Sarah Paine

A revolution is an uprising, an act of violence whereby one class overthrows the power of another.

Clausewitz is not about class warfare at all.

In fact, his wife is always trying to wine and dine the aristocrats, so completely different in that department.

Mao is looking at the world, and he believes the linchpin of the social order are landlords, and he's going to detonate them and try to destroy them.

And he talks about the violence of all of it, that you're going to get the peasant masses to overthrow these landlords, and that this is going to require terror in rural areas.

But this is absolutely necessary.

And of course, this is what the nationalists absolutely would not tolerate.

now also understood he was operating in a period of nested wars and that the ones that were ongoing were the Civil War with the Nationalists and then the regional war with Japan.

Pearl Harbor comes a little later.

And he talked about defeating Japan in three stages.

He said, defeating Japan requires three conditions.

First is progress by China, i.e.

the civil war, which is the basic and primary thing.

The second is difficulties for Japan, i.e.

the regional war.

And the third is international support, the big friend.

I'm going to talk about each of these three things in turn.

So

In order to win the civil war, Mao believes you need base areas.

These Soviets, where are they located?