Righteous Army
First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they attack you. Then you win.
It can be a harrowing jolt to realise that one is in the middle of a warzone1. The first thing to figure out, as quickly as possible, is the nature of the conflict. Who is fighting whom? What does each side want? Does it concern me? Before making any decisions, one needs intel and the ability to sort through it – no easy task when we are swamped in propaganda and empty “noise”, both designed to hide the truth. Without access to reliable information, it is impossible to make good decisions. And, under false impressions, we are subject to manipulation.
This is, of course, why there is such a massive effort, both overt and covert, to control the narrative. People observing the hissyfit du jour over Twitter and its new owner’s efforts to restore at least some free speech are beginning to understand how tight the web is. This goes beyond traditional (and some “alternative”) media. Little of the narrative soup we find ourselves in is organic. Propaganda encompasses the entertainment industry, social media “influencers”, search engine suppression and promotion, Internet influence ops, bots and bot armies and more. These are some of the weapons deployed against you – it is wise to be aware of them.
Part of the process of “waking up”, of realising that much of the infrastructure of society is lies and manipulation, is recalibration. If traditional outlets cannot be trusted, we must find new sources of information, evaluating them on the quality of their content. Naturally, it is not practical to vet every last datum for truth. We should be skeptical as we cultivate new networks. Trust, but verify.
Governments, institutions and corporations that are not serving the people must also be judged accordingly. If they are not operating in our interests, then whose? To recognise that these are controlled partially or fully by the enemy is to apply a new lens. But even assets controlled by the enemy, such as the media, can yield useful information.
Where does the enemy expend resources? When does the enemy react and what forces the enemy to react the strongest? What does it try to prevent becoming public knowledge? What does the enemy promote the most enthusiastically? Careful study of such behaviour lets us penetrate the darkness of the fog of war, to uncover leadership, command structure and supply lines. Favoured mouthpieces of the enemy, once identified, offer excellent opportunities.
It does not take much research to uncover at least the skeleton of the conspiracy. The Covid operation, if it has produced anything positive at all, has opened the eyes of many to the magnitude of the infiltration and its evil. But we need to be careful. The enemy operates in the manner of a secret society. Or an intelligence agency. Very few know the whole picture. Information is tightly compartmentalised. In this way, it is difficult for anyone to betray much of the secret. Disinformation, even within the enemy ranks, is thus preferable. All that matters to leadership is that the “job” gets done, without potential qualms or conscience impeding it. If a useful idiot, in ignorance, furthers the plans of the enemy, even better. In other words, the situation is complex. Many of those involved in discrete aspects of the enemy’s plan remain blind to the totality of its implications.
At its heart, the enemy is attempting to impose a kind of technofeudalism. A tiny few that believe they are a privileged elite want to introduce a system of complete control over the rest of mankind. Slavery, in other words. And a massive part of society is either supporting or financing this, often unwittingly.
During Covid, many obeyed orders that were illegal or unethical and often felt virtuous for doing so. Authority figures believed, in ignorance or otherwise, that they were entitled to infringe the rights and freedoms of individuals, often cloaking their actions in a twisted distortion of morality. And many citizens complied with “mandates” or “laws” or “statutes” believing that they had to2. This resulted in unnecessary suffering and death. Whether such leaders were duped into tyranny or not does not exempt them from culpability.
The past has much to teach us about war. Not only through the immortal wisdom of figures such as Sun Tzu, but also through study of the individual conflicts themselves.
Late in the 16th century, Korea faced its own existential threat - Im Jin Wae Ran (임진왜란). It was, until D-Day, the largest naval invasion in world history. Over six years, Japan committed more than 300,000 men to an effort to conquer Korea as a beachhead to deal with China (Ming). There are a few parallels to our current situation.
Korea underestimated the danger from the east. It believed any attack would be akin to the raiding pirates that Ming and Korea had both dealt with previously. Japan had gone through more than a hundred years of turbulence in the Sengoku period of warring daimyo and the leadership of Korea therefore assumed this chaos had made them weak. Instead, Toyotomi Hideyoshi had unified the country, and as the new leader, had a massive army of battle-hardened, disciplined samurai at his command. Also, he had a politically expedient reason to keep this military busy overseas, rather than giving it the opportunity to challenge his rule at home.
The Korean army was ill-prepared. Like Japan, Korea’s commanders were drawn from the aristocracy, but without the crucible of decades of warfare of their counterparts. Many had spent their lives more concerned with scholarship and calligraphy. The infantry were unarmoured. And, although the government was aware of technology such as matchlock guns, they were slow to grasp its implications.
The Japanese, for their part, were confident to the point of contempt for Korea’s ability to defend itself. And this was supported by their clear supremacy on the battlefield early on. Established Korean bureaucratic rules also impeded a quick response. This enabled the Japanese to steamroll through much of the country to control key cities and fortresses. It was believed that once they had subdued the leadership, civil and military, then the populace – the peasants – would of course submit.
There are three aspects of the war that I want to touch on briefly. First, the psychological. The samurai wore fearsome masks, took trophies of heads or noses and sometimes carried these into battle. Any defiance was met with brutality. At the siege of Dongnae, the Korean commander was informed that the Japanese objective was China and if he allowed them through, his men’s lives would be spared. His reply: “It is easy for me to die, but difficult to let you pass.” The Japanese took the town, slaughtered all men, women and children and then killed the dogs and cats as an example. The terror campaign did not have the anticipated result of breaking the Koreans’ spirit. Rather, it galvanised popular resistance.
The second is the inspired leadership of Yi Sun Shin. As a naval leader, he remains unparalleled. While he is most celebrated for his victory of 13 ships against a fleet of 300 (of which 133 were warships, the rest support), and his use of the “turtle ship”3, his tactics were perhaps outshone by his character.
The Japanese became so frustrated with Yi Sun Shin’s disruption of their supply lines that they employed a double agent in the Korean court to plant disinformation in an attempt to lure him into an ambush. Yi refused his orders as he was familiar with the waters and their potential hazards and also because he did not trust spies.
By disobeying the King, he may have saved the country. He was hauled to the capital in chains and tortured almost to the point of death. Only support from others at the court prevented his execution. In the end, he was given what was designed to be a more humiliating punishment: demotion to the lowest rank. Yi accepted his fate and performed his duties without complaint. In his absence the entire Korea fleet (save for the 13 ships mentioned above) was annihilated in the only Japanese victory on the sea. Yi was hurriedly reinstated and the tide turned. His generalship was supreme, but so was his integrity. This won great respect from the enemy and in so doing, challenged Japanese preconceptions of superiority. Yi’s principled and selfless leadership by example did much to bolster the hearts and minds of Koreans and foster doubts in the Japanese, helping to win the ideological war.
The third is the Righteous Army - ui byeong (의병). Recognising that the country’s army would not be enough to defeat the invaders, various elements of the populace united to form citizen’s’ armies. Ex-soldiers, members of the aristocracy, farmers and even Buddhist monks joined, believing the cause to be a noble one.
One monk, Hyujeong, described the aggressors in terms that may be familiar to some. He referred to the samurai as “virulent snakes” and that their brutality justified a temporary abandonment of Buddhism’s pacifism in order to shield the innocent. His call to arms to able-bodies monks encouraged them to “put on the armour of mercy of Bodhisattvas, hold in hand the treasured sword to fell the devil, wield the lightning bolt of the Eight Deities and come forward4.”
The Righteous Armies caused havoc for the Japanese. Although often no match for them in pitched battles, they successfully waged a guerrilla campaign, which coupled with Yi Sun Shin’s naval blockade, disrupted the enemy’s supply lines. This resistance nullified the enemy’s ability, and ultimately will, to fight.
When reasonable men and women are pushed, when freedoms, even perhaps illusory ones, are challenged, when people are engaged and united for a noble cause, then no enemy can resist its force. Not all will fight, but enough will. Many more will simply not comply, once the evil of the scheme is exposed. This itself is a powerful weapon against tyranny, against the imposition of a system of control, as the British Empire found out in India.
The Hindu concept of Ahimsa, from which Gandhi derived his response to Imperialism, does not entail the abrogation of force. There are cases for justified war, self-defence and responses to crime in general. Interestingly, the Japanese martial art Aikido adopted the philosophy of Ahimsa in negating the force of an opponent by turning it against itself5. Others online have been paying close attention to the US military’s Law of War and how it applies to current circumstances.
Regardless, part of this war will be the people reclaiming their integrity, their strength of purpose. If the enemy is bent on dividing us, corrupting us and encouraging us to hate ourselves, then we must find ways to do the opposite. For the cause of free humanity is just, and to participate in this endeavour (in whatever fashion one chooses) is itself ennobling.
One critical battlefield is the human mind. The war on perception, narrative, and values through bullying, coercion and deception. Thus it will be transformative. The humanity that emerges from it will be stronger, the society that we shape in its aftermath, closer to freedom, closer to the divine6.
And we will win.
In the wake of Nuremberg, the Australian population had the foresight to insert protections agaainst such abuses into the constitution. This did not stop the government from ignoring it. Other legal remedies may involve Common Law, bioweapons treaties or the Nuremberg Charter itself.
That dragon head on the front was functional - it could shoot fire or cannonballs
There are echoes here to be explored another time
This interview with Mattias Desmet also touches on these themes