The 33 Strategies of War (83 page)

For the next few years, Breton's strategy seemed to be working. Dali's scandalous paintings were the talk of Paris. His exhibitions caused riots. Suddenly everyone was interested in surrealism again, even younger artists. But by 1933, Breton was beginning to rue his inclusion of Dali. He had begun to get letters from the Spaniard expressing great interest in Hitler as a source of paranoiac inspiration. Only the surrealists, Dali felt, were capable of "saying pretty things on the subject" of Hitler; he even wrote of sexually charged dreams about Hitler. As news of Dali's infatuation with the Fuhrer spread within the movement, it provoked a great deal of argument. Many surrealists had communist sympathies and were disgusted by the Spanish artist's musings. To make matters worse, he included in one enormous painting an image of Lenin in a grotesque pose--exposing oversized buttocks (nine feet long), propped on a crutch. Many in the surrealist group admired Lenin; was Dali being deliberately provocative? After Breton told Dali he disliked this rendition of the human buttocks and anus, a delirious profusion of anus images suddenly began to populate the artist's paintings.

Throughout his revolutionary and missionary travels, Hasan
[
leader of the Nizari Ismailis
]
was searching for an impregnable fortress from which to conduct his resistance to the Seljuk empire. In about 1088, he finally chose the castle of Alamut, built on a narrow ridge on a high rock in the heart of the Elburz Mountains in a region known as the Rudbar. The castle dominated an enclosed cultivated valley thirty miles long and three miles across at its widest, approximately six thousand feet above sea level. Several villages dotted the valley, and their inhabitants were particularly receptive to the ascetic piety of Hasan. The castle was accessible only with the greatest difficulty through a narrow gorge of the Alamut River.... Hasan employed a careful strategy to take over the castle, which had been granted to its current Shiite owner, named Mahdi, by the Seljuk sultan Malikshah. First, Hasan sent his trusted
dai
Husayn Qai-ni and two others to win converts in the neighboring villages. Next, many of the residents and soldiers of Alamut were secretly converted to Ismailism. Finally, in September 1090, Hasan himself was secretly smuggled into the castle. When Mahdi realized that Hasan had in fact quietly taken over his fortress, he left peacefully....

T
HE
T
EMPLARS AND THE
A
SSASSINS
, J
AMES
W
ASSERMAN
, 2001

By early 1934, Breton could stand no more, and he issued a statement, cosigned by several members, proposing Dali's expulsion from the surrealist group. The movement was split down the middle; Dali had both supporters and enemies. Finally a meeting was called to debate the issue. Dali had a fever and a sore throat; he came to the meeting wearing half a dozen layers of clothing and with a thermometer in his mouth. As Breton paced the room, listing the reasons for his banishment, Dali began to take off and put on his overcoat, jacket, and sweaters, trying to regulate his temperature. It was hard for anyone to pay attention to Breton.

Finally Dali was asked to respond. "I had painted both Lenin and Hitler on the basis of dreams," he said, the thermometer in his mouth making him spit many of his words. "Lenin's anamorphic buttock was not insulting, but the very proof of my fidelity to surrealism." He continued to put on and take off clothing. "All taboos are forbidden, or else a list has to be made of those to be observed, and let Breton formally state that the kingdom of surrealist poetry is nothing but a little domain used for the house arrest of those convicted felons placed under surveillance by the vice squad or the Communist Party."

The members of the circle were perplexed to say the least: Dali had turned their meeting into a kind of surrealist performance, both making fun of the creative freedom they advocated and claiming it for himself. He had also made them laugh. A vote to exclude him would only confirm the accusations he had leveled at them. For the time being, they decided to leave him alone, but in the meeting's aftermath it was clear that the surrealist movement was now more divided than ever.

At the end of that year, Dali disappeared to New York. Word came back to Paris that he had completely conquered the art world in America, making surrealism the hottest movement around. In the years to come, he would actually emigrate to the United States, and his face would grace the cover of
Time
magazine. From New York his fame spread far, wide, and around the world. Meanwhile the surrealists themselves faded quietly from public view, marginalized by other art movements. In 1939, Breton, disgusted by his lack of control over Dali, finally expelled the Spanish artist from the group, but by then it hardly mattered: Dali himself had become synonymous with surrealism, and it would stay that way long after the surrealist movement had died.

Interpretation

Salvador Dali was an extremely ambitious man. Although he appeared eccentric to say the least, his diaries show the extent to which he applied strategy to get what he wanted. Languishing in Spain early on in his career, he saw the importance of capturing the Paris art world, the center of the modern-art movement, if he were to rise to the heights of fame. And if he were to make it in Paris, his name would have to be attached to some kind of movement--that would demonstrate his avant-garde status and give him free publicity. Considering the nature of his work and paranoiac-critical method, surrealism was the only logical choice. Of course it helped that Dali's good friend Bunuel was already a member of the group and that his lover, Gala, was also the wife of Paul Eluard, one of surrealism's principal authors and thinkers. Through Bunuel, Gala, and a few others (people Dali called "messengers" and "porters"), he spread his name strategically throughout Paris and aimed himself directly at Breton. In truth, Dali despised any kind of organized group and actively disliked Breton, but both could be useful to him. By insinuating his presence through others and suggesting that he was a surrealist
avant la lettre,
he cleverly managed to get Breton to invite him into the group.

Now, as a true surrealist, an official insider, Dali could continue to wage his insidious war. At first he made a show of being a loyal member of the group, the platform from which he spent several years winning over Paris with his striking paintings. The surrealists were grateful for the new life he had given them, but in reality he was using their name and presence to propel his career. Then, once his fame was secure, he proceeded to dynamite the group from the inside. The weaker the surrealists were internally, the more he could dominate them publicly. Dali deliberately chose Hitler and Lenin as images he knew would disgust many in the group. That would both bring out Breton's totalitarian side and cause a major split among the members. Dali's "performance" at the meeting to expel him was a surrealist masterpiece in itself, and a strategic blow to any vestiges of group unity. Finally, when the movement was riven with division, he scampered off to New York to complete his campaign. Appropriating the seductive name of surrealism for himself, he would go down in history as its most famous member, far more famous than Breton.

It is hard to make your way in the world alone. Alliances can help, but if you are starting out, it is hard to get the right people interested in an alliance with you; there is nothing in it for them. The wisest strategy is often to join the group that can best serve your long-term interests, or the one with which you have the most affinity. Instead of trying to conquer this group from the outside, you burrow your way into it. As an insider you can gather valuable information about how it functions and particularly about its members' hypocrisies and weaknesses--knowledge you can use to wage insidious intraorganizational warfare. From the inside you can divide and conquer.

Remember: your advantage here is that, unlike the other members, you have no sentimental attachment to the group; your only allegiance is to yourself. That gives you the freedom you need to make the manipulative and destructive maneuvers that will propel you to the fore at the others' expense.

If you decide to wage a war for the total triumph of your individuality, you must begin by inexorably destroying those who have the greatest affinity with you.

--Salvador Dali (1904-1989)

KEYS TO WARFARE

The most common form of defense in old-fashioned warfare was the fortress or walled city, and military leaders strategized for centuries about how to take such structures. The fortress presented a simple problem: it was designed to be impenetrable, to require such an effort to take it that unless doing so was strategically essential, an army would tend to pass it by. The conventional strategy against the fortress was to scale or breach its walls, using siege engines and battering rams. Often that meant first besieging it, creating around it circles known as "lines of circumvallation and contravallation" that would prevent supplies and reinforcements from coming in and the defenders from leaving. The city's inhabitants would slowly starve and weaken, making it possible eventually to breach the walls and take the castle. These sieges tended to be quite long and bloody.

Over the centuries, however, certain enlightened strategists hit upon a different way to bring down the walls. Their strategy was based on a simple premise: the apparent strength of the fortress is an illusion, for behind its walls are people who are trapped, afraid, even desperate. The city's leaders have essentially run out of options; they can only put their faith in the fortress's architecture. To lay siege to these walls is to mistake the appearance of strength for reality. If in fact the walls are hiding great weakness within, then the proper strategy is to bypass them and aim for the interior. This can be done literally, by digging tunnels beneath the walls, undermining their strength--a conventional military strategy. A better, more devious route is to infiltrate people inside them or to work with the city's disaffected inhabitants. This is known as "opening an inner front"--finding a group on the inside who will work on your behalf to spread discontent and will eventually betray the fortress into your hands, sparing you a long siege.

In late January 1968, the North Vietnamese launched the famous Tet Offensive against the South Vietnamese and American armies. Among their targets was Hue, the ancient capital of Vietnam and a city of great religious significance for the Vietnamese people. In the center of Hue is a massive fort called the Citadel, and within the Citadel is the Imperial Palace compound, the heart and soul of Hue. The Citadel has incredibly thick and high walls and is surrounded on all sides by water. In 1968 it was guarded by American soldiers and their allies. Yet the North Vietnamese were somehow able to take the Citadel with remarkable ease. They held it for several weeks, then disappeared from Hue as if by magic after a massive U.S. counterattack. The Citadel was unimportant to them as a physical or strategic possession; what they were after was the symbolism of being able to take it, showing the world that American invincibility was a myth.

The capture of the Citadel was a remarkable feat, and this is how it was done. Months before Tet, the North Vietnamese began to infiltrate men into the city and to organize those of their sympathizers who already lived in Hue and worked inside the Citadel. They got hold of detailed plans of the fortress, which allowed them to dig elaborate tunnels under its walls. They were also able to leave stockpiles of weapons at key points. During the Tet holiday, they infiltrated even more of their men into the city, dressed as peasants. Confederates inside the fortress helped them to overrun some of the guard posts and open the gates. Melting into the local population, they made it impossible for the Citadel's defenders to distinguish friend from foe. Finally, having reconnoitered the location of the concentrated command structure inside the Citadel, the North Vietnamese were able to take it out right away, leaving the defenders unable to communicate with one another. This created mass confusion, and in the process the defense of the Citadel collapsed.

The North Vietnamese called this strategy the "blooming lotus." It has deep roots in Asian military thinking, and its applications go far beyond war. Instead of focusing on the enemy's formidable front, on capturing key points in the periphery of its defenses and finding a way through them (the traditional Western approach), the lotus strategy aims first and foremost at the center--the soft and vulnerable parts within. The goal is to funnel soldiers and confederates into this central area by whatever means possible and to attack it first in order to spread confusion. Rather than trying to penetrate defenses, it infiltrates them. This includes the minds of the enemy soldiers and officers--strategizing to get under their skin, to unbalance their reasoning powers, to soften them up from within. As with the lotus flower, everything unfolds from the center of the target.

To attack or to intervene.
--We often make the mistake of actively opposing a tendency or party or age because we happen to have seen only its external side, its deliquescence or the "faults of its virtues" necessarily adhering to it--perhaps because we ourselves have participated in them to a marked degree. Then we turn our back on them and go off in an opposite direction; but it would be better if we sought out their good and strong side instead or evolved and developed it in ourself. It requires, to be sure, a more penetrating eye and a more favorable inclination to advance what is imperfect and evolving than to see through it in its imperfection and deny it.

H
UMAN
, A
LL
T
OO
H
UMAN
, F
RIEDRICH
N
IETZSCHE
, 1878