Jerry, relax a bit... Fyi, gorilla is a anthropoid ape mammal that comes from Africa.
Guerrilla, on the other hand, has been adopted in English to describe the kind of unconventional, hit-and-run warfare, from the Spanish word for war, guerra, and some old (12th century) German, werran, which means to confuse.
Military history shows that when a nation finds itself invaded by a more powerful one, two responses are possible. The invaders can be met in set battles, in which case the defenders most often go down to defeat. Or they can realize that such is a losing strategy--as did Mao Tse-tung, the Chinese communist leader, while battling Japanese invaders during World War II.
Mao set down his military philosophy in a few maxims: "The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue."
T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, used that strategy during World War I. The British officer worked behind the lines stirring up an Arab resistance movement to the Turks. It bore postwar fruit in the creation of Arab states that eventually became independent, among them Iraq. |
