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Simon Tanner's avatar

Outstanding essay! It warmed my heart you referenced Don Pentecost. So much to unpack here. I’ll definitely save this one for the archives. Two things that came to mind, Booth succeeded in spite of being a civilian because he had the will, and he rehearsed. He planned, and he prepared, and he set the literal stage,

His training as an actor: rehearsing until it’s perfect, thinking through blocking and moving, and keeping calm/ improvising under pressure, are all skills crucial to successful operations, when militarized.

Lastly, on improvised weapons in a totalitarian state, I immediately thought of this quote:

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more - we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward." - Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

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djealas's avatar

"Of course this is far from comprehensive…" I found that quite humorous! I was going to comment that this is one of the most comprehensive article on knife fighting I've ever read, it's almost book length too. Well written and researched. You introduced many concepts I was unaware of, and presented an excellent article on Ulysses as well.

My spouse wanted to learn about how to use a knife in the event she was confronted and attacked by a larger male, and I introduced her to the concept of closing the distance to the combatant, knife hidden in her dominant hand, latch on to him and stab as fast and as forcefully as she could for as long as she could. Mannequin training proved it worked, directly in correlation to what you describe in your article. Devastating. Well written article, many thanks.

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