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Most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has. That’s not stupidity or weakness, that’s just human nature.
Secrecy is a vacuum and nothing fills a vacuum like paranoid speculation.
America is especially sensitive to war weariness, and nothing brings on a backlash like the perception of defeat. I say “perception” because America is a very all-or-nothing society. We like the big win, the touchdown, the knockout in the first round. We like to know, and for everyone else to know, that our victory wasn’t only uncontested, it was positively devastating. If not…well…look at where we were before the Panic.
“Fear,” he used to say, “fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe.”
You can’t stop the rain. All you can do is just build a roof that you hope won’t leak,
It’s fear, dude, just fear and you don’t have to be Sun freakin Tzu to know that real fighting isn’t about killing or even hurting the other guy, it’s about scaring him enough to call it a day. Break their spirit, that’s what every successful army goes for, from tribal face paint to the “blitzkrieg”
But what if the enemy can’t be shocked and awed?
I don’t know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill them.
Do you know what it feels like to suddenly be told that the one goal you’ve worked toward your whole life, that you’ve sacrificed and suffered for, that’s pushed you beyond limits you never knew you had is now considered “strategically invalid”?
Ignorance was the enemy. Lies and superstition, misinformation, disinformation. Sometimes, no information at all. Ignorance killed billions of people.
Americans are the only people he’s ever met who just can’t accept that bad things can happen to good people.
