Even if you're very interested in Maoism, these kids weren't really Maoists in the substantive sense. They had minimal understanding of actual Marxist-Leninist theory or politics, and most of what they were spouting was pure nonsense. Being in love with Mao as an icon is not the same as being Maoist. Not if you have only the most superficial possible understanding of the politics of Mao, Marx, Lenin or Stalin, gleaned from one single little book, and use a lot of flowery or bombastic rhetoric to disguise the superficiality of your understanding.
Although they meant well, they were isolated from the masses and made no attempt whatsoever to actually engage with the masses, cloistered in their little apartment with their toy guns, giving speeches only to each other about things the average worker neither knows nor cares about, eventually deciding they could bring about the revolution by themselves through individual terrorism such as bombing universities or assassinating visiting Soviet ministers (tactics that communists opposed from the very beginning; the early Russian communist movement vigorously denounced such adventurist tactics by the Narodniks in the late 19th century). They effectively became petit-bourgeois revolutionaries, rushing into ultra-left extremism and then fizzling out.
These sorts of people are part of the reason why Mao wrote "Oppose Book Worship", which can be seen here:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-6/mswv6_11.htm
This part is particularly relevant:
"A Communist Party's correct and unswerving tactics of struggle can in no circumstance be created by a few people sitting in an office; they emerge in the course of mass struggle, that is, through actual experience. Therefore, we must at all times study social conditions and make practical investigations. Those comrades who are inflexible, conservative, formalistic and groundlessly optimistic think that the present tactics of struggle are perfect, that the "book of documents"[5] of the Party's Sixth National Congress guarantees lasting victory, and that one can always be victorious merely by adhering to the established methods. These ideas are absolutely wrong and have nothing in common with the idea that Communists should create favourable new situations through struggle; they represent a purely conservative line. Unless it is completely discarded, this line will cause great losses to the revolution and do harm to these comrades themselves. There are obviously some comrades in our Red Army who are content to leave things as they are, who do not seek to understand anything thoroughly and are groundlessly optimistic, and they spread the fallacy that "this is proletarian". They eat their fill and sit dozing in their offices all day long without ever moving a step and going out among the masses to investigate. Whenever they open their mouths, their platitudes make people sick. To awaken these comrades we must raise our voices and cry out to them:
Change your conservative ideas without delay!
Replace them by progressive and militant Communist ideas!
Get into the struggle!
Go among the masses and investigate the facts!"
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