the land Egypt by great judgment’. Sure enough, ever time Pharaoh hesitated in the face of the onslaught of plagues, the Bible reports that the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart. God explained this to Moses, after the hail, when Pharaoh acknowledged God’s power for the first time but still reneged on a promise: ‘I have hardened his heart, and the hearts of his servants, that I might shew these my signs before him: and thou mayest thell in the ears of thy son, and of thy son’s son, what things I have wrought in Egypt, and m signs which I have done among them, that ye may know how that I am the Lord’. God needed an obstinate Pharaoh because the only way he could demonstrate the full range of his power, and it superiority over all other powers on earth, was to put on the most awesome display. If Pharaoh has crumbled at the first plague there would have been no wondrous reports to pass down to future generations. Others would not appreciate the extent of his formidable power” (Freedman, 2013, p. 16).
40 La respetuosa solicitud inicial para realizar un viaje de peregrinación de tres días se convierte en una firme demanda de liberación definitiva.
41 “During the 1980s, there was a shift toward Sun Tzu. Sun Tzu’s influence was attested to by two references in popular culture. In the movie Wall Street, the villainous Gordon Gerko advises Bud Fox: ‘I don’t throw darts at a board. I bet on sure things. Read Sun Tzu, The Art of War. Every battle is won before it is ever fought’. Fox later used Sun Tzu to prevail over Gerko: ‘If your enemy is superior, evade him. If angry, irritate him. If equally matched, fight, and if not, split and re-evaluate (…) Another villain, Tony Soprano, the eponymous boss in The Sopranos, was told, somewhat sarcastically, by his psychiatrist Dr. Malfi: ‘You want to be a better mob boss, read the Art of War’. Later Soprano reported back to her: ‘Been reading that –that book you told me about. You know, The Art of War by Sun Tzu. I mean here’s this guy, a Chinese general, wrote this thing 2400 years ago, and most of it still applies today! Balk the enemy’s power. Force him to reveal himself’. Soprano clearly felt that his introduction to Sun Tzu had given him a competitive advantage; ‘Most of the guys I know, they read Prince Machiavelli’. Soprano claims to have found Machiavelli, whom he read in a study guide, no more than ‘okay’. Sun Tzu, however, ‘is much better about strategy’. As a result of Tony Soprano’s endorsement, Sun Tzu became Amazon’s bestseller in New Jersey” (Freedman, 2013, pp. 508 y 509).
42 Inicialmente Moloc propone una guerra total y abierta contra Dios. Con buen criterio, sin embargo, Belial hace notar que las fuerzas rebeldes son solo un tercio de las fuerzas leales, por lo que el resultado esperado de una confrontación directa es negativo. Luego de reflexionar, Lucifer concluye que para derrotar a Dios es necesario incrementar el número de rebeldes. Por eso la propuesta de Belcebú, de conseguir que los hombres se unan a la lucha, resulta estratégicamente perfecta.
43 “There was always a double standard when it came to cunning, trickery, deception, and stratagem. Against your own people -whit whom deception should be much easier because you understood them and they were more likely to trust you- it was generally reprehensible, but against enemies, it could be acceptable and even admirable if the trick was a good one. The closer the social bond, the more distasteful were the attempts to exploit the bond through deception; the weaker the bond, the more difficult it was to deceive successfully. Either way, reliance on cunning was subject to a law of diminishing returns. Once the reputation was acquired, then others would be watching for tricks” (Freedman., 2013, p. 65).
44 La ley de los retornos decrecientes del engaño es empleada por Immanuel Kant para demostrar que, por definición, el engaño impide que la acción cumpla con la “Fórmula de la Ley Universal” y, por tanto, que resulte moralmente valiosa. Ver: sección “Políticas” de este Capítulo.
45 Las armas nucleares emplean procesos de fisión (división) y de fusión (combinación) a nivel sub-atómico (protones y neutrones). Esos procesos liberan considerables cantidades de energía (la fisión de un neutrón de uranio, por ejemplo, genera energía equivalente a 2.5 neutrones de esa misma materia). Por su diseño, las armas nucleares provocan numerosas cadenas de fisión y de fusión, de modo que ocasionan reacciones de naturaleza exponencial (sometidas a una tasa de crecimiento proporcional a la cantidad). Por tal razón, una bomba nuclear de 4,400 kilogramos de Uranio puede liberar una cantidad de energía equivalente a la que liberan 30’000,000 de cargas de dinamita.
46 “Scholarly advice on the theory of strategy shifted clearly in the 1950s from the conduct of warfare to the management of threats and political commitment policy. Deterrence emerged as the dominant strategic concept in the 1950s, and subsequent decades have not dethroned it. Strategic theorists and practitioners from around the world seem to agree that the sole utility of nuclear weapons was deterrence” (Gray, 2018, p. 39).
47 “(…) we can summarize how and why strategy works by standing just four words: Ends, Ways, Means, and Assumptions. The relations among this four concepts must constitute a theory of strategy, albeit a tersely minimalistic one. It can be restated, still economically, as follows: political Ends, served by strategic Ways, employ military Means, with the whole activity largely governed by relevant Assumptions” (Gray, 2018, p. 44).
48 “Strangely, perhaps, it was a country led by a figure totally untroubled by naïve liberal hopes for especially good behavior at home or abroad -namely, Joseph Stalin- that was almost fatally caught out. Stalin allowed his hopes to overwhelm what he was hearing from his own Soviet intelligence assets, as well as useful foreign ones, about the very near-term German intentions to invade. The Soviet Union was fortunate to survive the German attacks launched on 6 June 1941. The invasion was a genuine surprise, at least to Stalin, who had persuaded himself that such an assault would not occur” (Gray, 2018, p. 87).
49 La idea de Rockefeller de emplear el “trust” para evadir la aplicación de remedios antimonopolio resulta transformacional, en la medida en que otorga a esta figura “alcances organizacionales”. A raíz de esa idea el “trust” pasa a ser una “forma organizacional” alternativa a las tradicionales (p.e. “corporation”).
50 Como afirma Freedman: “Plans may be hatched by the cool and the calculating but they are likely to be implemented by the passionate and the unpredictable” (Gray, 2018, p. 16).
51 La decisión del Imperio Austrohúngaro de anexar los territorios de Bosnia y Herzegovina (1908) frustra el proceso de creación de la “Gran Nación Serbia”, razón por la cual diversos sectores de la sociedad Serbia complotan (con la colaboración directa de Rusia) para iniciar un conflicto armado en contra aquel Imperio.
52 “The cars rolled past houses and shops decked with Habsburg black-and-yellow and Bosnian red-and-yellow banners, towards the Sarajevan Muhamed Mehmedbasic, who had taken up a position by the Cumurija Bridge. As the cheers rose from around him he prepared to prime and throw his bomb. It was a tense moment because once the percussion cap on the bomb was cracked (…) there was not going back (…) The next assassin in line (…) was the Bosnian Serb Nedeljko Cabrinovic, who had places himself on the river side of the Quay. He freed his bomb and broke a detonator
