Thirty-six practical applications (3)
Six six thirty-six, the number in the technique, the number in the operation. "Soldiers are not tired of deception" is a prominent feature of military struggle, and China has always paid great attention to the strategy of military struggle, and since ancient times there have been various books on the art of war. Among them, the "Thirty-Six Plans" was written in the Ming and Qing dynasties, which belongs to the later one, so it is a collection of dacheng ones. The "Thirty-Six Plans" summarizes the military thinking and struggle experience of successive dynasties, and in this issue we talk about the third plan of winning battles, "killing people with a knife."
"Killing people with a knife" is a poisonous scheme, which is more appropriate to say that it is a military strategy than a political power trick that deceives oneself. However, there is no clear boundary between political power and military struggle, in any case, they are both struggle strategies, and the ideological pulse is the same -- taking it from the enemy, making it fight itself, and weakening the enemy's position. Unlike the "encircling Wei and saving Zhao" strategy we talked about in the previous issue, there are many examples of "killing people with a knife", such as the Emperor Taiji's divisive plan to get rid of Yuan Chonghuan by The hand of Chongzhen, and Sima Yi to use the hand of Zhuge Liang to get rid of the internal competitor Zhang Guo. In modern warfare, it is not uncommon to use the creation and exploitation of contradictions in enemy positions as a military strategy, such as Hitler in World War II, which was repeatedly used.
In the winter of 1936, Hitler suddenly received information that Soviet Marshal Tukhachevsky might launch a coup d'état. Although Germany had not yet gone to war with the Soviet Union, but weighing up this insufficient evidence, Hitler had a poisonous plan to "kill with a knife" in order to eliminate Tukhachevsky, a possible future heavyweight opponent. If this is really done, it can also be exchanged for the Soviet Union's good feelings for Germany, thus stabilizing the East and eliminating worries. So Hitler had the intelligence chief Heydrich secretly organize a series of "evidences" to "collect" and "fabricate" Tukhachevsky's anti-Soviet campaign. These "evidences" included forged correspondence between Tukhachevsky and his colleagues and senior German generals (the content of which consisted mainly of Tukhachevsky's coup plan), the sale of information by Tukhachevsky and others to Germany and the receipts of huge sums of money obtained, and the transcript of the reply letter from the German intelligence services to Tukhachevsky. Heydrich then managed to transfer this information to Soviet spies. Not surprisingly, the Soviet high command bought the information for a huge sum of three million rubles, and Tukhachevsky and eight other high-ranking generals who could fight well were quickly arrested, difficult to reply to in the face of a large amount of "evidence", and sentenced to death in just a few tens of minutes of interrogation, and executed in twelve hours. Later, the German invasion of the Soviet Union was very smooth in the early stages of the war, which had a lot to do with the lack of experienced senior command generals in the Soviet Union. Hitler was very good at using this tactic, and used a similar strategy before the German invasion of Norway. The German fascists, through political deception and espionage, gathered a large number of sympathizers in Norway and formed a coalition party, which was later renamed the Fifth Column, which was used to oppose the Norwegian authorities as an internal force for the military invasion of Norway, allowing them to consume themselves.
In fact, I think that the "knife" of "borrowing a knife to kill people" should refer to third-party forces, not necessarily only to alienate each other. According to the conditions of the two sides of the game at that time, external factors such as celestial phenomena and geography can become "knives", such as Kublai Khan's two wars to invade Japan, both of which suffered heavy losses due to typhoons, the capsizing of countless large and small warships, and there was no longer any power to launch an attack, and Japan was saved. For the Japanese side, the "typhoon" is a "knife", and the Mongols are not so much defeated by Japan as they are defeated by typhoons. In general, the "borrow a knife to kill people" strategy is more sinister and less elegant, and perhaps the "waiting for work" in the next issue will be more elegant.