Please Welcome our New Co-Blogger, Lynn C. Rees

On behalf of Charles Cameron and J. Scott Shipman, I would like to warmly welcome the newest co-blogger to zenpundit.com, Lynn C. Rees.

Rees’ blogging and insightful comments have long been enjoyed by many in this corner of the blogosphere, though some were written  pseudo-anonymously and then later circulated by third parties on private listservs.  Some samples of his writing:

….If I were to draw a rough analogy between the Old Testament and De re militari in Chinese history, the Old Testament would be a compilation of all the major Spring and Autumn and Warring States‘ literature of one of the smaller seven warring states (Judah) redacted by a Legalist-leaning Confucian (the Deuteronomists of Josiah’s reign) right before Chin (Neo-Babylonian Empire) completed its conquest of China (Fertile Crescent) and then re-redacted by Szma Chyan (Ezra) in the early days of the Han (Achaemenid) Dynasty. The theme of the Deuteronomists (“In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” Judges 21:25) is similar to a strong theme emphasized by editors of the Seven Military Classics that China had to be unified under one authority (“all under Heaven” (TyanSya) to eliminate the disorder of warring states during the Warring States era. This theme was recently expertly propagandized by the Beibing Regime in the interesting Jet Li film Hero on Jau Jeng.

De re militari would be a compilation of stray bits of the six existing Seven Military Classics studiously assembled by a public-spirited provincial Confucian scholar with no military experience and submitted as a memorial to the Late Han court in the hopes that its ancient virtues would rouse the court to reverse the collapse of the dynasty.

The Western strategic tradition after 1500 drew heavily on works synthesizing De re military and more recent recovered works from antiquity like Polybius and especially Livy.

and, from another post, in a different place:

….A network requires asabiya, that almost mystical force of network cohesion and harmony that makes the members of a group unite to fight the far enemy instead of dividing to fight the near enemy. While asabiya is sometimes personified by a particular individual and their qualities, true asabiya transcends the one and distributes itself across the many. But individual humans remain asabiya’s greatest ally and most dangerous enemy. It’s appropriate to view the network immediately around particularly potent individuals as webs rather than networks. Like its namesake spider web, an individual’s web places them in the center of a network. Like the spider, the web allows a supernode to detect fluctuations in asabiya density before it directly encounters the source of the disturbance. The web also amplifies a supernode’s reach, radiating its localized asabiya through its web into the greater network, disrupting or strengthening broader network asabiya as it might.

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