In Asian fighting systems, there is a clear distinction between internal and external combat arts, with the external more effective at defeating opponents and the internal better at helping the practitioner heal physically and mentally and manage the demons that might be contained within his troubled soul, for no untroubled citizen of a postmodern society ever seeks proficiency in a classical or practical combat art.

The typical progression is for a young man who has been bullied to seek recourse through training in the more physically demanding arts such as wrestling, boxing, MMA or kick boxing, or in an Asian context, devote his energies to a “hard” “External” art like karate or Tae-Kwon-Do, and then, after many adventures, injuries, victories and defeats to take up some less brutal past time, like Tai Chi, Beautiful Springtime, Scent the Flower while Petting the Serene Cat of Celibacy, etc., largely in an attempt to keep himself self-disciplined enough to avoid doing prison time for the crime of self-defense.

I would like to depart from this concept of the body who retreats from external conflict to a path of internal subjugation, to discuss the progress of the postmodern censorship state, or, the toxic body politic which currently squats like a diuretic glutton upon the graveyard of our moral heritage.

The United States Military, the largest and most potent war machine in human history, since it won the world heavyweight title of belligerent nation states in 1945, has, over three generations failed to impose its will upon: North Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, all polities about the size of the largest American states, and has only definitely imposed its will upon Granada and Panama, each the size of smaller American states. It has meanwhile only managed to terrorize lesser states such as Libya, Somalia and Lebanon. Compared to victories against the world empires of Britain and Spain in its 18th and 19th century ascent and the defeat of Imperial Japan virtually one-handed, this 20th and 21st century record is dismal and very much parallels the typical rise and fall of a prize-fighter such as Mike Tyson, who rampaged through established and older combatants, then met with internal crisis and has spent the balance of his life improving his internal discipline, his self-control.

It is of interest to note that the feeble will of the U.S.A., most tellingly demonstrated by a decade long loss in Vietnam and two two-decade long failures to impose its national will on Afghanistan and Iraq, has been accompanied by internal dissolution, lack of confidence, loss of focus and identity and finally an overriding attempt to impose internal discipline, particularly the banishment of troublesome thought from within.

Nothing parallels the rise and fall of a heavyweight champion like the rise and fall of the U.S.A., with the most telling corollary being an overriding need in the consciousness of the formerly all-conquering external combatant, to limit its external combat to those half-committed ventures [imagine a boxing exhibition by the retired Jack Dempsey and an overmatched amateur being mimicked by a humanitarian expedition by the U.S.A. to free a backward people from themselves] calculated to increase its internal discipline—kind of like this washed up stick-fighter hitting the heavy bag with a bat in an attempt to maintain a shadow of his prime identity.

Dissident thinkers living in the nation that was raised on the foundational lie that free thinking was sacred to a political machine devoted to social control, should consider that such free-thinking would only be tolerated while the machine grew and that once it reached maturity and began to decline that it must absolutely devote itself to internal suppression of thought lest its binding lie be unraveled, leaving it naked to the winter of truth long held at bay by its heated lies.