Fish In Water

Fish

Roberta mentions Mao's "fish in water". It means nothing to me, so I go a-Googling and find this:

They enabled Mao's army to make use of its excellent fish-in-water relationship to the farmers around it. - The Life of Mao by Ross Terrill

And this on problemattic.net:

An Indian policeman describes the problem with attempts to assimilate and conquer the tribal groups:

“See Ma’am, frankly speaking this problem can’t be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don’t understand greed. Unless they become greedy, there’s no hope for us. I have told my boss, remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out.”

And Roy describes this beautiful scene at an annual Maoist festival, deep in the jungle:

At first, the PLGA comrades watch the dancers, standing aside with their guns. But then, one by one, like ducks who cannot bear to stand on the shore and watch other ducks swim, they move in and begin to dance too. Soon there are lines of olive-green dancers, swirling with all the other colours. And then, as sisters and brothers and parents and children and friends who haven’t met for months, years sometimes, encounter each other, the lines break up and re-form and the olive green is distributed among the swirling saris and flowers and drums and turbans. It surely is a People’s Army. For now, at least. And what Chairman Mao said about the guerrillas being the fish and people being the water they swim in, is, at this moment, literally true.

The communists (FARC) are fighting in Latin America. I suspect that property rights are at the root of their complaints, much as they were in early 20th century China.