(Answer at the end).
WINNERS
By Charles Kocian
After three days of the Midterms Elections, the land of the free were still waiting the final results. In contrast, Brazil took only some hours to give the results of its last presidential election. Who wins a political or any other kind of competition? Sun Tzu, the great Chinese military strategist said that victory is for who he knows better the terrain: objective reality: “We may distinguish six kinds of terrain, to wit: 1, accessible ground; 2, entangling ground; 3, temporizing ground; 4, narrow passes; 5, precipitous heights; 6, positions at a great distance from the enemy.”
USA taxpayers voting in the Midterms Elections of 2022.
“I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.” Joseph Stalin said and added: “The State is an instrument in the hands of the ruling class, used to break the resistance of the adversaries of that class.”
USA president Dwight Eisenhower make a similar comment. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.”
Kennedy and Eisenhower in the White House.
In April 27, 1961, president John F. Kennedy said in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel that “The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions.”
His assassination is well documented in the Oliver Stone Film JFK, with Kevin Costner.
JFK film by Oliver Stone.
In the same speech, Kennedy continued saying that: “Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed –and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment, the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution, not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply “give the public what it wants”, but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate and sometimes even anger public opinion.”
Democracy in the Renaissance.
Going to the times of the Renaissance, Florence was governed by a group of citizens instead of a prince. Its citizens did not take their right of self-government for granted. They treated freedom as a prerequisite and expression of personal virtue. Among their values were individualism and secular scepticism which was reflected in their buildings, art and science.
Luther nailing its 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg’s Castle Church in Germany.
The Renaissance values propagated through the printing press challenging Vatican’s authority. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed its 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg’s Castle Church in Germany. That derived into the Reformation wars that lasted from 1618 to 1648. It started as a battle between the Catholic and Protestant states within the Holy Roman Empire but ended being a war between the rulers of Europe, which by the way, was fought by the ruled of both sides.
Battle of White Mountain, November 8, 1620, in the Reformation Wars.
One of the battles of the Reformation wars was the Battle of White Mountain, that took place in November of 1620 near Prague. It was a major victory of the Roman Catholic Habsburgs over the Protestant Military Union.
This war between rulers, and between rulers and ruled, is a story that has been repeated since the Bronze Age. The Sea Peoples ended the Bronze Age burning the principal cities of the commercial routes attacking also Egypt. Its Empire didn’t last with the international commerce interrupted. Perhaps the Bronze Age ruled were angry with the Bronze Age rulers. Nothing new under the sun.
Sea Peoples attacking Egypt.
We can read from Wikipedia: “It has been proposed that the Sea Peoples originated from a number of different locations, such as western Asia Minor, the Aegean, the Mediterranean islands, and Southern Europe. Although the archaeological inscriptions do not include reference to a migration, the Sea Peoples are conjectured to have sailed around the eastern Mediterranean and invaded Anatolia, Syria, Phoenicia, Canaan, Cyprus, and Egypt toward the end of the Bronze Age.”
Athenian political corruption existed.
After the Bronze Age, in ancient Athens, the corrupt politicians were consistently conjured up in public discourse to explain bad political results, playing free speech a central role in its Democracy. But it was not enough. They invented the Kleroterion which was a device to randomly select citizens for state councils, offices and court juries among others power positions. That process was called The Sortition. It was their principal way of achieving fairness and equity from a larger pool of candidates to avoid power corruption.
Kleroterion, a device invented by the Greeks to inhibit “power corruption”.
The Kleroterion was a stone incised with rows of slots and with an attached tube. The citizens’ token was placed in the slots, and the container was filled with dice of different colours. The dice were released one by one, and each corresponded to a specific row of tokens. The selection decided who was given a seat on the citizen’s council or juries and other positions of power.
CONCLUSION
Since the Bronze Age there has been a war between rulers, and between rulers and ruled. Because war is the art of deception, the rulers has created all kind of deceptions to control the mind of the ruled. Who wins? In the long term, the only winner of humanity is the honest mind, because both, rulers or ruled, they need intellectual honesty to achieve individual self-esteem.
Individual self-esteem is the soul of an advance civilization.
Now answer to question 25.
QUESTION N° 25
In sports and war wins who knows best the terrain.
a) True
b) False
The answer is: true.
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