Category Archives: War

How To Think And Act Like A Ruthless Warrior By Jack Kerwick

Argument, Conflict, Crime, Just War, Liberty, War

“Virtuous people become virtuous by acting virtuously. Similarly, one becomes a warrior by acting like one. The Warrior Within envisions himself crucifying, without mercy, the monsters of his choosing.”—Jack Kerwick

Warriors aren’t born. They are made.

This is the philosophy behind Warrior Flow Combatives, or Warrior Flow.

And a Warrior without Ruthless Intent is like a library without books or, more accurate yet, a square without four sides.

Ruthless Intent is nothing more or less than the will to crush the Enemy, those who would prey upon the innocent, into nonexistence.

To the end of cultivating this virtue—and, yes, it most certainly is a martial and moral virtue—physical training is necessary, yes. But even more importantly, mental training is required.

To cultivate Ruthless Intent, the aspiring Warrior must routinely engage in three mutually supportive and equally essential activities: Self-Talk, Visualization, and what Warrior Flow refers to as “Visceralization.”

Self-talk requires one to pay meticulous attention to the inner commentary that the mind ceaselessly cranks out, for even when it is commentary upon happenings in the external world, it is, ultimately, autobiographical, it is self-commentary, for our thoughts on the world, our relationships with others, are inescapably colored and shaped by our experiences and memories.

We need to manage that “inner voice.”

Self-talk is inescapable. We are all incessantly speaking to ourselves, whether we realize it or not. There is scarcely a moment when, either through word or image, we aren’t communicating to ourselves. Past experiences, or our interpretations of those experiences, we have, in large measure subconsciously, weaved into an autobiographical narrative. As is the case with any other work, our self-story is necessarily selectively edited. Yet we confuse this highly redacted version of ourselves with our whole selves.

And we allow this abridged reading of ourselves to color our sense of reality.

Warrior Flow implores students to attend carefully to their Self-Talk. Moreover, they are to assume conscious control of it, to habituate their minds to thinking self-affirming thoughts. In the case of this combat art specifically, the Warrior-in-the-Making must begin thinking and living as if the future self that he wants to become is already a present reality.

It doesn’t demand much reflection to realize that this is indeed how we became whatever it is that we’ve ever become. If one wants to become a cook, one must first cook. If one want to become a dancer, one must dance. If one wants to become a football player, one must play football.

Aristotle, the most prominent of all virtue theorists, wrote famously on this subject. Brave men become brave by acting like brave men. Just men become just by acting like just men.

Comprehensively, virtuous people become virtuous by acting virtuously.

Similarly, one becomes a warrior by acting like one. And acting like a warrior means as well thinking like one.

Yet Aristotle knew that being virtuous was a matter not just of thinking a certain way, but of feeling the appropriate way. For instance, a courageous person is someone who knows what to fear and the extent to which he should fear it. The object of fear elicits the emotion or passion of fear within the body. The courageous person, though, experiences fear in the appropriate proportion.

The aspiring warrior must feel as the Warrior that he will become feels. As he regularly affirms his own physical abilities, his resolute acceptance of injury, and even death, in battle, and his equal resolve to incapacitate the Enemy by whichever means, with ruthless efficiency, his Self-Talk will necessarily be accompanied by visuals.

As with his Self-Talk, though, the Warrior Within must make sure that the activity of Visualization in which he engages is consciously directed. He needs to open up the reservoir of his imagination and unleash his creative powers as he envisions himself crucifying, without mercy, the monsters of his choosing. They could be real people or imaginary. They can be people who one has personally known or only those of whom one has heard. In any event, to cultivate Ruthless Intent—the conviction that predators must be reduced to prey, the raw, undifferentiated determination to instill within violent attackers the same unbridled terror that they sought to inspire in their victims—one must not only visualize, but visceralize.

Visceralization is a species of visualization. When a person engages in Visceralization, he doesn’t just see the object of his imagination; he hears, smells, and touches it, and he perceives it with all of his senses in painstaking detail. He visualizes it in what students of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) refer to as an “associated” way.

In other words, when associated visualization (visceralization) occurs, the visualizer doesn’t just form a mental picture of himself within the framework of the visual, as is the case when it is “dissociated visualization” that occurs. Associated visualization, in contrast, immerses the visualizer within the scene that he envisages, allowing him to enact it.

When a person visceralizes he experiences those emotions that he either once experienced, if he is in effect reliving a past event, or those that he would experience if the event that he visceralizes actually occurred. Physiologically speaking, the emotion felt in the body while visceralizing and that felt in response to a real world happening are one and the same. The brain doesn’t know the difference.

Specifically, when developing Ruthless Intent, an aspiring warrior must not only perceive his attacker or attackers in his mind; he must as well feel in the very marrow of his bones all of the contempt, the righteous indignation and fury with which he visualizes himself destroying the Enemy. Physiologically speaking, the feelings that he conjures while training are one and the same as those that he would have in a real confrontation. The brain doesn’t know the difference between the fantasy and the reality.

While immersed in visceralization, the aspiring Warrior can, for example, feel the flesh of the Enemy’s neck spontaneously with the sound of it snapping as he drives an axe-handed chop to it with all of the power that he believes is necessary for the purpose of cleaving the Enemy’s skull from his body. Beholding the (admittedly anatomically impossible) spectacle promises to go no small distance toward marshalling and channeling from within one’s pain, rage, fear, and disdain for the wicked.

I leave this to your fertile imagination, but there are practically limitless ways by which the Warrior-in-Waiting can visceralize visiting destruction upon the Enemy. Creativity in combat is a virtue of the Warrior. Yet it presupposes Ruthless Intent.

And to the end of cultivating Ruthless Intent, Self-Talk, Visualization, and Visceralization are imperative.

***

Jack Kerwick is a columnist for Beliefnet, FrontPage Magazine, American Greatness and Townhall.com.  He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Temple University, a master’s degree in philosophy from Baylor University, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and religious studies from Wingate University. I teach philosophy at several colleges in the New Jersey and Pennsylvania areas. Follow him on Twitter.

HEADLINES To Heed In Aftermath Of Election 2020. And A Message From 2024 Trump-Tucker Ticket

Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Ethics, Foreign Policy, Liberty, Morality, Politics, Technology, War

FROM REVOLVER NEWS:

REMEMBER GOP: “The Republican party did not carry 71,000,000+ votes … President Trump did…

Matt Gaetz speaks … “Biden may import domestic policy of The Squad and the foreign policy of Dick Cheney”

“Conservatives flock to Parler … #1 downloaded app…” [I’ll be signing up, soon. I’m on Gab.]

“Ken Starr: What Pennsylvania did a ‘lawless act’”

Third world stuff in Michigan…”

Fox News refuses to carry Trump press briefing…

A message to dissident America from Tucker Carlson (of the 2024 Trump-Tucker-ticket):

UPDATE II (11/4): NEW ON YouTube: Donald Trump Will Crush ANTIFA. VOTE!

Donald Trump, Founding Fathers, South-Africa, The State, War

“On a personal note: POTUS is why I became an American Woman. I naturalized because of Donald J. Trump.

I thought that were I to post a short, heartfelt video, you’d be more forgiving of my running election interference for the Russians. (FakeNews phonies: I’m being highly cynical. In other words, I’m joking, you dour dummies.)

Naturally, I had always been down with the founding documents and the Founding Fathers. But because of Uncle Sam’s depredation and unjust wars, I wasn’t feeling it.

Until … Trump.   https://www.ilanamercer.com/the-trump-revolution/

If I were I black commentator, I have no doubt that this bit of information, divulged first here, would have generated greater interest in our conservative circles.

In any case, and very plainly, I urge you to consider my support for POTUS, in the context of my capacity as a longtime writer against war and against the state and for ordered liberty – a writer who also wrote a 2011 book about the demise of South Africa, due to forces not dissimilar to those undermining America.

I anatomized that destruction of my homeland South Africa in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” so I know that this election is the tipping point for America. Those of us who lost a homeland recognize it. …”

WATCH THIS SHORT MESSAGE AND VOTE!

*****

Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s currently on Gab, YouTube, Twitter & LinkedIn, but has been banned by Facebook.

UPDATE I (11/3): Waiting.

UPDATE II (11/4): The wait is turning sad.
Thanks to kind readers, who felt what I felt—yet still took the time to kindly and generously make me feel welcome …  

Dear Ilana,

I am not normally one to send “fan letters” and fawn all over people,
so I consider this quick note just an affirmation of your writing. I
have been a regular reader of yours for a few years now. I enjoy and
look forward to your insights, your intelligent discourse, and your
humor. All attributes that are sorely lacking on a grand scale in so
much of what is dumped out there as news, or truth, or thought.

Two points: First, your use of language is thrilling and
thought-provoking in this day and age of click-bait and “right  thinking”. Thank you!

Second, I want to congratulate you for becoming a naturalized
American citizen, and welcome you. I see that as a positive action
motivated by optimism and healthy pride.  And even though being a US
citizen offers so many possibilities and opportunities, I believe
what you bring to the table is of greater value.

With respect, and my regards,

Kevin H.

Retired M/Sgt Illinois State Police, historian, certified NRA
instructor & CMP RSO

 

UPDATED (10/30): NEW COLUMN: We ‘Lizard Brains’ Love Our POTUS—Kvetching COVID Joe Must GO!

COVID-19, Democrats, Donald Trump, Elections, Foreign Policy, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Racism, War

NEW COLUMN is “We ‘Lizard Brains’ Love Our POTUS—Kvetching COVID Joe Must GO!” It is currently on WND.COM, the Unz ReviewNAEBC and Townhall.com.

An excerpt:

In 2016, Hillary Clinton called Trump voters Deplorables.

The year 2020 finds Jon Meacham likening us to lizard brains. Meacham, one of the left’s favorite historians, mused that white America has retreated into unthinking limbic mode.

A patrician from Texas, an oil man, responded politely, on Martha MacCallum’s Fox News show: “If putting food on my family’s table and worrying about my employees makes me a lizard brain, then call me iguana.”

Iguanas-cum-deplorables are with Trump, and he with them. And he, President Donald J. Trump, is leaving everything he’s got on the battlefield.

Trump is not merely showing up, standing prone, looking out nervously upon a few oddly encircled, masked supporters, as his rival, Joe Biden, is doing.

Oh, no! Be it in Bullhead City or Goodyear, Arizona, or Circleville, Ohio, or Lansing, Michigan—Trump has been turning in the kind of performances that come from the heart, cocking a snook at the media establishment, while throwing himself into each and every rally with as much joy, exuberance and optimism as went into the rally before and the one to follow.

Here is a president who loves the thousands upon thousands of constituents who cling to him, to their guns and their God. He draws his strength from them, and engages in repartee with them.

America will … be the first … to land an astronaut on Mars … maybe we will make that a woman,” taunted POTUS, in Arizona.

“Make it Nancy Pelosi,” came a retort from the crowd. Trump thought this was peaches: “Who said that? That’s pretty good. Stand up, please. Look at this guy. That’s pretty good,” came the president’s happy-warrior reply.

Breaking protocol with the colluding quislings of cable news, Michael Smerconish, a CNN commentator, could not contain his admiration for the president’s energy and stamina, following the commander-in-chief’s bout with COVID, as he charged headlong into battleground states. The anchor gushed spontaneously about the four rallies a day POTUS has been putting on: Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Florida, on and on, while Biden tiptoed in and out of the basement.

While Trump riffs easily about football with His People; “Sleepy Joe” carries on about COVID, which is a bit of a downer, wouldn’t you say?

“We’re not living with it; we’re dying with it. We’re not profiting from it; we’re croaking from it,” he keeps yelling.

(Actually, the Bidens are profiting handsomely. “Sleepy Joe’s” experience as a “blue-collar” type was short-lived. Once he headed for the fleshpots of Washington, D.C., Biden, it would appear, morphed into an oligarch. By the looks of it, he parleyed his political influence into a wealth-making juggernaut.)

If Biden’s miserable message works, America is no longer America. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN is “We ‘Lizard Brains’ Love Our POTUS—Kvetching COVID Joe Must GO!” It is currently on WND.COM, the Unz Review, NAEBC, and Townhall.com. 

UPDATE (10/30):

Another money moment from President Trump about the lockdown of the country: In Michigan, for example, only the husband of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is allowed out of the house.