![]() Depending on the reaction of the forces of status quo, banner or the bayonet take the leadership mantle. Some stay on the streets with banners, others get behind the foxhole with bayonets. ![]() The naughtiest take up arms and start to organize themselves before someone proves tall enough or wise enough to assume leadership. Elders stay back, pray, and talk to local and global media. Young men and women take to the streets to protest. All someone needs to do is ring the bell and then keep people informed. The most ignorant person, in the darkest corner of the world, would also know the state of his things in comparison to the rest of the world. Global and local media, both mainstream and alternative, keeps prepping people through informing and educating. The word is out there, always riding the air, for everyone to hear, see, and feel. The world of modern insurgencies, even in places ruled by psychos, is the world of ubiquitous information. They were averse to, and afraid of, leaving their place and pedestal. Lastly, Mao’s was a peasant society tied to their home and hearth and their farms. He also operated amongst a people who, for millennia, had thought they had nothing to do with the world outside the Middle Kingdom and who therefore were not easily inflamed by the revolutionary spirit. Back then, computers were weighed in tons, and men and merchandise still travelled in boats across China. This was perhaps essential in his time and environment. Mao and his comrades considered it natural to work slowly and patiently on winning popular support and on mobilization of a meaningfully large segment of the populace before moving on to arming and training party cadres, and gathering force like a storm. Maoist thought and precedent on insurgency is replete with mentions of graduations, stages, and linear progression. Here is a brief explanation of these changes. And lastly, increasingly, the insurgents have a globalist outlook instead of Mao’s paranoid jingoism. ![]() Fourth, insurgencies are spearheaded by tech-savvy facebookers and tweeters instead of Mao’s peasants and even Trotsky’s factory workers. Third, the storm of insurgency is now brewed in the politico-social hothouses of reasonably affluent urban communities instead of the disaffected slums and the alienated countryside. Second, the central role of a demagogic leader (like Mao, or even Lenin) has waned and people have tended to guide their own destinies. One, the distinction between Maoist stages has blurred and the insurgent movements now progress in (often concentric) circles instead of moving along a linear path. I believe insurgency has evolved in five seminal ways. If insurgency is all about standing up against the forces of status quo – the debate about right and wrong insurgencies not being germane to this piece – the art has evolved in a big way during the last decade of the 20th and first of the 21th century. Throughout most of the 20 th century, Mao’s thoughts on organization of a guerilla-cum-insurgent struggle have enjoyed a pride of place in academic discourse on this subject.
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