Related: Fall Reading List VII.
1. "The Origin of Strategy" By Bruce Henderson (1989). An excerpt:
In 1975, the British War Office opened its classified files on World War II. Serious readers of these descriptions of “war by other means” may feel inclined to revise their thinking about what happened in that war and about strategy generally, particularly the differences between actual strategies and apparent strategies.
The evidence is clear that the outcome of individual battles and campaigns often depended on highly subjective evaluations of the combatants’ intentions, capabilities, and behavior. But until the records were unsealed, only people who were directly involved appreciated this. Historians and other observers ascribed victories and defeats to grand military plans or chance.
Also in 1975, Edward O. Wilson published Sociobiology, a landmark study in which he tried to synthesize all that is known about population biology, zoology, genetics, and animal behavior. What emerged was a framework for understanding the success of species in terms of social behavior—that is, competition for resources. This synthesis is the closest approach to a general theory of competition that I know of. It provides abundant parallels for business behavior as well as for the economic competition that characterizes our own species.
Human beings may be at the top of the ecological chain, but we are still members of the ecological community. That is why Darwin is probably a better guide to business competition than economists are.
Classical economic theories of business competition are so simplistic and sterile that they have been less contributions to understanding than obstacles. These theories postulate rational, self-interested behavior by individuals who interact through market exchanges in a fixed and static legal system of property and contracts. Their frame of reference is “perfect competition,” a theoretical abstraction that never has existed and never could exist.
In contrast, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, outlines a more fruitful perspective and point of departure for developing business strategy: “Some make the deep-seated error of considering the physical conditions of a country as the most important for its inhabitants; whereas it cannot, I think, be disputed that the nature of the other inhabitants with which each has to compete is generally a far more important element of success.”
2. "Freemasonry And Judaism: The Secret Powers Behind Revolution" By Vicomte Leon De Poncins (1928). An excerpt:
We are witnessing an immense revolutionary movement of which the first outward manifestation was the French revolution of 1789.
This movement, which, since then, has spread all over the world, has a much deeper significance than is generally supposed, and aims at the overthrow of civilization.
The fate of humanity is at stake, and it is of great importance for us to know the causes of the movement and its consequences, or, in a word, to know where we are going.
But among the revolutionary forces there are two, which, although more or less hidden and unknown to the public, are none the less primordial.
These are Freemasonry and Judaism.
It is these two forces which we wish to make better known. The aim of this work, therefore, is not to produce new unpublished evidence but to set out and summarize the whole question for a reader who is supposed to be ignorant of the subject.
It must be clearly understood that what follows applies to continental Freemasonry, the question of English masonry being treated separately at the end.
3. "Hess: The Missing Years, 1941-1945" By David Irving (2010). An excerpt from a lecture Irving gave about his book:
"Quite a lot of the top Nazis were corrupt, brutal, and vile. Rudolf Hess wasn't. Rudolf Hess, throughout his rise to position of Deputy Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess was basically a very decent man. All the Germans recognized this. If they had a beef with the Nazis, the local Nazi mayor, or the local Nazi police chief, then they would write to Rudolf Hess to complain and he would act on it. He would take steps to act on these malfeasances. I'm not just saying this that I'm saying this. In fact, after the war was over, after the ghastly tragedy of WWII was finished, the Americans moved in with all their righteous self-justification and set up the Nuremberg trial to put Nazi war criminals on trial.
And they investigated all the criminals, and Rudolf Hess was among them. And they sent an American army lieutenant called Eric Lippman who was probably Jewish, he lived in Florida afterwards, they sent Lippman to Rudolf Hess's house, the family house. He no longer lived there, of course, he was in captivity ever since his dramatic flight. Lippman went to Rudolf Hess's house to look for evidence that he was a criminal. And all of Rudolf Hess's papers were there, going back to the turn of the century, ever since he was born. All the Rudolf Hess files were in the family house in Hinterland in Bavaria and Eric Lippman spent the whole day going through them. He wrote a letter to the chief American prosecutor in Nuremberg, which I've got cause I wrote a book on the Nuremberg trials called 'Nuremberg: The Last Battle.' Justice Robert H. Jackson, who was the American chief prosecutor, a very, very fine man, in fact. Jackson was an idealist. He's one of my heroes. He set out with an ambition that you can end wars by law. Just promulgate a law against making war, and that would be the solution. No more killing. He was an idealist. Jackson send this guy Lippman to investigate the Hess papers, and Lippman wrote a letter back to Jackson, which I found in Jackson's papers. His son let me have access to them, the papers. Lippman wrote a letter saying I've gone through Rudolf Hess's files in his house and he was a fine guy, we shouldn't be prosecuting him. He was a decent guy, people wrote to him with complaints and he acted on the complaints, in every case. He wasn't corrupt, he wasn't brutal, he left Germany before the crimes began, we shouldn't be putting him on trial. Quite an interesting letter. I've quoted most of it in the book." - David Irving, from 2:09-4:29 in part 4 of his lecture.
