Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
– Sun Tzu, Chinese strategist
Usually attributed to the military, Fabian tactics have been used successfully in the early centuries of empire-sponsored maritime exploration, discovery and conquest; politics and government, and in the administration of criminal and civil law.
The central theme of the Fabian ploy is to wear out the adversary — by cutting off the supply of basic necessities; by the withering and wearing out of patience; and sustaining a victory with minimum loss to property, life and limb.
Fabian tactics and strategies were born two hundred years BC when Carthage’s Hannibal lost to Rome’s Fabius Maximus who won the 2nd Punic War using attrition without an anticipated frontal attack.
Ho Chi Minh won Vietnam using similar strategies successfully paralysing American efforts that depended on superior air, land and naval machinery. Ho Chi Minh unleashed guerrilla warfare tactics that was far superior, and unfamiliar, to the American military. The rest is geography.
In Myanmar, the military junta has been very successful in wearing out the pro-democracy forces that still believe they are winning the war against a perennially oppressive government.
Britain’s Fabian Society is conveniently labelled as a socialist organisation whose purpose is to advance the principles of democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist effort in democracies, rather than by revolutionary overthrow.
A twist, a spin, a slant, a shadow, a whisper, a knowing nod, a wink, an interpretation here and there, allows a new idea to get birthed, welcomed and accepted.
In Thailand, where the monarch is revered as a reincarnation of a god, anti-monarchists are staging another futile attempt at re-defining freedom and liberty.
Fabian strategies enjoying untrammelled overview, overreach and overkill of the law and justice system are unmatched and unstoppable in America, where as Alexis Tocqueville observed in 1825, every contentious matter in America ends up in a court of law.
Read any American statute, and you will find that the state is primary, and the people secondary. Example, the 14th Amendment proclaims that “No State shall deprive any citizen of his rights to . . .,” instead of “No citizen shall be deprived of his rights to . . .”
John Marshall, the 4th Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court established and entrenched the gold standard in the administration of law and justice in the early 1800s that has survived till date with every judge in the free world using his template.
Successfully innovating Fabian philosophy, John Marshall designed the art of finding a primary principle in the written law, and thereafter discovering a secondary principle upon refining the primary principle. The court, inevitably, became a super-legislature.
Thank Providence for Liversidge v. Andersen [1941] UKHL 1, when the sole and famous dissent by Lord Atkin forever changed the dynamics of the power of the Executive.
Fabian tactics, strategies and techniques work extremely well in our neck of the woods given the subtlety, sorcery, surety and sophistry of Article 7(2), Article 43(6) and Article 121(1A) of the Federal Constitution. Blessed is he or she that knows how to use it to navigate the troubled and uncertain waters of Malaysian jurisprudence.
Fabian methodology is firmly entrenched in the local laws, written constitutions and regulations in many of Great Britain’s former colonies. The local element is always missing like it has no significance. The imperial stench and the mark of Cain is quite difficult to remove.
The voters and citizens, too, are entitled to employ Fabian techniques if they learn to put Henry David Thoreau’s principles to work. Imagine nobody voting or working, and the nation’s written laws and constitution are paralysed regardless of the imposition of a national Emergency.
Labour plays a major and unique role in employing Fabian games. Imagine storing up enough food and water for six months, staying home, and nobody goes to work. Civil disobedience has been recognised as a Fabian strategy, too.
Brexit was fashioned under Fabian philosophy by Mahatma Gandhi in India in 1947 thus disavowing the British Raj forever using civil disobedience as a weapon resulting in the subsequent Partition that ravaged the subcontinent.
Sun Tzu could not have put it better in “The Art of War” when he surmised that “people should not be unfamiliar with strategy, those who understand it will survive, those who do not will perish”.
The almost checkmated citizenry always has a smothered mate move to play as the ultimate strategy when the supreme power is bereft of wriggle room.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the New Sarawak Tribune.
