The Art of War

The Art of War. It was one of the last classical Chinese texts to arrive in Europe, a fact motivated by the hermetic nature of the country's military authorities for preserving and not divulging to foreign states valuable secrets of military art that had been jealously guarded for centuries and summarized in a small manual of scarcely thirteen chapters and several dozen pages, authored by a personality with doubts about its real existence called Sun Tzu. The Chinese military were very sure that with the help of Sun Tzu a war could be waged, and indeed won, because it contained truths and postulates as clear and true as these: The war "...is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence, it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected". The art of war is based on deception "Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near". And although nature offers us the possibility of living in harmony with it, it only takes a few people to break the balance and drag the population into antagonistic conflicts that only lead to military confrontation, in which the most disadvantaged masses bear the brunt, because as Sun Tzu points out: "A destroyed people cannot be reborn, and death cannot be turned into life".