"We can destroy any army with our firepower. Here we use it against trees and trash" (unidentified GI, during the Vietnam War)

In the late 60s my family moved to Madrid for the second time. Still, we used to spend Christmas in Barcelona, with my paternal grandparents. My brother and I would sneak upstairs, where our cousins used to live. Year in and year out, I would see this newspaper clipping, tacked to a cork board in their bedroom, with article entitled "Chess vs Go in 'Nam". I used to read it every time. The author thought that two different conceptions of war were pitted against each other in Vietnam and that the Americans believed they were winning when, actually, perhaps they were losing because their enemy used an entirely different strategy.

It was not until I went to study in the USA that I was able to purchase a game of Go, learn how to play and see for myself how lucid the writer of the article --whom I have never been able to trace-- had been. As everyone knows, chess is about two armies fighting each other with pieces of very different value and capability. Each player aims to capture their opponent's pieces whilst losing as few as possible of his own in order to create an imbalance of power and position that allows him to deliver a decisive stroke. The game is over when one of the players is able to do so by capturing a concrete piece from the rival army.

Go is also a board game where two armies are confronted. However, in both armies every piece is identical, the purpose of skirmishes is not to capture your opponent's pieces but to control spaces. The game ends when all the pieces have been placed and the winner is the player who controls the most space at the time.

Indeed, in the Vietnam War the US focused on destroying --mainly through aerial bombing-- those elements that they regarded as critical for the enemy: weapon depots, supply lines and troop concentrations. In fact, the US spent the entire war trying to locate and destroy a nonexistent enemy HQ and preparing for a conventional, open terrain battle that would allow them to use their tanks and the other conventional weaponry that they had deployed. The enemy (the regular North Vietnamese army and the VC) conducted several conventional offensives (starting with Tet) but, despite some psychological success, they endured catastrophic losses in every one of them. Those disasters were deceptive because, simultaneously, the North was able to carry out --with enormous tenacity-- a systematic penetration of the rural South and set up a loose but ever-present, indestructible network of informers, depots and positions. In the long run, this network got the North its victory.

Every time "El Mundo" reports about a police enquiry into a Convergència leader or his family (regardless of how credible the story might be), every time Ms Sáez de Santamaría speaks out against the Catalan process, every time the Spanish government, the Council of State or the Spanish Constitutional Court rule on the matter, every time the State Prosecution is encouraged to take action, every time unofficial spokesmen talk about "Mas' delusion", every time, in short, that I see how the State's actions focus on beheading the pro-independence movement; every time I come across a rickety ANC stand in the street, run by a couple of volunteers, every time I meet the no-less-rickety Muriel Casals --the president of Òmnium Cultural--, every time I witness what citizens who hope to be anonymous again (Súmate's Eduardo Reyes told me that he has spoken in public 270 times in the last ten months!) are prepared to endure, every time I watch thousands of Catalans from all walks of life who are willing to put on a T-shirt and stand on their predetermined spot somewhere in the country and to cast a weird-looking ballot into a cardboard box, every time --in short-- that I notice how the pro-independence movement is rooted in the people's enthusiasm; every time I see all that, I think that on the Catalan chessboard some are playing a game of chess while others are playing a game of Go. I have no doubt that any full-on attack by the latter will end in disaster. But I am equally certain that, if they are tenacious enough, they will win the game before the former have grasped the rules.