China, 1916. He Long, frustrated by heavy taxation on salt carriers, breaks into the Salt Tax Bureau. He burns the records inside, then distributes the property among the most needy in the province. Sure, he killed a couple of people in the process, but that's not why other salt carriers came to his side,
They followed him because he disrupted two systems, and it had an immediate effect. First, he disrupted the information flow to the province, allowing the carriers to elude punishment. Second, he disrupted the symbolic system of taxation and authority.
This idea of Systems Disruption (which came from John Robb) is a real key to the idea of guerrilla warfare. Yeah, it won't get the headlines that a murder will. But if you look at network theory (and I'll be linking to some in the next few days) you see that systems disruption like this begins to break a whole network down into fragmented pieces. And fragmented pieces lead to greater violence in ways that not even the taking of a human life to do.
I'll be exploring this mor in coming days now that the blog is back online.
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