Election is liked Waging War

By Mortz C. Ortigoza

Running a political campaign is liked waging a war.

In my conversation with a newly minted high elective official, he told me that running for governorship and a congressional seat in the 2022 election a candidate should look for viable candidates to challenge the opponents who are allied in these two positions.

“So the rival in either of these two posts could spread thin his financial resources thus weakening them and ensuring the victory of their opponents”.

He cited that these phenomena happened in the concluded May 13, 2019 election where the opponent in the national position lost because he was preoccupied overseeing and funding many political fronts.

”Sus, it sounds Sun Tzu. They are no different in war,” I quipped.

“Why?” Another politico, who was part of a huddle, posed his question to me.

I told him about the rash and audacity of Germany’s Fuhrer Adolf Hitler when he launched his ambitious plan to conquer Great Britain and the vast land Soviet Union, and waged wars in the Mediterranean and Africa against American General George Patton and British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery.

“What happened there?”

“After Hitler annexed and partitioned Austria, Finland, Yugoslavia, and Romania and invaded Poland, flushing out the British in a beach called Dunkirk, France, defeating the French in France, he attacked Great Britain thru a legendary air war battle because the country was separated by the English Channel to France and then he launched an invasion of Soviet Russia called Operation Barbarossa”.

Barbarossa started on Sunday of June 22, 1941.

That operation, according to Wikipedia,  stemmed from Nazi Germany’s ideological aims to conquer the western Soviet Union so that it could be repopulated by Germans (Lebensraum), to use Slavs as a slave labour force for the Axis (Germany) war effort and to annihilate  the rest according to General Plan Ost, and to acquire the oil reserves of the Caucasus and the agricultural resources of Soviet territories

I cited that Hitler’s strategies enmeshed him in locking horns with his enemies the Britons, Americans, and Russians in three war fronts.

When he sent three million soldiers, many of them cracked troops in the largest invasion of history son of a gun, to attack Kiev, Stalingrad, Leningrad, and others in Soviet Union, he maintained 35 Divisions or more or less half a million Wehrmacht soldiers in France afraid that the British could invade France and Germany.
Before the invasion of Soviet Union, the British  with  their then new technology’s radars and inferior number  of combat planes frustrated the air attacks of the flamboyant German Luftwaffe (air force) chief Hermann Wilhelm Göring who sent 2,500 combat aircraft.

 When asked why Hitler’s military juggernaut lost the war in Operation Barbarossa, Christopher Dowling wrote in a book compilation’s Modern Battles edited by Jon E. Lewis I bought at the book expose’ at the World Trade Center in Pasay City, excerpt:

“Perhaps the last word should be given to (Field –Marshal Karl Rudolf Gerd) von Rundstedt. After the war he told a group of Russian officers that had the Luftwaffe won the Battle of Britain Germany would have defeated Russia in 1941. The Russian had come to ask him which he considered to be the decisive battle of the war, expecting him to name Stalingrad. When he replied, “The Battle of Britain”, they closed their notebooks and went away”.

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Another lesson I learned.

If the two governorship candidates resorted to vote buying by spending two hundred and five hundred pesos for each of the more than a million voters, the cash strapped Mr. Two Hundred Pesos should forego it.

“Why? I asked”

He said the two hundred pesos being spent in one of the six districts with 324,000 average voters were useless since they could not boost the stocks of Mr. Cash Strapped.

“How can you expect voters in that district to vote for him when his opponent flood it with three hundred to five hundred pesos thus outbidding him in winning the hearts and minds of the voters”. He cited that Mr. Cash Strapped should have waited for the rival to buy votes in the two districts and counter his P300 with P500 or his P500 with P650”.

“His two hundred pesos sowed in four districts were ineffective instead he should have concentrated his “guns” on the two districts and outbidding his opponent”.

Outbidding an opponent to a corrupt voter happened in some cities and several towns in the province that saw mayors who have sterling records lose the polls.

“In the recent election performances were not the barometer to win the poll. What matter most was the money a candidate offered to the voters in the last day, night, or hour before the start of the casting of votes at the precincts,” he stressed to me.


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War is politics with bloodshed, politics is war without bloodshed - Mao Zedong

READ MY OTHER ARTICLE:

Espino Urges: Challenge the De Venecias, Arenases

(You can read my selected columns at http://mortzortigoza.blogspot.com and articles at Pangasinan News Aro. You can send comments too at totomortz@yahoo.com)