American Civil War?

Imagine:

It’s 5 November 2024 in the United States of America and you’ve cast your vote in the most important event of the year, the elections. You eagerly await the outcome and your candidate wins! Or they don’t. The next thing violence breaks out in several places across the country.

What do you do?

Probably nothing at first, but with the authoritarian government of Keir Starmer locking up citizens for tweets in Britain, with the European Union trying to smother free speech, with the United Nations pushing its agenda, an agenda you didn’t vote for, an agenda that does not respect your freedom and potential for prosperity and with the United States about to vote at a time when Americans are arguably more divided than ever before, the world is steering towards a showdown that promises to be more savage than the shootout at the OK Corral and the specter of civil war, even a world war, looms in the shadows.

Let’s hope that it does not happen, let’s hope that saner heads prevail, let’s hope that peace prevails, but because it might not, it behooves us to ponder the improbable so that if conflict kicks off we know what to expect, increasing our chances to survive and increasing the odds that the right side will win. If a civil war does break out, I don’t think it will unfold like it did in the mediocre movie Civil War. For one thing, Texas and California are not likely to fight on the same side because their world views are diametrically opposed. No. If it happens it is more likely to be the red states, those states where most people vote for the Republicans, against the blue states, those states where most people vote for the Democrats, with the purple states, those states where there is more or less an equal mix of Republicans and Democrats, swaying to one side or the other while some states might try to remain neutral.

Ordinary folks will have to decide where they stand and if they want to fight. If they want to fight, ordinary folks will have to decide what they want to fight for. Sure, there might be some people who will enjoy the sheer thrill and satisfaction of killing and maiming their political enemies, but for such violence to have any meaning the fighting has to serve a political purpose.

If you choose not to fight, you might be swept up in the conflict anyway. You might be forced to defend your family and friends whether you like it or not.

Do you fight to keep the states together or to secede?

If you fight to secede, keep in mind that it will break up the United States and weaken the country vis-à-vis its foreign enemies like China, Russia, and Iran. Iran might seize the opportunity to attack Israel, Russia might push harder in Ukraine, and China might invade Taiwan or even take the risk and attack the USA.

Do you still see a future with those Americans who disagree so deeply with you on so many issues?

If you do, it would be best not to start the fight in the first place. On the other hand, if you see no way that you can live with those on the other side, you might decide to fight to secede and settle down with others who are more similar to you.

Whole military units or bases might mutiny and side with the rebels or the government similar to what happened during the previous civil war. This would strengthen the rebels against the incumbents in Washington D.C. considerably. Otherwise, it will likely turn into a highly uneven guerrilla war, pitting the world’s most advanced military against a rag-tag bunch of rebels armed with whatever they can find. At least Americans are well armed, so they will have some weapons to start the insurgency.

An insurgency is a violent, armed rebellion by a small, lightly armed group who fights a guerrilla war against a larger authority to wrest some political concessions from them or to overthrow them completely. In a guerrilla war these small groups often harass the stronger enemy by ambushing them and using hit-and-run tactics and raiding while they avoid conventional combat against the stronger foe, as they build up their own strength until they can take on the enemy in a conventional fight. Conventional combat consists of uniformed armies slugging it out with sophisticated modern vehicles and weapons in large armies.

This would not be the first time that citizens take up arms in asymmetric warfare on American soil. During the American Revolution, the colonial forces sometimes used guerrilla tactics — especially Francis Marion who became known as “the Swamp Fox.” “The Swamp Fox’s” tactics caused the British to complain that he does not fight like a gentleman or a Christian and they even declared him a criminal.

Mao Zedong, the Chinese dictator and perhaps the most successful insurgent leader of all time, put it like this:

“The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue. “

(Other sources say it was one of his generals, Chu Teh, who came up with this apt description, but I don’t want to argue because those who argued with Mao often ended up dead. Either way, it succinctly sums up the strategy).

Even so, during the revolutionary war the Americans won their most important victories with a conventional army at Saratoga and Yorktown where soldiers fought in uniform under officers following a chain of command and using conventional tactics.

We should thus study both insurgency warfare as well as conventional combat.

Insurgencies

Insurgencies can take many forms and what works at one place and time may not work somewhere else. Even so, we can learn a lot from the past. The two most important theories about how to fight civil wars is the one by Mao, who formed his thinking during the Chinese Civil War which he fought and won, and another idea that a small movement can spark a revolution without first galvanizing large parts of the population, called focoism, which worked well for Fidel Castro and his Commie compadre, Ernesto “Ché” Guevara in Cuba.

Let’s look at Mao first:

Mao was born in 1893 as the son of a prosperous farmer in Hunan province. After high school he went to work as a library assistant at Peking University where he came into contact with the theories of Karl Marx. He liked them and in 1921 he was one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party.

At the time, China was weak.

The Chinese imperial Qing dynasty collapsed in 1912 when the child emperor Pu Yi, renounced his throne and the country became a republic. The republican government was weak and large part of the country was taken over and ruled by warlords. Initially the Communists worked mostly in the cities to seize power. In 1927 they launched a campaign of uprisings in the southeastern cities like Canton, Nanchang, and Shanghai called the “Autumn Harvest.” Mao led an uprising against the government in Hunan province, but the tactic failed and the incumbent regime led by Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Guomingdan party, decided to deal decisively with the rebels.

The Chinese government found it relatively easy to find, capture, and kill the Communists in the urban areas. The government even beheaded some of their Communist captives in the streets to terrorize the rest and warn the population not to join them. This forced the Communists who wanted to keep their heads to flee to the countryside where they clustered in isolated areas and set up bases. Mao set up a base in the mountains of Jiangxi Province from where he and his followers waged a guerrilla war. While waging the guerrilla war Mao learned by doing and wrote down how.

In an essay called “On Protracted War,” Mao divided insurgency into three stages:

First, the insurgents spread propaganda to try to convince the population that their cause is just while they try to build networks that will be important in the fight to come. Marx thought that the Communist revolution would be led by industrial workers, but China had little industry at that time and eighty to ninety percent of the Chinese population was conservative and narrow-minded peasants who lived in the countryside, so Mao said that the Communists should focus on winning their support instead. If the communists could get the peasants to support them, the guerrilla fighters could hide among the masses. Mao said:

“The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.”

Second, the insurgents start a guerrilla war, harassing the enemy with raids and ambushes while avoiding a conventional fight against a superior force. Instead they try to draw the enemy in until they become extended and then attack them where they are weak and isolated. The insurgents scavenge what weapons and ammunition they can find and they try to recruit more soldiers. As small victories mount, more and more people from the general population might come over to their side since people like to support winners. Here and there the insurgents can also begin to govern the places that they control.

Third, when they are strong enough, the insurgents move from guerrilla tactics to a conventional war with uniformed soldiers, tanks, artillery and armor, and perhaps even planes to overthrow the enemy government by force.

The strategic sages at Sandhurst, Britain’s military school where His Majesty’s military officers are schooled in the arts of war divide an insurgency into six elements:

First, you need to have a clear and precise objective. Second, they say you need to win civil support. Third, they say there is a build-up phase, fourth, attrition, fifth, a transition from a guerrilla war to conventional warfare, and sixth, the insurgents take over. That is fine and dandy because you need to have a clear objective before you start to fight. “Civil support” can fall into Mao’s first phase and “Build-up” can easily fit into both the first and second phases of Mao’s model. “Attrition” falls into Mao’s second phase while “transition” and “take over” fits into the third phase.

Mao made a distinction between an insurgency against a foreign occupier and a fight against an indigenous government. He experienced both, fighting first against the Chinese government, then against the Japanese occupiers during World War Two, and again against the government of Kai-shek, which the Communists finally overthrew.

Mao wrote that it might be easier to beat an occupying force like the Japanese because they are likely to put less value on control of the occupied country than an indigenous government might do, so a devastating set-back like the Battle of Dien Bien Phu where the Vietnamese forces defeated the French could be enough to force the occupiers to leave. Americans saw this clearly during the Vietnam War as well as in the recent conflicts in the Middle East. The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong were willing to pay a much higher price in blood to win.

On the other hand, a native government is likely to be more tenacious, which will demand a bigger effort from the rebels. That means a civil war in the USA might be longer and bloodier than the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It might take a series of battles to beat the incumbents or to quell the resistance.

Mao also warns insurgents not to go over to the third phase before they are really ready for it, because if they play to the strengths of the incumbent regime before they themselves are strong enough, it could lead to their destruction. If something like this happens, he says the rebels should fall back to the second and if need be, even to the first phase of the war. That is why the struggle can take a long time. You need patience if you want to win a civil war.

Mao insisted that the military leaders should remain subordinate to the political leadership, since everything they do has political consequences. In its most extreme form the purpose of a revolutionary war is usually to destroy a society and its institutions and replace them with a new state structure. That is why it does not just consist of military actions, but also contains a political, economic, social and psychological dimension.

Mao differentiated between “the enemies with guns” which are enemy combatants and “enemies without guns” which are those who do not fight but are opposed to the revolution, people that he called secret counterrevolutionaries. Because he was not a democrat (democrat with a small “d”) he thought the military was essential to defeat both these groups.

As it turned out, the Chinese Civil War vindicated Mao’s ideas.

During the first phase, from 1927 to 1937, Chiang Kai-shek was on the offensive and the Chinese Communists on the defense. Over the next six years, the Communists gradually expanded their territory and they occupied a few towns and small cities while Mao molded a motley mass of men into a modest military force that he named the Red Army.

On 7 November, 1931 the Communists declared that they are forming a Chinese Soviet Republic. They said:

“It is the state of the suppressed workers, farmers, soldiers, and working mass. Its flag calls for the downfall of imperialism, the liquidation of landlords, and the overthrow of the warlord government of the Nationalists. We shall establish a soviet government over the whole of China; we shall struggle for the interests of thousands of deprived workers, farmers, and soldiers and other suppressed masses; and to endeavor for peaceful unification of the whole of China.”

The government forces found them in Jiangxi and attacked them in 1933. After a series of clashes, Chiang Kai-shek took personal command and brought a force of more than seven hundred thousand troops to encircled the Communist bases with more than three thousand blockhouses while armored cars patrolled the roads and aircraft searched for insurgents, ready to strike from the sky. The government used mobile columns of soldiers to drive the Communists against the blockhouse lines, similar to the tactics that the British used against the Boer commandos in South Africa during the second Anglo-Boer war.

Like in South Africa, the tactics worked and in 1934 the Communists’ were forced to break out of their base in Jiangxi and go on the Long March to the even more remote and barren area of Yenan, a journey of more than six thousand miles that took more than a year to complete. Of the more than hundred thousand Communists who started, only about twenty thousand made it to Yenan, a shockingly low number, but they did pick up some forty thousand recruits along the way. Chiang tried to encircle them there too, but before he could destroy them, the Japanese invaded China in 1937. Clearly Mao had some luck.

The invasion of the Japanese started off the second phase. Initially Chiang ignored the Japanese invaders and focused on destroying the Communists, but one of his generals mutinied and the mutineers capture Chiang and handed him over to the Communists who, to his great surprise, did not kill him but offered him a deal. They said if he allied with them against the Japanese they would let him go. Chiang accepted.

The government forces were siphoned off to defend the country against the Japanese and the Chinese would fight against them longer than anyone else, losing millions of lives from 1937 to 1945, but tying down millions of Japanese troops who could have prolonged the war in the Pacific Ocean against the Americans.

The communists used that time to build more bases and they flaunted themselves as freedom fighters fighting against the foreigners. In 1940 the tenuous truce between the Nationalists and the Communists broke down and they fought against each other as well as against the Japanese. On 7 December 1941 Japan attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and the Americans allied with China against them.

After 1941, neither the Japanese nor Chiang Kai-shek’s forces were strong enough to chase the Communists from their bases. Chiang hoped that the Americans would land in China to fight against the large Japanese army there and help him to get rid of the Communists at the same time, but instead the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese home-islands, which was enough to convince the Nipponese to give up. Japan surrendered on 2 September 1945. Some Japanese soldiers handed over their weapons to the Communists whom they mistook as the proper Chinese government representatives, strengthening the Communist forces.

With the Japanese gone, Chiang could turn all his attention on the Communists. He held a strong hand: he had an internationally represented government and a seasoned army while American aid flowed in including military advisors and military equipment. Despite these advantages, Chiang only controlled southwest China. He put party bureaucrats in power over most of the country that wasn’t controlled by the Communists but, understandably after such a long war, the economy was devastated and there was hyperinflation. Chiang’s government was also corrupt and many local officials took bribes and extorted money from the population, which decreased his support among the people. Americans can expect the same kind of mismanagement to occur during the chaos of a civil war.

Warlords got their old gangs together and started to rob and exploit peasants in parts of the country. The Communists crushed these gangs in the areas they controlled which made many peasants join them. Some of the bandits also joined because if they did not they were usually shot. The Communists made them an offer that they could not refuse.

The Communists also put landlords on trial in the areas that they took over, beating them up and forcing them to kneel down on sharp stones while peasants harangued them at a “People’s Court” after which the crowd usually beat them to death with their fists, feet and wooden sticks or the Communist soldiers shot them in the back of the head. The Communists killed more than a million landlords in this way.

The Communists also tortured their own soldiers when they suspected that they might not be loyal enough. Soldiers were encouraged to watch their comrades and if one expressed “bad thoughts” they had to report him because he was betraying their cause. Leftists don’t like freedom of speech and freedom of thought. Those who expressed “bad thoughts” were punished by pulling out their nails with pliers. If that was not enough to make them confess, they were stripped and strung up by their wrists from a beam and burned with incense sticks. If that was not enough they made a man stretch out his hands on a table and then hammered a six inch nail through them, transfixing the suspect to the table. Like Mao said:

“A revolution is not a tea party.”

(This reminds me of the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin who said: “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.”)

The Nationalists were no less brutal and when they took back some of the land that the Communists stole; they buried some of the peasant leaders who took part in the “People Courts” alive as a warning to the rest of the people not to co-operate with the Communists. The Nationalist also rarely took prisoners and preferred to shoot them and the wounded, arguing that they do not even have enough medical supplies to take care of their own men, let alone the enemy. In contrast, Mao encouraged Chiang’s men to desert and join the Communist cause.

Mao and Chiang Kai-shek gambled big on the enormous and rich industrial region of Manchuria, a province roughly the size of Western Europe. It was far from Chiang’s bases and because it was so big it was difficult to control. Chiang couldn’t concentrate his forces and his supplies in Manchuria because he had to keep control over the whole country, but both sides committed large armies to Manchuria.

Chiang’s army moved into Manchuria in late 1945 and early 1946 and Mao tried to take them on in a conventional fight. The people supported the Communists and helped them by sabotaging telegraph and telephone lines and tearing up pieces of railway to disrupt the movement of government forces. Mao told his troops to seize the railroad junction town of Siping, and they attacked with more than four hundred thousand men, but Chiang’s troops were still too strong and they kept Red forces at bay.

At this point the USA interrupted the fighting. They wanted a unified and stable China, so they sent the statesman George Marshall to see if he could broker a peace agreement. By June 1946, Mao and Chiang agreed to a cease-fire.

Mao’s forces fell back on phase one while they kept fighting a guerrilla war in some remote areas of northern China. Chiang’s forces occupied and held the large cities, but they became overextended, and when the cease-fire broke down, they were forced to defend a few strong points, while Mao used a combination of guerrilla and conventional tactics to great effect, seizing the initiative and gaining the upper hand. The rebels attacked isolated garrisons, capturing their weapons and vehicles and exposing the Nationalists to sniper attacks and ambushes whenever they ventured out into the countryside.

Mao’s men became entrenched and he likened their position in Manchuria to that of an armchair with Mongolia and Korea providing the armrests, while the Soviet Union served as the backrest. Chiang could have cut his losses in Manchuria and consolidated his control in the rest of China, but instead he doubled down and committed more forces to Manchuria. The Communists guerrillas had greater mobility and they cut Chiang’s supply lines to the south. In the summer of 1948, the Communists launched a big conventional offensive known as the Liaoning campaign, to drive Chiang’s forces out of the cities.

Chiang’s men were weakened by the lack of supplies and the constant fighting. Many of them defected to the Communists, increasing Mao’s manpower. During this phase, the Communists decided they did not have enough time to win over the population, so they terrorized them instead, murdering them in masses to scare them into supporting the insurgents. The Communists cowed the population and exploited them ruthlessly, stealing their food, vehicles and supplies.

At this point the USA could have intervened, but since China is such a vast place and Chiang Kai-shek was corrupt, it would have required an enormous investment of men and money to fight the Communists with no guarantee of success. There was also the chance that Russia might intervene on the Communist side.

By 1947 the Communists were ready to move over to the third phase.

At Changchun the Communists surrounded the city. The Nationalists tried to break out several times, but without success. Some Nationalist officers went over to the Communists and told them where the weaknesses in the defenses were and where the survivors were sheltering. These traitors then directed the Communist artillery onto their erstwhile comrades. After three months of the siege the population was forced to eat their dead and corpses were bought and sold for food. More than a quarter million Chinese died during the siege. The city finally surrendered on 26 October, 1948. You have to ask why the Nationalist army did not try to relief them or why they did not fly in food for the people.

The Communists soon over-ran all of Manchuria and controlled most of the north. Chiang called it a “world catastrophe.”

Chinese strategists have a saying:

“Manchuria is a limb of the nation, but the central provinces are the heart.”

Now the Communists aimed for the heart. They set out to take over the area south of the Great Wall and they advanced toward the Yangtze River, which divides northern from southern China. At Xuzhou, a critical railway junction in Jiangsu Province, six hundred thousand Communist troops fought against a roughly equal force of Nationalist troops for almost two months and defeated them with the conventional tactics of mechanized warfare and artillery fire, abilities that they only recently mastered. Again, logistics was a problem and in the end the Nationalist troops survived by eating grass and animal bones. One Nationalist commander, General Huang Baitao, committed suicide.

This broke the back of Chiang’s army. America considered it a lost cause and stopped giving military aid.

At the walled town of Xinbaoan the Communists defeated the Nationalists by saturating the town with artillery fire before sending in the infantry to mop up the survivors. The Nationalist commander, Guo Jingyun, shot himself, but the Communist refrigerated his corpse in the frozen ground and then sent it to Beijing to serve as a warning.

The Communists soon took the major port city of Tianjin and the imperial capital of Beijing, ripping the heart out of the Nationalist resistance. The Communists took China’s southern capital of Nanjing in April 1949 and China’s commercial center at Shanghai in May. Before Shanghai fell Nationalist execution squads shot suspected Communists and those who said the Nationalist cause is lost by shooting them in the back of their heads in the streets to discourage others.

Clearly a civil war is nasty business.

The Nationalists also transferred millions of dollars in gold and silver bullion to Taiwan, a large island ninety miles from the mainland. By the end of January 1949, they controlled all of Northern China and by the 1st of October, 1949, Mao declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China which gave the Chinese Communist Party control of the mainland and the destiny of more than five hundred million people.

Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Party fled to Taiwan where they formed a separate Nationalist state which they claimed is the legitimate government of all of China. The problem was that they did not have the force to back that up.

The fighting from 1946 to the end of 1949 cost the lives of more than six million people. The Civil War has never formally ended and the two sides never signed a peace treaty and tensions between them remain to this day. If the US gets embroiled in a civil war on home soil, it might just be the moment that the Chinese Communists decide to invade Taiwan and resolve the issue once and for all.

Why did the Nationalists lose?

While the fighting was still raging Mao said: “…the feelings of the people are against him (Chiang), the morale of his troops are low, and his economy is in difficulty.”

Chiang himself gave four reasons:

First, he complained that his military leaders lacked tactical skills. He said:

“Our commanders fight muddle-headed battles.”

He complained that they planned poorly because they did not study the opposing troop dispositions and they did not take the lie of the land into consideration. Many of them were also only concerned with their own self-interest.

It’s important to know your enemy and use geography to the best of your advantage.

Second, he complained that the officers treated the ordinary troops poorly. His troops were also poorly trained. He said:

“The soldiers’ combat skills are so poor that they cannot fight.”

I find it extraordinary that after the Second World War — a global conflict that China took part in longer than any of the other belligerents — Chiang could not muster some grizzled veterans or even some foreign experts to whip his army into shape. Chiang’s forces also had German and American military advisors who could and should have helped. He could even have contracted some mercenaries. Many highly experienced and well-trained German soldiers joined forces like the French Foreign Legion after the war to escape persecution or to seek their fortune. They were a dime a dozen at that time.

Many of Chiang’s soldiers were not volunteers. Chiang’s goons went around villages and press-ganged the men into the army, which made as many as forty percent of the soldiers desert during their basic training. The Nationalist army also included many men who formerly fought for warlords, bad men who continued to do bad things, looting, raping, torturing and torching villages, making a bad impression on the people and turning the peasants against the government.

Twenty percent of the soldiers also died from starvation. Corrupt officers sold the rice and grain meant for their men to crooked merchants for extra money. Logistics and ethics were clearly not good. I’ve read somewhere that “war brings out the best and the worst in men.” Americans can expect to see similar betrayals in a civil war situation. I am not speaking out of experience (I am not a fighter, I am a writer, but believe you me I will fight back and shoot someone who wants to shoot me first. They will tear this revolver from my cold, dead, clammy fingers before I give it up and I will take a cluster of Commies with me, believe you me so help my God, but I digress). The Chinese Civil War showed time and time again how important logistics are in warfare.

Between 1937 and 1949 over fifteen million soldiers in the Nationalist military died.

If civil war breaks out in the USA, it would behoove the military veterans to teach those around them the rudiments of military tactics and marksmanship. A guerilla fighter must know his or her weapon very well and never leave it out of arm’s reach. They should also put the butt on their boots when they stand to rest so that it does not make an indentation in the ground so that if people track them, their pursuers will not be able to guess what weapons they are carrying. Those who know something about strategy should also teach it to the rest of the group so that they can understand the big picture. It will help motivate them to fight. A good officer takes care of his men and he (or she) should eat last.

Third, Chiang admitted that the Nationalists’ morale was low. He said:

“It cannot be denied that the spirit of most commanders is broken and their morality is base.”

This made me think about my time in the army when some stupid, un-educated non-commissioned officer confused the word “morale” with “morals.” They are not the exact same thing, bucko. When you Google its meaning, it says that “morale” means the confidence, enthusiasm, and discipline of a person or group at a particular time. Given that the Nationalist forces were poorly trained and led by incompetent and corrupt leaders who treated them poorly, I completely understand why their confidence, enthusiasm, and discipline were low.

Fourth, Chiang said that his political party, the Guomingdan, lacked good organization, discipline, and effective propaganda and performed its functions perfunctorily and without care. In contrast, the Communists were highly motivated, organized, disciplined, and excelled in spreading their propaganda. Chiang said that his party’s critical weakness was that they lacked unity at crucial moments. The party also became corrupt and got a reputation for nepotism and favoritism, instead of being a party for the people.

Because Chiang had to fight against the Japanese and the Communists, his government spent a lot of money on military matters and neglected the rest of the economy. To stay afloat, they imposed harsh taxes on people and companies and they nationalized the banks. To compound the problems, they also borrowed a lot of funds from foreign financiers with harmful repercussions for the economy. Inflation spiraled out of control, so much so that in many regions money lost all value and people reverted to bartering.

Ultimately the Communists were better fighters than their opponents and it was perhaps Mao’s ruthlessness and qualities as a general that was the deciding factor. I am no Communist and I hate their ideology, but perhaps they deserved to win. Chiang had to present a better alternative.

Chiang made a mistake to bet big on Manchuria. He would probably have been better off if he first consolidated his strength in the center and the south of China before he attempted to take the north. Instead, his forces were extended far from their bases of support and this made it easier for the Communists to cut their supply lines.

Future guerrillas can learn from this to draw the enemy out, make him extend himself, and then cut his supply lines while you attack his isolated and vulnerable forces.

Chiang also appointed commanders who were personally loyal to him, rather than on their ability. Merit should be the measure of a man’s worth in all areas of life and especially in a critical struggle for live and death like in a civil war. Some of Chiang’s high-ranking officers, some of those that he hand-picked himself, also betrayed him and spied for the Communists, giving them crucial information about Nationalist troop movements and positions. The poor soldiers in the field were sold out by their commanders. In contrast, Mao’s men were mostly loyal to him.

Be careful of enemy spies.

As for morale, guerrillas should try to keep it high. The knowledge that they are fighting for their freedom and the freedom of their children should be motivation enough when the alternative is slavery to the system. It was enough to motivate those brave souls who fought in the American Revolution and should be enough for us.

Mao’s Legacy

Mao imagined in his youth that the Communist Party would easily win over the support of the people and channel it to destroy capitalism and free the oppressed masses, but by 1948, after twenty years of brutal struggle, he had no more patience and he and his henchmen ruthlessly exploited and terrorized the very people they claimed to represent, killing thousands of them to achieve their Communist goals.

The Communists also killed more than a hundred and fifty thousand of their own soldiers whom they suspected of disloyalty over the course of the war. This is often the path that Communists take: The Party eats its own. It happened during the French Revolution, it happened in Cambodia where Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge tried to upstage Stalin and Mao, and it happened in China. Would a Communist take-over be any different in the United States?

Because of his success, Mao became an icon for Communists all over the globe and by the 1950s, insurgent leaders as well as their opponents all read his writings, while China sent help and advisors to those who wanted to imitate him. In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh and his henchmen used Mao’s methods to defeat the French militarily and the Americans politically. In the 1990s the Shining Path movement in Peru as well as the Communists that took power in Nepal in 2008, drew on Mao’s maxims for guidance and inspiration. Despite cases where they failed, Mao’s prescriptions for revolution remain appealing to those who want to wrest power from the ruling regime.

Mao was a better general than a statesman. His Great Leap Forward during which he tried to transform China’s agrarian economy into an industrial one, proved to be a great leap backwards for China, causing millions of Chinese to die of hunger. It should be studied by all those who oppose and those who want to impose Socialism in other societies.

Mao’s way is not the only way to fight a civil war.

Most theories of how to win a civil war say that you have to get the support or at least the acceptance of a large portion of the population. Some insurgents, however, thought you don’t.

Russian Anarchists attempted to achieve their goals in the 19th century through the “propaganda of the deed” which is a devastating and dramatic act that they hoped would cause a big change.

Anarchists think that the state is a tool that the ruling class uses to control and exploit us (and it can be), so they wanted to create a society without government, a society with no state, no taxes, and no army, and instead they want to let local communities as small as small peasant villages run their own affairs. Similar to Communists they believe that if they can destroy the state they can somehow create an egalitarian society. Like Communists, they seem to have a bad understanding of human nature. With no state, the bullies will rule and impose their will with pure power and there will be little care for the sick, the weak, and the poor. Because a functioning state uses violence or at least the threat of violence to keep those who are evil or who would do evil in check and also assert its own authority, the Anarchists think that it is justifiable to use violence to defend themselves, fight, and exact vengeance on the state.

Typically Anarchists prefer anarchy, so they have no supreme leader and there is not an international organization that tries to coordinate them on a global level like the Communist International Organization, but some of their best known ideological gurus and influential thinkers are Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, men with bushy beards. The great British comic book writer Alan Moore also identifies as an Anarchist.

If a civil war breaks out in the United States and the government collapses or can’t reach everywhere, local communities might have to band together and support each other, much like the Anarchists want. However, there will be those who will take advantage of the opportunity to force their will on the weak. Warlords might rise up and take over certain areas, enforcing their own sense of justice while pure anarchy might reign in other areas.

If Anarchists get their way and break up the state and get rid of the army they would be vulnerable to bigger groups or other nation states. Smaller groups are vulnerable to attack from bigger groups, so I don’t think Anarchy is such a smart idea, but that is just me.

Anarchists assassinated many government officials and were responsible for many bombings from 1870 to the 1920s to try to inspire the masses to rise up and rid themselves of oppressive authorities. They managed to murder six monarchs, including the tsar of Russia, the empress of Austria-Hungary, as well as the kings of Italy, Portugal, and Greece. An anarchist assassin also killed US President William McKinley, the leader of France, two prime ministers, and hundreds of government servants, policemen, as well as some innocent bystanders. Yet, this was not enough to make those governments fold.

In 1886 in Chicago, someone threw a bomb in Haymarket Square during an Anarchist protest march, killing seven cops. Four Anarchists were caught, sentenced and hanged for the heinous deed. Seven years later, in 1893, an Anarchist named Santiago Salvador Franch tossed two bombs into the Liceu Theater in Barcelona which was packed to the rafters, killing twenty people. Another Anarchist, Auguste Vaillant, set off a nail bomb in the French parliament, wounding two dozen people.

By the start of the 20th century, an Italian named Luigi Galleani, created an Anarchist secret society dedicated to achieving anarchy through terrorism. He Escaped from prison in Italy and traveled to the United States in 1901. In Paterson, New Jersey, he edited an Anarchist journal called La Questione Sociale. He did not directly order terrorist acts, but inspired others to do his dirty work with his silver tongue and his persuasive writing. In 1916, one of his acolytes poisoned the soup at a ritzy reception in Chicago, causing more than a hundred people to become sick. Another one of Galleani’s followers stabbed a policeman. In 1917, another acolyte dynamited a police station in Milwaukee.

By 1918, the US government was fed up with him and they used a new Sedition Act to close his newest publication, called Cronaca Sovversiva, and deported him back to Italy. His followers, however, did not give up and in April of 1919, they mailed thirty-six bombs to congressmen, governors, mayors, police commissioners, and the US attorney general. Luckily most of the bombs were intercepted before they reached their targets.

Although the Galleanisti, as they were known, were probably never more than a few dozen fanatics, they show how much trouble a small secret club can cause.

Their dramatic deeds remind me of the Islamist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the magazine in France that published comic images of the prophet Muhammad, as well as the spectacular and tragic attacks on 9/11 when fanatical Islamic terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon which is the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense.

However, no matter how unexpected, no matter how spectacular, no matter how shocking the assassinations, bombings, and other terrorist attacks were, they were not powerful enough to shake the state and bring down the entire system. They can, however, spark a war, like the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand that led to the First World War which led to the end of many monarchies in Europe, and like the assassination of Donald J. Trump might have set off a civil war in the United States, but it usually is not impactful enough to destroy the government itself and transform society. You need more than just that one act.

If anything, the attacks on 9/11 united the American people and strengthened their resolve to exact justice and vengeance against the perpetrators. Flying planes into the World Trade Center was like poking the hornet’s nest. It just gave the Americans a reason to wage war in the Middle East.

Fidel Castro and his Commie Compadre, comrade Ché Guevara, the Communists who took control of Cuba when they overthrew the regime of Fulgencio Battista, took a slightly different approach. They called it focoism, which comes from the Spanish word foco which means “to focus.” According to the theory of focoism the revolutionary group can create the conditions for revolution through violence, so they don’t have to wait until the conditions are ripe and they have the support of the majority of the people before they act.

Even so, in his book On Guerrilla Warfare, comrade Ché breaks down the stages of the revolution into the same stages that Mao mentions, which shows that he also studied at the feet of the Chinese master.

Ché wrote:

“The triumph will always be achieved by a regular army, even though its origins were in a guerrilla army.”

Fulgencio Batista was a corrupt ruler who came into power through a military coup and he repressed his political opponents. On July 26, 1953, a smooth-talking, bombastic, and ambitious lawyer named Fidel Castro led a hundred and fifty supporters in an attack on an army base in western Cuba to try to steal weapons. They failed. Fulgencio’s thugs hunted them down and many rebels were caught and killed.

Castro evaded the government goons for four months but eventually they caught him and sentenced him to prison. Fulgencio pardoned him and offered him a place in the government, but Castro refused and he fled to Mexico with a handful of followers from where they planned their next move. Castro’s party became known as the 26th of July Movement.

Ernesto “Ché” Guevara, an Argentinian medical student who was more interested in politics than in medicine joined Castro in Mexico. Castro and company returned to Cuba on 2 December 1956 onboard a yacht named the Granma. Most of them were caught by Cuban soldiers, but Castro and a few followers fled to the remote mountains of southeast Cuba.

Castro, like Mao, had some luck when a New York Times reporter named Herbert Matthews found and interviewed him which made him famous. Matthews reported that Castro had “strong ideas of liberty, democracy, [and] social justice.” This garnered sympathy for Castro in Cuba and abroad.

Castro and company continued the fight, but by the summer of 1958, they were down to about three hundred fighters, fighting against a Cuban army that was at least a hundred times larger. However, the United States grew tired of Batista’s corruption and they cut off aid to his army. Batista’s army advanced slowly into the mountains and forests, eager not to fight while Castro’s guerrillas ambushed them and then fled, never giving them a chance to pin them down and finish them off. Batista’s soldiers soon lost heart and began to desert and even defect to the rebels.

Castro gained followers and prestige and then the guerrillas came down from the mountains and out of the forests to force Batista out of government. Batista’s army disintegrated and on New Year’s Day 1959 he fled the country with a fortune, first to the Dominican Republic and eventually to Portugal. Castro imposed a Communist Marxist-Leninist one-party state on Cuba and allied with the Soviet Union. Again, the rebels were men with bushy beards. The guerrillas started with Mao’s phase two, guerrilla warfare and never really went over to the third stage, conventional war.

Castro’s success inspired left-wing revolutionaries all over Latin America and the Cuban Communists tried to export their recipe for success, but it met with mixed results. Comrade Ché was, like Butch Cassidy and the Sun Dance Kid, eventually killed in Bolivia.

That covers the best known theories of insurgency warfare. What about conventional war? Conventional war is a big topic that can fill libraries of books, so I will write about that another time. Theorists of guerrilla warfare like Mao and Ché form their thoughts based on their experiences that are specific to a certain time and place and they may not work in different circumstances. Focoism worked for Comrade Castro and it is today used by many radical Islamist terrorist groups, but I think Mao’s view is more robust and more applicable to the American situation.

Killing some of the major politicians on either side, like the Anarchist did, will just ramp up the distrust and hate and those politicians will be replaced by others who will carry the torch, so the “propaganda of the deed,” will not be enough to overthrow the government and change the system. It might, however, spark a civil war which might grow into something bigger that eventually transforms the country.

Focoism worked in Cuba, but it is unlikely that a much more professional and bigger, better armed, better trained, better educated and better led military like that of the United States will be beaten by a bunch of rag-tag guerrillas. Although the Cuban revolution successfully used this method, it failed in most other places because modern states are just too sophisticated and strong. In contrast, broad-based revolutionary movements could and did work in many more examples.

So if a civil war is to be fought, Mao’s methods might be the best way to go. Like China the USA is a large country with large remote areas where guerrillas can hide, plan, and fight from. It is usually easy to start an insurgency or a revolution, because there is always some popular peeve to exploit, the weapons to begin a guerrilla war are relatively cheap and easy to get, while counterinsurgency takes lots of time, troops, and treasure and the results are not always clear. The tactics the US military used in Iraq and Afghanistan to try to win hearts and minds did not bring any lasting results. Guerrillas can build up supplies and support and harass the enemy, taking what victories they can, while building their forces and expanding their knowledge and skills to the point where you can take the government on in a conventional fight and overthrow them.

In the USA it might start off or turn into a hybrid war with some parts of the country seeing conventional combat while in other parts people fight a guerrilla war. Phase one of Mao’s theory, the ideological work has already been done. They American public already know the issues and they are probably more politicized than people in other places.

It is hard to think who will come to the aid of those who want to fight for freedom. Traditional Western allies like Britain, Europe and Australia have become increasingly authoritarian and are more likely to back those on the Left. Other countries like China, Russia, and Iran might also support the side on the Left. Russia might surprise us by staying true to their professed values and support the Right. Argentina seems to be a likely supporter of the Right. Australia might enter the fray as well. Heck, Mexico might even try to retake the territories they lost during the Mexican-American war like Arizona, Nevada, and California. I don’t think China would risk attacking the USA because that might unite the country against the common foe, but who knows where the chaos might lead?

Even so, I don’t think there will be a civil war. I think saner heads will prevail.

I think former president Donald J. Trump will win because right now Kamala Harris is losing popularity. Even if the Left murders Trump, I think J.D. Vance will step in and follow through. Governor Ron DeSantis is also waiting in the wings.

Even if the Democrats win, if they can temper some of their more extreme policies, I don’t think the Right will rise in revolt. The US has had almost four years under President Joe Biden and Vice-President Harris, there has been spiraling inflation, mass immigration, and several assassination attempts on former President Trump, and yet the Right has not revolted and an uneasy peace has prevailed. If the Right wins I think there will be unrest, riots, and recriminations, but it might not turn into a full-scale revolt.

But you know what?

I could be completely wrong.

I hope that peace prevails, but if it does not, if a civil war does break out, if it comes to that, at least Mao left us a method.

Whatever the outcome of the next American elections, I am sure it will have repercussions for the rest of planet.

If you like what you just read, please follow me on Medium and share this with your friends. If you did not, I thank you for reading this far and I hope you will like my next post.

Thank you.

Bibliography

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