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Divide and Conquer: Difference between revisions
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(Import from TV Tropes TVT:Main.DivideAndConquer 2012-07-01, editor history TVTH:Main.DivideAndConquer, CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported license) |
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{{quote|''"Siamese fighting fish - fascinating creatures. Brave, but on the whole, stupid. Yes, they're stupid. Except for the occasional one, such as we have here, who lets the other two fight. While he waits. [[Victory By Endurance|Waits until the survivor is so exhausted that he cannot defend himself, and then like SPECTRE... he strikes!"]]''|'''[[James Bond (Film)|Ernst Stavro Blofeld]]''', ''[[From Russia With Love (Film)|From Russia With Love]]''}}
Why work when you can get someone else to do the work for you? A favored tactic of [[The Chessmaster]], both villain and [[Anti
Most often, this is when the villain decides to let another, unaffiliated villain absorb the majority of the Hero's time and energy. Truly skilled use of this trope is when the villain can break up the [[Five
[[The Power of Friendship]] is a powerful thing. Some villains realize that after getting beaten by it too many times, so they try to somehow [[Divided We Fall|split up whatever team of heroes they're facing]]. This might involve getting two heroes to [[Hate Plague|hate each other]], [[Achilles in His Tent|getting one hero to hate the others]], or otherwise forcing the team to split up. [[The Lancer]] is a common target of this tactic.
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Compare [[Let's You and Him Fight]]. Contrast [[Enemy Mine]]. #9 in [[The Thirty Six Stratagems]], making this one of [[The Oldest Tricks in The Book]].
{{examples
== Anime & Manga ==
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** And they do follow up in the book as well, only instead of bribing an air force commander to attack a U.S. Ship, they pose as officers in the red army and trick a tank brigade in East Berlin into attacking an American base in West Berlin. They are also unwittingly helped by an American mole in the Politburo whose been feeding the U.S. false information in the hopes of destabilizing the current government in the USSR so he can grab power himself.
* Inverted in the Asimov's short story: ''In a Good Cause''. where the wars amongst humans actually made them stronger, which gives them the upper hand against the united aliens.
** Also inverted the same with the aliens of Harry Turtledove's [[
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* Not only was this the plot of the first episode of ''[[Teen Titans (Animation)|Teen Titans]]'', it was also the title!
* In the [[Filmation]] film, ''[[Flash Gordon (Animation)|Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure of All]]'', this is how Ming keeps control of the planet Mongo, although they phrase it as "separate and rule".
* Discord in ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (Animation)|My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic]]'' splits up the Mane cast physically when they enter his hedge maze. He takes the opportunity to [[Mind Rape]] them one by one to split up their friendship as well.
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** One of the reasons Japan was able to conquer large portions of China in the 1930s - the Communist Chinese wanted their own government defeated even more than Japan did, while the ruling Chinese Nationalists were conversely so preoccupied with trying to stamp them out (not to mention being hopelessly corrupt, incompetent and unpopular-those going together) they caved easily before the Japanese.
** The German-led Axis took advantage of this during their invasion of Yugoslavia in WWII by rallying the country's neighbors to help invade and by arming the radicalized minorities (most notably the Croats with some Slovene, local Hungarian, and Albanian support) against the Serbian-dominated Royal government. It worked devastatingly well - [[Gone Horribly Right|probably too well]], if the subsequent bloodshed and the resulting rise of the Partisans and the Chetniks and their effective tying up of hundreds of thousands of Axis troops shows. Some of the Croatian groups the Nazis stirred up were also such fanatically brutal killers that ''[[Even Evil Has Standards|even SS death squads were sickened by them]]'', and left the Serbs burning for revenge...
** The Soviets tried to do this throughout their history (and started before the Soviet Union even existed yet) by trying to drive wedges between their enemies, whoever they might be at the time. In [[World War One]], they tried to pull Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the various White Factions apart and incite revolution in at least one of them. Before, [[False Friend|during]], and after [[World War Two]], they believed that pitting the West against the Germans would leave a power vaccum that would effectively cement Soviet dominance ([[Nice Job Fixing It, Villain|which was thwarted by Hitler's paranoia and decision to strike at the USSR first]]). And in the Cold War they generally tried to keep the West and the Chinese from coming to any kind of agreement while trying to undermine the solidarity of the Western powers themselves.
*** This was countered by United States opening up (relatively) friendly relations with China despite their ideological incompatibility, as each considered the Soviets to be the greater threat (America seeing them as such because the USSR was simply more powerful than China, and China because the USSR was literally right next door to them).
* Large companies have been known to do this as well. During the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Southwest_Railroad_Strike_of_1886 Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886], [[Railroad Baron]] Jay Gould allegedly boasted that he could "hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."
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