This article was first published in The eXile on November 27, 2002

Ever wanna go to Kathmandu? Not me. I was never a hippie. The hippie types always talked about heading off to Nepal for spiritual enlightenment, but it sounded like my idea of Hell: a bunch of grimy beggars grabbing at you, yelling gibberish, trying to sell you yak dung as prime-grade hash. Some of the old acid casualties in my community college classes had been there and always said it was a real deep experience, but it didn’t seem to’ve done those zombie trolls much good. Most of them were on SSI, paid by the State of California to watch reruns of Gilligan’s Island and not bother anybody with their acid flashbacks.

The first sign most people had that things weren’t so peace’n’lovey in Nepal was June 2001, when the whole Nepalese royal family got wiped out over dinner. Turned out to be the old story: bratty son wants to marry a local slut, Dad says no, bratty son has a tantrum. Except this little prince had his tantrum with an automatic rifle. One of those classic dinner-table arguments, like in American Beauty or something. “Dad, can I marry Devi?” “No, no, no. Now eat your curry.” “‘Scuse me…gotta, um, wash my hands.” And before Daddy and Mummy and sisters and brothers can dig into their chicken koorma, the li’l prince is back, peppering the whole dining room with lead. The whole family wiped out before the entree, just like King Ralph.

You gotta hand it to the Prince, though. I mean, that’s love. “Honey, I shot the folks.” I bet his girlfriend was real touched. Nothing says “I love you” like wiping out your entire family.

Still want to go to Kathmandu? Well, it gets worse. Way worse. That hot-tempered prince wasn’t the only person in Nepal sayin’ it with automatic rifles these days. Turns out there’s a big, bloody, serious Maoist revolution going on there right now. Man, Bob Seger is gonna be bummed. I still can’t really believe it myself. Maoists in Kathmandu? Nepal is where rich liberal assholes like Dianne Feinstein go “trekking.” It’s not where you expect to find Charlie, up there at 20,000 feet with the Gurkhas and the Sherpas.

But it’s a fact: they’ve got a Maoist insurrection, and a big one too. Been going on since 1996. It started out in the classic way: the local Communist Party split between the peaceniks who just want to go handing out leaflets, and the hotheads who want to start fighting now. The hotheads won out, the Nepalese commies split up, and the two or three dozen university types who always dreamed of being the local Che Guevara headed for the hills to radicalize the Nepalese peasants.

They found the peasants already pissed off, in the mood to go off and kill some landlords. You don’t think of Nepal as having masses of oppressed peasants, but some of the stuff I’ve been reading is pretty gross: people selling themselves and their whole families to the local landlord just to get malaria medication. Seriously: a peasant gets sick, figures anything’s better than dying, and uses his family as collateral for the money he needs to get malaria medication. When he gets better, he and his wife and kids are the property of the local loanshark.

Slavery was actually legal in Nepal till a couple of years ago. You could buy whole families if you needed household help. Sometimes the debts were a hundred years old: because granddad had bad luck with the dice, all his kids, for ever and ever, were slaves. Little kids working 18-hour days, every day, for no money, for life. Hell, with a life like that, Ashcroft’d turn into a Maoist.

So if you’re living a miserable life as a Nepalese slave, and a nice clean-cut Maoist recruiter sneaks into the village one night and tells you it’s all gonna change and all you have to do is learn a few of Mao’s little inspirational haiku and hack your landlord to death…well, I have to say, I’d join up myself. And these recruiters were university types, all clean-cut and inspiring. The peasants must’ve been dazzled just to see’em, Nepal’s finest, paying attention to them and their grubby villages. They joined up, and the revolution started cranking.

Mao’s battle-plan is simple. It can be adapted to almost any country as long as you’ve got the basic ingredients: mean landlords, hungry peasants, educated city people who couldn’t care less what’s happening in the countryside. In other words: if you’ve got a really fucked-up agricultural country. Nepal had that.Mao’s plan doesn’t take military geniuses to make it work. What it does take is lots and lots of discipline and patience, because you must avoid battle until the odds are overwhelmingly in your favor. So the first rule is: No Hotheads Need Apply.

Step one is to work the villages. The university-trained commie recruiters fan out into the villages and radicalize the locals — which isn’t too hard when the landlords have been buying and selling peasants like mules.

The next part is harder: you set up a shadow government. You don’t attack the local police or army at this stage — you try to make them irrelevant. Instead of taking complaints to the cops, peasants take their quarrels to a People’s court that meets in a shed at night. Instead of paying regular taxes, you pay people’s taxes to a guy who comes around at night with a notebook and a bag. The idea is to isolate the cops, tax collectors and other informers — to “put out the eyes” of the government in the area, so that by the time you’re ready to attack, they won’t have any intelligence system worth the name and you’ll take them completely by surprise.

Of course, it’s never as neat as the way Mao laid it out in the little red book. People talk, the cops know something’s going on. And in Nepal, “cops” doesn’t mean a squadcar with two guys in it. The Nepalese police are organized in paramilitary units dispersed in barracks across the countryside, with dozens or even hundreds of men armed with automatic rifles, heavy machineguns, light armored vehicles and air cover on request. These cops know that if they lose their grip on the villages, they’ll wake up some night to find their barracks overrun. They start bringing in likely suspects and working out on them, using whatever form of torture is traditional in these parts.

There are 90,000 cops/soldiers fighting for the new King, up against at least 10,000 guerrillas. That’s not good odds for the government. Conventional wisdom says you need at least 10 soldiers for every guerrilla, but that’s assuming your troops are as good, man for man, as the guerrillas. The Nepalese cops/soldiers aren’t very good. The leader of the rebels (who’s from the upper class himself, naturally) said recently “The King’s army will not fight for very long.” He’s probably right.

The landlords know it too. They can feel their grip on the locals getting weaker. Scary grafitti on the walls, people not bowing and scraping the way they used to….They start calling their cousins in Kathmandu, begging them to send more troops. It all starts heating up.

But when the local version of the IRS stops getting taxes from the peasants — that’s when the authorities really get grim. You can mess with the army and the cops, but don’t mess with the tax collectors. When the government stops getting taxes, they use the only leverage they’ve got: they send the army to get their money at gunpoint. The Maoists are doing the same thing to the villagers at night. Not a happy time to be a Nepalese villager, especially when the rebels are known to use some pretty extreme penalties for late payment of tax — such as crushing people’s arms and legs with big rocks.

Squeezing the peasants between two forces like this is part of Mao’s big plan. The idea is to drive the peasants so damn crazy they’ll finally be ready to fight. The soldiers actually help the Maoists at this stage by lame attempts at reprisal: they’ll almost always grab the wrong people, torture them, and end up radicalizing whole families, whole villages. The Maoist cadre won’t be touched; they’re hiding deeper in the hills. But every time the cops beat somebody to death, all his cousins become recruits. So the meaner the cops get, the stupider they get, the better for the revolution.

This is where that old commie line about making omelets and breaking eggs comes into play big-time. The more the cops and soldiers terrorize the locals, the more isolated the Army ends up in their sandbagged barracks. Nobody feeds them intelligence any more; they’re holed up, always on the defensive, no longer capable of choosing the time and place for combat.

That’s when the slow, boa-constrictor Maoist plan switches over to the offensive. The Maoists focus on numbers and surprise. A few months ago the Maoists attacked a police barracks in Gam, in western Nepal. There were at least a thousand of them, yelling, waving torches, shouting slogans. They overran the base and hacked to death every cop or soldier they found, at least 70 dead. The Maoists lost maybe 200 — if you can believe the cops — but that’s not important. A victory like that spreads through the villages instantly. The peasants — and remember, these people are used to being bought and sold like cattle — suddenly realize they can take on the army and win.

They’re riding high right now, but where do they go from here? That’s the problem. Suppose the Maoists beat the Nepalese Army. Would India let that happen? India thinks of Nepal as sort of a kid brother-annoying but part of the family. The Indian Army may not be good enough to fight a real war, but it sure as hell could squash the Maoists in Nepal. It’s had a lot of practice with this sort of war, in other hellholes like Bihar. It could easily bring in enough troops for the 25:1 ratio you need to flush out and destroy rural guerrillas.

And it’s not likely the original Maoists, the Chinese, are going to help the guerrillas. They’ve got other things on their minds: profit margins, export ratios — money, money, money. I kinda like imagining a meeting between one of these Nepalese gung-ho Maoist rebels and Zhiang Zemin. “You, the party of Mao, must help us overthrow the landlord elite!” “Um, sorry, but all our cash is tied up in short-term Citicorp bonds. How would your revolutionary peasants like to invest in our new Shanghai enterprise zone?”

It must be kind of discouraging to be a Maoist; who can you count on these days? The only real friends the Nepalese Maoists have are the leftovers of those crazy Peruvian guerrillas, the Shining Path. Remember them? They were like the one-hit wonder of eighties guerrilla warfare: dynamite-throwin’, machete-choppin’, Incas who made Peru a lively place.

And with friends like Shining Path, well…you ain’t got no friends. So the Nepalese Maoists are up against it in the long run. They may win inside Nepal, but their talk about “planting the red flag on Mount Everest” ain’t gonna happen. Where would Dianne Feinstein go trekking? The folks who run this world wouldn’t let anything get in the way of their expeditions up K2 or Everest. They’d bribe the Indian Army to waddle in like a big fat Sumo and squash the Maoists.

And there wouldn’t be a damn thing Shining Path, on the run down in Peru, could do to help. But that brings me to the last big mystery here, the same one I started out with: the hippies. I mean, what is it with hippies and hi-altitude peasant rebellions anyway? First it was Shining Path — remember back in the late 80s, all the hippies were wearing those wool Inca hats that looked like wool versions of 14th-c. man-at-arms helmets? And now, in all the little grimy coffee places where the local alternos hang in Fresno, they’re all wearing those ratty cloth over-the-shoulder bags you get from Nepal.

What is it with these people? Is there like some kind of romance to low-oxygen poverty and dirt?

There’s a punch line coming for all the hippie tourists who take the pilgrimage to Nepal, though. See, the Maoists haven’t touched a single tourist yet. Not one. Interesting, huh? Odds are they’re not sparing the scruffy guesthouse types out of softheartedness. Qualms ain’t on the menu when you’re running a Maoist insurrection. So they’re probably saving it up for something real, real big. And I have to admit, it cracks me up to think of a whole busload of hairy Californians playing hostage, shoved into a freezing cave in the Himalayas, guarded by lice-ridden crazy peasants whose idea of fun is bringing big ol’ rocks down on people’s arms and legs.

That’ll teach those hippie girls in high school to tell me I should “lose some weight.” I didn’t mind it when the white-trash skanks called me “Lardo” — that trash doesn’t know any better. But it got to me, I admit it, when the — whatever you’d call’em, grunge girls or neo-beatnik chicks or whatever — when they did it. I mean, their parents went to college and all, you sort of expected them to be a little better.

So I’m just kinda waiting here, for the day the Nepalese Maoists decide to go for the tourists, kidnap a bus of longhaired suburban girls looking for spiritual enlightenment. Talk about losing weight — yeah, they’ll lose some weight in that fucking cave. Did you see that [sic] letter from some girl named “Avril” who wanted me to read her peace poem and “think about it”? She’s just the kind I’m talking about it. Anybody want to chip in on a one-way ticket to Nepal for Avril? It’ll be real, real spiritual.

This article was first published in The eXile on November 27, 2002

Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to brecher@exiledonline.com.

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