In his short story “The Upside Down Evolution” (c.1985 in Polish, 1986 in English), science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem claims to have read a military history of the world written in the twenty-first century, and used what he learned in his novels:<\/p>\n
In 1967, I wrote a science fiction novel entitled His Master’s Voice<\/em> (published in English in 1983 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). On page 125 of that edition, third line from the top, are the words “the ruling doctrine was … ‘indirect economic attrition’,” and then the doctrine is expressed in the aphorism, “The thin starve before the fat lose weight.”<\/p>\n
The doctrine expressed publicly in the United States in 1980 — thirteen years after the original [Polish] version of His Master’s Voice<\/em> — was put a little differently. (In the West German press they used the slogan “den Gegner totrüsten” — “arm the enemy to death.”)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The policy of indirect economic attrition has changed significantly with the fall of the Communist Bloc; nevertheless, it remains an effective foreign policy, one which will, no doubt, be followed by either major presidential candidate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In his short story “The Upside Down Evolution” (c.1985 in Polish, 1986 in English), science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem claims to have read a military history of the world written in the twenty-first century, and used what he learned in his novels: In 1967, I wrote a science fiction novel entitled His Master’s Voice (published … Continue reading “Indirect economic attrition”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,21],"tags":[348],"class_list":["post-2404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-culture","category-political-culture","tag-stanislaw-lem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2404"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2405,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2404\/revisions\/2405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}