New Frontier of War by William R. Kintner & Joseph Z. Kornfeder

Author:William R. Kintner & Joseph Z. Kornfeder [Kintner, William R. & Kornfeder, Joseph Z.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science, Government, Communism & Socialism, History, Asian, Russia, International
ISBN: 9781839745584
Google: wRAnzgEACAAJ
Amazon: B08BTPYSDG
Barnesnoble: B08BTPYSDG
Goodreads: 55167994
Publisher: Barakaldo Books
Published: 2020-01-15T00:25:48+00:00

CHAPTER XII—SOUTHEAST ASIA: CONFUSED BATTLEGROUND

THE NATIONS OF SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA WILL BE PRIME targets of communist political subversion and guerrilla action during the next decade. The Communists, riding the forces of nationalism,{166} “anti-colonialism,” and internal discord, will exploit the chaos and volatility of poverty-stricken nations ruled by weak, frequently strife-torn, and inexperienced governments. The pattern of attack will vary from country to country. The political campaign will be reinforced through the pressure exerted by massive Chinese Communist military power and both Chinese and Soviet trade and aid forays designed to dislocate the economies of the region.

When the Communists began their operations in Asia, they tried to apply the Marxist-Leninist doctrine as it had developed in Europe and the Soviet Union. They started in the big cities, where there was the beginning of a small bourgeois class, a small group of Westernized intelligentsia, and a small number of factory workers. Their operations were based on an imperfect sociological analysis of the peoples in the area. They overlooked the fact that variants of capitalism, feudalism, and a wide range of concepts of property had often made their appearance in the thousands of years of Asian history.{167}

There is immense variety in the area we call Asia. In some countries the peasants who tilled the land were abused and exploited by absentee landlords. In other areas the peoples were subject to authoritarian political or even religious systems, as in Tibet. But in some countries the number of freeholders or rich villages without landlord control was much greater and far more dynamic than the orthodox Marxist analysis was willing to admit. The Malayan cities were founded by merchants, not by kings or princes. Shipping around the Malayan Peninsula goes back to the time of Christ or earlier, and the use of speculative capital was well known to the great Indian and Arab trading combines which existed while Europe was passing through the Middle Ages. Even after Western influence began to make itself felt in India and China the picture of Asia as reacting solely to outside forces is an inaccurate one. Around 1830, for example, there were more than one hundred millionaires living in Canton, each possessing a personal fortune of more than one million silver dollars. There were far fewer men of equivalent wealth then living in the United States.

There was, of course, no exact parallel between Asian society and that of the West. In general, the former consisted of three main classes. First, there were those who maintained the governments and who comprised the political bureaucracy as typified by the mandarins of China. Next were the tradesmen and handicraftsmen, who approximated the guilds of medieval Europe. The last and by far the largest group was composed of the peasants.

In the mid-twenties, when the Soviets, through their communist parties, started to work on Asia, Europe’s capitalistic penetration into that continent was not deep. Most Asians still made their living from agriculture and handcraft. The modern capitalistic class stratification upon which Communists are accustomed to base their operational methods simply did not exist or was present to an insufficient degree.

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