Web: The Death of a Thousand Cuts

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The Death of a Thousand Cuts

Bud Burrell

Sanity Check via Wayback, 2 February 2006

During my undergraduate studies, I read of an historical method of execution known as the Death of a Thousand Cuts. I have come to see that as a metaphor for how guerrilla wars (like ours) are won and lost.

Whether any of us have fully realized it or not, we have been engaged by an insidious enemy whose sole desire was to steal what was not theirs from others they viewed as their inferiors, rather than earn it legitimately. When a person was executed by the infliction of a thousand small cuts, the pain was enormous, eventually killing the subject by shock and loss of blood, but very, very slowly.

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