Brzezinski had a little understanding of chess, it soon became clear from the text of his book, and he apparently gave it this loud title, trying to express many longing desires of future world pattern, but he said nothing in particular about strategy – as a method – of realizing his desires in reality. If follow him in this chess analogies, it all resembled the situation when someone hardly aware of rules of the game declared his guaranteed victory against any rival, not knowing any chess theories and not possessing the feeling of the game in playing chess. Not paying much attention to phrase-mongering of Brzezinski, with the thought that “pawn” wrote memoirs imagining itself a “queen”, at last I started reading the review, and I’ve found that its beginning expressed my mind essentially, but without chess analogies. I liked the insinuation on “intellectual muscles” of the former National Security Adviser of American President:
“There is a legend coming from the antiques times of Greek-Persian warfare. The numerous armies and fleet of Persia which by that time already conquered many peoples and established its presence on the Mediterranean Sea, were overhanging the Hellenistic Civilization, the latter, at the first sight, being much less powerful and controlled less “human” and material resources than its potential conqueror. The war began and one sage suggested showing to the Greek warriors their future enemies as they really were.
A group of captured Persians appeared naked in the field where the battle-ranks were drawn up. It is known, even from antique sculpture, that the Greeks of those times paid special attention to bodybuilding exercises to prepare themselves for military service. When this people who were used to purposeful physical training from their childhood saw the Persians naked they almost fell with laugh as they could not imagine that such feeble men even though grouped in numerous armies would be a dangerous enemy on the battle-field. The ensuing military actions brought decisive victory of Greeks over feeble Persians who at that time pretended to establish the unrivalled world primacy of their state and subsequently, to shape the outlook of the whole world”.
The authors of the review thoroughly familiarized me with the USA NSC-20/1 Directive of August 18,1948, which was clearly headed: "Our goals with respect to Russia"[29], and also with extracts from other, not less aggressive, if to get away from formed by themselves political predilections and fears, document of the same department – USA NSC-68 Directive of September 30, 1950.
The boldness of assessments in the review was considerably supported by convincing description of contemporary global strategy, but I was amazed most of all by distinctly formulated priorities of generalized means of ruling a society, which can be perceived by the opposite side in definite circumstances as a kind of weapon:
“Every society is managed in one way or another, and therefore the global historical process may be perceived as a global process of ruling which, at the first place, comprises many processes of regional ruling (policies of regional states and international policies, forces which are not institutionalised within state: mafias, Jewish diaspora); secondly, it proceeds within life processes of the Earth and Space, standing higher than it in the hierarchy. Accordingly, in terms of the Sufficiently Universal Theory of Ruling with respect to the life of societies in the course of historically long intervals (hundreds of years and more) one may specify the following instruments of influence on society, whose reasonable use allows controlling its life and death:
Information of worldview nature, or methodology, which, once adopted, allows men to project – individually and socially – their "standard automations" of identification with regard to particular processes within the completeness and integrity of the World, and to define in their individual perception the hierarchic order of these processes in their mutual interconnection. This information lays foundation for the culture of thinking and for the completeness of ruling activities including also intra-social absolute power both on regional and global levels.
Information of annalistic, chronological nature, in all domains of Culture and all domains of Knowledge. It allows seeing, in which direction the processes are developing, and to correlate particular domains of Culture as a whole and of branches of Knowledge. To those, whose worldview is based on the sense of proportion and is conformable to the World, this information allows identifying particular processes while sieving the "chaotic" flow of facts and phenomena through the worldview "sieve" – subjective human measure of identification. (Within the present context the culture means all information, which is not transferred genetically in the succession of generations).
Information of fact-descriptive nature: description of particular processes and their interconnections constitutes the substance of information of the third priority, which includes the faith-teachings of religious cults, secular ideologies, technologies and facts of all domains of science.
Economic processes, as an instrument of influence subordinated to purely informational instruments of influence through finances (money), which embody a totally generalized type of information of economic nature.
Genocide practices, affecting not only those who live today but also the generations to come, eliminating the genetically determined potential for learning and for development by them of the cultural heredity of ancestors: nuclear blackmail-threat of use; alcohol, tobacco and other kinds of narcotic drugs genocide, food additives, all ecological pollutants, some medicines-real use; "gene engineering" and "biotechnologies" – potential danger.
Other instruments of influence mainly by force – weapons in traditional sense of this word; killing and crippling human beings; destructing and exterminating material and technical objects of civilization, cultural monuments and bearers of their spirit.
Although there are no evident distinctions between the instruments of influence because many of them, by their capacities, could be related to different priorities, their classification in hierarchical order, as presented above, allows nonetheless to identify the dominating factors of influence that may be used as instruments of ruling, and in particular, as instruments of suppression and elimination of those phenomena in the social life that are conceptually inadequate in the sense of ruling.
When used within one social system this set is tantamount to generalized means of ruling this system. But when applied by one social system (social group) to others, which have different internal concepts of ruling, it is tantamount to generalized weapons, i.e. means of warfare, in most general sense of this word, or – instruments of support for self-ruling within another social system, when there is no conceptual incompatibility of ruling in both systems.
This approach determines the priority order of the above classes of instruments of influence on the society because the changes in society's state under the impact of the instruments of supreme priorities, entail much more significant consequences than those incurred by the instruments of minor priorities, although such changes proceed more slowly, without "noisy effects". In other words, within the historically long intervals the level of effectiveness is increasing from the first point to the sixth, while the level of irreversible results of their application, which by and large determine how efficiently problems of the social life are solved in ‘now and forever’ terms, is falling”.