On Guerrilla Warfare
by Mao Tse-tung, Samuel B Griffith
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Book Summary Information
Author: Mao Tse-tung, Samuel B GriffithEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); Chinese (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-09-21
ISBN: 0252068920
Number of pages: 128
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Book Reviews of On Guerrilla Warfare
Book Review: 800 Pound Gorilla, does Guerilla
Summary: 3 Stars
Mao Tse-Tung: revolutionary, visionary, God-Emperor of Dune, damned fine singing voice. In all honesty, I kow-tow before Mao, certainly a genius of military and political strategy and tactics who ranks up there with Napoleon: sure he cracked a few eggs in making his hyper-power omelette, but look what he had to work with! Look what he did! Look how he turned a withered, senescent, chopped-up concession-ridden fiasco into a bristling, somewhat scary little monster that managed to hold off the two duelling superpowers of the Age!
In due deference to the Great Chairman, Mao was a man ahead of his time, and a long way behind it: he was very Zen. He was a Warrior-Philosopher King. He was focused: he once said "Power flows from the barrel of a gun". You think Mao would have put up with Michael Moore blabbering around in the Great Hall of the People, or had any patience for fools at the New York Times op-ed desk babbling on about Gitmo?
More to the point: Mao slaughtered millions of his own people, and yet he still had higher approval ratings than Bush!
With that in mind, let us all do a little bow before Mao. If he's up there, somewhere, beaming down at us from the Great Heavenly Hall of the People: hey, man, take a bow, Mao!
With that in mind, I was actually hanging out in a bookstore this evening, checking out the wares, and I asked the prim, no doubt uber-liberal, schoolmarmish clerk if they had a little Mao. She said they stocked "On Guerilla Warfare", so I sat back and dug a little on the Mao scene.
Guess what? "On Guerilla Warfare" ain't all that. No doubt, it's the kind of book some sextegenerian dinty-eyed Boston hippy with a long greasy grey ponytail would dig on---ironically the very guy, if a Revolution did come, would spend his final seconds twitching on the end of somebody's bayonet.
Anyway: the point is, "On Guerilla Warfare" is hopelessly dated. It's nowhere near as yummy and relevant as the Little Red Book, and I can boil it down for you as follows:
*Your army is small and nimble. Keep it moving, keep it stealthy, use the shadows, don't face off against a field army or you'll die like a dog.
*Win hearts and minds, Comrade! Work in the fields with the peasants: rebuild the villages the Imperialist running dogs and their Capitalist masters have burned and razed!
*Fight the Peasant's War! Cheap, cheap, cheap---Mao invented Top Ramen!
*Use Retreat as an Offensive Tactic. Pull back, draw the Enemy in, and pull back again---until you're on what Sun Tzu called "Deadly Ground", and then smash the b*stard.
All of this stuff has been handled before, by Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, and far more elegantly.
Not that "On Guerilla Warfare" is a bad book. On the contrary: this is truth in advertising---Mao wrote a stripped-down instruction manual for fighting a modern army with a chickensh*t ragtag peasant army. His bonafides? He won. He kicked Japanese a**, then he turned around and kicked Chiang Kai-Shek back to Formosa. Good going, Mao!
It's just that---well, Jesus, it's very dated. All kinds of stuff about the 'Japanese fascist Imperialist army', the weapons and 'material issued the Peasant Comrades fighting Imperialist Tyranny', that sort of thing. And as it is an instruction manual, it's prosaic in its specificity, to wit: "the K-Ration, issued by the American imperialists in the hope of using our valiant Comrades as stopgaps against the Japanese Imperialist Fascist invaders, is actually a useful weapon: it is cold, and blunt, and can crack a skull."
You see what I'm sayin', Dawg? Word!
As a work of incipient tyrant psychology, it is a little interesting. Mao is obviously writing to impress: in a way, it's amusing to envision a time when Mao felt he needed to score points.
But in the end, I'm sorry to say, "On Guerilla Warfare" is a bore, a snore, a big zero. Unless you've got a big beef with the invading Japanese Imperialistic Fascist Army---these days relegated to packs of hungry tourists with camcorders---I'd avoid.
Then again, this is a slim little volume, so you can skim it in the bookstore (or library, Comrade) in 30 minutes. Then you'll have the knowledge you need should a Japanese Fascist Aggressor creep out from beneath your bed: you can smash him in the head with a K-ration.
JSG
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