A coworker who read The Roots of Aggression asked me, “How can retreating—running away—be aggression?”

As you approach your car a boy grabs your car keys and runs. You chase him around the corner and are mugged by two thugs, who stuff you in a trash can and take your car. The boy was an aggressor, the retreat a calculated aspect of the aggression.

Ray Robinson knocked Grazzianno out going backwards.

As a boy, Tecumseh of the Shawnee used to pretend to be a lost orphan to lure settlers to their death at the hands of waiting warriors.

The Parthians slaughtered Crassus and his legions via the feigned retreat.

The Mongols wiped out many an army via the feigned retreat.

When the local hood rats mount their off road vehicles on city streets and dare the police to chase them, that is a form of aggression.

Last week, when some drunk was fleeing from a Baltimore Country cop in Northeast Baltimore and rammed into a city cop car by accident—a cop that was chasing another fool—causing the cop car to run over an infant in its stroller, that was aggression, lethal aggression.

Not being competent in the application of, or even remotely understanding in the nature of, aggression, the liberal, the academic, the woman, has a very narrow and gross understanding of aggression, usually limited to the most narrowly defined aspect of “fighting” or mutual combat.

Our news casts are loaded with false references to robberies, attacks and mob stompings being described as "fights." This practice itself is a form of aggression, the old First Estate Mind Screw, in which the prey is informed that the violence occurring all around him is consensual and not predatory, disabling him from taking countermeasures until it is too late, until the lions and hyenas are upon him, until he has been fed into the Meat Chute of Souls by the cannibalistic State.

My experience speaking with educated people and women on the topic of violence has led me to believe that such humans are fundamentally incapable of understanding aggression, ad are hence both its victims and its unwitting purveyors, the priests of the all-devouring machine.

I recently had a conversation with two university graduates, one a self-described liberal man, the other a right wing woman. When I described a funny incident in which I found myself on a city bus surrounded by Black, mixed, and Latino people while reading an old eugenics book on birthrates by race, they were both shocked that I would be so foolhardy, so courting of an attack by outraged people of color, for reading about race, that they questioned my judgment in even carrying such a book with me on public transportation, let alone reading it!

They had, and have, and will forever have, a view of aggression that prevents them from realizing that the urge, the foundational worry, the fear, engendered by carrying a book on race openly in a violent, left wing, mixed-race society is in fact a sense of peril born of a social state of implicit aggression. They fear the society they live in to such a degree that they unconsciously seek the comfort of branding the carrying or reading of such a book as an act of rudeness, impropriety or aggression that could be expected to illicit understandable violent “defensive” action on the part of society at large.

This is a reading of societal “posturing,” “threatening,” “bluffing.”

As a man willing to kill to maintain my ability to read what and when I want, such threats are merely invigorating.

This brings us to another form of posturing, a venerable form that goes back to ancient Egypt: holding up a banner, flag, or battle standard. Such actions have always been an invitation to combat, although they are rarely now understood as such.

This is changing.

Painting a Confederate battle flag on your car, or wearing, bearing or raising any flag that is not accepted by the other humans you come into contact with, is an act of aggression. Try walking into a "Ravens roost" bar in Baltimore in a Pittsburgh Steelers outfit. Although I am no Confederate, brandishing the Stars and Bars is an act of aggression that I applaud, providing you are white man enough to defend that flag!

Roman legions had signifiers and many armies of the modern age had flag bearers, even drummer boys, buglers and fife players, which reminds us, that these little twerps playing their marching tunes were every bit as much the aggressor as the Viking singing his battle song, the Celt roaring his battle cry, the Confederate soldier shouting his rebel yell, some martial arts faɡɡot meowing while he prepares to kick you, and the oar master beating a time on the drum while the galley slaves propel a war galley toward the enemy vessel.

Communication, including gross posturing, intricate battle commands, and simple shouts to “get him,” are all aspects of aggression, as surely as a lion’s roar.