https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TCzIds04R4

Thomas C. Schelling wrote in his 1966 book Arms and Influence:[9]

Salami tactics, we can be sure, were invented by a child […] Tell a child not to go in the water and he’ll sit on the bank and submerge his bare feet; he is not yet ‘in’ the water. Acquiesce, and he’ll stand up; no more of him is in the water than before. Think it over, and he’ll start wading, not going any deeper; take a moment to decide whether this is different and he’ll go a little deeper, arguing that since he goes back and forth it all averages out. Pretty soon we are calling to him not to swim out of sight, wondering whatever happened to all our discipline.

Salami slicing tactics

Salami slicing tactics, also known as salami slicing, salami tactics, the salami-slice strategy, or salami attacks,[1] is a divide and conquer process of threats and alliances used to overcome opposition. With it, an aggressor can influence and eventually dominate a landscape, typically political, in piecemeal fashion. Opposition is eliminated "slice by slice" until its members realize, usually too late, that it has been virtually neutralized in its entirety. In some cases, the tactics include the creation of several factions within an opposing political party, followed by its dismantling from the inside, without giving the affected parties the opportunity to protest or react. Salami tactics are most likely to succeed when its perpetrators keep their true long-term motives hidden and maintain a posture of cooperativeness and helpfulness while engaged in gradual subversion.

Origins
Edit
It was commonly believed that the term salami tactics (Hungarian: szalámitaktika) was coined in the late 1940s by Stalinist dictator Mátyás Rákosi to describe the actions of the Hungarian Communist Party in its ultimately successful drive for complete power in Hungary.[2][3] Noting that "salami, an expensive food, is not eaten all at once, but is cut one slice at a time," Rákosi claimed he destroyed Hungary's leading, center-right, Smallholders' Party through a "step-by-step approach ... known as the 'Salami tactic,' and thanks to it we were able, day after day, to slice off, to cut up the reactionary forces skulking in the Smallholders' Party."[4][5][6] By portraying his opponents as fascists (or at the very least fascist sympathizers), Rákosi was able to get the opposition to slice off its own right wing, then its center, then most of its left wing, so that only sympathizers ("fellow travellers" willing to collaborate with the Communist Party remained in power.[3][7]

However, according to historian Norman Stone, the term might have been invented by Hungarian Independence Party leader Zoltán Pfeiffer, a hardline anti-communist opponent of Rákosi.[8]