The strategy of gradualness: how to de-sovereign a state without the knowledge of a people
One of the 36 most ingenious tricks (of the Chinese art of war) goes by the name of "Remove the wood from under the pot": it is the nineteenth, that is, the first of the fourth book intended for confused situations or where it is necessary to confuse opponents . It teaches that, in order to steal energy from an enemy, it is not advisable to act all at once, but rather to proceed step by step, a little at a time. Just like when you have to reduce the power of a fire burning under a big pot. The simplest way is to remove one log at a time from under the boiling pot. Once the wood is eliminated, in whole or in part, the strength of the bonfire will also be affected by reducing it proportionally, because it is precisely the wood that feeds the flame. Moral: graduality pays. It makes us achieve results that we would never have been able to achieve by acting with impetus and with the “greedy” goal of obtaining everything immediately.
To understand this oriental wisdom pearl even better, let's review a bit of our Western history. Do you remember the Roman general Quinto Fabio Massimo called " cunctator "? " Cunctator " means "temporiser". He is the commander in chief of the army in charge of defending the precarious fortunes of Rome when the great Carthaginian leader Annibale Barca was well beyond the "gates" of Italy. The latter seemed on the point of delivering a fatal blow to the very existence of the city founded by Romulus and destined to become one of the greatest empires in history.
Hannibal had managed to invade the peninsula by passing through the Alpine passes. After a grueling and terrible march, even at very high altitudes through gorges and cliffs, complete with elephants in tow, he had gathered around him an army composed not only of Carthaginians, but also of allies gathered, along the way, from the populations Celtic from Northern Italy. The astute strategist had then inflicted very hard defeats in Rome and its legions in various battles, one of which was that of Lake Trasimeno, which resulted in a real massacre for the Roman infantry and knights. Well, it was in that tragic moment that Quintus Fabius Maximus found himself invested with the very delicate task of preparing the extreme defense against the wild African general. And he opted for a strategy that envisaged not a direct confrontation, but a slow series of peripheral skirmishes with which he aimed to wear down and take Hannibal's troops to exhaustion.
In the long run, his method proved to be successful (Canne's defeat was due precisely to the change of strategy of the consuls Varrone and Emilio Paolo). In any case, the line of action was then resumed and allowed Rome to gain time and get back on the saddle until, thanks to the Scipios, a definitive and grave triumph over the formidable Carthaginian enemy.
Quinto Fabio Massimo deserved the above epithet, "temporeggiatore": with this appellation we designate those who are not in a hurry, who knows how to wait and reaches their goal not through a sudden, open and furious attack; rather, through small steps, perhaps without the victim noticing. This is the meaning of the trick we are talking about.
A suitable metaphor, to make the idea even better, is the one taken from the work of the great Noam Chomsky. We are talking about the principle of the boiled frog, explained in the book Media and power which, note, is perfectly in line with what we are saying: it is always about pots.
So how do you boil a frog almost without your knowledge? You throw it into the cauldron of cold water and then raise the temperature one degree at a time.
The poor animal will find itself cooked to perfection almost without realizing it. It is a variant of Quinto Fabio Massimo's strategy: proceeding tome tome and heck heck , as the Neapolitans would say, with the lights off, without attracting attention. In this way it is possible to defeat even the greatest leader in history (on a par with Napoleon), namely the Hannibal of the third century BC.
If this is how a distracted frog is brought to a boil, it is always thus that the sovereign peoples and independent nations of an entire continent are deprived of freedom. Why are we talking about this, right? How we suddenly found ourselves deprived of our sovereignty and our independence almost without realizing it.
The reason is all summarized in the strategy in question. They have boiled us by degrees, like the frog in the example, they have worn us out with small, almost imperceptible, changes to our legal system. We speak of "reforms" carried out without too much fuss, one step at a time, from year to year, sometimes letting a certain number of seasons pass between one and the other of the most significant changes; so that, in fact, we did not pay too much attention.
We must not underestimate this manipulation technique because it is one of the most powerful and effective; and also because it continues to be used, at our expense, while we “doze off”. Let us now see, more closely and more concretely, how the strategy in question has been applied to the European project.
Do you remember, perhaps, a single moment when there was a wide public debate on the question of our joining the euro or the EU? Indeed, let's put it this way: do you remember a moment when you were asked if you wanted to give up the exclusive power to make the laws that Italians must obey? Or what if you wanted to abdicate the prerogative of having your own national bank that governs the genesis of a national currency when and how it wants without having to depend on a foreign entity? Or if you wanted to attribute the power to make rules, capable of getting the better of Italian laws themselves, to a body of twenty-seven unelected people, almost all of non-Italian nationality, in which only one Italian participates, always not elected by anyone? You don't remember, do you? Don't worry, you have no memory problems. It just never happened.
Yet each of these questions perfectly describes the current state of affairs. So how did it happen? It happened thanks to the stratagem of wood and fire, thanks to the strategy of Quinto Fabio Massimo and Chomsky's boiled frog: one step at a time, without fuss, without information, without discussion, without debate.
In 2004, the European Constitution was approved, with trumpet blasts, in Rome, only to be rejected by the French and the Dutch in a referendum that trashed the entire project; it is interesting to recall the name of the contribution that Romano Prodi, then President of the European Commission, had personally decided to make to the future Constitution of Europe: the Penelope project27. That's right: “Penelope”. The famous wife of the Achaean hero Ulysses passed into the history of universal literature and the collective imagination as the very symbol of persevering and silent patience. The noble matron, shrewd and discreet almost as much as her crafty consort, wove the cloth during the day, which she unraveled at night. He had in fact promised the suitors, who were disputing his hand, that, as soon as he had finished it, he would be granted to one of them.
Was the name “Penelope” chosen at random? Of course not. Was that project elaborated during public consultations? Of course not. Rather, in great secrecy. In short, we find applied the gradualness of the stratagem we are talking about mixed with the silent industriousness of the previous one: riding the sea without the knowledge of the sky.
In an interesting and well-documented article by Giovanna Tosatti dated 19 July 2018, taken from the "Officina della Storia" website, the Penelope Project is significantly described as follows:
"A feasibility study called" Penelope ", developed in secret by a small group of officials under the leadership of François Lamoureux and presented to the public on December 5, 2002. The name was chosen by Lamoureux himself, mindful of a chapter in the work of Jean-François Deniau L'Europe interdite (1977), in which the author stated that the ancient Greeks never gave names by chance ».
And, again: "A name that evokes fidelity, tenacity, shrewdness, a reference to" night "work, and to confidentiality which, as Paolo Russo Caia, consultant of the Commission wrote, was used to avoid pressures and compromises, to protect an object still fragile before completeness and its internal coherence make it robust. Like its ancient ancestor, it is armed with patience: in order to propose its text, the Commission has in fact waited for the Convention to express the political will to make a constitution and for its Praesidium to elaborate its famous squelette ».
But let's get back to us and to current events. All of the aforementioned were stages of progressive approach, not too obvious, if you look at them from a short-term perspective. If, on the other hand, you observe from a distance, with a look not afflicted by myopia, the drawing begins to appear very clear in its premeditated intentionality. In short, it was the practical and flawless implementation of the boiled frog strategy. Too many passages, in too long a time and never debated enough, have made us lose the sense of the tapestry as a whole.
That things really went like this, the historian and columnist of the Corriere, Sergio Romano, explains in detail in a 2004 book, Europe, history of an idea . Romano, at one point, talks about the method used by Jean Monnet. The latter is one of the old foxes responsible for the community unification process. He realized that the ruling classes of the individual countries (as quarrelsome as Renzo's capons) would not have given up so easily "the sacrosanct symbols of national sovereignty" (Romano's words). To flush them out of the hen house where each was confined, Monnet resorted to a subterfuge that strikingly recalls the technique I have spoken of in this chapter.
The author, as a historian, summarizes it as follows: «It was necessary to unify some sectors, entrust their administration to a supranational authority and hope that every step towards integration would create the need for a further step. Thus began a kind of domino game ». And, again: «This was the European domination: one chip next to the other, according to the logic of necessity and opportunity. Each progress created problems that required new solutions, each stretch of road opened new perspectives and forced Europe to broaden its horizon ».
The project is conceived just like a parlor game or – if you prefer a metaphor more suited to the times – like the advance of a blockchain. Not only is each step small and apparently unrelated to the "long march" of which it constitutes an insignificant segment, but it is made in such a way that it can no longer be questioned once taken. Each move inexorably and irrevocably blocks all those already made previously. Thus, peoples and states find themselves in a position to have only one possibility: to stand still or to move forward. And, of course, the progressive and the reformist on duty have a good game in suggesting that it is certainly worthwhile to push ahead.
After all, if you are thirty, you should make thirty-one, right? As for the appropriate countermeasures to this stratagem, there are essentially two:
- in the first place, we must find the time and the way to study history, even recent, if we want to have an overview adequate to understand the logic of things and, above all, that of the strategists behind the scenes. This means work , effort , discernment . Three elements that obviously take time. That time of which, perhaps not surprisingly, the current structure of society systematically deprives us: if we work, because work dries us up and is now led to such frenetic rhythms that we arrive in the evening drained of all energy. And maybe only able to think about how to spend the evening in peace; if we do not work, because the absence of work anguishes us and therefore focuses our attention only on the need to put together lunch and dinner. In both cases, we must then deal with the pitfalls of entertainment, that is, the disproportionate number of possible distracting sources represented by the boundless offer of media, films, internet, pastimes and so on and so forth. Not only is this not accidental, it comes with a price. It "gets us out of the way", literally. In short, it prevents us from participating in the game, it prevents us from orienting ourselves through its path and its "boxes", it prevents us from understanding its rules and functioning. Ultimately, it deprives us of the very possibility of “playing”, that is, of counting for something. Well: in order to understand, orient and decide (consequently) in a sensible and conscious way, we must prepare, apply and study the rules of the game. Also, and above all, part of these rules is the knowledge of the recent history of the unification process, of the “key” passages of this history, of the links between one passage and another. It's up to us to decide if it's worth it. If we lean towards no, then let's not complain that it is so bad, all tight and enslaved, on the famous hot roof.
- Secondly, we must always remember that going back is not the only option on the plate. If backing down, in certain cases and at certain times, may seem a frightening solution (think of all the media terrorism on Brexit or on Italexit), then we can also focus on a less ambitious, but temporarily effective goal: that of " stay still ”, to refuse to proceed along a path whose perverse origins and real, and not at all good, intentions have been discovered. The strategy of standing still has many limitations, but also some big advantages: that of stopping the march to hell, to begin with. It is a temporary tactic, of course, but it allows us to catch our breath, to look around us, to understand if it is really a marked "destiny" that indicated to us by those who urge us to continue forward and without respite. In other words: it is only by stopping that one can develop the desire, and the strength, to go back.
Francesco Carraro
www.francescocarraro.com
Reading suggestions: " Self-defense manual for sovereignists " (Byoblu editore)
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The article The strategy of graduality: how to de-sovereign a state without the knowledge of a people comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/la-strategia-della-gradualita-come-de-sovranizzare-uno-stato-allinsaputa-di-un-popolo/ on Sun, 20 Dec 2020 18:28:18 +0000.