if the viceroy would immediately repeal the salt tax.

Irwin read this letter with a sense of relief. He imagined the sixty-year-old Gandhi, rather fragile and leaning on a bamboo cane, leading his ragtag followers from his ashram--fewer than eighty people--on a two-hundred-mile march to the sea, where he would gather some salt from the sands. Compared to what Irwin and his staff had been expecting, the protest seemed almost ludicrously small in scale. What was Gandhi thinking? Had he lost touch with reality? Even some members of the Indian National Congress were deeply disappointed by his choice of protest. In any event, Irwin had to rethink his strategy. It simply would not do to harass or arrest this saintly old man and his followers (many of them women). That would look very bad. It would be better to leave him alone, avoiding the appearance of a heavy-handed response and letting the crisis play out and die down. In the end the ineffectiveness of this campaign would somewhat discredit Gandhi, breaking his spell over the Indian masses. The independence movement might fracture or at least lose some momentum, leaving England in a stronger position in the long run.

As Irwin watched Gandhi's preparations for the march, he became still more convinced that he had chosen the right strategy. Gandhi was framing the event as almost religious in quality, like Lord Buddha's famous march to attain divine wisdom, or Lord Rama's retreat in the Ramayana. His language became increasingly apocalyptic: "We are entering upon a life-and-death struggle, a holy war." This seemed to resonate with the poor, who began to flock to Gandhi's ashram to hear him speak. He called in film crews from all over the world to record the march, as if it were a momentous historical event. Irwin himself was a religious man and saw himself as the representative of a God-fearing, civilized nation. It would redound to England's credit to be seen to leave this saintly man untouched on his procession to the sea.

Gandhi and his followers left their ashram on March 12, 1930. As the group passed from village to village, their ranks began to swell. With each passing day, Gandhi was bolder. He called on students throughout India to leave their studies and join him in the march. Thousands responded. Large crowds gathered along the way to see him pass; his speeches to them grew more and more inflammatory. He seemed to be trying to bait the English into arresting him. On April 6 he led his followers into the sea to purify themselves, then collected some salt from the shore. Word quickly spread throughout India that Gandhi had broken the salt law.

Irwin followed these events with increasing alarm. It dawned on him that Gandhi had tricked him: instead of responding quickly and decisively to this seemingly innocent march to the sea, the viceroy had left Gandhi alone, allowing the march to gain momentum. The religious symbolism that seemed so harmless had stirred the masses, and the salt issue had somehow become a lightning rod for disaffection with English policy. Gandhi had shrewdly chosen an issue that the English would not recognize as threatening but that would resonate with Indians. Had Irwin responded by arresting Gandhi immediately, the whole thing might have died down. Now it was too late; to arrest him at this point would only add fuel to the fire. Yet to leave him alone would show weakness and cede him the initiative. Meanwhile nonviolent demonstrations were breaking out in cities and villages all over India, and to respond to them with violence would only make the demonstrators more sympathetic to moderate Indians. Whatever Irwin did, it seemed, would make things worse. And so he fretted, held endless meetings, and did nothing.

It is impossible to win a contest with a helpless opponent since if you win you have won nothing. Each blow you strike is unreturned so that all you can feel is guilt for having struck while at the same time experiencing the uneasy suspicion that the helplessness is calculated.

S
TRATEGIES OF
P
SYCHOTHERAPY
, J
AY
H
ALEY
, 1 963

In the days to come, the cause rippled outward. Thousands of Indians traveled to India's coasts to collect salt as Gandhi had. Large cities saw mass demonstrations in which this illegal salt was given away or sold at a minimal price. One form of nonviolent protest cascaded into another--a Congress-led boycott of British goods, for one. Finally, on Irwin's orders, the British began to respond to the demonstrations with force. And on May 4 they arrested Gandhi and took him to prison, where he would stay for nine months without trial.

Huang Ti, the legendary Yellow Emperor and reputed ancestor of the Chou dynasty, the historical paradigm of concord and civilization, is said to have brought harmony from chaos, tamed the barbarians and wild beasts, cleared the forests and marshes, and invented the "five harmonious sounds," not through an act of epic bloodshed, but through his superior virtue, by adapting and yielding to "natural conditions" and to the Will of Heaven. Confucianism henceforth repudiates as unworkable the idea of military solutions to human problems. Huang Ti's most notable heir, we are told, was Ti Yao, a gentleman who "naturally and without effort," embraced reverence, courteousness, and intelligence. Nevertheless, during his reign, the Deluge, mythology's universal symbol of anomie, threatened to inundate the land. Thus it fell upon him to appoint a successor to preserve the order of his own son. Ti Yao chose the most qualified man for the job, the venerable Shun, who had in various tests already demonstrated a capacity to harmonize human affairs through righteousness....... Shun in turn selected Yu the Sage to engineer an end to the flood. Because Yu refused wine and always acted appropriately, moving with and not resisting nature, the Way of Heaven
(T'ien Tao)
was revealed to him. He subsequently harnessed the river waters not by fighting against them with a dam, but by yielding to them and clearing for them a wider channel within which to run. Were it not for Yu, so the story goes, who herein personified the wisdom of both Confucius and Lao-tzu, the Taoist prophet, we would all be fish.

R
ELIGIOUS
M
YTHOLOGY AND THE
A
RT OF
W
AR
, J
AMES
A. A
HO
, 1981

Gandhi's arrest sparked a conflagration of protest. On May 21 a group of 2,500 Indians marched peacefully on the government's Dharasana Salt Works, which was defended by armed Indian constables and British officers. When the marchers advanced on the factory, they were struck down with steel-plated clubs. Instructed in Gandhi's methods of nonviolence, the demonstrators made no attempt to defend themselves, simply submitting to the blows that rained down on them. Those who had not been hit continued to march until almost every last one had been clubbed. It was a nauseating scene that got a great deal of play in the press. Similar incidents all over India helped to destroy the last sentimental attachment any Indians still had toward England.

To end the spiraling unrest, Irwin was finally forced to negotiate with Gandhi, and, on several issues, to give ground--an unprecedented event for an English imperialist viceroy. Although the end of the Raj would take several years, the Salt March would prove to be the beginning of the end, and in 1947 the English finally left India without a fight.

Interpretation

Gandhi was a deceptively clever strategist whose frail, even saintly appearance constantly misled his adversaries into underestimating him. The key to any successful strategy is to know both one's enemy and oneself, and Gandhi, educated in London, understood the English well. He judged them to be essentially liberal people who saw themselves as upholding traditions of political freedom and civilized behavior. This self-image--though riddled with contradictions, as indicated by their sometimes brutal behavior in their colonies--was deeply important to the English. The Indians, on the other hand, had been humiliated by many years of subservience to their English overlords. They were largely unarmed and in no position to engage in an insurrection or guerrilla war. If they rebelled violently, as other colonies had done, the English would crush them and claim to be acting out of self-defense; their civilized self-image would suffer no damage. The use of nonviolence, on the other hand--an ideal and philosophy that Gandhi deeply valued and one that had a rich tradition in India--would exploit to perfection the English reluctance to respond with force unless absolutely necessary. To attack people who were protesting peacefully would not jibe with the Englishman's sense of his own moral purity. Made to feel confused and guilty, the English would be paralyzed with ambivalence and would relinquish the strategic initiative.

The Salt March is perhaps the quintessential example of Gandhi's strategic brilliance. First, he deliberately chose an issue that the British would consider harmless, even laughable. To respond with force to a march about salt would have given an Englishman trouble. Then, by identifying his apparently trivial issue in his letter to Irwin, Gandhi made space for himself in which to develop the march without fear of repression. He used that space to frame the march in an Indian context that would give it wide appeal. The religious symbolism he found for it had another function as well: it heightened the paralysis of the British, who were quite religious themselves in their own way and could not countenance repressing a spiritual event. Finally, like any good showman, Gandhi made the march dramatically visual and used the press to give it maximum exposure.

Once the march gained momentum, it was too late to stop it. Gandhi had sparked a fire, and the masses were now deeply engaged in the struggle. Whatever Irwin did at this point would make the situation worse. Not only did the Salt March become the model for future protests, but it was clearly the turning point in India's struggle for independence.

Many people today are as ambivalent as the English were about having power and authority. They need power to survive, yet at the same time they have an equally great need to believe in their own goodness. In this context to fight people with any kind of violence makes you look aggressive and ugly. And if they are stronger than you are, in effect you are playing into their hands, justifying a heavy-handed response from them. Instead it is the height of strategic wisdom to prey upon people's latent guilt and liberal ambivalence by making yourself look benign, gentle, even passive. That will disarm them and get past their defenses. If you take action to challenge and resist them, you must do it morally, righteously, peacefully. If they cannot help themselves and respond with force, they will look and feel bad; if they hesitate, you have the upper hand and an opening to determine the whole dynamic of the war. It is almost impossible to fight people who throw up their hands and do not resist in the usual aggressive way. It is completely confusing and disabling. Operating in this way, you inflict guilt as if it were a kind of weapon. In a political world, your passive, moralistic resistance will paralyze the enemy.