Isegoria

Bernard B. Fall wrote The Theory and Practice of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency for the April 1965 issue of the Naval War College’s Review:

Let me state this definition: RW = G + P, or, ‘revolutionary warfare equals guerrilla warfare plus political action.’ This formula for revolutionary warfare is the result of the application of guerrilla methods to the furtherance of an ideology or a political system. This is the real difference between partisan warfare, guerrilla warfare, and everything else. ‘Guerrilla’ simply means ‘small war,’ to which the correct Army answer is (and that applies to all Western armies) that everybody knows how to fight small wars; no second lieutenant of the infantry ever learns anything else but how to fight small wars. Political action, however, is the difference. The communists, or shall we say, any sound revolutionary warfare operator (the French underground, the Norwegian underground, or any other European anti-Nazi underground) most of the time used small-war tactics — not to destroy the German Army, of which they were thoroughly incapable, but to establish a competitive system of control over the population. Of course, in order to do this, here and there they had to kill some of the occupying forces and attack some of the military targets. But above all they had to kill their own people who collaborated with the enemy.

But the “kill” aspect, the military aspect, definitely always remained the minor aspect. The political, administrative, ideological aspect is the primary aspect. Everybody, of course, by definition, will seek a military solution to the insurgency problem, whereas by its very nature, the insurgency problem is military only in a secondary sense, and political, ideological, and administrative in a primary sense. Once we understand this, we will understand more of what is actually going on in Viet-Nam or in some of the other places affected by RW.

Holy Smoke, Joan Acocella’s review of two new books on the Crusades, notes “two facts about the Middle Ages that nonspecialist readers must get into their heads”:

The first is that violence was a normal fact of medieval life. Seizing your brother-in-law’s castle, cutting off his nose — these were unremarkable activities. The second is the pervasive religiosity of the period — above all, the fear of damnation, especially on the part of the knights. They were usually the ones committing the violence. Yet every sermon they heard told them that killing was an abomination to God; every church portal they gazed up at showed grinning devils hauling the violent down to Hell. So they were caught in a vise: the thing they were trained to do was also a thing that was going to cause them to burn for all eternity. They tried to stave this off. They went on pilgrimages; they made donations to monasteries. (The rise of the monastic orders in the Middle Ages owes much to knightly guilt.) Still, they knew they were living in a state of sin.

Then Urban, in preaching the First Crusade, offered them a solution. He called upon them to kill, and told them that on this occasion it was not a sin — indeed, that it would win them remission of past sins.

In Armor vs. Attitude, Ralph Kinney Bennett explains that “armor is a very relative thing” with this anecdote:

There’s a famous old story about some late 19th century Chinese warlord who bought some gunboats fitted with state-of-the-art Krupp armor. When he moved confidently up-river against a rival warlord’s forts, his opponent’s guns tore through the gunboats’ armor. He indignantly telegraphed a complaint to Krupp. The company wired back to inform him that his opponent had recently purchased the latest Krupp armor-piercing guns and ammunition. Tough luck.