Tuesday, January 23, 2007

sun tzu

although martin kramer's conference Know Thy Enemy or an Approximation Thereof and link should go in my mis morerías blog, as it deals with the relationship of western societies with islam and the arab world, its general meaning and applicability to so many things of our daily life made me announce it here.

as an appetizer, i will reproduce here a quote attributed to the ancient chinese general sun tzu that serves mister kramer to present his own thoughts: "Know thy enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are sure to be defeated in every battle."

and will quote mister kramer himself, disguised as a composite of Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, Osama bin Laden, Bashar Asad, Muqtada as-Sadr, and Khalid Mash'al: "Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful." ... "Too often, you aren't prepared to give us credit for having visions of our own. And when you overhear snippets of our own big ideas... you say: oh, that's not really serious." (...) "To summarize your problem in a sentence: you don't give us credit for having what you have, which is vision."

You will find the full conference in
mister kramer's sundstorm blog