While it is vital for revolutionary socialists in Norway to learn from the failings of previous revolutionaries in this country, it is of course just as important to learn from countries with similarities to Norway, and to this end, Japan has always struck me as having a number of similarities to Norway, in terms of geography, topography, land use, and political status, et cetera.
For this reason I find it interesting that the Japanese Communist Party established paramilitary units in mountain villages in the 1950s, inspired by Mao's idea of protracted people's war — namely the establishment of a revolutionary base area in isolated rural mountain regions to wage guerrilla warfare against the government. Yet the JCP's guerrilla warfare campaign is described as a failure, and the party would eventually take on a reformist route and distance itself from political violence.
In Norway, one of the main historical communist parties (AKP-ML) was also influenced by Mao Zedong Thought, yet to my knowledge never tried to wage a protracted people's war in practice, even with its calls for violent revolution. AKP-ML did at the very least publish a book called Gerljakrigføring i Norge ("Guerrilla Warfare in Norway") which you may still find on Nasjonalbiblioteket's website, however this book was written based on the premise that its tactics would be used in case of a Soviet invasion of Norway, rather than being used to further the revolutionary cause.
All of this is essentially to say that my questions are:
- Why did the JCP try to start a protracted people's war, but AKP-ML did not?
- Why is the JCP's guerrilla warfare campaign (seen as) a failure?
- What lessons can we learn from all of this? What should have been done differently?