mao is in da house 2.0

Most of you probably don't even remember Mao Zedong. He died in September 1976. That's more than 30 years ago. Nowadays he's probably most known due to the abundance of Chinese Mao kitsch and memorabillia. For me Mao is almost entirely connected with the Chinese Civil War, the Long March, the Cultural Revolution and the Gang of Four. Even kids heard about these things back in the 70's. Maybe because the Vietnam War put focus on that part of the world or because Maoism was really in vogue among radical Swedish students during those years and some of them were my substitute teachers.

So why the hell do I write about Mao? Simple. I'm reading John Keegans book A History of Warfare. It's very interesting and he mentions Maos ideas of a "protracted people's war".

"People's war strategically avoids decisive battles, since a tiny force of a few dozen soldiers would easily be routed in an all-out confrontation with the state. Instead, it favours the strategy of protracted warfare, with carefully chosen battles that can realistically be won. A revolutionary force conducting people's war starts in a remote area with mountainous or otherwise difficult terrain in which its enemy is weak. It attempts to establish a local stronghold known as a revolutionary base area."

He also mentions how Mao focused on discontent peasants instead of factory workers to build support for his revolution. During WWII Tito used Maos ideas in his war against the Nazis. But both Maos and Titos highly politicized method of war caused a lot of suffering for both the peasants and workers they claimed to support. Now it seems like a very similar situation is occurring in the muslim world. Small Islamist groups use or have used similar tactics in Afghanistan, Algeria, Chechnya, Kashmir and, to some extent, Iraq. But who are they fighting against? Their governments? Russia? India? USA? Maybe. But in Algeria the extreme use of terror against civilians made it obvious that these small groups no longer fought a guerilla war against an oppressor - they had become terrorists and oppressors themselves. Anyone with a different view than themselves were regarded as an enemy and ought to be killed. Islamist fringe groups, often consisting of Afghan war veterans, killed everyone. Even fellow muslims. Now this has become an everyday practise in Iraq too and a peaceful end seems to be very far away. More than a hundred thousand civilians were massacred in Algeria during the civil war in the 90's and maybe as many as a hundred thousand civilians have been killed in Chechnya. Since the US invation of Iraq in March 2003 approximately 650 000 civilians have been killed. 600 000 of those died because of violence.

Between 1980 and 1987 Iran had it's own Cultural Revolution. Makes one wonder. In Sweden many old Maoists became neoliberals and neoconservatives. Did the old Maoists in the muslim world become hardcore Islamists?