From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
Date: Sun, 2 Nov 1997 21:15:30 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: What Will Revolution Look Like?
Message-ID: <1.5.4.32.19971102131057.00a611e0@pop.pipeline.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Warmaking is ever changing in response to the last wins
and losses. However, winners are less likely to change 
than losers, for why change a successful formula,
publish it, or a well-spun dissimulation.

As ever, unknown forms of war are in gestation, being
tested and debriefed, in military institutions and
wargames, in business, in education, in the amorphous
culture at large through legal competition and crime
and their variable gray areas where fair and unfair,
civilized rules and their breaking, are ever in grim 
and vicious dispute.

While there are piles of studies on organized and
guerilla wars of the past, the most provocative are
those that attempt to describe what's coming, how
to recognize its early warnings and what can be done
to head it off or, more likely, advance it.

The highest warmaking art is winning without physical
fighting, to outfox the enemy by demoralizing, by 
demonstrating that attack is futle, that there is no 
chance of defeating a superior force. That's why 
military exhibitionism and psy war is reputed
among military and political leaders to be as vital as 
that of brute force, as best exemplified by the Cold 
War 50-year stalemate and psychological "win-win" to
a status of Cool War.

To get a handle on what's in store, imagine that completely 
unbelievable methods of warfare, overt and covert, are 
being concocted now, composed of strategies, tactics, 
warfighters and armaments never before used -- and will 
not be revealed and understood until too late for defense. 

Try to forget everything you know about warfighting, 
crime fighting, conflict resolution, rules of engagement,
black operations, guerilla tactics, hiding among the 
people. Assume the enemy knows everything you know and
more, is better armed and smarter than you, has more 
spies among your supporters and in your most intimate 
circle.

Imagine that your toilet, your bed, your fridge, your car, 
your is triggered to explode by radio or your computer by
your password.

Consider that there will be no time to reflect and 
reconsider when things go catastrophically wrong and the
enemy is unrelenting attacking with inhuman viciousness, 
when you're defenses are crumbling and weapons failing,
when mates are squealing, dead or run away, when you can't 
stop shitting yourself, when your legs are buckling, when 
your minds racing out of control, when you're begging god
and mom for mercy and the upraised axe is descending, the
barrel back of head is firing.

Remember that who the enemy is is no secret to either side, 
on whichever side you're on, and presume that the emeny is 
more ready and able to cook your goose than you are theirs.

What actual war carnage teaches, what the current civil war 
in the US is showing, is what the TV-sofa war does not: 
nobody wins, ever, except the mindfuckers who've never gone
berzerk in combat or in the jobplace, killed friend and foe 
to save own asses.

You only win wars by never having to fight them, those 
started by weakling cowards unable to steal, cheat and lie 
well enough to satisfy their demonic lusts.

Best to outsmart the enemy in war, work and love, so that 
what you're up to is revealed only years later if ever. For
the best won wars are never known at the time, no parades,
no medals, no glory, no war stories, no memorial cemeteries
and monuments, no veteran hospitals filled with carrion, 
just peace and tranquility shooting deer, harpooning dolpins,
rip-tearing the landscape for profligate cowboy wargames
riding homicidal freeways.

We're all gonna lose our civil war in market place killings and 
road rage, thanks to today's warfighting lesson in free fire 
criminal enterprise by those who've never been shot and
shot and shot, and lost for good -- the vainglorious winners,
the losers desperate to regain glory days.