Divide and conquer?

Reader question:

Please explain “divide and conquer” in this sentence: Parenting younger children is often about divide and conquer.

My comments:

Younger children?

Babies and toddlers, for instance, rather than teenagers.

Ok, parents often try the “divide and conquer” strategy when it comes to conquering, or rather controlling little boys and girls and teaching them how to behave at home and abroad.

Small boys and girls are too young to understand rules and regulations. When they cry for no good reason, for example, they’re difficult to control, or console. If two or more babies all cry out loud at the same time, order is especially hard to restore.

However, when these children are separated and on their own, they’re easy to control.

Easier to control, that is, easier than otherwise.

Anyways, that’s the concept of “divide and conquer”.

Now, you wonder if conquer, as in conquering Africa or conquering the highest peaks on Earth, is too big a word to deploy on “younger children”. It is too big a word, but “conquer” is used here as an idiom and not to be taken too literally.

The idea of “divide and conquer”, you see, is borrowed from the practice of “divide and conquer” by ancient kings and emperors.

The concept of “divide and conquer” is not difficult to understand. Let’s take the king in an ancient court for example. That king would have a better life if his subjects were divided into small groups who are fighting each other all the time. In that case, they would all look up to the king for resolving their differences.

If they were not fighting each other, however, all the people would have to blame the king for any of their problems they had. After all, the king was supposed to be responsible for the wellbeing of all.

So, for his own benefit, the king would prefer the population being divided, weak and fighting with each other.

If not, they might realize that the king were their common enemy and they might join together against the king.

And then where would we be, right?

“Divide and conquer” as an expression has its origin in the Latin phrase “divide et impera”. “It describes one of the tactics which the Romans used to rule their empire,” according to Collins COBUILD Idioms Dictionary.

For greater clarity, let’s examine “divide and conquer” in detailed media examples:

1. In recent days, former U.S. President Donald Trump and his Republican running mate, JD Vance, have doubled down on their false and defamatory claims about legally admitted Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, thus churning up widespread fears, bomb threats, and school evacuations. Claiming that these migrants were destroying the American “way of life,” Trump promised that, if elected, he would order massive deportations. This statement echoed his astonishing promise, made during the 2024 campaign and previously, to seize and deport between 15 and 20 million immigrants.

Nativist agitation has a long, sordid history in the United States. In the 1850s, large numbers of American Protestants rallied behind the Know Nothing movement and its political offshoot, the American Party, ventures centered primarily on opposing the influence of immigrant Catholics. In the latter part of the 19th century, hostility toward Chinese immigrants (“the yellow peril”) and, later, Japanese immigrants led to lynchings, riots, and legislation that barred virtually all immigration from the two Asian nations.

During the early 20th century, American xenophobia focused on the alleged dangers provided by the “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe, predominantly Catholics and Jews. Such people, it was claimed, had a higher propensity for moral depravity, feeble-mindedness, and crime, and were polluting the “Nordic race.” As a result, many “old stock” Americans championed changes in immigration law to sharply reduce the number of these allegedly inferior people entering the country. Adopted in legislation during the 1920s, a new, highly discriminatory national origins quota system did, indeed, largely restrict their ability to enter the United States, leaving millions to perish in Europe after the onset of the Nazi terror.

Of course, many Americans, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, welcomed the arrival of people from foreign lands. And, in line with their views, U.S. immigration law was significantly liberalized in 1965.

We should also recognize that the United States was hardly unique in undergoing surges of anti-immigrant nativism. Indeed, over the centuries, recent arrivals in many countries experienced rampant xenophobia – including “Paki-bashing” in Britain and violence against Turkish immigrants in Germany. Recently, in fact, intense opposition to immigration and immigrants provided a key factor behind British public support for Brexit and the startling rise of previously marginal, hyper-nationalist parties in Europe.

What has inspired this hostility to people coming from other lands?

Many individuals, it seems, feel uneasy when confronted with the unfamiliar. Thus, they sometimes find differences in skin color, religion, language, or culture to be disturbing. Although some people can – and often do – find these things a welcome addition to their lives or, at least, interesting, others become uncomfortable. In these circumstances, immigrants are easily added to other disdained minority groups as victims of widespread misinformation, mistrust, and prejudice.

Unfortunately, this unease with human differences provides a ready-made opportunity for political exploitation. As many a demagogue or unscrupulous politician has learned, fear and hatred of the “other” can be effective in stirring up a mob or winning an election.

Although nativism has been mobilized by political parties and movements of varying political persuasions, it has appeared most frequently on the right. Fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s focused heavily on the supposed glories of their nation and the ostensible biological inferiority of people from other lands. This xenophobia provided a rightwing ideological component in numerous countries, including the United States, where groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Silver Shirts, the Nazi Party, and the America First movement lauded a mythical “Americanism” and assailed the foreign-born.

More recently, too, anti-immigrant sentiment has played a central role in Europe’s parties of the far right, such as France’s National Front (now the National Rally), Alternative for Germany, the Swiss People’s Party, Hungary’s Fidesz, the Party of Freedom of the Netherlands, the Brothers of Italy, and numerous others of their stripe. Meanwhile, in the United States, anti-immigrant sentiment has thrived in the increasingly right-wing Republican Party. Trump’s adoption of an anti-immigrant approach as a central theme of his MAGA movement, like his promise of building a wall between Mexico and the United States, is no accident, but part of a political strategy to ride xenophobia to power.

A key reason that nativism has become a staple of the right is that, with the advent of democratic institutions in many nations, the right has faced a difficult situation. Before the commoners gained the vote, their opportunities for effectively challenging economic and social inequality were limited. But, armed with the ballot, masses of people had the power to elect governments that would implement more equitable policies, such as sharing the wealth. This could be accomplished in a variety of ways, including taking control of giant corporations and estates, heavily taxing vast fortunes, raising workers’ pay, reducing the workday and lengthening vacations, building inexpensive housing, and establishing free education and healthcare. Worst of all, from the standpoint of the right, such leveling measures, advanced by a burgeoning left, had significant popular appeal.

Faced with this dilemma, the economically and socially privileged and their political parties on the right recognized that, to defeat the drive for the expansion of economic and social equality, it would be useful to fan the flames of popular prejudices (among them, hostility to immigrants), as this would divide the mass base of the left and put it on the defensive. Consequently, they gravitated toward this divide and conquer strategy – a strategy that sometimes worked.

Will it work again in the 2024 U.S. presidential and congressional elections? With the poll numbers so close, it’s hard to say.

- Will the Right’s Anti-Immigrant, Divide-and-Conquer Tactics Work in 2024? CommonDreams.org, September 26, 2024.

2. Divide and rule, or divide and conquer, in political and social contexts, refers to the tactic of gaining and maintaining control by fragmenting opposition. This involves taking advantage of existing divisions within a political group or community by adversaries, or deliberately creating or exacerbating such divisions to weaken unity and prevent collective action against the ruling power.

Who was the first to use Divide and Conquer?

The divide and conquer (or divide et impera) strategy has ancient roots and is not attributed to a single individual, but rather evolved over time as a common military and political tactic. However, some of the earliest documented uses of the strategy are found in the Roman Empire, notably by Julius Caesar during his conquest of Gaul. Caesar skillfully exploited divisions among the Gallic tribes to prevent them from uniting against him, weakening their resistance and enabling Roman control.

The concept of divide and conquer can be traced back to Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great. Philip used this tactic to subdue the Greek city-states, playing them against each other to strengthen his own position. The idea was to fragment larger, unified opposition by encouraging infighting or exploiting internal divisions, making it easier to dominate smaller, weakened factions.

In essence, while Julius Caesar is often closely associated with this strategy, it was already in use by leaders like Philip II of Macedon and likely developed even earlier in human history, applied to both military and political arenas.

Also, Caesar’s own writings, such as Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Commentaries on the Gallic War), were used to shape public perception of his campaigns, portraying him as a hero and justifying his actions. This was a form of propaganda that bolstered his political position in Rome.

Caesar, famous for his military expertise and numerous conquests, was a Roman statesman, general, and writer who played a key role in the expansion and defense of Rome's borders. He famously conquered Gaul (modern-day France and Belgium) while simultaneously safeguarding the Roman Empire.

His success, widespread popularity, and defiance of the Senate stirred both admiration and fear among his allies and adversaries. Caesar recognized that to ensure his survival and that of the Roman state, he had to embrace both defensive and offensive strategies, striking decisively against any threats to his personal ambitions and to Rome.

- Was Divide and Conquer a Julius Caesar Invention, or Not? RomanEmpireTimes.com, October 3, 2024.

3. Stone-faced as he stared into a gaggle of cameras on Tuesday, the leader of Canada’s largest province laid bare how it feels to be America’s northern neighbour and closest ally this week.

“It’s like a family member stabbing you right in the heart,” said Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford. A day before, president-elect Donald Trump had pledged hefty tariffs on Mexico and Canada, the US’s two largest trading partners. “It’s the biggest threat we’ve ever seen … It’s unfortunate. It’s very, very hurtful.”

For both Mexico and Canada, whose economic successes are enmeshed in their multibillion-dollar trade relationships with the United States, the forecasted chaos and disruption of a second Trump term has arrived. And the first salvo from Trump has already forced leaders from Mexico and Canada to revisit their relationship with the US – and with each other.

Both have maxims to describe living in the shadow of the world’s largest economic and military superpower, which sees nearly $2tn worth of goods and services pass through its two land borders.

“Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant,” the late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau told then US president Richard Nixon. “No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”

For Mexicans, it is the words of the 19th-century dictator Porfirio Díaz: “Poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States.”

The vagaries of the relationship were tested again this week when Trump threatened in a social media post to apply devastating levies of 25% on all goods and services from both countries, and to keep them in place until “such time as drugs, in particular fentanyl, and all illegal aliens stop this invasion of our country!”

Although in 2018 the US, Canada and Mexico renegotiated the Nafta trade pact that Trump had long blamed for gutting US manufacturing, the three countries still have deeply intertwined supply chains – especially an automotive industry that spans the continent – making a levy of that magnitude potentially devastating to all.

In Canada, Trump’s demands have left the government scrambling to make sense of the threat – and how seriously to take it.

“‘Good-faith negotiator’ is not usually a descriptor of Donald Trump. He loves to disrupt it. He loves to divide and conquer,” said Colin Robertson, a former senior Canadian diplomat who has had numerous postings in the US. “Trump is determined to truly make his mark. Last time he was disorganized. This time, he’s certainly started off demonstrating a high degree of organization.”

- ‘He loves to divide and conquer’: Canada and Mexico brace for second Trump term, TheGuardian.com, November 30, 2024.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：张欣）