Standing alone in the autumn cold:
The Hsiang flowing northward,
Orange Island, the cape.
I see thousands of hills in crimsoned view,
The woods piling up in deep-dye;
The mighty stream, in its gleam of jade,
One hundred barques racing by.
Eagles high up, cleaving the space,
Fish gliding above shallow ground;
Ten thousand creatures, under a frosty sky,
all fighting for freedom.
Mao Zedong, 1929

Lenin’s statues have toppled in the old Soviet Union, and China is sliding inexorably toward capitalism: none of this would have surprised Mao Zedong in the slightest. Other communists figured that once the workers of the world united and threw off their chains they were going to create Utopia. Mao believed that the Party would need constant revolution and struggle lest it degenerate into a new bourgeoisie and proletariat. He came from a culture which measures its history in millennia. To him this would be just another phase in a long and unending cycle, to end soon enough with a new proletarian uprising.

Today Mao’s followers are among the poorest and most downtrodden people in the world. That would come as no surprise to him either. Karl Marx believed the revolution would begin when the workers rose up in the cities to overthrow their industrial masters. Mao reached out instead to the rural poor, to the forgotten agricultural classes and menial laborers. Once Mao had the countryside, it was only a matter of time until the cities fell too.

Christ promised the meek they would inherit the earth; Mao provided them with instructions on how to claim it. His famous quote about power emanating from the barrel of a gun was no witty quip intended to win indie cred. Maoism doesn’t just advocate violence against oppression: it sees violence as the only appropriate response to capitalism and imperalism, and condemns those who seek peaceful solutions as “revisionists” and “opportunists.”

While Mao spoke no foreign language, his philosophy has spread throughout the world. I considered including Maoism in my survey of religions: Mao inspires, and continues to inspire, a fanatical devotion comparable to that given to Christ or Muhammed. Maoism can thrive in environments which were never touched by Islam, or in environments where Islam is seen as the oppressor. Since September 11, our primary focus has been on “Islamic Fundamentalists.” Russian communism may have given way to good old Russian feudalism, but Maoism could yet prove to be the Next Big Thing among the terrorist set.

What follows are brief profiles of regions in which Maoist or Maoist-influenced organizations are playing a significant role:

India
Kurdistan
Nepal