Iain Abernethy - The Practical Application Of Karate

One of the biggest problems I see when it comes to modern self-protection is the failure to understand just what we are protecting ourselves against. If we don’t understand the question, there is no way that we can give an adequate answer. In the classic text “The Art of War” Sun Tzu famously wrote: “If you know your enemy and know yourself, you will not know defeat in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemy but know yourself, you win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemy and do not know yourself, there is grave danger in every single battle.” From a self-protection perspective, our enemy is the violent criminal. It is the violent criminal that we need to understand if we are to be keep ourselves safe from them. We need to understand their motivations and their methods if we are to be best placed to deal with them. I would suggest that we martial arts types have a bad habit of assuming criminals will act like fellow fighters and martial artists. We are therefore don’t “know our enemy” an