I found Steven Pressfield through a link over at Lex’s place. Steven has a series of posts on Afghanistan that shed a light on that country which mainstream America needs to heed. He discusses some concepts that are sure to get some hackles up but his take on the tribal structure of Afghan society is dead on. Our early days in the mountains of Afghanistan following 9/11 were largely successful due to Special Forces working with tribal leaders of the Northern Alliance to rout the Taliban. (Go read Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton.)
Steven has impressive guest posts from Michael Yon and Capt Thomas Daly that are an education in themselves – far beyond what the MSM has been serving up on Afghanistan. Go and learn.
Switching gears, as I clicked around his site I was surprised to find he wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance in addition to his several novels on ancient warfare. I never read the book but really enjoyed the movie. Another title that caught my eye was The War of Art. My mind tricked me – I thought I saw The Art of War but I knew that wasn’t right so I went back. The War of Art, unlike the ancient text its title plays on, deals with “winning the inner creative battle.” I’ve fought that one many times. Steven talks about internal Resistance:
Amid the smoking shards of this ultimate debacle, we come face to face with our own bullshit. We reckon our limitations. We are fallible, we are flawed, we are human. We realize, finally in our guts, that we don’t have the power/brains/beauty that we so deliriously imagined we did. We recognize that the forces arrayed against us–specifically our own interior impulses of self-sabotage–are far more powerful than we are. And they’re playing for keeps. They’re out to bury us, and they will kick our ass today and every night and day into the future.
He’s on to something. I think I better go read the book so I can finish writing mine.
Resistance is everywhere these days.
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