A Managed Conflict Apparatus

Three essays written in the 1960s by the strategic-minded James Burnham – himself a former Trotskyite admired by Trotsky himself – will still help us to understand and counteract certain lesser known “weapons systems” that are non-kinetic , such as “political warfare” and a subordinated, but strategically directed “psychological warfare.” While more generally trying to consider and differentiate various “forms of modern warfare,” Burnham also chooses to remind us of Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881), whom Lenin greatly admired, especially his covert “Blanquist Cadres” and their strategic direction of a revolutionary “Conflict Apparatus” (especially in the manipulation of mobs). We may still learn much from a lucid articulation of these principles and methods, and thereby more effectively be able to resist them – or even perhaps to apply them carefully ourselves, virtuously and under strict discipline – though today, necessarily now, under new conditions of advanced breakthrough technologies and the abiding reality of pervasive “Perception Management” ( i.e., “Deception”).

Whereas James Burnham considers – and necessarily in 1960 focuses on – “the Political Action of Communist Forces” (Menshevik, Bolshevik, Gramscian, and Maoist), we may now aptly transpose and apply his insights to the “Political Action of Islamic Forces and Jewish Forces,” as well as to Revolutionary Leftist Forces, in general: the applied doctrines of Saul Alinsky, George Soros, and other such networks of strategic organization and uprooting agitation such as the revolutionary liberationist Jesuits, those ardently dialectical (Hegelian and Marxist), purportedly progressive neo-Modernist ones.

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