The Nomadic Alternative – Page 93

While admitting the excellence of the Roman constitution he claimed its rulers were ruining it. The unpredictable impositions of the tax collector drove people to despair and emigration. Honest men suffered where the tax-dodgers went free. And the exorbitant costs of lawyers prevented a man from entering the courts of law to press his claims. When the fruit reaches this condition of ripeness it simply asks to be picked.

VI

Nomad warfare is guerilla warfare. Guerilla and nomad aim to throttle the city. A few men of the fringe chip away at the foundations till the structure topples of its own accord. "The villages", wrote Mao Tse-tung, "are the limbs of the ruling classes. The cities are their brains and heart. If we cut out their brains and heart, they cannot escape death; but if we simply cut off their appendages, it will not necessarily kill them." The guerilla's skill, like the skill of the bull-fighter, lies in dodging brute force till brute force exhausts itself and in timing delivery of the mortal blow.

The settled peasant has the same supine torpor as his plants. He cannot accustom himself to quick movement and is not a candidate for guerilla activity. Solidarity with the soil is not the stuff of revolution. The best a guerilla can hope for is an obdurate blanket of peasant silence. Che Guevara wrote that the "guerilla is above all else an agrarian revolutionary". But were this so, why must a guerilla organization insert 'military cadres' into the ranks of the peasantry for their own good and whether they like it or not? Guevara was mistaken. Guerillas are recruited from unsettled, alienated peoples, hell-bent on revenge. Daniel James, a biographer of the hero, astutely noticed that he was "a product of a romantic pastoral past", without following up the implications of his remark.

The tactics of guerilla warfare model themselves on nomad raiding. This is the technique of "attack and withdrawal" which Ib'n Khaldun