Word: mao
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...with its cellular organization modeled on the techniques of Mao's Red Army, played a key role in gaining support for the Communists among the Vietnamese population. Like their Red Army counterparts, the NLF worked in small groups, emphasizing the Thieu government's exploitation and downplaying their revolutionary aims. They tried to win the support of the Vietnamese peasants by treating them courteously--for the most part. Gradually, many Vietnamese villages became NLF strongholds, prompting some of the more horrible U.S. attrocities to "flush out" NLF members...
...burned hostility toward the Chinese into their minds for good. Before World War II, Nationalist China gave shelter to anti-French Vietnamese political refugees, but even this consideration failed to erase the enmity. In his subsequent war against the French, Ho Chi Minh was offered the support of Mao Tse-tung's advancing Communist army, which might have meant quick, joint victory. Ho declined. Later, with pithy logic, he explained why he had preferred to fight a protracted guerrilla war on his own: "It is better to sniff the French dung for a while than to eat China...
...impaired some Vietnamese soldiers' will to fight. Recruits have bribed their officers to let them return home. The AWOL rate is so high that the army command has announced a two-year reorganization plan that will better integrate the demoralized southern troops into a more aggressive fighting force. Mao Tse-tung may have been right when he said, "Weapons are an important factor in war but not the decisive factor; it is people not things that are decisive...
...arms have bulked large in the modernization program for Iran in recent decades, but the program has been unexpectedly upset by a social revolution in a religious form. Meanwhile, after thirty years of estrangement, American business is now undertaking to assist modernization in China, where the social revolution of Mao Tse-tung has already occured. Iran and China could hardly be more different, but the American approach to the two places may have certain similarities worth pondering...
Teng Hsiao-p'ing (Deng Xiao ping) is no Shah and undoubtedly knows as much about villages and villagers as he knows about cities and technicians. The cult of Mao in its day had religious overtones, but the Chinese people on the whole seem capable of seeking happiness without benefit of revealed religion. This is what made them so interesting to philosophers of the 18th century Enlightenment. Fanaticism is not their normal state of mind. Under Mao they carried through a very considerable social revolution and the Chinese leadership in coming years is not likely to forget about it. Chinese...