From The Victoria Teach In

But the whole point of our discussion today is that the struggle in Vietnam has been escalated to the point where it's no longer simply a grass-roots revolutionary war.

I Want to talk now about how this has happened, and how much it is logically a development of the revolutionary strategy pursued by the Vietcong.

There are are three major Communist theoreticians of revolutionary war: Mao Tse-tung of China, Vo Nguyen Giap of North Vietnam and Che Guevara of Cuba (at least that's where he lives now).

The works of all three can be studied in English, and if you read them you should, quite soon, be struck by the emphasis they all lay on the idea that revolutionary organisation is military organisation, and by the emphasis which Mao and Giap lay on the idea that the guerrilla army must in the end become a regular army and engage in regular warfare, moving divisions and corps about the landscape and fighting pitched battles.

Guevara is the only one of the three who hasn't this stress on regular warfare, and the reason is that Guevara is the only one of the three who saw the regime he was attacking disintegrate before any battles were fought.

Mao and Giap, on the other hand, began their careers as revolutionary organisers in conditions of civil war, where politics was already a matter of the movement of armies—Mao in the era of the Chinese warlords; Giap in that of the collapse of the Japanese occupation and the attempt of the French to reoccupy—and both won their victories on a foundation of revolutionary authority but by regular military means.

Mao marched his armies south from Manchuria, Glap at Dien Bien Phu became the only Asian Communist to destroy a large Western force in a classic pitched battle of fortress type. But this makes Mao and Giap unique figures, not only among Communists but among all other practitioners of revolutionary war.

It's important to remember that revolutionary war is not a Communist invention, let alone a Communist monopoly: it was practised by the Irish against the British in 1919-21, by the Palestine Arabs against the British in 1936-38, by the Israelis against the British in 1946-48, by the Indonesians against the Dutch about the same time, by the Mau Mau in Kenya in the early fifties and by the FLN in Algeria from 1954 to 1962; and only the last of these owed any significant debt to Asian Communist theory.

Now the importance of knowing this is that once we remember that it is not a Communist monopoly, we are forcibly reminded that it cannot be understood, solely in terms of Communist theory.