Who Was Sun Tzu’s Napoleon?
thestrategybridge.org
thestrategybridge.org
Also the story becomes more deep when you realize that there are story elements where they act like the character would coincidentally slip into a situation but actually was probably stupid on purpose to create a much better outcome for himself. My favorite example being when Caocao fails to kill Dong Zhuo who is laying in front of him sleeping. If you are a mass murderer like either of these two there is almost no chance to fail to assassinate someone laying in front of you sleeping. And yet Caocao did.
What happened due to this failure? The rebels took him in and started to listen to his ideas, when before they ignored him due to his low background. Also one of his biggest competitors, Wang Yun, who coincidentally is the owner of the knife used in the attempted murder.
What would have happened if he had successfully killed Dong Zhuo? Lu Bu probably would have killed him on the spot. Maybe he would go in history as a small hero but he would have never become emperor.
Second, by the time Sima Yi commanded a large field army, Cao Cao had died for a long time. Sima Yi represented powerful large land-owners who would gain monopoly on official positions during Cao Pi's reign, Cao Cao's son. It is a recipe for weakening imperial authority and endangering emperors. Historians argue that Cao Cao passed up the chance to become emperor because he would not countenance such policy.
Third, that TV show is like so much of Chinese TV that is a wasteland. It is melodramatic, ludicrous, and laughably bad acting. I am sorry, but it is unwatchable, not just the show, even the trailer. Compare the stylized combat and bloodletting to the realism of "Game of Throne" (yes, I am ware of the irony of calling historical drama fake and fantasy real); there is no comparison. Nothing there is believable, much like every word out of CCP's mouth. It is sad, really.
PS: And yes, good catch. Cao cao actually wasn't emperor officially. His son became emperor. Totally forgot that point for some reason.
The show's main character is SiMa Yi, which is kind of new to me. It's like a retold of "Romance of Three Kingdom" from a SiMa family and Cao family perspective. Though I hated a lot of Chinese TV shows, this one I actually like and would recommend. I can't remember any combat in this show though, probably fairly average. I wouldn't compare it to Game of Thrones, maybe House of Cards is a closer genre.
On the other hand, GoT does the same sort of thing in reverse; technical polish and a realistic aesthetic are the vehicle for a different set of propositions about how the world works. One genre uses fantastical formalism while another relies on fantastical plots.
It's interesting to contrast these two with more subversive explorations of the same forms, like Shadow and Watchmen (the movie; I haven't seen the TV reimagining yet though people seem to be raving about it).
"A dead Zhuge scares away a living Zhongda (Sima Yi)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Wuzhang_Plains
Then of course there's the gathering of arrows, but there are too many good stories to talk about. Just look in one of my brocade sacks, each has a useful story! (Chapter 54)
Cao Cao volunteered for assassination mission but asked Wang Yun for a renowned sword/knife as the assassination weapon. As he entered Dong Zhou's chamber he encountered general Lu Bu, a fearsome warrior and Dong Zhou's personal body guard. Cao Cao told Lu Bu that he wanted to try out a famously fast horse of Dong Zhou and asked the general to fetch it. When Cao Cao failed to kill Dong Zhou, he pretended that he was gifting the famous (assassination weapon) sword as a token of respect. Then he went outside and jumped on the famously swift horse general Lu Bu just brought at Cao Cao's request and fled, while Dong Zhou and Lu Bu were puzzled by Cao Cao's action.
I cannot vouch for the story's authenticity, but what a fascinating story.
Overall, always according to TFA, Sun Tzu's Art of Way is way more practical and literal, and less "hand-wavey overall strategy" than generally understood. I think I actually like this because it more or less destroys its appropriation by self-help/business gurus. After all, if Sun Tzu is literally talking about killing your enemies while they are crossing the river, it's less useful as a metaphor for startups -- a welcome side-effect.
If you read Sun Tzu, at least you can then claim to have read one of the classics, and know a little bit about ancient warfare. Even if it's not directly applicable to running a startup. Which is certainly more than can be said of the pointless waffle that fills the self-help/business shelves in the bookstore.
But note I was talking about those worthless derivatives "The Art of War for Business", "The Art of War for Entrepreneurs", etc. Those rely on Sun Tzu's work being generic enough it can be applied to whatever, so it's hilarious to find out it maybe wasn't... exposing those derivative books as the trash they truly are.
They teach sons of all nobles the thing, and when the time comes to slash throats, they use them being "gridlocked" into their thinking against them.
English translation:
https://oastarod.wordpress.com/2016/02/19/zhu-zhiwu-causes-t...
It describes how an excellent diplomat manipulated vulnerabilities between countries to turn down a conflict. It happened in 630BC, but still applies to today.
The reason we still read these people at all (Thucydides, Machievelli, Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, etc) is because their work transcends "the historical and cultural milieu of its origination".
Time (and the accumulation of human opinions) is the real judge here and in the case of all of these writers, time has judged that they are, in fact, saying something eternally true about politics and fighting wars that transcends their historical circumstances. If you want to delve into their historical backgrounds, that's great -- and perhaps it will lead to new, valid intepretations. But it isn't wrong to read them as political philosophy, which is what we generally do.
I can't possibly imagine how one can both treat a source as holding profound and transcendent views and be uninterested or unsure of what the author meant when writing it; at that point it seems that the literary work is merely an excuse for the reader to project their own ideas into an authorative source, and the work is only valued for its prestige.
What I've found is that, in critiques of an earlier philosopher, the most common attitude is an acceptance of key insights, but debate over their implications and the extent of their application. So, whether or not you see The Prince as satire, it is valued for its skepticism of abstract ideas and insistence on realpolitik. That is the transcendent perspective of The Prince, and that isn't really debated, as far as I know.
When I read Machievelli in school, we learned that he was a republican but that The Prince was really, truly advice for autocrats. There's no contradiction here because Machievlli is a realist and he understands that autocracies happen and sometimes they might even be necessary (hey, we in the US have martial law for a reason).
Thus, "project[ing] their own ideas into an authoritative source" is perfectly fine if phrased a bit more nicely. Perhaps more like "adapt our understanding of the source material in light of contemporary thinking". Not to say that context doesn't matter at all, especially with translations. But in the end, when analyzing works such as "Art of War", it's unavoidable that we project our current context onto its text. As post-modernists point out, we cannot escape our biases, so why pretend to do so?
But you must admit it's at least a bit funny if when you read Sun Tzu's "attack your enemy's allies" you understand "work to undermine the alliance, maybe sow discontent so that they turn against each other" but wise old Sun Tzu actually meant "physically stab your enemy's ally with your sword. Right through the heart. That's what 'attacking' means, right? What do you mean 'undermine', anyway?".
Reading your earlier post, I was trying to figure out how it could possibly be helpful to attack your own allies on a battlefield.
It's an interesting commentary on Sun Tzu that someone could even imagine him prescribing such a course of action.
It's much harder to translate that idea to essays or educative works, though.
The art of war is basically a text book, so it's as literal as you can get. Biases should matter about as much as reading the package leaflet of some meds, or a math book.
It's pretty obvious that the reason it's popular has more to do with the ancient and exotic origin, the suggestive title and the opportunities for the reader's self image it provides than for its actual content -at least in the West. But considering this effect anything other than an expression of ignorance, and actually judging the work for its unintended ability to cause such effect, feels... I don't know,a travesty. Almost as superficial as judging the book for the covers' drawing or its usefulness as a doorstop.
That is also for Shakespeare and the families in GB. Maybe satire was necessary to disguise criticism. But the underlying meaning is crystal clear.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3618720/amp/...
No, just being right is an insufficient explanation for why textbooks will obtain the mythical status of the works you reference.
“Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face NOTHING new under the sun. For all the “4th Generation of War” intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc, I must respectfully say. “Not really”. Alexander the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying (studying, vice just reading) the men who have gone before us.”
Alexander would just marry off tribal chieftain's daughters to his generals and move on to the next trouble spot, seems like a hard sell with today's mores & norms.
> The reason we still read these people at all (Thucydides, Machievelli, Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, etc) is because their work transcends "the historical and cultural milieu of its origination".
Yes and no. IIRC, Sun Tzu strongly advises against attacking walled cities. The edition of Sun Tzu that I read made the point that reason for that was because, at his time, siege engine technology was not up to the task. In Sun Pin, written a few hundred years later, the advice changed.
There's a core there that does transcend "the historical and cultural milieu of its origination," but you kinda need to tether the text to its milieu to find it.
Strong agree. Clausewitz has a whole Chapter on billeting armies. The advice presented is mostly of use to historians. Not everything he wrote was timeless. Applying a work in a modern context involves understanding its limitations and the context in which it was written.
Why did Clausewitz think X? If X is still relevant today, is it relevant for the same reasons that it was 200 years ago?
Does this idea X truly transcend time, or are there just many important similarities between our time and the time of Clausewitz?
What if he was literally telling you how to put an arrow through the eye of the enemy general? How do you write a self-help book "based on The Art of War" out of that? (You can still derive general meaning that wasn't put there by Sun Tzu, but it's a lot harder!)
A lot of the passages that seem completely controversial now, can be understood if you think about what was going on.
For example, saw a bunch of people saying it was proof of misoginy the fact the bible consider menstrual fluids "unclean", thing is, that law was enacted when they lived in a mobile tent camp, if a person with a blood-transmissible disease washed on the middle of the camp water source for example, it could quickly infect everyone.
Or Paul in New Testament saying men should NOT cover their heads, make a lot of sense when you find out people at the time decided to adopt a fashion from some roman nobles that started to use robes with head covering during religious events, with the intention of appearing more spiritual.
This is just purely ex post facto pseudo-scientific rationalism of rampant misogyny. If you want to be true to the statements made in historical sources (e.g., the bible), try to put yourself in their shoes -- in this case, imagine that you are a patriarch in a deeply misogynistic society that views women and children as property and not people. The reason for the law is thus completely justified to such a person: to them, menstrual fluid is gross and just another example of why women clearly do not have the full rights of a "real person".
For semen, there is a clear distinction that it is anything it touches becomes dirty and needs washing. But for menstruation its whatever the woman touches that becomes unclean (and for seven days it seems!), not merely what the blood touches.
The original comment thus provides an explanation for why these two cases are treated separately, which is basically what you asked for.
On the other hand, a broken clock is right twice a day.
It is interesting that we hate cynicism when expressed by others yet we feel entitled to express it ourselves. Sometimes it is a good idea, when judging the behaviour of others, to consider options other than malice.
It's actually an interesting question, given that the book is usually studied in striking divorce from its historical context, especially in popular analysis.
So according to you, who responded to Julius Caesar in a way that's relevant to what Mao did? What did Sun Yat-sen do that requires a comparison to Alexander in order to better understand him? Or are you just listing random names without having read the article?