The 33 Strategies of War - 29

OCCUPY THE MORAL HIGH GROUND

THE RIGHTEOUS STRATEGY

In a political world, the cause you are fighting for must seem more just than the enemy’s. Think of this as moral terrain that you and the other side are fighting over; by questioning your enemies’ motives and making them appear evil, you can narrow their base of support and room to maneuver. Aim at the soft spots in their public image, exposing any hypocrisies on their part. Never assume that the justice of your cause is self-evident; publicize and promote it. When you yourself come under moral attack from a clever enemy, do not whine or get angry; fight fire with fire. If possible, position yourself as the underdog, the victim, the martyr. Learn to inflict guilt as a moral weapon.

THE MORAL OFFENSIVE

In 1513 the thirty-seven-year-old Giovanni de’ Medici, son of the illustrious Florentine Lorenzo de’ Medici, was elected pope and assumed the name Leo X. The church that Leo now led was in many ways the dominant political and economic power in Europe, and Leo–a lover of poetry, theater, and painting, like others in his famous family–wanted to make it also a great patron of the arts. Earlier popes had begun the building of the basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome, the preeminent seat of the Catholic Church, but had left the structure unfinished. Leo wanted to complete this mighty project, permanently associating it with his name, but he would need to raise a fair amount of capital to be able to pay for the best artists to work on it.

And so in 1517, Leo launched a campaign to sell indulgences. Then as now, it was Catholic practice for the faithful to confess their sins to their priest, who would enforce their contrition by assigning them a penance, a kind of worldly punishment. Today this might simply be a prayer or a counting of the rosary, but penances were once more severe, including fasts and pilgrimages–or financial payments known as indulgences. The nobility might pay an indulgence in the form of a saintly relic purchased for their church, a large expense that would translate into the promise of a reduced time spent in purgatory after death (purgatory being a kind of halfway house for those not evil enough for hell, not good enough for heaven, so forced to wait); the lower classes might pay a smaller fee to buy forgiveness for their sins. Indulgences were a major source of church income.

For this particular campaign, Leo unleashed a squadron of expert indulgence salesmen across Europe, and the money began to pour in. As his chief architect for the completion of St. Peter’s he appointed the great artist Raphael, who planned to make the building a splendid work of art, Leo’s lasting legacy to the world. All was going well, until, in October 1517, news reached the pope that a priest named Martin Luther (1483-1546)–some tiresome German theologian–had tacked to the doors of the castle church of Wittenberg a tract called The Ninety-five Theses. Like many important documents of the time, the tract was originally in Latin, but it had been translated into German, printed up, and passed out among the public–and within a few weeks all Germany seemed to have read it. The Ninety-five Theses was essentially an attack on the practice of selling indulgences. It was up to God, not the church, to forgive sinners, Luther reasoned, and such forgiveness could not be bought. The tract went on to say that the ultimate authority was Scripture: if the pope could cite Scripture to refute Luther’s arguments, the priest would gladly recant them.

The pope did not read Luther’s writings–he preferred poetry to theological discussions. And a single German priest surely posed no threat to the use of indulgences to fund worthy projects, let alone to the church itself. But Luther seemed to be challenging the church’s authority in a broad sense, and Leo knew that an unchecked heresy could become the center of a sect. Within recent centuries in Europe, the church had had to put down such dissident sects by the use of force; better to silence Luther before it was too late.

Leo began relatively gently, asking the respected Catholic theologian Silvester Mazzolini, usually known as Prieras, to write an official response to Luther that he hoped would frighten the priest into submission. Prieras proclaimed that the pope was the highest authority in the church, even higher than Scripture–in fact, that the pope was infallible. He quoted various theological texts written over the centuries in support of this claim. He also attacked Luther personally, calling him a bastard and questioning his motives: perhaps the German priest was angling for a bishopric? Prieras concluded with the words, “Whoever says that the Church of Rome may not do what it is actually doing in the manner of indulgences is a heretic.” The warning was clear enough.

Leo had much on his mind during these years, including turmoil in the Ottoman Empire and a plan to launch a new crusade, but Luther’s response to Prieras got his attention right away. Luther wrote a text in which he mercilessly took apart Prieras’s writings–the church, he argued, had failed to answer his charges and to base its arguments on Scripture. Unless its authority in granting indulgences and excommunicating heretics was rooted in the Bible, it was not spiritual in nature but worldly, political, and that kind of authority could and should be challenged. Luther published his text alongside Prieras’s, allowing readers to compare the two and come to their own conclusions. His direct quotation of Prieras, his audacious and mocking tone, and his use of recently developed printing technology to spread his message far and wide–all this was quite shocking and new to church officials. They were dealing with a clever and dangerous man. It was now clear to Leo that the war between the church and Luther was a war to the death.

As the pope pondered how to get the German priest to Rome and try him as a heretic, Luther accelerated his campaign, continuing to publish at an alarming rate, his tone ever more vitriolic. In An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, he claimed that Rome had used its spurious authority to bully and cow the German people for centuries, turning Germany’s kingdoms into vassal states. The church, he said again, was a political power, not a spiritual one, and to prop up its worldly rule it had resorted to lies, forged documents, whatever means necessary. In On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, he railed against the pope’s lavish lifestyle, the whoring among the church hierarchy, the blasphemous art Leo funded. The pope had gone so far as to have staged an immoral and bawdy play by Machiavelli, called Mandragola , within the Vatican itself. Luther juxtaposed the righteous behavior advocated by the church with the way its cardinals actually lived. It was the pope and his entourage, Luther charged, who were the real heretics, not he; in fact, the pope was the Antichrist.

It seemed to Leo that Luther had responded to Prieras’s threat by raising the temperature. Clearly the threat had been weak; the pope had been too lenient. It was time to show real force and end this war. So Leo wrote a papal bull threatening Luther with excommunication. He also sent church officials to Germany to negotiate the priest’s arrest and imprisonment. These officials, however, came back with shocking news that altered everything: in the few short years since the publication of The Ninety-five Theses, Martin Luther, an unknown German priest, had somehow become a sensation, a celebrity, a beloved figure throughout the country. Everywhere the pope’s officials went, they were heckled, even threatened with stoning. Shop windows in almost every German town contained paintings of Luther with a halo over his head. “Nine-tenths of the Germans shout ‘Long live Luther,'” one official reported to Leo, “and the other tenth ‘Death to Rome.'” Luther had somehow aroused the German public’s latent resentment and hatred of the church. And his reputation was impeccable: he was a bestselling author, yet he refused the income from his writings, clearly practicing what he preached. The more the church attacked him, the more popular Luther became. To make a martyr of him now could spark a revolution.

Nevertheless, in 1521, Leo ordered Luther to appear in the town of Worms before the Imperial Diet, a gathering of German princes, nobles, and clergy organized by the newly elected Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Leo hoped to get the Germans to do his dirty work, and Charles was amenable: a political creature, worried by the antiauthoritarian sentiments that Luther had sparked, he wanted the dispute over. At the Diet he demanded that the priest recant his teachings. But Luther, as usual, refused, and in dramatic fashion, uttering the memorable line “Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me.” The emperor had no choice; he condemned Luther as a heretic and ordered him to return to Wittenberg to await his fate. On the way home, however, Luther was kidnapped and taken to Warburg Castle. The kidnapping had actually been planned and executed by his many supporters among the aristocracy; he was safe. Living in the castle under an assumed name, he was able to ride out the storm.

Leo died that year, and within months of his death, Luther’s ideas and the reforms that he had advocated had spread throughout Germany like wildfire. By 1526 a Protestant party was officially recognized in different parts of Europe. This was the birth of the Reformation, and with it the vast worldly power of the Catholic Church, at least as Leo had inherited it, was irrevocably broken. That obscure, pedantic Wittenberg priest had somehow won the war.

Interpretation

Luther’s original intention in his Ninety-five Theses was to discuss a point of theology: the relationship, or lack of it, between God’s forgiveness and papal indulgences. But when he read Prieras’s response to his argument, something changed in him. The pope and his men had failed to find justification for indulgences in the Bible. There was much more they could not justify as well, such as the pope’s unlimited power to excommunicate. Luther came to believe that the church needed drastic reform.

Reformation, however, would require political power. If Luther simply railed at the church’s wickedness from the pulpit or among his fellow priests, he would get nowhere. The pope and his men had attacked him personally, questioning his motives; now Luther in turn would go on the offensive, fighting fire with fire.

Luther’s strategy was to make the war public, transforming his moral cause into a political one. He did this by exploiting the previous century’s advances in printing technology: his tracts, written in vigorous, angry language that appealed to the masses, were widely disseminated. He chose points of attack that would particularly outrage the German people: the pope’s decadent lifestyle, funded through the sale of indulgences; the use of church power to meddle in German politics; on and on. Perhaps most devastating of all, Luther exposed the church’s hypocrisies. Through these various tactics, he was able to spark and stoke a moral anger that spread like fire, forever tainting the public’s vision not just of the pope but of the church itself.

Luther knew that Leo would respond to him not with arguments based on the Bible but with heavy-handed force, which, he also knew, would only make his cause shine all the brighter. And so with incendiary language and arguments that questioned Leo’s authority, he baited the pope into rash counterattacks. Luther already led an exemplary life, but he took it further by refusing all income from his writings. This widely known move in effect made his goodness theatrical, a matter for public consumption. In a few short years, Luther gained so much support among the masses that the pope could not fight him without provoking a revolution. By using morality so consciously and publicly, he transformed it into a strategy for winning power. The Reformation was one of the greatest political victories in history.

Understand: you cannot win wars without public and political support, but people will balk at joining your side or cause unless it seems righteous and just. And as Luther realized, presenting your cause as just takes strategy and showmanship. First, it is wise to pick a fight with an enemy that you can portray as authoritarian, hypocritical, and power-hungry. Using all available media, you strike first with a moral offensive against the opponent’s points of vulnerability. You make your language strong and appealing to the masses, and craft it, if you can, to give people the opportunity to express a hostility they already feel. You quote your enemies’ own words back at them to make your attacks seem fair, almost disinterested. You create a moral taint that sticks to them like glue. Baiting them into a heavy-handed counterattack will win you even more public support. Instead of trumpeting your own goodness–which would make you seem smug and arrogant–you show it through the contrast between their unreasonable actions and your own crusading deeds. Aim at them the most withering charge of all–that they are after power, while you are motivated by something higher and selfless.

Do not worry about the manipulations you will have to resort to if you are to win this moral battle. Making a public show that your cause is more just than the enemy’s will amply distract people from the means you employ.

KEYS TO WARFARE

In almost all cultures, morality–the definition of good and evil–originated as a way to differentiate one class of people from another. In ancient Greece, for example, the word for “good” was first associated with the nobility, the higher classes who served the state and proved their bravery on the battlefield; the bad–the base, self-centered, and cowardly–were generally the lower classes. Over time a system of ethics evolved that served a similar but more sophisticated function: to keep society orderly by separating the antisocial and “evil” from the social and “good.” Societies use ideas about what is and is not moral to create values that serve them well. When these values fall behind the times or otherwise cease to fit, morality slowly shifts and evolves.

There are individuals and groups, however, who use morality for a much different purpose–not to maintain social order but to extract an advantage in a competitive situation, such as war, politics or business. In their hands morality becomes a weapon they wield to attract attention to their cause while distracting attention from the nastier, less noble actions inevitable in any power struggle. They tend to play on the ambivalence we all have about conflict and power, exploiting our feelings of guilt for their purposes. For instance, they may position themselves as victims of injustice, so that opposing them seems wicked or insensitive. Or they may make such a show of moral superiority that we feel ashamed to disagree with them. They are masters at occupying the high ground and translating it into some kind of power or advantage.

Let us call these strategists “moral warriors.” There are generally two types: unconscious and conscious. Unconscious moral warriors tend to be motivated by feelings of weakness. They may not be so good at the straightforward game of power, so they function by making other people feel guilty and morally inferior–an unconscious, reflexive way of leveling the playing field. Despite their apparent fragility, they are dangerous on an individual level, because they seem so sincere and can have great power over people’s emotions. Conscious moral warriors are those who use the strategy knowingly. They are most dangerous on a public level, where they can take the high ground by manipulating the media. Luther was a conscious moral warrior, but, being also a genuine believer in the morality he preached, he used the strategy only to help him in his struggle with the pope; slipperier moral warriors tend to use it indiscriminately, adapting it to whatever cause they decide to take on.

The way to combat moral warriors in general is indicated by certain strategies that have evolved in modern warfare itself. The French officer and writer Andre Beaufre has analyzed the use of morality as a military strategy in the contexts of the French-Algerian wars of the 1950s and of the Vietnam wars fought by first France and then the United States. Both the Algerians and the North Vietnamese worked hard to frame each of their respective conflicts as a war of liberation fought by a nation struggling for its freedom against an imperialist power. Once this view was diffused in the media and accepted by many in the French and American publics, the insurgents were able to court international support, which in turn served to isolate France and the United States in the world community. Appealing directly to groups within these countries that were latently or overtly sympathetic to or at least ambivalent about their cause, they were able to sap support for the war from within. At the same time, they cleverly disguised the many nasty maneuvers to which they themselves resorted to fight their guerrilla wars. As a result, in the eyes of the world, they dominated the moral battlefield, enormously inhibiting France’s and America’s freedom of action. Stepping gingerly through a political and moral minefield, these powers could not fight their wars in a winnable manner.

Beaufre calls the strategic use of morality an “exterior maneuver,” for it lies outside the territory being fought over and outside battlefield strategy. It takes place in its own space–its own moral terrain. For Beaufre both France and the United States made the mistake of ceding the high ground to the enemy. Because both countries had rich democratic traditions and saw their wars as justified, they assumed that others would perceive these struggles the same way. They saw no need to fight for the moral terrain–and that was a fatal mistake. Nations today must play the public game, deflecting their enemies’ attempts to portray them as evil. Without appearing to whine about what the other side is doing, they must also work to expose their enemies’ hypocrisies, taking the war to the moral court themselves–fighting on apparently moral terms. Cede the moral terrain to the other side and you limit your freedom of action: now anything you might have to do that is manipulative yet necessary will feed the unjust image the enemy has publicized, and you will hesitate to take such action.

This has great relevance to all forms of conflict. When your enemies try to present themselves as more justified than you are, and therefore more moral, you must see this move for what it most often is: not a reflection of morality, of right and wrong, but a clever strategy, an exterior maneuver. You can recognize an exterior maneuver in a number of ways. First, the moral attack often comes out of left field, having nothing to do with what you imagine the conflict is about. Something you have done in a completely different arena is dredged up as a way to drain your support or inject you with guilt. Second, the attack is often ad hominem; rational argument is met with the emotional and personal. Your character, rather than the issue you are fighting over, becomes the ground of the debate. Your motives are questioned and given the darkest turn.

Once you realize you are under attack by a moral warrior using the exterior maneuver, it is vital to keep control of your emotions. If you complain or lash out angrily, you just look defensive, as if you had something to hide. The moral warrior is being strategic; the only effective response is to be strategic, too. Even if you know that your cause is just, you can never assume that the public sees it the same way. Appearances and reputation rule in today’s world; letting the enemy frame these things to its liking is akin to letting it take the most favorable position on the battlefield. Once the fight for moral terrain has begun, you must fight to occupy the high ground in the same way you would in a shooting war.

Like any form of warfare, moral conflict has both offensive and defensive possibilities. When you are on the offense, you are actively working to destroy the enemy’s reputation. Before and during the American Revolution, the great propagandist Samuel Adams took aim at England’s reputation for being fair-minded, liberal, and civilized. He poked holes in this moral image by publicizing England’s exploitation of the colonies’ resources and simultaneous exclusion of their people from democratic processes. The colonists had had a high opinion of the English, but not after Adams’s relentless campaign.

To succeed, Adams had to resort to exaggeration, picking out and emphasizing the cases in which the English were heavy-handed. His was not a balanced picture; he ignored the ways in which the English had treated the colonies rather well. His goal was not to be fair but to spark a war, and he knew that the colonists would not fight unless they saw the war as just and the British as evil. In working to spoil your enemy’s moral reputation, do not be subtle. Make your language and distinctions of good and evil as strong as possible; speak in terms of black and white. It is hard to get people to fight for a gray area.

Revealing your opponent’s hypocrisies is perhaps the most lethal offensive weapon in the moral arsenal: people naturally hate hypocrites. This will work, however, only if the hypocrisy runs deep; it has to show up in their values. Few will care about some innocuous self-contradictory comment made or vote taken long ago, but enemies who trumpet certain values as inherent to their side yet who do not always adhere to those values in reality make juicy targets. The Algerian and North Vietnamese propaganda campaigns were so destructive in part because of the discrepancy they were able to show between the values of freedom and liberty espoused by France and the United States and the actions those countries were taking to squash national independence movements. Both nations seemed hypocritical.

If a fight with your enemies is inevitable, always work to make them start it. In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln maneuvered carefully to make the South shoot first at Fort Sumter, initiating the Civil War. That put Lincoln on the moral high ground and won over many ambivalent Northerners to his side. Similarly, even if you are fighting a war of aggression, your goal to take from your enemy, find a way to present yourself not as a conqueror but as a liberator. You are fighting not for land or money but to free people suffering under an oppressive regime.

In general, in a conflict that is potentially nasty, in which you are certain the enemy will resort to almost anything, it is best that you go on the offensive with your moral campaign and not wait for their attacks. Poking holes in the other side’s reputation is easier than defending your own. The more you stay on the offensive, the more you can distract the public from your own deficiencies and faults–and faults are inevitable in war. If you are physically and militarily weaker than your enemy, all the more reason to mount an exterior maneuver. Move the battle to the moral terrain, where you can hamstring and beat a stronger foe.

The best defense against moral warriors is to give them no target. Live up to your good name; practice what you preach, at least in public; ally yourself with the most just causes of the day. Make your opponents work so hard to undermine your reputation that they seem desperate, and their attacks blow up in their faces. If you have to do something nasty and not in harmony with your stated position or public image, use a cat’s-paw–some agent to act for you and hide your role in the action. If that is not possible, think ahead and plan a moral self-defense. At all costs avoid actions that carry the taint of hypocrisy.

A stain on your moral reputation can spread like an infection. As you scramble to repair the damage, you often inadvertently publicize the doubts it has opened up, which simply makes things worse. So be prudent: the best defense against a moral attack is to have inoculated yourself against it beforehand, by recognizing where you may be vulnerable and taking preventive measures. When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and initiated the Civil War against Pompey, he was highly vulnerable to the charge of trying to usurp the authority of the Roman Senate in order to become a dictator. He inoculated himself against these charges by acting mercifully toward his enemies in Rome, making important reforms, and going to the extreme in showing his respect for the Republic. By embracing some of the principles of his enemies, he kept their attempts at moral infection from spreading.

Wars are most often fought out of self-interest: a nation goes to war to protect itself against an invading, or potentially dangerous, enemy or to seize a neighbor’s land or resources. Morality is sometimes a component in the decision–in a holy war or crusade, for example–but even here self-interest usually plays a role; morality is often just a cover for the desire for more territory, more riches, more power. During World War II, the Soviet Union became a beloved ally of the United States, playing a key role in the defeat of Hitler, but after the war it became America’s darkest enemy. American self-interest, not the Soviets, had changed.

Wars of self-interest usually end when the winner’s interests are satisfied. Wars of morality are often longer and bloodier: if the enemy is seen as evil, as the infidel, it must be annihilated before the war can end. Wars of morality also churn up uncontrollable emotions. Luther’s moral campaign against Rome generated such hatred that in the subsequent invasion of the Holy City by the troops of Charles V, in 1527, German soldiers went on a six-month rampage against the church and its officials, committing many atrocities in what came to be known as “the sack of Rome.”

As in war, so in life. When you are involved in a conflict with another person or group, there is something you are fighting over, something each side wants. This could be money, power and position, on and on. Your interests are at stake, and there is no need to feel guilty about defending them. Such conflicts tend not to be too bloody; most people are at least somewhat practical and see the point in preventing a war from going on too long. But those people who fight out of a moral sense can sometimes be the most dangerous. They may be hungry for power and are using morality as a cover; they may be motivated by some dark and hidden grievance; but in any case they are after more than self-interest. Even if you beat them, or at least defend yourself against them successfully, discretion here may be the better part of valor. Avoid wars of morality if you can; they are not worth the time and dirty feelings they churn up.

REVERSAL

A moral offensive has a built-in danger: if people can tell what you are doing, your righteous stance may disgust and alienate them. Unless you are facing a vicious enemy, it is best to use this strategy with a light touch and never seem shrill. Moral battles are for public consumption, and you must constantly gauge their effect, lowering or raising the heat accordingly.