They Are Using The Martial Arts… Against You
Wake up progressive strategy wonks, or you’ll continue to be outflanked and utterly defeated.
Puerto Rico and Hurricane Maria are suddenly wiped off the media radar. How does this magic happen so rapidly, frequently and adroitly?
Textbook martial arts strategies, that’s how.
There’s much to turn our head, what with the Secretary of State calling the president “a moron,” Harvey Weinstein (rightfully) getting attacked for doing what Trump does to women with impunity, the NRA suddenly being all warm and fuzzy with gun control after the Las Vegas massacre by deceptively supporting “inquiries” into ‘bump stock’, and Trump’s giddy and irresponsible implications of mysterious military strikes or some other shocking news.
Five Jiu Jitsu Phrases to Tip You Off
The main phrases being used to describe how Jiu Jitsu is being used against you are simple, and there’s only five (5) of them.
Five Jiu Jitsu Phrases to Tip You Off
- Jiu Jitsu move- “Latisha did an awesome Jiu Jitsu move on Ted that left him completely speechless.”
- Political Jiu Jitsu- “The Republican Party just did a political Jiu Jitsu move on the leading Democrats that left them tripping all over themselves.”
- Moral Jiu Jitsu- “If you want to protest more effectively, learn a few moral Jiu Jitsu techniques.”
- Off balancing the enemy- “It’s good to get your attacker off balance. But you’ve got to keep your own balance at the same time, while simultaneously steering the encounter (or relationship) to a more balanced position.”
- Using the enemy’s force or strength against him- Imagine reading a headline like this (oh, wait): “A congressman who is an outspoken opponent of abortions, pressured his girlfriend, with whom he was having an illicit affair, to get an abortion.”
Just the fact that they are calling this stuff Jiu Jitsu or Aikido, two masterful self-defense arts, shows us how seriously all this martial arts mumbo-jumbo is actually being taken.
Aikido embodies the idea that when we stop resisting something, we stop giving it power. In aikido, an uke, the person who receives an attack from the thrower, or nage, absorbs and transforms the incoming energy through harmony and blending. There is no word for competitor, only for the one who is giving or receiving the energy.- Essay on Sarah Lewis, from Maria Popova’s Brainpickings
Below, you’re going to see a lot of references to our five terms. But keep in mind, you might not see this topic talked about anywhere (except here). That’s because not many Jiu Jitsu or Aikido teachers are writing about what’s clearly there to see.
Political Jiu Jitsu
Let’s investigate how we are all being out maneuvered. And notice that what I’m going to be citing is easy to find. These things are not made-up nor are they unhinged ravings.
To get the ball rolling, I did a cursory Twitter search.
Clearly this is not a random term. It took less than 30 seconds to open Twitter and search for these results.
Jiu Jitsu is a study of the philosophy of consciousness, and how to manipulate the attacker
One of Jiu Jitsu’s Essential Points of Self Defense is to, “Avoid trouble whenever possible.”
We can interpret this to be an encouragement to becoming pacifists. But when we are under attack, putting our head in the sand is not a healthy option. To counterbalance any notion of avoiding the realities of life, another essential rule states, “Be aware of your surroundings.”
Awareness, then, becomes a vital tool of good self-defense.
If you study philosophy, you’re already aware that there are many branches of the tree, many ways of thinking, of stitching together how the mind thinks, why it even thinks at all, and what it thinks about under what circumstances. Is thought real? What’s real?
The philosophical camp of the objectivists forms the far larger group of practicing philosophers. Scientific and cautious, this group tends to be a bit leery of subjectiveness and experience. And philosophers, like quantum many physicists, also tend to get a little nervous when the topics of awareness and consciousness emerge.
The branch of philosophy which tries to sort though consciousness is not necessarily the most highly regarded branch- because it touches all that so-called hard-to-quantify touchy-feely stuff. It is called Phenomenology, or “the study of that which appears.” Marginalized or not, it is a fascinating discipline, and represents the aspect of western philosophy most closely tied to eastern philosophies such as Taoism and Zen.
Consciousness is such a forbidding study that one person, Dr. David Chalmers, decided to provide a simplified overview of it, a view which would allow both students and scholars to be more facile in their studies.
“Australian philosopher David Chalmers [came] to the rescue — a bit. In a 1994 paper, Dr. Chalmers divided the problem of consciousness into two parts, easy and hard.”
Easy and hard. Let’s keep focusing on the easier stuff.
Moral Jiu Jitsu, made easy
Moral Jiu Jitsu is described as a method of deploying Jiu Jitsu-based tactics when involved in non-violent protests. Gandhi’s methods are cited as an example.
Richard Gregg (1885–1974) was a Quaker Lawyer, a leading American theorist on non-violence and one of the first people to introduce Gandhi’s teachings on non-violence to the Western world. He described the tactics of non-violence as “moral jiu-jitsu.”
Gregg draws the analogy between non-violence and the practice of jiu-jitsu.
The victim not only lets his attacker come but, as it were, he pulls him forward by kindness, generosity and voluntary suffering, so that the attacker loses his moral balance.
What we are clearly seeing here are items 3, 4 and 5 from our list above. Gregg uses the actual term “moral jiu-jitsu,” while the writer is using the concept of the defender creating an off-balance situation, including using the enemy’s strength or energy against him.
Our list is really quite useful.
They’re using Aikido to lull us “back to sleep”
There’s a handful of journalists to whom I turn for insight and inspiration. I’ve recently discovered Caitlin Johnstone, an independent writer from Australia. The day I sat down to write this article, I came across this aikido reference incorporating diversion and momentum.
Humanity’s natural impulse toward goodness and harmony gives birth to something beautiful, and the psychopathic elites who have seized control of our world find a way to corrupt it toward their interests. Humanity is constantly striving to wake up from its illusions and begin functioning in a sane way, but these bastards are so adept at the science of social manipulation that they always find a way to divert the momentum of those efforts, aikido-like, toward lulling humanity back to sleep.- Caitlin Johnstone
Economic wars incorporate Jiu Jitsu moves as a powerful tool
Allan Greenspan, a neocon economic wizard, was blunt in how the upper class uses the lower class’s energy against them. From an interview with Noam Chomsky:
As Greenspan explained during his glory days, his successes in economic management were based substantially on “growing worker insecurity.” Intimidated working people would not ask for higher wages, benefits and security, but would be satisfied with the stagnating wages and reduced benefits that signal a healthy economy by neoliberal standards.
Russia accused of using Jiu Jitsu against democracies
Russia’s information warfare is a form of political jiu-jitsu, reflecting its belief that the simplest way to take down a democracy is to turn its most powerful asset, the open minds of citizens, into a vulnerability.- Source
Jiu Jitsu and the Jihadists
One of my favorite social/political/economic philosophers is Noam Chomsky. Incredibly informed and articulate, Noam never stops trying to wake us up.
Scott Atran, one of the most insightful researchers on jihadi movements, calculates that “the 9/11 attacks cost between $400,000 and $500,000 to execute, whereas the military and security response by the U.S. and its allies is in the order of 10 million times that figure. On a strictly cost-benefit basis, this violent movement has been wildly successful, beyond even Bin Laden’s original imagination, and is increasingly so. Herein lies the full measure of jujitsu-style asymmetric warfare. After all, who could claim that we are better off than before, or that the overall danger is declining?”
Chomsky is using an example here that is vital in our understanding the power of Jiu Jitsu: leverage. One person, in the right place, doing the right move, can create a 10,000 fold effect.
Weaponizing American society, using Jiu Jitsu moves
In many forms, Jiu Jitsu is being used against us: economically, morally, politically and, most importantly, cleverly.
Dictatorial security states and heavily armed police forces are well prepared to deal with violent outbursts, which conveniently serve to justify heavy-handed repression and legitimate a trend toward militarization. The corporate media is all too willing to play along, with local news stations fixating on acts they perceive as violent and valorizing attempts to restore order. What confounds and destabilizes authorities is a different type of militancy. Gene Sharp writes, “Nonviolent struggle against violent repression creates a special, asymmetrical conflict situation,” in which the use of force by those in power can rebound against them and embolden opposition.
There is a parallel here to the martial art of jiu-jitsu, where practitioners use the momentum of an opponent’s blow to throw him off balance. “Harsh repression against nonviolent resisters may be perceived as unreasonable, distasteful, inhuman, or harmful to… the society,” Sharp explains. Therefore, it turns the public against the attackers, provokes sympathetic onlookers to join the demonstrations, and encourages defections even within those groups that might regularly be opposed to protests.- sourced from Bill Moyers website and the book What Makes Non-Violent Movements Explode?
