The Nomadic Alternative – Page 94

said was common to mobile nations. The litany of the modern guerilla is still Sun Tzu's The Art of War, the oldest military treatise in the world, written in the 5th Century B.C. at a time when the northern frontiers of China were hard-pressed by the swift-moving peoples of the steppe. For Mao Tse-tung, that longtime man of the fringe and avid reader of bandit novels, The Art of War was the Bible and he plagiarized it with scrupulous accuracy. His celebrated dictum - "The enemy advances we retreat; the enemy camps we harass; the enemy tires we attack; the enemy retreats we pursue." - is virtually a paraphrase of Sun Tzu's "All warfare is based on deception. When we can attack we feign impotence; when we deploy our forces, we feign inactivity; when we are near, the enemy must believe we are far off; when far off that we are near." Sun Tzu may also be read in conjunction with the Books of Joshua and Judges, both of which reveal the strategy of the nomadic Hebrews against the cities of the plain.

According to Sun Tzu, a successful guerilla war depends on four principles - Discipline, Mobility, Deceit and Propaganda. Willingness to endure discipline is an act of faith. A small body of fighters, loyal to the point of suicide for tribe or cause, is worth any amount of ill-disciplined rabble. The candidate should be healthy and young and the results are more effective if the subject undergoes a ferocious catalogue of ordeals to toughen him and bind him to his fellows. Nomad discipline - with its circumcisions and ritual tortures - is notorious. Bedouin boys eat camel dung that "they may have the endurance of a camel".

The nomad and guerilla must be everywhere at once. Then the fear of the unknown and unpredictable will disquieten the enemy. "The skilled tactician", wrote Sun Tzu, "is like the shuai-jan. This is a snake that lives in the Ch'ang mountains. Strike at the head, and you will be attacked by the tail; at the tail, by the head; at the middle, by both head and tail." Invisibility is incompatible with heavy armaments and the guerillas must remain invisible. Otherwise they are lost. They cannot risk overt attack, but must