Comment by vintermann

Comment by vintermann 5 days ago

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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.

AnthonyMouse 5 days ago

> 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.

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  • vintermann 5 days ago

    > 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.

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    • AnthonyMouse 5 days ago

      > 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?

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      • vintermann 5 days ago

        Look, I don't want to be mean because if you're in the US right now you're in a situation which sucks. But that situation of 10000 people with guns seizing a military base to bootstrap an effective civil war, is just so absurd I don't even know how to begin.

        You're right, private communication is an essential tool of resistance, more important than any weapons. But if you start buying up old Blackberries to give to your kids and all your friends, don't you think that gets you on a watchlist in itself? Not only should your 10000 people have guns to take on a military base, they should have impeccable infosec too?

        Pretty much all civil wars in history had foreign backing for one or more sides. It seems no one ever had enough domestic resources to confront the domestic resource control machinery - which makes sense when you think about it. Though the more optimistic way to look at it was that if you had that level of control, you'd win without a civil war.

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        • AnthonyMouse 4 days ago

          > that situation of 10000 people with guns seizing a military base to bootstrap an effective civil war, is just so absurd I don't even know how to begin.

          What about it strikes you as absurd? A country's military is spread all over the place. It's entirely practical to overwhelm it in a specific location by concentrating your forces there. You then have access to more powerful weapons in order to do it again.

          > But if you start buying up old Blackberries to give to your kids and all your friends, don't you think that gets you on a watchlist in itself?

          There are about a billion PCs and laptops made in the last 20 years that can run Linux and whatever communications software you want. If owning a laptop gets you on a list then most of the population is already on the list, and if the list contains everyone then it contains no one.

          > Not only should your 10000 people have guns to take on a military base, they should have impeccable infosec too?

          Have you considered the other side of that coin? All of these geniuses have their own forces and infrastructure being tracked into the poorly-secured databases of all of these private companies. Compromise those databases and drones start showing up in vulnerable places that weren't expected to be known. But to stop tracking everybody you have to stop tracking everybody.

          The thing where members of The Party can turn off the telescreen doesn't actually work. If the millions of people who work for defense contractors are being tracked, you've got a significant vulnerability. If they're not, guess who was already working to infiltrate your defense industry to begin with.

          > Pretty much all civil wars in history had foreign backing for one or more sides.

          That's just true of wars in general. But also, supposing that something like this were to happen, where there was a sufficient fracture that it isn't immediately obvious who would come out on top, every foreign government would then have to position themselves. And then why would support have to come from some disreputable despots rather than e.g. Canada or Western Europe?

          > Though the more optimistic way to look at it was that if you had that level of control, you'd win without a civil war.

          If you have 100 people and they have a million, you lose. If you have a million people and they have 100, you win. If it's not that unbalanced then both sides fight until the cost of fighting gets higher than the cost of bargaining.

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0xDEAFBEAD 5 days ago

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.

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  • vintermann 5 days ago

    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.

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    • 0xDEAFBEAD 5 days ago

      >Afghanistan

      We're going in circles. The Afghans won. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46791876

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      • vintermann 5 days ago

        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.

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