Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD 5 days ago
That would explain why it was so easy for the US to suppress insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan...
It's actually rather difficult to think of tyrannical regimes which persisted against an armed citizenry in the long term.
Yeah realistically if there was actual mass repression of citizens (i.e. things like "courts" have essentially ceased to be a factor in much of anything), simply going on strike would be a pretty good start. You demonstrate peacefully, and carry arms as a deterrent so they can't crush the demonstrations the way they did in Iran.
Is armed with knives enough?
Presumably it isn't, and you'd need a certain minimum level of technological parity with your tyrants.
Presumably that also isn't fixed. So even if rifles might have been sufficient in the early US even though the government had cannons, rifles may not be sufficient when the government has chemical weapons and armored cars.
So where's the industrial base which makes the weapons? Or the money to buy the weapons? For Iraq, Afghanistan, and for that matter in lots of conflicts the US weren't involved in (or were involved in on the anti-government side!) the answer seems straightforward enough: in foreign countries which also don't like your government. Without a bunch of neighbors and rival powers which really didn't want the US in Iraq/Afghanistan, could the insurgents have done much?
Who do you propose should arm the resistance in the US, if government supported "police" paramilitaries run amok? (Let's for the sake of argument not get into whether that has happened yet). It's going to have to be quite an impressive level of support, too, to stand up against systems developed precisely against that sort of eventuality and battle-tested in the US' sphere of influence.
> Is armed with knives enough?
It depends on the numbers. Do they have 100,000 guys with guns but you have a hundred million with knives? Then you have a chance. But your chances improve a lot if your side is starting off with something more effective than that.
> Presumably it isn't, and you'd need a certain minimum level of technological parity with your tyrants.
You don't need parity, you need a foothold to leverage into more.
> So where's the industrial base which makes the weapons? Or the money to buy the weapons?
In a civil war, you take the domestic facilities and equipment by force and then use them. But first you need the capacity to do that. Can 10,000 guys with knives take a military base guarded by a thousand guys with guns? Probably not. Can they if they all have guns? Yeah, probably.
Then the government has to decide if they're going to vaporize the facility when you do that. If they don't, you get nukes. If they do, now you have a mechanism to make them blow up their own infrastructure by feigning attacks. And so on.
> Can they if they all have guns? Yeah, probably.
Heck no, they can't. Even if they could, the government's advantage isn't just in weapons. Long before you'd get your 10000 people with their gun safe stash together, they'd know exactly who you were and what you were planning.
I think your proposal reads like bad power fantasy fiction. You can resist a powerful authoritarian/occupying government with force, but not without a lot of foreign backing - like in Iran right now - and I don't think you are prepared to ask the Russians for help. It would of course open a huge can of worms if you did, and you'd be right to ask if the world where you win with such support will even be better than the world where you lose.
> Heck no, they can't.
Well that settles it then.
> Long before you'd get your 10000 people with their gun safe stash together, they'd know exactly who you were and what you were planning.
It's almost like anonymity and private communications tech belongs next to weapons on the list of things needed to resist authoritarianism.
> not without a lot of foreign backing
Why does it require any foreign backing whatsoever? You're not going to do it if you're three people, but a civil war is when some double digit percentage of the country is on the other side. You don't think that's enough people to supply substantial domestic resources?
Knives are basically obsolete technology in military terms. Firearms are not obsolete; that's why almost every soldier (or "paramilitary") carries one. Your technological parity point is technically correct, but it doesn't really apply here.
There are more privately owned guns than people in the US. We are already profusely armed.
I'm not contesting that you're armed. I'm not contesting that guns can still be "useful". But not in resisting a government with anti-"insurgence" drones battle tested against various levels of resistance from Palestine to Ukraine to Afghanistan.
>Afghanistan
We're going in circles. The Afghans won. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46791876
The Afghans won - not without foreign support, by the way - against a foreign occupying force, in the end by promising a lot of amnesties to people who had been working with the occupying government, and convincing them to turn en masse. Promises which they from what I understand, mostly kept. They fought for years and died in droves, then they suddenly won "without firing a single shot", figuratively speaking, with diplomacy directed at their own countrymen. I'm sure there are some lessons to be learned there for resisting your own government too there, but I really only mentioned them as a place where anti armed insurgence technology has been extensively battle tested by the government you're considering picking a fight with.
If you don’t care about how many you kill, these kinds of insurgencies can be ended. I don’t think the US Armed Forces could be convinced to attack their fellow Americans but if they did it would be worth remembering that the Warsaw Uprising ended poorly for the uprisers.
This is not like Ukraine where there are lots of underground manufacturing facilities.
If you tried building drones to stop US tanks and IFVs then the Californians would tell you that your factory needs to first go through environmental review. By the time the review is done the war will be lost.
> If you tried building drones to stop US tanks and IFVs then the Californians would tell you that your factory needs to first go through environmental review. By the time the review is done the war will be lost.
this would very obviously not be the case if California needed them for war, or had been in on again off again war already for a decade
I don’t think it’s that obvious. The US was delayed in building shells for Ukraine because they couldn’t scale up production at a factory on account of it being historically listed. It’s been 10 years since Ukraine was first attacked in Crimea and we’ve been involved on again off again.
Californians frequently will tell you that we’re in a housing “crisis” and then oppose all housing. I’m sure when another crisis arrives it’ll be different.
What’s the other “crisis” popular as a cause in California? Climate change? Man, this state must be at the forefront of fighting it then. Oh what’s that? Ah, wind and nuclear opposed by local homeowners. I see, I see.
Oh yes, when the next crisis arrives I’m sure it’ll be different. We’re just waiting for a real crisis, guys. Any second now.
People in Iraq and Afghanistan were willing to eat grass and blow themselves up to resist the foreign invaders. How long do you think Meal Team Six will keep going if they can't get to a Burger King?
If the US military wasn't willing to simply flatten cities all over Iraq and Afghanistan, why would you expect them to do that in their own country to their own homes and family members?
Because Iraq or Afghanistan weren't threatening the man in power. Just take a look at what is currently happening in Iran if you wonder what happens when the local authority fears the crowd.
I would say Iran is a much better illustration of what happens when your citizenry is disarmed. The crowd isn't very scary. They don't pose a real threat. There's little risk in crushing them. They can't fight back meaningfully.
the insurgencies in Afghanistan at least were difficult to suppress because they based of out pakistan, a supposed american ally and notable nuclear power.
to actually do the job of taking out the taliban would require going into pakistan to stop them in their bases.
in iraq, the insurgency was the former iraqi military, not just random citizens with small arms
>in iraq, the insurgency was the former iraqi military, not just random citizens with small arms
We are quite far from a situation of mass repression of citizens in the United States like you see in Iran. But if it came to that, I imagine the 15 million+ veterans in this country might have something to say about it. They outnumber active duty military personnel by a factor of 5.
And even Iran had to pull in outsiders because their military wasn't willing to fire on their own people.
Especially when you consider the US citizenry have direct access to logistics and infrastructure. You can't bomb a city or factory into producing more fuel or bombs or any of the million other things that are required to keep the US economy working well enough to fund any military operations. It would be hell on earth to be in the US, but the US military/ICE/cops/courts don't work if the citizenry aren't being productive and playing along nicely.