John Minford, #SunTzu 9: 46 "If a general is by turns tyrannical and in terror of his own men, it is a sign of supreme incompetence."
Funny, this verse leans both ways. Here's what I mean. Followers can terrorize - or at least terrify - their leaders and reduce them to tyranny through their petrified fear. Leaders are just humans; they suffer all the same weaknesses the rest of us do.
Here's an example. In elementary school I did very poorly, and thought I was quite unintelligent. My teachers all told my parents not to worry about it, as I was actually above average in intellect, just rebellious in my studies. I didn't comply well enough for good grades.
I started to figure out how to force myself into the beginnings of disciplined study, and some of the social skills to pacify teachers' expectations, and my grades went up. Ah, but in college, I unwittingly came to completely and utterly terrify some of my professors.
Guess which ones. Yep, you got it, the incompetent ones. Once I found and released my inner academic lion, I was taken over by a kind of raw, unstoppable competitiveness, and simply fought for every single point that went into winning my 4.0 GPA.
The most tyrannically terrified professor was in my Political Science course. I had no idea how much I detested him for his incompetence, but he knew, and hated to see me marching toward his desk to fight over this or that about my scores.
It was even worse in his lectures. He had never read a primary source. He hadn't read the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. He'd never read any history other than the pablum they put in textbooks. So, I'd come to class fresh from the library. You get the idea...
I can't honestly tell you I've found my true empathy for the poor bastard, I haven't. But I can tell you that I now - with Master Sun's counsel - understand all I did to cause him to be both so terrified of me, and so angry at me to the point of foolish severity.
I'll spare you the gory details, although I remember every single one of them these near 40 years later! I do have to share that he ended up giving me a B+ for the course, destroying my perfect 4.0. Yep, 3.95 GPS resulted. I laugh, but no, I'll never forgive him for that.
I've shared many times that Benghazi was one of my own more horrible turning points. Clinton's Impeachment turned me away from Democrats. I'd been so happy with his election in 1992, but his behavior in the Oval Office disgusted me, and his lies in a court to a Judge.
I still wasn't at a place of seriousness yet, until September 11, 2001. Those two planes burned holes into my identity when they flew into the towers. Any of us in adulthood at the time will never be the same again, as we were before. American childhood ended that day.
For all that, I didn't know what to do. As many of you know, I didn't find the path to action until 2016. But Benghazi was the real turning point in my soul. I judge Obama viciously and utterly, cool kid in charge of his cool clique, violently running his cool kid's world.
So, Obama defeats HRC in 2008 and becomes the coolest president since Jack Kennedy, and even cooler because he's black. As I've shared, I was so happy for that, foolishly thinking America could finally put paid to the issue of racism at last.
But what's he going to do about HRC? He's got to give her the greatest plum, the most powerful position in the world after the office of POTUS, Secretary of State. And what a perfect position for her and one and only one Blackberry.
So, now she can extract the greatest rewards and threaten the most hellacious punishments in the world. Evil Goddess-like in her power, she can destroy kings and obliterate nations, and that is precisely what she did. It was her job to let the world know her power.
I'm getting a bit too emotional right now. I will never forget or forgive what happened in Benghazi. September 11, 2012, precisely 11 years to the day after the World Trade Center attacks. So, please allow me to intellectualize just a bit by going back to Master Sun's text.
To fully internalize the power of today's verse - 9: 46 - you need to read verses 44 & 45 again, and follow how today's verse is their culmination, demonstrating how a weak general fails utterly. He gives excessive rewards in desperation, excessive punishments in exhaustion.
By turns tyrannical and terrified of his own men, his complete incompetence overtakes the day. A teaser on tomorrow's verse shows the ultimate outcome. Envoys with words of conciliation appear, desiring cessation of combat. His defeat is complete.
How exhausted was HRC during the 2016 campaign, and how petrified of real people, or any form of actual journalism where she might be asked a real question? How about those ropes her people use to shield her when walking in the public? How incompetent was her campaign?
She still continues to call her campaign a victory and continues to generate ever new reasons why she failed to be rewarded for her victory with the office that was her right as Queen Tyrant of America. I'll come back to Benghazi another day.
Before we close out today's discussion, allow me to offer one additional teaser for tomorrow's work. We The People were led though inexorable steps to surrender our Constitutional Rights, and allow our federal government to become a tyrant, afraid of us. We'll discuss that.
If you need any proof at all, just look at the perpetual endeavor to remove the president we elected, in hope of Making America Great Again. Our hope was a president who would return us to freedom, to our Constitution, and remove the yoke of tyranny from our shoulders.
You'd better bet they're deathly afraid of us, their men, in 2020. They'll hand out their vast rewards to bribe the bribable. They'll tyrannize the best among us, who don't bend to corruption's allure. And they will reveal their exhaustion, desperation, and complete incompetence.
274 verses completed, 182 to go. To return to previous sections in our #WarForAmerica2020 and #SunTzuForMAGA series, don't forget to head over to @WarForAmerica21. You'll find the digital table of contents for this series, there. Please retweet each entry you enjoy.
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