The new art of war

The new art of war

PRAVDA

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Translating into Italian the work of the Russian political scientist Leonid Savin Couching & conflicts was for me an experience that aroused mixed emotions. If on the one hand, in fact, you must necessarily face similar works to enrich the baggage of your knowledge and ability to understand the world around us, on the other hand, you exposes yourself to the risk, far from being merely potential, of the disenchantment in finding yourself deceived by those you trusted: this is what happened to me, when the miserable events of Italian politics mixed in August 2019 with my efforts to translate the chapter dedicated to the Ukrainian Maidan. Couching & conflicts deals with the theory concerning the "new art of war", which is also the title of the Italian edition [1]: not only information and disinformation as they are generally understood but also, among other things, the set of methods by which a country can be affected economically and socially through the manipulation of its economy on international markets, so as to favor a change of government (or "regime", just to use a word that makes so much bad anti-demokrats...). From these manipulations to the sadly known colored revolutions, perhaps followed by an external military intervention, the step may not be really immediate but still remains tragic: Libya docet, the Latins would say, and so also Syria even if right against the lions of Damascus the mechanism has jammed, showing its inevitable limits. Savin's book Reading and translating Savin's book I got the idea that the great puppeteers of our time, the United States of America dully stuck in their illusion of still living in an exquisitely unipolar world, succeeded in the crazy and visionary task to turn the generic ideas about war of Sun Tzu into a field operating manual. The world of Sun Tzu is two-dimensional, as are all agricultural and technological ones: in it, there is no Air Force that can be deployed against the enemy nor are possible any reconnaissance in the skies of an enemy country to gather valuable information or disturb its communications. In such a world, there are not even computers, Internet and computer networks that have allowed the diffusion of a different type of networks, the social ones, which today find wide application in the context we are talking about.

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