Art of War (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

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Book: Art of War (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free
Author: Sunzi
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quest for statehood from England (a small force against a larger one), and by France as it battled Algerian independence fighters (a large force against a weaker one). The scholar Francis Dummer Fisher, cited by historian Barbara Fields ( Humane Letters: Writing in English About Human Affairs , 2003), writes, “War is not defined by damage, however great, but by an intent to conquer.” Professor Fields, an expert on the American Civil War at Columbia University, continues:
    Just as mass murder is not necessarily terrorism, so mass murder and terrorism are not necessarily war. Indeed, their perpetrators often choose mass murder and terrorism precisely for lack of the political standing, power, resources, or numbers to wage war. . . . Any attempt to destroy life and property, without an objective of conquest, is a criminal act, and its perpetrators merit prosecution under criminal statutes. But such an attempt is not an act of war except in a loose, metaphorical sense. . . . When the word war is taken to justify the arbitrary exercise of power in the absence of war, metaphorical language may become an instrument of tyranny.
    On paper, these distinctions seem trite, but they bespeak real and perilous differences—differences for which a serious monk admonished all who would fight to calculate the odds and consequences with a bookkeeper’s punctiliousness, and then engage heart and soul. Long before Sun Tzu was a baby and no doubt well into the future, nations will get their dander up over matters that mystify subsequent generations.
    Sun Tzu reminds us that empires, in the Orient or Occident, are lost when inadequate men become leaders and wage war for base reasons or no reason at all. Western history is rife with apt examples: England lost its American colonies because of the fizzle-headed King George III and his tax men; the disaster that was World War I owed much to the folly of aristocrats bent on trying out new weapons; even the Crusades resulted from arrogance and the misbegotten vanity of rulers who did no research before they attacked Palestine. The arch-conservative cartoonist David Low once quipped, “I have never met anyone who wasn’t against war. Even Hitler and Mussolini were, according to themselves.”
    The issue of a “definite objective” is as essential to the successful military mind as its absence is to a defeated one. Sun Tzu often advises shifting points of attack to baffle the enemy and trounce him. For example, in chapter XI, paragraph 37: “By altering his arrangements and changing his plans, he keeps the enemy without definite knowledge. By shifting his camp and taking circuitous routes, he prevents the enemy from anticipating his purpose.” The principle here mimics a wolf pack attacking a bear from every direction. One on one, the bear would naturally succeed against a smaller enemy, but with his energies splayed on so many fronts, he can be defeated.
    Throughout the centuries, there is a deliciously romantic quality to China’s intellectuals. Their passion for knowledge and for transmitting it to others is well-nigh a love affair. The genius of Sun Tzu speaks to Everyman, but his heritage speaks particularly to that belief immanent in both high Western, especially Greek, and Asian cultures—“that a coherent and logical explanation of things could be found, that the world did not ultimately rest upon the meaningless and arbitrary fiat of gods or demons” ( A Short History of the World ).
    In more recent memory, readers who might want to conjure their own image of the spiritual and intellectual impetus that conceived and produced The Art of War might remember the photograph of a small, slender man standing alone before an advancing tank during the 1989 T’iananmen Square Uprising. He could as easily have been Sun Tzu or his descendant Sun Pin, author of a text that has come to be called The Lost Art of War or The Art of War II .
    Sun Tzu’s work is a unique admixture of simplicity, an

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