Non american leftists tend to have a more reserved take on guns.
It’s hard to advocate for armed resistance against tyranny XIXth century style after 150 years of military industrial complex development have made the state’s power so asymmetrically strong. Guns nowadays kill kids in schools, but won’t do much against tanks, jets, drones, etc.
Paradoxically, it’s liberals that like guns in my country (hunting has become a bourgeois activity).
Yeah, I’m an American leftist and this is my take. I’m not anti-gun. I’d say I’m pro-responsible-gun-ownership. However, some people (leftists and conservatives) think they could beat the US military in a straight up fight. They can’t. It doesn’t matter how many guns you have.
If it comes to it it’ll be won by gorilla warfare. It’ll be hit-and-run tactics and explosives. If you get shot at, you’re probably fucked. You’ll be hiding in the woods or in caves, or potentially within the populace, and taking opportune moments, mostly just hiding and waiting —slowly wearing them down over years, maybe decades.
There is something to be said about military defectors though. If it gets to the point of civil war, some amount of military personnel will side against the government, and they’ll bring equipment with them. Maybe they will sometimes fight head on, but it’ll still be uncommon.
It’ll be bloody and horrible, and very messy. The number of weapons you start with won’t matter. Most will probably be taken from the military, and they won’t be what wins the war anyway.
This argument never seemed true to me. A typical uprising isn’t suppressed with tanks and fighter jets. It’s suppressed with police. Your uprising doesn’t have bases and fortifications to bomb. An uprising isn’t attempting to control territory. The military and all it’s power isn’t really built to supress an uprising. The US lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan despite having the most powerful military in the world because asymmetric tactics work.
A typical uprising isn’t suppressed with tanks and fighter jets…
Okay sure, give me an example of a modern uprising where the protesters used weapons to achieve their goals.
Eastern bloc collapse, arab spring, sudan, burkina faso… succeeded because the military refused to side with the state against the uprisings, not because civilians had weapons.
And you’re straight up wrong (or uninformed?), modern uprisings are suppressed with tanks and jets. It took days for the Syrian military to flatten armed protesters and the entire urban areas in which they attempted their revolution. Same thing in Libya, it was a slaughter, weapons and guerrilla tactics were losing to the military, it took a NATO intervention to turn the tide. For an even more recent example, the Myanmar uprisings were met with artillery, airstrikes, scorched earth tactics on their own land, no fucks given mass executions, etc.
It’s suppressed with police…
Well it’s a good thing that we haven’t been militarizing the police in every country these past decades then.
The US lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan…
Vietnam and Afghanistan weren’t attempts to fight against the tyranny of a state. I know imperialist media likes to portray them as proletarian resistance fighters in jungles/mountains, but both were actually an organized military fighting guerrilla warfare in perfect terrain using their own military grade weapons and equipment, with heavy logistical support from outside allies.
TL;DR: Remind me what happened to the civilians who tried to fire at the turkish police in 2016?
It took days for the Syrian military to flatten armed protesters and the entire urban areas in which they attempted their revolution.
Yeah it was a bloody mess, but after hundreds of thousands of dead and eleven years of war Bashar isn’t running Syria anymore. A modern military, when it doesn’t care about civilian casualties, can utterly destroy an urban uprising, but that’s terrible PR and is likely to embolden the revolutionaries at hand. The Houthis also seized control of most of Yemen (by population) through an armed uprising, so there are examples of “successful” 21st century armed insurrections.
The armed uprising by the Syrian population was the 2011 insurgency, which ended in massacres of civilians. Following that, part of the Syrian army defected and formed the FSA. The civil war was an army vs army proper war, not a popular insurgency, there were no “civilians with guns” fighting, only trained military.
The Houthis are a very well organized movement with a lot of external funding and backing, it’s much more than a popular uprising (although it does have the support of the population). The people fighting that civil are were trained military, not civilians with guns who decided to fire back at an oppressor. It’s really a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
I’m sorry but I think you just aren’t well informed enough on geopolitics to be discussing these topics. I don’t mean this in an offensive way, but these topics are much more complex than “government vs the people”, there’s multiple sides and external third parties to all the conflicts you are describing in extremely simplistic ways, none of which look anything like a country’s population using its guns to fight against its own military.
The armed uprising by the Syrian population was the 2011 insurgency, which ended in massacres of civilians. Following that, part of the Syrian army defected and formed the FSA.
It didn’t “end;” the FSA formed against the backdrop of increasingly militant anti-government resistance. Hell, the first defections from the Syrian army predate the formation of the FSA by months.
The civil war was an army vs army proper war, not a popular insurgency, there were no “civilians with guns” fighting, only trained military.
I mean, yes, because “civilians with guns” is what a failed uprising looks like. If the government doesn’t fold, a popular uprising’s main immediate goal is to become a proper army. The Syrian civil war is what it looks like when a (particularly gruesome) uprising gets off the ground.
The Houthis are a very well organized movement with a lot of external funding and backing, it’s much more than a popular uprising
Definitely, but again the organization and external funding and backing came during the years of insurgency and civil war. It’s not like they spawned in 2004 with 300k armed men.
It’s really a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Yes, but it didn’t start as a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Anyway my point here is: A sustainable armed uprising will very quickly stop looking like an armed uprising. Of course it’ll seem like popular uprisings don’t work if when a popular uprising works you retroactively classify it as something else. I know that the Syrian or Yemeni civil wars don’t boil down to “government vs people,” but that’s (sort of, with a hundred footnotes) how they started.
give me an example of a modern uprising where the protesters used weapons to achieve their goals.
Uprising was maybe the wrong word. But off the top of my head, the Black Panthers and the IRA both used lots of weapons to achieve their goals. The Black Panthers were considered by the FBI to be the biggest threat to the US government in the 60s. They were eventually stopped with counter-intelligence, infiltration, criminalizing, and disarmament rather than military action.
You bring up good examples of uprisings that didn’t use weapons and times that uprisings were suppressed with military force. I guess I would slightly walk my original claim back. However, I still think that the people having guns is better than not. I can’t find an article, but during the 2020 BLM protests, there were plenty of armed counter protesters. The police were harassing the protesters and leaving the counter protesters alone. Lots of ink was spilled about how this showed which side the police were on. That’s probably true. But there was also some Texas BLM protests where the protesters showed up armed and the police didn’t fuck with them. They didn’t need enough firepower to win a battle. They just needed enough to deter aggression.
Neither the black panthers nor the IRA overthrew a state, or defended a territory against a modern army. Both movements were contained, infiltrated, and suppressed by states using overwhelming force/tactics. Their guns didn’t protect them from a modern government’s means of action (which is far more than just the military).
The only reason the IRA was able to last so long was the UK deliberately tolerating a small conflict in order to avoid political escalation. They thought it was preferable to have a rowdy Belfast than to flatten it like Russia flattened Chechnya, the terror attacks on the mainland did much more for the IRA than the armed resistance. The good friday agreement was the IRA giving up out of exhaustion, not a win for armed resistance at all.
guns in BLM
Well yeah, a handful of cops will be reluctant to escalate against a rowdy crowd. The same happens in France without guns, when protesters start throwing rocks the police backs away and waits for the CRS (riot police with military grade weapons) to take over.
Guns wouldn’t do much to deter SWAT, the national guard, etc.
I might be wrong (non-USA perspective here), but wasn’t there also a big political angle? Since BLM were protests against police brutality, it would have been really bad PR wise for the police to escalate with more police brutality, therefore they showed more restraint than usual, no? Optics of shooting back at protesters would have caused a huge nationwide mess. Wouldn’t call this a case of guns working, rather of politics constraining the states’ options. If the government had wanted to do Kent State 2.0, I doubt guns would have stopped them, but they chose not to.
I also don’t recall guns stopping rubber bullets shot at journalists, cars rammed into crowds, entire neighborhoods being gassed, activists being kidnapped in unmarked vans, tac units being sent in Portland, doing anything to protect Rittenhouse’s victims, etc…
The IRA kiiiinda did though. The map looks different than it did. It was an anti-colonial struggle, so winning looks different, but yeah, they did the thing.
And I think things like swat would be substantially deterred by going after pigs at their dens in retaliation for every act of violence. Nobody’s doing this right now.
And I think things like swat would be substantially deterred by going after pigs at their dens in retaliation for every act of violence
MOVE bombing?
LA riots crushed in blood?
Waco obliterated?
Modern states don’t get deterred when you attack their symbols of power. They reply in kind with overwhelming force. SWAT isn’t scared of retaliation, they exist for this exact purpose.
I don’t mean symbols and I don’t mean the whole state.
Doing nothing is also larping my own suicide, and it should be noted that I have no friends+am bad at violence. Really just trying to make outcomes where I might not die palatable to others. Thanks for helping BTW.
To be clear, just because I’m rough in my disagreement doesn’t mean I dislike you.
I have friendly feelings towards most people who decide to engage in lefty communities (some exceptions apply).
Even towards that other person who’s feeling overconfident about geopolitics and made my blood boil a little… in the end we’re all on the same side of the class war and I strongly believe in empathy, mutualism, togetherness. Whatever happens in the world, you have communities of people all around the world who would let you join them and consider you their friend without a second thought.
You mean… apart from DAANES in northern Syria (more commonly known as Rojava)? Or the Zapatista territories in Mexico?
Rojava is not a civilian uprising with guns, it’s a militia state backed by a regular army (YPG), with US air support, US bases, US supplies. They’re fighting ISIS, not overthrowing the Syrian state through street protests.
Zapatistas are actually proving my point… when they launched in 1994, they got absolutely crushed by the mexican military and had to retreat to jungles and small autonomous areas. The only reason they survive is political, it would be terrible PR for the mexican government to launch a campaign on them so they let them live in peace. They lost militarily, did not overthrow the mexican state, did not force anything at gunpoints, and don’t control any major population centers. I love the zapatistas for what they’re doing, did some ethnographic work with them so I’ve interacted with them in person: when they talk about their uprising they don’t talk about victory but rather about a week of terrible bloodshed and sadness.
All insurgencies start as civilian uprisings - with or without guns.
They’re fighting ISIS, not overthrowing the Syrian state through street protests.
No… they took advantage of Syrian state power fragmenting to launch their insurgency - which they could not have done without armaments. This was before tenuous US support arrived.
Zapatistas are actually proving my point…
No, it doesn’t. All insurgencies experience defeat initially. The Viet Minh was, at first, roundly crushed by French colonial forces. Before WW2, Mao’s rebels tasted nothing but defeat at the hands of Kuomintang forces. This is merely the historical pattern almost all insurgencies must pass through. Logistical reality dictates the fortunes of insurgencies - not their levels of commitment to either “peaceful” or “violent” means.
it would be terrible PR for the mexican government to launch a campaign on them
If you are going to take armchair revolutionaries to task for simplifying and essentialising the nature of insurgency (justified as it may be), you should be careful not to do the same yourself. If PR was the only thing standing between the Mexican state and crushing militant autonomy within it’s own borders, it would have happily already done so already.
Your comment made me do a very long sigh, but fine, I’ll engage.
This is on me for going into an Internet debate on a topic on which I have scholarly expertise.
All insurgencies start as civilian uprisings - with or without guns.
Rojava had long pre-existing structures, they’re not a random uprising that armed itself. It’s a political party (PYD) and its professional militia (YPG) with command structure, logistics, training, external Kurdish support, not civilians grabbing weapons for a spontaneous revolt. It’s a disciplined paramilitary organization seizing territory when the Syrian regime pulled back, with US support.
This also applies to Talibans, FARC, ETA, LTTE, Hamas, etc. There are literally no examples of successful modern insurgencies *starting* as civilian uprisings. This is factually untrue. You are wrong.
they took advantage of Syrian state power fragmenting to launch their insurgency
This did not happen.
The PYD/YPG walked into a power vacuum and set up local governance. They did not wage an armed campaign against the Syrian state. They actually maintained a non-aggression pact with Assad for years. You cannot launch an insurgency against a state you’re not fighting.
The Syrian state did not lose Rojava because civilians had guns. It lost Rojava because Assad abandoned it. If he wanted that area, YPG rifles would not have stopped the Syrian air force, artillery, missiles, armor. We know this because when Assad did want territory, he flattened entire districts full of people with weapons who couldn’t do shit about it.
zapatista / vietminh / mao comparion
Youtube clip of the “bruh sound effect #2”
This is an unserious comparison.
Mao and the Viet Minh had millions of military grade fighters, supplies, training, heavy weapons, regime collapses that opened power vacuums, massive foreign backing, whereas the Zapatistas have rifles in some isolated rural communities and a few thousand non-military fighters.
This is merely the historical pattern almost all insurgencies must pass through.
Most insurgencies don’t start as peasant uprisings that get crushed and then re-emerge lmao
Talibans emerged from Mujahideen networks with Pakistani support, Hezoballah began with heavy iranian backing, LTTE instantly had external funding and territorial control, FARC never had a spectacular early defeat, ISIS captured Mosul in days… you’re just using some romantic examples from a handful of cold war cases and thinking they’re a general principle. They’re not.
If PR was the only thing standing between the Mexican state and crushing militant autonomy within it’s own borders, it would have happily already done so already.
The timing of the insurgency was not random.
The PRI’s legitimacy was fragile at the time. NAFTA had just launched, massacring indigenous rebels would have jeopardized it. The Catholic Church (very very important for PR in mexico) was asking to mediate a ceasefire. It’s political optics that constrained the state.
Besides, Mexico did crush them militarily. It took 12 days.
Modern states can annihilate insurgents when they stop caring about optics. see: Russia/Chechnya, Syria/Hama, Sri Lanka/LTTE, China/Xinjiang, Turkey/PKK, Ethiopia/Tigray, Myanmar/Rohingya, etc…
Mexico chose to not join this club. States restrain themselves for political reasons, not for fear of insurgents.
If you are going to take armchair revolutionaries to task for simplifying and essentialising the nature of insurgency (justified as it may be), you should be careful not to do the same yourself.
Pointing out the political context of the EZLN isn’t simplifying insurgency, it’s knowing the history.
not civilians grabbing weapons for a spontaneous revolt.
Again… is that how I characterised them?
This is an unserious comparison.
Where did I compare them, Clyde? I merely used them to demonstrate that suffering military reversal does not necessarily mean the end of an insurgency.
There are literally no examples of successful modern insurgencies starting as civilian uprisings.
There is no such thing as an insurgency (“modern” or otherwise) that doesn’t start with civilian uprisings. No extant insurgency has “modern” roots - if that is what you demand an example off I’ll simply write your demand off as ridiculous and not worth bothering with.
They did not wage an armed campaign against the Syrian state.
Somehow, I don’t think Assad would have seen it that way if he had won the civil war.
It’s political optics that constrained the state.
Merely optics to you, actual political threats to them.
Besides, Mexico did crush them militarily. It took 12 days.
Again… not the first insurgency to survive military reversal.
Modern states can annihilate insurgents when they stop caring about optics.
Caring about “optics” is not the reason Russia suffered defeat during the 1st Chechen War.
Most insurgencies don’t start as peasant uprisings that get crushed and then re-emerge lmao
Complete mischaracterisation of what I actually said. Most insurgencies do experience military reversal at some point in their existence or other. And no…
you’re just using some romantic examples
…I never claimed there was anything “romantic” (whatever that means) about it.
Afghanistan ain’t called the graveyard of empires for nothing. Both the Russian and American militaries, with all their overwhelming might and superiority, lost their wars against dirt farmers living in caves. Militaries are shit for fighting anything but other militaries.
Russian and American militaries, with all their overwhelming might and superiority, lost their wars against dirt farmers living in caves
The US sent billions to the Talibans vs the USSR, it was a proxy war.
Various sources (allegedly saudis and pakistan) sent billions to the Talibans and Al-Quaeda vs the US, it was another proxy war. On top of that they had a lot of leftover US weapons from the previous war.
They were not fighting proles with guns, they were fighting an actual military with military grade weapons.
Don’t move goalposts, we’re talking about resisting the tyranny of the state here, demonstrators vs military.
PS: Calling them “dirt farmers living in caves” is straight up racist, try not to do that. Both Talibans and Al-Quaeda had central command, a very organized military, courts, intelligence units, shadow governments, taxation systems, bureaucracy… you’re just repeating the imperialist propaganda the USA uses to justify their defeat.
The high explosives were helping the Tainan a lot too. IEDs both killed and fucked-with the US military in ways an even a thousand ARs never could. And cheap drones weren’t even a thing yet back then.
If it turns into a shooting war between the US military and its own civilian populace, apart from the multitude of other unimaginable horrors, you would undoubtedly see countries trying to stoke the flames and make the conflict more involved and expensive for the United States. Hell, I’m pretty well convinced that it’s happening right now; if you were China or Russia or any other hostile foreign actor, you would much rather the United States destroy itself from within than try to confront us directly.
Modern day “people vs state” uprising are over in a matter of days.
It would not last long enough for any external support to stoke any flames.
Unless it turns into an actual civil war, military vs military instead of civilian vs military. Sure, then you’d have lots of foreign involvement, but civilians having guns would barely affect the eventual outcome if at all. Civilians vs military these days is hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby tier, in the USA it’d be even more asymmetrical and brutal given the state of your military.
Ask the survivors of the MOVE bombing how guns would have helped them, now add 40 years of military industrial complex and technological progress to the equation. You’ll get a mental picture of reality.
Militaries are shit for fighting anything but other militaries.
That’s not true at all. Almost every time an insurgency is cut off from outside logistical support (or doesn’t have it in the first place) it’s chances of being defeated by conventional militaries is pretty high.
There are lots of examples - the LTTE in Sri Lanka (defeated in the 2000s), the MNLA in Malaya (defeated in the 1960s) - they are simply just not as well-known as the insurgencies that succeeded.
The whole reason the Palestinian resistance had to accede to this (so-called) “ceasefire” is because they simply do not have the logistics to carry on the fight for that much longer - if the Palestinians had a Ho Chi Minh Trail, Israel would be history by now.
Paradoxically, it’s liberals that like guns in my country (hunting has become a bourgeois activity).
Here in South Africa it’s the same - probably because it’s only the rich (and the top rung of their pet managerial classes) that gets to legally own them. That, and the libs wouldn’t dream of hurting the privatised security goon industry (ours is the third-largest in the world, believe it or not).
but won’t do much against tanks, jets, drones, etc.
Not necessarily, the “conflicts” in the middle east has proven that guerilla warfare can go pretty far, even when against the military of a superpower with all the toys they want
There’s a massive difference between fighting the tyranny of the state in an uprising and fighting foreign invaders in a heavily militarized proxy war with heavy outside support.
True, an uprising within a country against a tyrannical government can take many other weapon-less forms. And bringing weapons/violence into it should absolutely be a last resort, but it should still a resort. Not that anyone should want to get it to that point
Non american leftists tend to have a more reserved take on guns.
It’s hard to advocate for armed resistance against tyranny XIXth century style after 150 years of military industrial complex development have made the state’s power so asymmetrically strong. Guns nowadays kill kids in schools, but won’t do much against tanks, jets, drones, etc.
Paradoxically, it’s liberals that like guns in my country (hunting has become a bourgeois activity).
Yeah, I’m an American leftist and this is my take. I’m not anti-gun. I’d say I’m pro-responsible-gun-ownership. However, some people (leftists and conservatives) think they could beat the US military in a straight up fight. They can’t. It doesn’t matter how many guns you have.
If it comes to it it’ll be won by gorilla warfare. It’ll be hit-and-run tactics and explosives. If you get shot at, you’re probably fucked. You’ll be hiding in the woods or in caves, or potentially within the populace, and taking opportune moments, mostly just hiding and waiting —slowly wearing them down over years, maybe decades.
There is something to be said about military defectors though. If it gets to the point of civil war, some amount of military personnel will side against the government, and they’ll bring equipment with them. Maybe they will sometimes fight head on, but it’ll still be uncommon.
It’ll be bloody and horrible, and very messy. The number of weapons you start with won’t matter. Most will probably be taken from the military, and they won’t be what wins the war anyway.
This argument never seemed true to me. A typical uprising isn’t suppressed with tanks and fighter jets. It’s suppressed with police. Your uprising doesn’t have bases and fortifications to bomb. An uprising isn’t attempting to control territory. The military and all it’s power isn’t really built to supress an uprising. The US lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan despite having the most powerful military in the world because asymmetric tactics work.
Okay sure, give me an example of a modern uprising where the protesters used weapons to achieve their goals.
Eastern bloc collapse, arab spring, sudan, burkina faso… succeeded because the military refused to side with the state against the uprisings, not because civilians had weapons.
And you’re straight up wrong (or uninformed?), modern uprisings are suppressed with tanks and jets. It took days for the Syrian military to flatten armed protesters and the entire urban areas in which they attempted their revolution. Same thing in Libya, it was a slaughter, weapons and guerrilla tactics were losing to the military, it took a NATO intervention to turn the tide. For an even more recent example, the Myanmar uprisings were met with artillery, airstrikes, scorched earth tactics on their own land, no fucks given mass executions, etc.
Well it’s a good thing that we haven’t been militarizing the police in every country these past decades then.
Vietnam and Afghanistan weren’t attempts to fight against the tyranny of a state. I know imperialist media likes to portray them as proletarian resistance fighters in jungles/mountains, but both were actually an organized military fighting guerrilla warfare in perfect terrain using their own military grade weapons and equipment, with heavy logistical support from outside allies.
TL;DR: Remind me what happened to the civilians who tried to fire at the turkish police in 2016?
Yeah it was a bloody mess, but after hundreds of thousands of dead and eleven years of war Bashar isn’t running Syria anymore. A modern military, when it doesn’t care about civilian casualties, can utterly destroy an urban uprising, but that’s terrible PR and is likely to embolden the revolutionaries at hand. The Houthis also seized control of most of Yemen (by population) through an armed uprising, so there are examples of “successful” 21st century armed insurrections.
The armed uprising by the Syrian population was the 2011 insurgency, which ended in massacres of civilians. Following that, part of the Syrian army defected and formed the FSA. The civil war was an army vs army proper war, not a popular insurgency, there were no “civilians with guns” fighting, only trained military.
The Houthis are a very well organized movement with a lot of external funding and backing, it’s much more than a popular uprising (although it does have the support of the population). The people fighting that civil are were trained military, not civilians with guns who decided to fire back at an oppressor. It’s really a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
I’m sorry but I think you just aren’t well informed enough on geopolitics to be discussing these topics. I don’t mean this in an offensive way, but these topics are much more complex than “government vs the people”, there’s multiple sides and external third parties to all the conflicts you are describing in extremely simplistic ways, none of which look anything like a country’s population using its guns to fight against its own military.
It didn’t “end;” the FSA formed against the backdrop of increasingly militant anti-government resistance. Hell, the first defections from the Syrian army predate the formation of the FSA by months.
I mean, yes, because “civilians with guns” is what a failed uprising looks like. If the government doesn’t fold, a popular uprising’s main immediate goal is to become a proper army. The Syrian civil war is what it looks like when a (particularly gruesome) uprising gets off the ground.
Definitely, but again the organization and external funding and backing came during the years of insurgency and civil war. It’s not like they spawned in 2004 with 300k armed men.
Yes, but it didn’t start as a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Anyway my point here is: A sustainable armed uprising will very quickly stop looking like an armed uprising. Of course it’ll seem like popular uprisings don’t work if when a popular uprising works you retroactively classify it as something else. I know that the Syrian or Yemeni civil wars don’t boil down to “government vs people,” but that’s (sort of, with a hundred footnotes) how they started.
Actually… of all the people who argued back, you’re the one who found the middle ground to agree on.
Your description of an armed uprising is indeed the ideal scenario, and does fit historical caser.
I just don’t believe in its feasability against a hyper militarized modern imperial state.
Uprising was maybe the wrong word. But off the top of my head, the Black Panthers and the IRA both used lots of weapons to achieve their goals. The Black Panthers were considered by the FBI to be the biggest threat to the US government in the 60s. They were eventually stopped with counter-intelligence, infiltration, criminalizing, and disarmament rather than military action.
You bring up good examples of uprisings that didn’t use weapons and times that uprisings were suppressed with military force. I guess I would slightly walk my original claim back. However, I still think that the people having guns is better than not. I can’t find an article, but during the 2020 BLM protests, there were plenty of armed counter protesters. The police were harassing the protesters and leaving the counter protesters alone. Lots of ink was spilled about how this showed which side the police were on. That’s probably true. But there was also some Texas BLM protests where the protesters showed up armed and the police didn’t fuck with them. They didn’t need enough firepower to win a battle. They just needed enough to deter aggression.
Neither the black panthers nor the IRA overthrew a state, or defended a territory against a modern army. Both movements were contained, infiltrated, and suppressed by states using overwhelming force/tactics. Their guns didn’t protect them from a modern government’s means of action (which is far more than just the military).
The only reason the IRA was able to last so long was the UK deliberately tolerating a small conflict in order to avoid political escalation. They thought it was preferable to have a rowdy Belfast than to flatten it like Russia flattened Chechnya, the terror attacks on the mainland did much more for the IRA than the armed resistance. The good friday agreement was the IRA giving up out of exhaustion, not a win for armed resistance at all.
Well yeah, a handful of cops will be reluctant to escalate against a rowdy crowd. The same happens in France without guns, when protesters start throwing rocks the police backs away and waits for the CRS (riot police with military grade weapons) to take over.
Guns wouldn’t do much to deter SWAT, the national guard, etc.
I might be wrong (non-USA perspective here), but wasn’t there also a big political angle? Since BLM were protests against police brutality, it would have been really bad PR wise for the police to escalate with more police brutality, therefore they showed more restraint than usual, no? Optics of shooting back at protesters would have caused a huge nationwide mess. Wouldn’t call this a case of guns working, rather of politics constraining the states’ options. If the government had wanted to do Kent State 2.0, I doubt guns would have stopped them, but they chose not to.
I also don’t recall guns stopping rubber bullets shot at journalists, cars rammed into crowds, entire neighborhoods being gassed, activists being kidnapped in unmarked vans, tac units being sent in Portland, doing anything to protect Rittenhouse’s victims, etc…
The IRA kiiiinda did though. The map looks different than it did. It was an anti-colonial struggle, so winning looks different, but yeah, they did the thing.
And I think things like swat would be substantially deterred by going after pigs at their dens in retaliation for every act of violence. Nobody’s doing this right now.
MOVE bombing?
LA riots crushed in blood?
Waco obliterated?
Modern states don’t get deterred when you attack their symbols of power. They reply in kind with overwhelming force. SWAT isn’t scared of retaliation, they exist for this exact purpose.
You are LARPing your own suicide.
I don’t mean symbols and I don’t mean the whole state.
Doing nothing is also larping my own suicide, and it should be noted that I have no friends+am bad at violence. Really just trying to make outcomes where I might not die palatable to others. Thanks for helping BTW.
To be clear, just because I’m rough in my disagreement doesn’t mean I dislike you.
I have friendly feelings towards most people who decide to engage in lefty communities (some exceptions apply).
Even towards that other person who’s feeling overconfident about geopolitics and made my blood boil a little… in the end we’re all on the same side of the class war and I strongly believe in empathy, mutualism, togetherness. Whatever happens in the world, you have communities of people all around the world who would let you join them and consider you their friend without a second thought.
We’re all tired of capitalism and violence.
Peace.
You know the continental US has like four of that perfect terrain, right?
Sure, if you ignore the rest of the phrase containing the “perfect terrain” quote your reply is perfect👍
Maybe my analysis doesn’t agree with yours?
I don’t actually know. I’m being high AF and posting right now.
You mean… apart from DAANES in northern Syria (more commonly known as Rojava)? Or the Zapatista territories in Mexico?
That’s two… I know you only asked for one.
Zapatistas were 1990s. 20th century
The 90s is modern.
But not 21st century.
I actually broadly agree with you but I must fight you over pedantry.
Rojava is not a civilian uprising with guns, it’s a militia state backed by a regular army (YPG), with US air support, US bases, US supplies. They’re fighting ISIS, not overthrowing the Syrian state through street protests.
Zapatistas are actually proving my point… when they launched in 1994, they got absolutely crushed by the mexican military and had to retreat to jungles and small autonomous areas. The only reason they survive is political, it would be terrible PR for the mexican government to launch a campaign on them so they let them live in peace. They lost militarily, did not overthrow the mexican state, did not force anything at gunpoints, and don’t control any major population centers. I love the zapatistas for what they’re doing, did some ethnographic work with them so I’ve interacted with them in person: when they talk about their uprising they don’t talk about victory but rather about a week of terrible bloodshed and sadness.
All insurgencies start as civilian uprisings - with or without guns.
No… they took advantage of Syrian state power fragmenting to launch their insurgency - which they could not have done without armaments. This was before tenuous US support arrived.
No, it doesn’t. All insurgencies experience defeat initially. The Viet Minh was, at first, roundly crushed by French colonial forces. Before WW2, Mao’s rebels tasted nothing but defeat at the hands of Kuomintang forces. This is merely the historical pattern almost all insurgencies must pass through. Logistical reality dictates the fortunes of insurgencies - not their levels of commitment to either “peaceful” or “violent” means.
If you are going to take armchair revolutionaries to task for simplifying and essentialising the nature of insurgency (justified as it may be), you should be careful not to do the same yourself. If PR was the only thing standing between the Mexican state and crushing militant autonomy within it’s own borders, it would have happily already done so already.
Your comment made me do a very long sigh, but fine, I’ll engage.
This is on me for going into an Internet debate on a topic on which I have scholarly expertise.
Rojava had long pre-existing structures, they’re not a random uprising that armed itself. It’s a political party (PYD) and its professional militia (YPG) with command structure, logistics, training, external Kurdish support, not civilians grabbing weapons for a spontaneous revolt. It’s a disciplined paramilitary organization seizing territory when the Syrian regime pulled back, with US support.
This also applies to Talibans, FARC, ETA, LTTE, Hamas, etc. There are literally no examples of successful modern insurgencies *starting* as civilian uprisings. This is factually untrue. You are wrong.
This did not happen.
The PYD/YPG walked into a power vacuum and set up local governance. They did not wage an armed campaign against the Syrian state. They actually maintained a non-aggression pact with Assad for years. You cannot launch an insurgency against a state you’re not fighting.
The Syrian state did not lose Rojava because civilians had guns. It lost Rojava because Assad abandoned it. If he wanted that area, YPG rifles would not have stopped the Syrian air force, artillery, missiles, armor. We know this because when Assad did want territory, he flattened entire districts full of people with weapons who couldn’t do shit about it.
Youtube clip of the “bruh sound effect #2”
This is an unserious comparison.
Mao and the Viet Minh had millions of military grade fighters, supplies, training, heavy weapons, regime collapses that opened power vacuums, massive foreign backing, whereas the Zapatistas have rifles in some isolated rural communities and a few thousand non-military fighters.
Most insurgencies don’t start as peasant uprisings that get crushed and then re-emerge lmao
Talibans emerged from Mujahideen networks with Pakistani support, Hezoballah began with heavy iranian backing, LTTE instantly had external funding and territorial control, FARC never had a spectacular early defeat, ISIS captured Mosul in days… you’re just using some romantic examples from a handful of cold war cases and thinking they’re a general principle. They’re not.
The timing of the insurgency was not random.
The PRI’s legitimacy was fragile at the time. NAFTA had just launched, massacring indigenous rebels would have jeopardized it. The Catholic Church (very very important for PR in mexico) was asking to mediate a ceasefire. It’s political optics that constrained the state.
Besides, Mexico did crush them militarily. It took 12 days.
Modern states can annihilate insurgents when they stop caring about optics. see: Russia/Chechnya, Syria/Hama, Sri Lanka/LTTE, China/Xinjiang, Turkey/PKK, Ethiopia/Tigray, Myanmar/Rohingya, etc…
Mexico chose to not join this club. States restrain themselves for political reasons, not for fear of insurgents.
Pointing out the political context of the EZLN isn’t simplifying insurgency, it’s knowing the history.
I’m not making a theory, I’m explaining a case.
You’re the one stretching an outlier into a rule.
Is that what I called them?
Again… is that how I characterised them?
Where did I compare them, Clyde? I merely used them to demonstrate that suffering military reversal does not necessarily mean the end of an insurgency.
There is no such thing as an insurgency (“modern” or otherwise) that doesn’t start with civilian uprisings. No extant insurgency has “modern” roots - if that is what you demand an example off I’ll simply write your demand off as ridiculous and not worth bothering with.
Somehow, I don’t think Assad would have seen it that way if he had won the civil war.
Merely optics to you, actual political threats to them.
Again… not the first insurgency to survive military reversal.
Caring about “optics” is not the reason Russia suffered defeat during the 1st Chechen War.
Complete mischaracterisation of what I actually said. Most insurgencies do experience military reversal at some point in their existence or other. And no…
…I never claimed there was anything “romantic” (whatever that means) about it.
Afghanistan ain’t called the graveyard of empires for nothing. Both the Russian and American militaries, with all their overwhelming might and superiority, lost their wars against dirt farmers living in caves. Militaries are shit for fighting anything but other militaries.
The US sent billions to the Talibans vs the USSR, it was a proxy war.
Various sources (allegedly saudis and pakistan) sent billions to the Talibans and Al-Quaeda vs the US, it was another proxy war. On top of that they had a lot of leftover US weapons from the previous war.
They were not fighting proles with guns, they were fighting an actual military with military grade weapons.
Don’t move goalposts, we’re talking about resisting the tyranny of the state here, demonstrators vs military.
PS: Calling them “dirt farmers living in caves” is straight up racist, try not to do that. Both Talibans and Al-Quaeda had central command, a very organized military, courts, intelligence units, shadow governments, taxation systems, bureaucracy… you’re just repeating the imperialist propaganda the USA uses to justify their defeat.
The high explosives were helping the Tainan a lot too. IEDs both killed and fucked-with the US military in ways an even a thousand ARs never could. And cheap drones weren’t even a thing yet back then.
If it turns into a shooting war between the US military and its own civilian populace, apart from the multitude of other unimaginable horrors, you would undoubtedly see countries trying to stoke the flames and make the conflict more involved and expensive for the United States. Hell, I’m pretty well convinced that it’s happening right now; if you were China or Russia or any other hostile foreign actor, you would much rather the United States destroy itself from within than try to confront us directly.
Modern day “people vs state” uprising are over in a matter of days.
It would not last long enough for any external support to stoke any flames.
Unless it turns into an actual civil war, military vs military instead of civilian vs military. Sure, then you’d have lots of foreign involvement, but civilians having guns would barely affect the eventual outcome if at all. Civilians vs military these days is hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby tier, in the USA it’d be even more asymmetrical and brutal given the state of your military.
Ask the survivors of the MOVE bombing how guns would have helped them, now add 40 years of military industrial complex and technological progress to the equation. You’ll get a mental picture of reality.
That’s not true at all. Almost every time an insurgency is cut off from outside logistical support (or doesn’t have it in the first place) it’s chances of being defeated by conventional militaries is pretty high.
There are lots of examples - the LTTE in Sri Lanka (defeated in the 2000s), the MNLA in Malaya (defeated in the 1960s) - they are simply just not as well-known as the insurgencies that succeeded.
The whole reason the Palestinian resistance had to accede to this (so-called) “ceasefire” is because they simply do not have the logistics to carry on the fight for that much longer - if the Palestinians had a Ho Chi Minh Trail, Israel would be history by now.
Here in South Africa it’s the same - probably because it’s only the rich (and the top rung of their pet managerial classes) that gets to legally own them. That, and the libs wouldn’t dream of hurting the privatised security goon industry (ours is the third-largest in the world, believe it or not).
Not necessarily, the “conflicts” in the middle east has proven that guerilla warfare can go pretty far, even when against the military of a superpower with all the toys they want
There’s a massive difference between fighting the tyranny of the state in an uprising and fighting foreign invaders in a heavily militarized proxy war with heavy outside support.
True, an uprising within a country against a tyrannical government can take many other weapon-less forms. And bringing weapons/violence into it should absolutely be a last resort, but it should still a resort. Not that anyone should want to get it to that point