There are some who might say that Machiavelli, who lived 1469 to1527, hasn't any application to today's situation. I disagree.
That's about as accurate a statement as can be had today.
Read the rest by Alan Bock, who is a conservative author that has a byline in the Orange County Register.
October 6, 2007
Machiavelli's Real Transgression
by Alan Bock
I was planning to write about Blackwater and a growing distaste for contracting-out, privatizing or outsourcing various operations in wartime to "mercenaries," and I will a bit. But the topic of mercenaries got me to thinking about Machiavelli, who famously advised the ruler in his small masterpiece, The Prince, to avoid mercenaries.
"Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous," he wrote, "and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy … They are ready enough to be your soldiers whilst you do not make war, but if war comes they take themselves off or run from the foe; which I should have little trouble to prove, for the ruin of Italy has been caused by nothing else than by resting all her hopes for many years on mercenaries, and although they formerly made some display and appeared valiant among themselves, yet when foreigners came they showed what they were."
That's about as accurate a statement as can be had today.
Read the rest by Alan Bock, who is a conservative author that has a byline in the Orange County Register.