This week, continuing in the vein of some of our previous strategy and military theory primers, I wanted to off a basic 101-level survey of the strategic theory behind efforts, in a sense, directed against the state itself, both violent approaches (what we might call ‘terroristic insurgency’)1 and non-violent approaches (protest). It may seem strange to treat violent insurgency and non-violent protest together but while they employ very different methods, as we’ll see, they share a similar theoretical framework, attempting to achieve some of the similar effects by different means, both working within the state, against the state (or its policies), focused on the changing minds rather than battlefields.
Naturally this comes in part in response to the significant amounts of protest actions happening right now in the United States, but the framework here is very much intended to be a general one, applicable to both armed insurgencies and non-violent protests worldwide. The world, after all, is really quite big and there are multiple major protest movements and multiple armed insurgencies happening globally at any given time. That said, much as with protracted war, a movement aiming to push against the state is naturally going to be heavily shaped by local conditions, particularly by the nature of the state against which it sets itself as well as the condition and political alignment of its people.
Finally, I want to clarify how I am using terminology here at the outset. I have mostly stuck here to ‘insurgent’ to describe violent actors opposing the state and ‘protestor’ to describe non-violent ones. Obviously in mass movements, violence is not a binary but a spectrum – a single fellow kicking over a trash can does not turn a non-violent march into a riot, but equally having a ‘political wing’ does not turn an organization mounting a terror campaign ‘non-violent.’ However the strategic dichotomy is going to be useful to understanding how these groups in their ideal form tackle problems. Likewise, I am going to describe the violent movements opposing the state as ‘insurgencies’ but I want to note at the outset that I am drawing a distinction here between what I am defining as ‘insurgencies’ which lack the backing of a conventional army or the expectation of soon acquiring one, as opposed to forces in a protracted war framework who have or expect to have the backing of a conventional force, however weak (we might call the latter group guerillas, although this too is imprecise). The line between these two strategies is certainly fuzzy – many insurgencies hope to eventually transition to protracted war and the two approaches share many tactics – but there are worthwhile differences between the two.
In particular, whereas the guerilla’s cause is supported by a conventional army – even if it is in hiding – and anticipates a shift to positional, conventional warfare and thus eventual victory on the battlefield (however distance), the insurgent has no expectation of developing a conventional force capable of meeting his opponent any time soon and is instead wholly focused on the ‘war in the mind,’ often through the use of terror tactics. That said, I mostly avoid ‘terrorist’ here as well, in an effort to avoid the ‘our freedom fighter is their terrorist’ problem of morally loaded language in order to focus on tactics and strategic effects, rather than the rightness or wrongness of the cause. And I should be clear here, what follows – despite being almost 11,000 words long – is very much a schematic overview into which a great amount of detail and nuance could (and probably ought) to be added, still I think the theory foundation here might be useful.
At the end, once we have our theory out, I am going to make a few observations about the current immigration policy anti-ICE protests in the United States generally and in Minneapolis-Saint Paul in particular and how I think they fit in to this framework.
(Bibliography Note: The difficulty in writing this kind of a framework is that much of what is written in terrorism and insurgency is written primarily from the counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency (COIN) perspective. Nevertheless, to the degree these works understand their enemies, they are useful. The standard teaching works for understanding counter-insurgency warfare are typically campaign histories of successful and failed COIN operations, such as J.A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (2005); note also older and influential efforts such as B.B. Fall, Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina (1961), D. Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (1964) and A. Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (1977) . The United States military’s understanding of these lessons is distilled in a field manual, FM 3-24, albeit hardly one without criticisms. For the references here to the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan (2001-2021), many of my observations are drawn specifically from W. Morgan, The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley (2021), which I cannot recommend strongly enough. Though it is hardly a perfect book, I also reference here Max Boot, Invisible Armies (2013) specifically for its discussion of the failure rate of insurgencies. In terms of framing these campaign histories, I lean here quite hard on the framework used by W.E. Lee in Waging War (2015) which was the textbook I taught this topic from when I taught a global survey of warfare. On the strategy of non-violence, what I would without question recommend first is T.E. Ricks, Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement 1954-1968 (2022). Also note the strategic thinking of non-violent leaders; Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963) is a remarkably cogent and clear explication of non-violence as a strategy in both its goals and how it was specifically framed for one such campaign. I am not an expert on Gandhi’s writings – which are voluminous – but I did read through the selections in Gandhi on Non-Violence, ed. T. Merton (1964). I am sure a scholar of his writings could do far better; I feel my insufficiency on this topic keenly. Finally, in terms of theory, this post uses as its theoretical foundation a mix of Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Krieg (1832) – I generally use the Howard and Paret translation, though no translation is perfect – and Hannah Arendt’s On Violence (1970).)
(Header image: from left to right, all via Wikipedia: Taliban fighters in 2021, a car-bombing in Iraq in 2005, a non-violent student sit-in in North Carolina in 1960 and an anti-ICE protest in Minneapolis, January 2026.)
Establishing a Framework
Before we dive in to the differences between insurgencies and protest movements, we have to establish their common framework and before we do that we need to establish some terms and for that we will need to rely quite a bit on Carl von Clausewitz, so get your beer mug, wine glass or drinking horn ready.
The starting point for understanding how both insurgencies and protests work is the Clausewitzian trinity. This is, in and of itself, something of an odd statement because Clausewitz, in writing On War (1832) was not focused on either insurgencies or non-violent protest movements but rather on conventional, large-scale interstate war of the sort that he had known. But the framework he constructed to understand the nature of war is so fundamental that it applies effectively to forms of conflict beyond the kinds of war he knew and indeed beyond the activity of war to some significant degree and so it is very useful here.
To very briefly summarize, Clausewitz begins by noting that war, by its nature, tends to escalate infinitely, each side of a conflict applying more and more force against the other until one side ‘runs out.’ Infinite escalate is an inextricable part of war’s core nature in the ideal. The two sides to a conflict thus increasingly commit their strength until one side can escalate no further – it has no more strength to apply – and thus fails, leading the stronger party in a position to impose their will upon the weaker. But of course in the real world this infinite escalation is restrained by real world factors, which Clausewitz breaks into three. It is these three factors that restrain (or in some cases, enhance) the escalating use of force that are the Clausewitzian trinity we so often talk about. They are:
Friction, the expression of randomness and unpredictability in war, encompassing all of the sorts of things that keep a state from having its full military force where it wants them to be, when it wants them to be there, functioning as intended. Bad weather, logistics snarls, unpredictable human with their emotions, unexpected enemy action – these are all forms of friction. The management of friction – management, not elimination, because it cannot be eliminated – is in Clausewitz view the proper occupation of generals, who apply their genius (natural talent) to it. And of course some actions and methods in war are also designed to increase an enemy’s friction – think something like supply disruption.
Next is Will, sometimes also termed Passion (translating Clausewitz is fun), which is to say the dedication of the people (or at least, the militarily or politically relevant people) to a cause. Clausewitz came up during the Napoleonic Wars, an age of mass warfare, so he thinks about this in terms of mass mobilization and for this post we should too. As such, Will resides with the People and is a product of their emotions, with the willingness of the great bulk of the society to submit to the hardships of a conflict in order to carry on the cause. High amounts of Will enables more escalation because a people will sacrifice more to carry on; flagging Will equally enforces limits on escalation.
Finally there is the political object, the actual aim of the conflict, the goal each side has. A state seeking an objective that is small or trivial or optional is going to be unwilling to spend its full strength in the pursuit of that objective. By contrast, a state whose entire existence is threatened will deploy everything it possibly can. In Clausewitz’ view the political object is managed by politicians, who do (or at least ought) to govern state strategy and the willingness of the state to expend resources by calculations of pure reason.
With these three elements in mind, it becomes possible to overcome an enemy (or to be overcome) without matching their maximum possible strength ‘in the ideal.’ A weak state, for instance, might hold off a stronger one simply because the thing being contested is much more important (the political object!) to them and so they apply a greater portion of their strength. Alternately, weak public support might prevent a strong state from mobilizing its full potential force or friction – perhaps a tricky supply situation at great distance with unpredictable conditions – might prevent the full application of that larger state’s force.
These three elements of the trinity are equally variables, which either side might seek to effect: to sap enemy will so as to limit the force they can mobilize or to structure political conditions so that attacking even a weaker neighbor is simply not worth the cost. In this latter point, this is how nuclear deterrence works: it raises the cost of a conventional war well above any possible gains, so that even a stronger state would profit nothing from attacking and so does not attack.
You may now stop chugging your drink (but have some handy, we’re not done with our good friend Clausewitz just yet).
For a weaker party in a conflict, altering these variables is of course essential: if you are the weaker party then by definition you are not in a position to win the ‘ideal’ trial of strength (which to be clear, never exists in the real world; it is only an ideal construct) in any case and so must seek ways to use the elements of the trinity as ‘levers’ to constrain your opponent’s ability to employ their strength, while keeping yours unconstrained.
And at last that is the key to understanding insurgencies and protests movements, because both insurgencies and protest movements take the form they do because from a perspective of pure force, they are the weakest parties compared to the violent power of the state, whichever state they might find themselves pitted against.
Theories of Victory
Fundamentally, what protests, insurgencies and terrorism campaigns have in common is that neither operates with any hope of directly challenging the armed force of the state. You may note this is a significant contrast to the theory of protracted war: while protracted war is a strategy of the weak against the strong, it envisions a future transition to a phase (or even phases) of direct, conventional ‘positional’ warfare, once the strength of the opposing power has been sapped. A force engaged in protracted war expects to win on the battlefield eventually, just not today. By contrast, while armed insurgencies often adopt a protracted war theory and thus a notional stage where they transition to conventional warfare, they often operate much farther from making that a reality.
Now I am to a degree defining this distinction between insurgency and protracted war – many of the parties involve understand themselves to be practicing both – but I think the distinction is important. A contrast may serve. The forces of North Vietnam (and their sympathizers in the South) waged a protracted war against the United States and the U.S. supported South Vietnamese government in which they were clearly in conventional terms the weaker partner, but at all points in that conflict, North Vietnam maintained a conventional military (the People’s Army of Vietnam or PAVN) engaging in a level of conventional warfare. That included major efforts to transition to direct, positional and conventional warfare in 1964 and again in 1968 and again in 1972 (being badly hammered each time). Practitioners of protracted war – we may, for the sake of simplicity here (if at the cost of some accuracy) call them guerillas – often engage in terrorist or insurgent tactics, but their overarching strategic theory assumes an eventual transition to conventional warfare.
By way of contrasting example, the insurgencies the United States faced in Afghanistan (alongside NATO allies) and in Iraq (alongside coalition allies) never seem to have seriously contemplated engaging the United States military in a conventional battle. Not only was the balance of forces extremely unfavorable, these groups had no real plan to make it favorable. This comes into really sharp relief if you think about airpower – without which engaging in a conventional groundfight against a modern military is simply high-tech suicide. North Vietnam, equipped by its allies, operated one of the most sophisticated air defense systems in the region and regularly inflicted air-to-air loses on United States pilots; they shot down thousands of planes. By contrast, the sum total of American fixed-wing aircraft combat losses in the air in Iraq and Afghanistan 2001-2021 consisted of a single A-10A Thunderbolt II.2 Accidents and maintenance issues claimed aircraft far more often than enemy action. At no point, so far as I can tell, did Iraqi or Taliban insurgents make a serious effort to challenge American airpower because unlike the North Vietnamese, it was never required to do so for their theory of victory.
Fundamentally insurgencies lack access to substantial amounts of industrial firepower (typically because they have no foreign sponsor willing to hand them modern heavy weaponry; small arms are neat but to wage modern conventional warfare, you need armor, artillery and airpower) and so while they try to achieve their aims through violence, they operate with no hope of directly challenging an opposing force that does have access to industrial firepower. That demands a different approach!
There is thus, I’d argue, a real difference between a weaker force which still aims for and has a practical plan to actually defeat an enemy force – in the above example, to shoot down their planes – as opposed to an insurgency that needs an enemy it cannot defeat to give up or go away.
Of course for a non-violent protest movement, this differential in armed force becomes essentially infinite: such movements bring no armed force at all to the table. And yet non-violence has arguably a better track record than insurgency at achieving its goals. How?
Fundamentally, these groups focus almost entirely on Will. Whereas the force of modern states comes from the ability to harness industrial firepower and is thus a product of economies, the endurance of an insurgency or protest movement derives almost purely from their ability to secure new recruits faster than they are exhausted, which in turn is a product of popular support and internal morale – which is, of course, just that Clausewitzian Will in action. So long as that will remains strong, these groups will aquire new recruits faster than the state can arrest or kill them and so they will grow. And since the weapons (or ‘weapons’ in the case of protest groups) the group is using do not demand an independent industrial base – they’re available commercially for prices individuals or small groups can afford, legally or otherwise – there is no industrial base, no core territory full of factories or warehouses to attack. So long as will remains, the group remains and can continue to advance their agenda.
Which would not add up to very much if insurgent or protest groups had no hope of actually achieving their aims – indeed, it would be very hard to sustain their own Will if that were the case – but of course these groups often succeed. The answer relies on understanding the Clausewitzian trinity as a tool (drink!): if the insurgency or protest movement cannot escalate to match the force of the state, it must use the levers the trinity provides to de-escalate the force of the state. In part this is done through the political object – by raising the cost of denying the insurgency or protest group’s demands until it the rational calculus is simply to give them what they want. That in turn is generally accomplished through degrading popular will, until the costs to the opposing state – in public support, in votes, in public compliance – either lead to capitulation to some or all of the demands or to regime collapse.
Both protests and insurgencies function this way, where the true battlefield is the will of the participants, rather than contesting control over physical space. That’s a tricky thing, however, for humans to wrap our heads around. We have, after all, spent many thousands of years – arguably the whole of our history and pre-history, largely fighting battles over territory. Our emotions are tuned for those kinds of fights and so our instinct is to revert to that style of fighting. One can see this very clearly in young or undisciplined protestors who imagine they will ‘win’ the protest by forcing back a police line, essentially ‘battling’ the cops. But protest groups do not ‘win’ by beating the police into submission and indeed even armed insurgencies generally do not win by victories in open fights.
In both cases, these movements win by preserving (or fostering) their own will to fight, while degrading the enemy’s will to fight.
Of course they use very different tactics to achieve that same goal.
The Tactics of Insurgency
Of course to begin with, as a product of the definitions we’re working with here, insurgents and terrorists use violent means to achieve their ends. But whereas one conventional army engages another with the intent of destroying it, we might say that the insurgent or terrorist instead engages in violence with the intent to communicate a message.
That is going to seem like a very odd statement, so let me explain.
The strategic effect the insurgent aims to achieve is not located in his target. Remember, we’re talking about violent movements that have no real hope in the foreseeable future of actually destroying the armed forces of their enemy, so while they may spend a lot of time blowing things up, they cannot win purely by blowing things up. Instead, they seek to persuade key audiences by violence as an alternative to the destruction of the enemy (of which they are incapable). So they stage attacks, destroying targets, to communicate their message to persuade those audiences. The precise framing of the messages may vary, but (and here I am following Lee, op. cit.), there is a standard set of audiences and messages the group wants to convey:
- To its own members, the insurgency needs to communicate that the group is active and making progress in order to sustain its own will. Inflicting casualties – often in spectacular, filmed and documented fashion – on real or perceived enemies can accomplish this, hardening the group member’s resolve to continue (and to sustain casualties).
- To potential members, the insurgency needs to communicate this same effectiveness, because it will take substantially losses, often much higher losses than the enemy. As a result, it needs a steady stream of young, angry and motivated recruits. The very inexhaustible nature of its recruitment is a key element of messaging to enemies (see below).
- To potential supporters of the enemy (which might be locals collaborating with an occupation government or civilians acting in support of a regime) the insurgency needs to communicate that it can inflict violence on enemy supporters and also that it will inevitably win. Essentially the message being communicated is, “if you support our enemies, we will eventually win and then kill you and your family.” The aim is to terrify opponents into passive acceptance of the insurgency, rather than active opposition.
- To the enemy itself, the insurgency aims to communicate its continued existence and ability to extract continued costs. The message is, in effect, ‘give up, we’re not going away.’ That message can be directed at leaders, but equally at rank and file members of the opposition, encouraging them to ‘melt away’ rather than endure year after year after year of fear and hardship combating the insurgency.
There is, it must be noted, a distinction here between two kinds of terror or insurgency aims: those that target primarily their own (independent) state and those attempting to expel the forces of another state (some kind of occupation or imperial government). In the former case, where the enemy leadership has nowhere else to go, the sense of inevitability the insurgency has to build is considerable in order to get supporters of the regime to abandon it completely, whereas by contrast encouraging an occupying force to leave is far easier: only the high cost and intractability of the insurgency – its inability to be destroyed rather than the inevitability of its success – may be required to make a foreign power decide that occupation is simply no longer worth it. Unsurprisingly, then, insurgency campaigns have significantly higher success rates against foreign occupying forces or foreign-supported occupation governments (and indeed, as Max Boot, op. cit. notes, the success rates for insurgencies generally and against independent indigenous governments specifically is abysmal; insurgents usually lose).
It may be easier to understand these strategic aims in the context of the concrete actions insurgents take to further them. The Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2021 can serve as a ‘model’ for how many of these functions work. By 2002, there was little question of the Taliban directly opposing the military forces of the United States and its coalition partners: they had been roundly and comprehensively defeated, pushed into small cells or mountain hideouts, with no conventional military force to speak of.
The most visible actions by the insurgency are what we might term ‘spectacular attacks’ – spectacular in every sense of the word because these are spectacles intended for spectators. This is the propaganda of the deed, the defining feature of terrorism, where through an act of spectacular violence, often (but not always) against civilians, a group aims to garner attention and support for its core message. In the context of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, the 2009 car bombing of the NATO HQ in Afghanistan serves as an example, as did the release of video of the captured Bowe Bergdahl the same year (of course the 9/11 attacks that started the conflict are also an example), alongside many others. Sometimes these attacks are focused on military targets, but as frequently not – what we are focused on here is that the attack’s primary role is messaging rather than direct military utility. What we need to understand about these attacks is that they are not expected to bring about military victory directly: they do not seriously endanger the military force of the insurgent’s opponent. Instead, they are exercises in messaging, which is why their spectacular nature is important, indeed central: they are intended to get news coverage, to be discussed and talked about and thus create a platform for the insurgent to spread his message: to supporters that the insurgency still exists and is ‘making progress’ and inflicting pain on the enemy (and thus worthy of support) and to the opposing force that the insurgency still exists and is capable of inflicting costs (and thus, perhaps you should just go away and give them what they want).
But while foreign media coverage often focuses on these larger spectacular attacks – they are designed to attract such coverage – insurgents are often doing a lot more less well-covered things. Core to the Taliban’s success was not attacks on United States forces but assassinations and a campaign of terror among Afghans who might support or collaborate with United States forces. The messaging in this case was very deliberate: that at some point the Americans would leave and the Taliban would remain at which point those who continued to work with the United States or the Afghan government it had supported would be killed (frequently along with their families). Note that while this message ended up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy in Afghanistan, that is not always true: Iraqi insurgents did the same kind of messaging, but AQI/ISIS has been very greatly reduced, while the government set up by the United States and its coalition partners in Iraq remains. Insurgents do not always succeed in their aims.
The campaign of terror, targeting local leaders and officials, police officers, and the US-friendly Afghanistan National Army, was always far more extensive in Afghanistan than direct Taliban actions against the direct American presence. Including civilian contractors, US and coalition deaths in Afghanistan numbered 7,423, but Afghan security forces suffered more than 65,000 KIA; estimates for Afghan civilian deaths at the hands of the Taliban are fuzzy at best but well into the tens of thousands. While Taliban insurgents certainly engaged in propaganda and leveraged sympathetic local leaders and networks to build their base of support among the populace, the ‘hard edge’ of this strategy was a clear willingness to ‘make a demonstration’ of local non-sympathizer Afghans through (locally) spectacular assassinations. Once again the goal was not to kill every person who supported the U.S. backed government but to, by very visibly assassinating a few, frighten the remainder into withdrawing their support, which steadily rotted away the foundations of the Afghanistan security forces.
There is also an element of friction in this kind of insurgency: after all, the insurgent is opposed. Generally in a counter-insurgency context, the powerful conventional military is attempting to set up governance, to convert its superiority of armed force into power (in Hannah Arendt’s sense), that is the more-or-less voluntary cooperation of the local populace. Those forces are trying to set up local police forces, courts, governments, services, schools, roads and so on in order to enable a civilian administration which can organize and govern the populace.3 Even if the insurgency is not ideologically opposed to some of these administrative structures (and they often are; the Taliban was very opposed to efforts to educate women, for instance), they want to prevent or slow their emergence because effective local governing structures drain away the disorganized or supportive human terrain the insurgency needs to function. Countries with well-organized, locally supported police forces are extremely difficult terrain for any insurgency to operate in. And at the same time, once they realize they are in a counter-insurgency framework, the conventional force is likely to begin attempting to hunt insurgents, which is also something the insurgent wants to avoid.
Consequently, insurgents also engage in small-scale attacks on local security forces, with a twin purpose. On the one hand, inflicting casualties, especially on a occupying force, can serve to erode the will of the distant public (informed about these losses by their media) to continue the struggle. Such attacks thus serve as messaging to that public. They they also serve to raise friction (in the Clausewitzian sense, keep drinking) making it harder for the conventional force to leverage its superiority in firepower and materiel. The near perpetual threat of Taliban ambush in large parts of Afghanistan outside of the major cities substantially limited the mobility of coalition forces, limited their ability to patrol and provide security, to supply distant bases, or to set up and maintain services, thus slowing down and eventually reversing progress at setting up a functioning civilian administration in the countryside, which was the one thing that might have actually successfully rooted out the Taliban in the long-term (by eventually transforming a war of insurgency into simply a question of crime, controlled by police and local officials robustly supported by the local populace).
However the theory of victory is not based on friction: the insurgent can delay the conventional force, but it cannot by force stop them completely. Instead, the theory of victory is focused on will and to a lesser extent the political object. An insurgency could plausibly succeed by simply raising the cost of an operation (like an occupation) higher than anticipated gains, causing a rational political leadership to pull the plug. In practice, political leadership rarely wants to admit failure so easily and states will pursue failing strategies for a long time simply to avoid the perception of defeat. Consequently the more common mechanism for successful insurgencies is that the erosion of will, of public support, compels political authorities to accede to some or all of the demands of the insurgents. The ‘center of gravity’ – the locus of the most important strategic objective – for most insurgencies thus often becomes the political support that sustains a government, be that a body of key supporters in non-democratic regimes or the voters in democratic ones. That body of key voters or supporters, of course, is often not even located in the theater of operations at all: the Taliban ultimately won their insurgency in Afghanistan because they persuaded American voters that the war was no longer worth the cost, leading to the election of leaders promising to pull the plug on the war.
This is a remarkably slow process, eroding public will: indeed, the very apparent inexhaustibility of an insurgent force is part of its messaging, that no matter how many fighters the conventional army kills, there are always more replacements and so the violence – the costs – never stop. Meanwhile hunting down insurgent groups catches a conventional force on the ‘horns of a dilemma’. Modern conventional armies are built for tremendous destructive firepower, but the insurgents often hide among supportive (or terrorized) populations. If the conventional force does nothing, the insurgency will grow without check, but if the conventional force tries to engage the insurgents, they run the risk of producing a lot of collateral damage. For insurgent forces – who are often ideologically unconcerned with civilian casualties – this can be turned to their advantage, using the small strikes they are capable of to bait the Big Conventional Army into attempting to leverage its massive firepower, with the collateral damage that results essentially producing a ‘spectacular attack’ for the insurgents when the local civilian population is caught in the blast radius. It is striking, reading something like The Hardest Place how some of the most damaging attacks for American forces in the Pech Valley were not Taliban attacks, but American attacks attempting to hit the Taliban that, through carelessness, excessive force or simply the fog of war, caused civilian casualties that poisoned any goodwill from the local populace.
This isn’t the place to discuss counter-insurgency warfare in depth here, but this problem is why the consensus is that COIN is best done with lots of infantry providing local security and relatively little in the way of airpower (though air mobility is useful) or heavy firepower. Of course, long, infantry-heavy deployments of large numbers of soldiers are both unpopular on their own and also produce higher rates of casualties among the Big Conventional Army. That in turn can sap public will to continue – especially in the case of wars against distant, foreign insurgencies – and thus make things unpopular for politicians, which is, in part, why governments keep trying to go back to counter-insurgency-by-guided-bomb, a strategy which quite evidently does not work well in the absence of ground forces.
However anyone using terror tactics – that is, the targeting of the defenseless for the purpose of the ‘propaganda of the deed’ – of all kinds and thus terroristic-insurgents are caught on the horns of their own dilemma. Remember: the attacks they are engaged in are not sufficient in themselves to produce victory or even meaningfully advance towards it. As a raw matter of manpower and resources, the United States could have sustained the fiscal and human cost of the Afghanistan War forever. Instead, the terroristic-insurgent’s attacks only work when they impact Will (keep drinking), which means they only work when they gain a wider audience, when they gain attention. In some cases that attention is local but in many cases a broad audience of supporters (potential recruits) and opponents is intended.
To get an audience, such attacks must get coverage, they have to draw attention. And what draws attention to these attacks is their spectacular nature: that they are particularly violent, particularly gruesome, that they strike a population (civilians, women, children) normally considered exempt from violence or occur in places (cities, religious or cultural sites) understood to be outside of the war zone. But of course the more spectacular the violence the greater the possibility of a ‘backfire’ of sorts, where the very violence and barbarity that the insurgent is driving in order to get that attention to attract those recruits, to demoralize their enemies, instead convinces their opponents that the insurgency is a dire threat which must be defeated at all costs.
Many insurgencies end up gored on the horns of this dilemma, some multiple times. Indeed, this is what happened to AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq), twice. In 2005, AQI violence alienated key tribal leaders in Iraq’s Al Anbar governate, leading to the ‘Anbar Awakening’ where some of those key leaders forged alliances with local coalition forces: shorn of local support and thus the ‘cover’ the population provided and opposed both by coalition forces and local militias, AQI lost footholds in key cities like Ramadi and Fallujah. AQI would go on to rebrand as the Islamic State (Daesch/IS/ISIL/ISIS), rebuilding itself in the context of the Syrian Civil War and then exploding outward in 2013 and 2014. The Islamic State likewise followed a policy of spectacular violence, which garnered it a lot of attention and a lot of recruits, but also produced both a domestic backlash in Iraq and Syria and a foreign backlash, leading to the emergence of a broad anti-IS coalition that by 2016 had destroyed the core of the organization, although various international ‘franchises’ continue to exist. Similarly, of course, the 9/11 attacks on the one hand brought the perpetrators, Al Qaeda (the original) tremendous attention – and an extended anti-terror campaign that has left nearly all of their senior leadership dead and much of the organization shattered. The Taliban may have survived the wrath of the United States, but relatively little of Al Qaeda did.4
And this dilemma actually leads us neatly into the mirror-image of a terrorist insurgency: non-violent movements.
The Tactics of Non-Violence
Non-violence is a strategy.
I think that is important to outline here at the beginning, because there is a tendency in the broader culture to read non-violence purely as a moral position, as an unwillingness to engage in violence. And to be fair, proponents of non-violence often stress its moral superiority – in statements and publications which are themselves strategic – and frequently broader social conversations which would prefer not to engage with the strategic nature of protest, preferring instead impotent secular saints, often latch on to those statements. But the adoption of non-violent approaches is a strategic choice made because non-violence offers, in the correct circumstances substantial advantages as a strategy (as well as being, when it is possible, a morally superior approach).
If we boil down the previous section on insurgencies, what we see is that the insurgent wages his ‘attack on will’ through a prolonged campaign of (violent) disruption, often relying on his opponent (the state) to supply the morally uncomplicated spectacular violence by overreacting to his (violent) disruption. I stress disruption here because again, the terroristic insurgent does not expect to car-bomb his way to victory (because he has nowhere near enough car bombs or he’d be waging a different kind of struggle), he expects to car-bomb his way to popular support or at least to the withdrawal of popular support from his opponent. One key way to accelerate that process is to use the car-bombs to bait the authorities into a damaging overreaction. But equally, the peril the terroristic insurgent runs is that his car-bombs will alienate his own support (car-bombs are not popular) faster than it erodes the will of his enemy.
Now to my knowledge no advocate of non-violence has ever expressed their approach this way, but for the sake of understanding it, we could put it like this: under the right conditions, a non-violent strategy resolves the dilemma by retaining the ‘attack on will’ strategy and simply dispensing with the potentially supporter-alienating violence (the car bombs), by in turn exploiting the overreaction of the state.
To simplify greatly, the strategy of non-violence aims first to cause disruption (non-violently) in order both to draw attention but also in order to bait state overreaction. The state’s overreaction then becomes the ‘spectacular attack’ which broadcasts the movement’s message, while the group’s willingness to endure that overreaction without violence not only avoids alienating supporters, it heightens the contrast between the unjust state and the just movement. That reaction maintains support for the movement, but at the same time disruption does not stop: the movements growing popularity enable new recruits to replace those arrested (just as with insurgent recruitment) rendering the state incapable of restoring order. The state’s supporters may grow to sympathize with the movement, but at the very least they grow impatient with the disruption, which as you will recall refuses to stop. As support for state repression of the movement declines (because repression is not stopping the disruption) and the movement itself proves impossible to extinguish (because repression is recruiting for it), the only viable solution becomes giving the movement its demands.
It is the same essential framework – create a disruption to draw attention and fatigue the opponent, use the attention to draw recruits to replace losses to sustain the disruption indefinitely until opposing will fails – as the insurgent, but delivered without violence.
We can see this basic framework in action in each of the Civil Rights Movements’ campaigns, applied both to each campaign individually and also to the whole movement. Let’s take the Nashville Campaign of 1960 as an example.5 The aim, formulated by James Lawson and drawing on Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence, was to draw national attention to the evils of segregation (the big picture strategic aim) and begin desegregation in Nashville (the campaign’s specific aim). The campaign was preceded by a significant period of training beginning in 1958 because far from being a weak or cowardly strategy, non-violence demands remarkable discipline. In late 1959, Lawson sent out what were effectively scouting parties to determine the reaction they would get from disruptions at specific locations.
The planned disruption was a series of sit-ins at lunch counters in downtown Nashville, which were at the time segregated. This would create real disruption and it had to: if there’s no disruption, then no attention is gained and the state does not respond. But the sit-ins would both demonstrate the unfairness of segregation in these stores, while at the same time the backlash against the sit-ins – hecklers, arrests – disrupted the stores’ business, in turn motivating more state reaction. The sit-ins began on February 13th, 1960, drawing angry crowds of pro-segregationist whites and disrupting business but also drawing attention and thus new recruits to the effort. As the effort thus expanded rather than contracted, by February 26th, the local state authorities (chief of police Douglas Hosse) warned there would be arrests and indeed the next day police first withdrew their protection of the protestors (encouraging white mobs to attack them) and then arrested only the protestors in the one-sided altercations that ensued. But of course spectacular, one-sided violence merely confirmed the moral rightness of the protestors, merely demonstrated the injustice of the system and thereby rallied new recruits to their cause.
So as the police arrested one batch of protestors, another group took their place. And another. And another. The police arrested some eighty students that day and then stopped because they hadn’t the capacity to arrest any more. Over the following days, arrests mounted (more than 150 before the end) but of course that just drew more attention, which drew more recruits and the police found themselves in the same trap as counter-insurgents: applying force was creating protestors faster than removing them and Nashville had real, sharp limits on how many protestors they could arrest. Which mattered because it meant the disruption did not stop, which meant that pressure – on local politicians and the business community whose businesses were disrupted – did not stop.
In the event, the Nashville sit-ins had a dramatic climax: the home of Z. Alexander Looby was bombed (dynamite thrown through a window) presumably in retaliation for his support. No one was killed, but this act of terroristic violence against the protest serves as a paradigmatic example of the above dilemma: intended to frighten them, it galvanized support for the protest, creating political conditions in which city leaders (notably Mayor Ben West, confronted by Diane Nash and C.T. Vivian) had to back down. That in turn led to the business owners – directly pressured by the campaign and now abundantly aware that state repression was not going to make the disruption stop – to negotiate with protest leaders, leading (albeit not instantly) to Nashville desegregating its lunch counters.
What I want to note here is that these actions were not disconnected or unthinking but carefully planned and selected. In particular the target of the action is intended to itself demonstrate the injustice (which thereby aids in gaining support) and to provoke overreaction. In this way a non-violent movement does not just receive violence, but it disrupts and provokes, it makes people uncomfortable as a way of drawing attention and baiting overreaction. Perhaps the most famous example of this principle anywhere in the world was Mahatma Gandhi’s strategy of non-cooperation, in which protestors simply refused to buy British goods, work in British industries or in jobs in the British governing institutions. Gandhi also protested the British salt monopoly in India by illegally making his own salt (very much in public, as part of a large demonstration), to which the British responded with more repression. The disruption forced a response (British authorities arrested tens of thousands of Indians): after all if the British authorities did nothing in response to these kinds of actions, British revenues in India would collapse and they would be unable to govern the country anyway. But of course violent British crackdowns further delegitimized British colonial rule.
Moreover, it must be noted that these protect actions, while non-violent were disruptive. They were designed to disrupt something, because if they didn’t disrupt anything, they could be ignored. It is important here to separate two kinds of ‘protest the right way’ arguments here: practitioners of non-violence pointing out that violent actors claiming to act for the movement harm it and people outside the movement demanding that the movement not be disruptive at all. In the very case it is very obviously true that for a movement pursuing a non-violent strategy like this, violent actors are actively detrimental because – again – this is all an exercise in messaging and they harm the message. Crucially, while violent actors may feel like they are accomplishing more by fighting the authorities violently, remember that the entire reason movements adopt these strategies is they they cannot expect to win by fighting the authorities directly, consequently violent actions accomplish nothing (you will not win a street battle with the cops)6 but they do harm the message. But at the same time some disruption is necessary to attract attention and a response by the state.
Martin Luther King Jr. is, in fact, incredibly clear-sighted about this in his famous 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail. While he openly notes that he initially tried negotiation and that his direct action is also primarily a means to return to negotiation, he declares openly that members of the movement must be “nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in a society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism” and that “the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” He also notes that he timed his action specifically to produce the desired pressure on businesses by timing it for the holiday shopping season (disrupting business), delayed only slightly in order to avoid negatively impacting the results of a local election. Disruption was the point, because disruption draws the necessary attention to the message and invites the state to act in repression which draws more attention, empowering the message and thus delivering the ‘attack on will’ at maximum volume and moral clarity.
Like any strategic approach, this approach works best in specific conditions. In particular it works most effectively in challenging a regime, law or practice maintained by violence, because that very violence plays into the kind of ‘throwing technique’ whereby the non-violent activist uses the state’s own violence against it. Such movements can thus, by disobeying the unjust law, take the violence that necessarily maintains it – violence that is normally concealed behind acquiescence to the law – and abruptly surface it. Notably in the above examples, protestors are not doing something unrelated to their cause to draw attention but rather in refusing to support the day-to-day function of colonial rule or by sitting at a specific lunch counter these actions surface the specific violence maintaining that specific law. It follows that laws, practices or regimes whose connection to violence is more indirect are much harder to challenge with these strategies.7 Because – and this is important to continue stressing – these methods are about messaging because the ‘target’ is will, so the clarity of the message matters quite a lot.
On the other hand, non-violent approaches can succeed where violent approaches might not have succeeded. It is debatable if Britain in the early 1900s could have handled an effort at armed insurrection in the British Raj – they had successfully quelled a major uprising in 1857 (and smaller efforts in 1909 and 1915 had also failed), of course, but the failure of other imperial powers to resist independence movements in the 1950s and 1960s might suggest they would not have repeated this success. But evidently considerable British preparation to put down an armed uprising didn’t much matter because the Quit India Movement and its predecessors didn’t give them an armed uprising, it increasingly gave them a non-violent movement they were utterly unprepared to effectively counter.
Likewise, it is important to remember that the system of Jim Crow segregation in the American South was sustained by terroristic violence against African-American communities and, backed up by local and state police, extremely well-prepared to meet violence with greater quantities of violence. Horrific events like the Wilmington Massacre (1898) and the Tulsa Race Massacre (1921) were vivid demonstrations of the ability of the white supremacist Jim Crow regime to muster superior quantities of violence (and a greater willingness to murder innocent people) if the question came to a violent confrontation. But one of the things that comes out extremely clearly in reading something like T.E. Ricks’ Waging a Good War is that white supremacist leaders – perhaps none more clearly than Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor – were wholly unprepared to fight a non-violent movement and instead by reacting with spectacular and horrifying brutality repeatedly played into the movement’s hands. By contrast it is striking, reading Ricks’ book, that the Civil Rights Movements tactics’ were most notably stymied in Albany, GA, where the local police chief, Laurie Pritchett realized that he could defeat their approach by having his officers act gently when arresting activists, by having enough jail space prepared for larger numbers and by charging them with things like disturbing the peace rather than with segregation laws, to avoid drawing attention to the injustice of the system.
(It is, of course, not an accident that COIN – counter-insurgency – strategy often follows similar injunctions towards avoiding provocation and what we might frame as gentleness. Fortunately for the protestor against injustice, the sort of people who tend to come to run systems of discrimination predicated on violence tend to be emotionally and constitutionally incapable of following that sort of advice – instead resorting by habit (often expressed in very gendered terms) to violence. The armies of Jim Crow had many a Bull Connor and very few Laurie Pritchetts, not by accident but as a direct result of the kind of system Jim Crow was. Also let me be clear: being tactically smart does not make Laurie Pritchett good; he was still defending a system of segregation, which was bad. Sometimes the bad guys have capable leaders, but they are still bad guys.)
All that said, there are very obviously regimes in the world that have rendered themselves more-or-less immune to non-violent protest. This isn’t really the place to talk about the broader concept of ‘coup proofing’ and how authoritarian regimes secure internal security, repression and legitimacy in detail. But a certain kind of regime operates effectively as a society-within-a-society, with an armed subset of the population as insiders who receive benefits in status and wealth from the regime in return for their willingness to do violence to maintain it. Such regimes are generally all too willing to gun down thousands or tens of thousands of protestors to maintain power. The late Assad regime in Syria stands as a clear example of this, as evidently does the current regime in Iran.8 Such regimes are not immune to an ‘attack on will,’ but they have substantially insulated themselves from it and resistance to these regimes, if it continues, often metastasizes into insurgency or protracted war (as with the above example of Syria) because the pressure has nowhere else to go.
The reason regimes such as this aren’t more common is that they tend to function quite poorly: force is expensive and having to maintain large amounts of inward directed force continuously because the regime lacks a strong basis of legitimacy inhibits the effective function of everything else. Indeed, I would argue such ‘prison regimes’ mostly exist today because the negative returns to warfare mean that, unlike in previous eras, it simply isn’t worth the otherwise extremely doable task of better-functioning countries to conquer them. Consequently many authoritarian regimes attempt to ‘split the difference’ by ‘de-politicizing’ much of their population and repressing the small remainder. However building the apparatus and cultural assumptions to support that kind of regime takes a long time and a lot of resources – it generally has to be done well in advance, often as a decades-long project of regime security and coup-proofing. If it was easy to do, there wouldn’t be a half-dozen successful ‘color revolutions‘ in the last thirty or so years.
Conclusions
I haven’t stressed this yet, so let me do so now: obviously the ability of both terroristic insurgencies and non-violent protest movements to succeed is substantially based on the available media technology. It is not an accident that these techniques become increasingly prevalent in the 1900s with the emergence of mass-literary and mass media. Because these approaches are fundamentally about messaging, message technology matters a lot. Of course that technology has only become more rapid and more powerful since the mid-1900s, which further enhances the effectiveness of movements that can harness such technology.
To pull this all together, both violent insurgencies and non-violent protests have the same overall ‘theory of action’ – unable to defeat the armed forces of the state, they aim to instead defeat the state by striking at its popular base of support (at ‘will’ in the Clausewitzian sense). Consequently, because the ‘real battlefield’ is not the battlefield at all, but the minds of the various publics supporting the state, these campaigns – armed or unarmed – are essentially messaging campaigns, engaged in persuasion to convince the relevant public that it is more just or at least easier and less painful to give up the struggle and give the group some or all of its demands.
While such movements often fail, the fact that they can succeed at all is remarkable because these are efforts predicated on the fact of being so immensely weaker than the state they challenge that they have no realistic hope of ever meeting it force-for-force directly.
At the same time it is important to note that while the overall framework of these two approaches is the same their tactics are totally different and indeed fundamentally incompatible in most cases. Someone doing violence in the context of a non-violent movement is actively harming their cause because they are reducing the clear contrast and uncomplicated message the movement is trying to send. Likewise, it is relatively easy to dismiss non-violent supporters of violent movements so long as their core movement remains violent, simply by pointing to the violence of the core movement. It is thus very important for individuals to understand what kind of movement they are in and not ‘cosplay’ the other kind.
That difference ripples into smaller decisions. Insurgent movements generally seek to hide their membership from the state, because they wish to avoid the armed force of the state – they want the state to try to strike them, miss and hit civilians in order to create spectacular moments they can exploit. By contrast, non-violent movements do not seek to hide their membership from the state, because they seek to use state repression as a means to grow too large to arrest. Gandhi is quoted by (ed. Merton, op. cit.) as noting, “I do not appreciate any underground activity. Millions cannot go underground. Millions need not.” Civil Rights protestors repeatedly went to jail, touting their willingness to bear their arrest under their own names, openly, as a badge of honor. Non-violent movements instead invite documentation both of their numbers (they want to seem big) and of the state’s actions against them. Because whereas the insurgent hopes state violence will fall on non-movement-members, a non-violent protest is intentionally inviting state violence to fall on them because doing so dramatizes and exemplifies the injustice of that violence.
A View From America
With all of that laid out, let me draw some conclusions for the current tense political situation in the United States.
First, I think it is fairly clear that the ‘anti-ICE’ or ‘Abolish ICE’ movement – the name being a catchy simplification for a wide range of protests against immigration enforcement – is primarily a non-violent protest movement. Despite some hyperventilating about ‘insurgency tactics,’ anti-ICE protestors are pretty clearly engaged in civil disobedience (when they aren’t engaged in lawful protest), not insurgency. To be blunt: you know because no one has yet car-bombed an ICE or CBP squad or opened fire from an elevated window on an DHS patrol.9 As I hope we’ve already demonstrated, mere organization is not an indicator of an insurgent movement: non-violent movements have to be organized (even if just locally so), often more organized and better trained than violent ones. Effective non-violence, after all, comes less naturally to humans, for whom violence has been normal for at least tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years.
But the tactics of anti-ICE protestors, most visible in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, follow the outline for non-violent protest here quite well. While protestors do attempt to impose a significant degree of friction on DHS immigration enforcement by (legally!) following and documenting DHS actions, that has also served as the predicate for the classic formula for non-violent action: it baits the agents of the state (ICE and CBP) into open acts of violence on camera which in turn reveal the violent nature of immigration enforcement. In this, DHS leaders like Gregory Bovino have essentially played the role of Bull Connor, repeatedly playing into the hands of protestors by urging – or at least failing to restrain – the spectacular, cinematic violence of their agents. Just as the armies of Jim Crow had many Bull Connors and few Laurie Pritchetts, it turns out that Border Patrol and ICE appear to have many Bull Connors; it remains to be seen if they have even one Laurie Pritchett.
The result has been a remarkable collapse in public approval for immigration enforcement, mirrored by some pretty clear implications for elections later this year of the trend continues. Indeed, while doubtless many in the movement are impatient at what they perceive as the slow pace of movement given that they are trying to stop deportations happening right now, as non-violent movements go, the public perception shift has been remarkably fast. ‘Abolish ICE’ went from being a fringe position to a plurality position – close to a majority position – in roughly a year. Civil Rights and Quit India took decades. In part I suspect this has to do with both the prevalence of mass media technologies in the United States – a society in which nearly everyone has a pocket internet device that can immediately send or receive text, audio or most importantly video – and the increasing capability of those platforms. Where the public may have experienced the Birmingham protests through a TV screen at a delay on the nightly news, today high-detail color footage of DHS uses of force are beamed directly into people’s phones within hours or minutes of the event taking place.
By contrast, the administration is fundamentally caught on the horns of a dilemma. Their most enthusiastic supporters very much want to see high spectacle immigration enforcement, both as an end unto itself and also as a sign of the administration’s continued commitment to it. In this, they act much like the white supremacist publics that sat behind men like Bull Connor demanding repression. But while the administration clearly remains unwilling to actually change its immigration policies, it desperately needs them out of the news to avoid catastrophic midterm wipeout. But ‘go quiet’ on immigration and lose core supporters; go ‘loud’ on immigration and produce more viral videos that enrage the a larger slice of the country. A clever tactician might be able to thread that needle, but at this point it seems difficult to accuse Kristi Noem of being a clever tactician.
Finally, we might briefly touch on the question of ‘coup proofing’ and if the administration is capable of insulating itself from public backlash. And the answer appears to fairly clearly be some version of ‘no.’ The United States electoral system is a tough nut to crack: almost anything strong enough to alter the results would be so obvious that you might as well just try and stage a coup. Meanwhile, as noted above, establishing the kind of regime that can rule by violence and the fear of violence in the United States is hardly unprecedented – that’s what the Jim Crow South was – but it is not a system which can be willed into existence overnight. Establishing the Jim Crow regime in the American South required more than a decade of terror and repression. Similar regimes overseas likewise took many years to construct and require a very large ‘in group’ willing to use violence – often on the order of a quarter to a half of a percent of the population. Indications that DHS is already struggling to recruit despite very obviously being far short of the number of agents required to effectively maintain an authoritarian state speak to the difficulty of creating such a large ‘insider’ force.10
In short then, it seems like the current administration’s immigration policy is facing a non-violent movement and is both vulnerable to that movement and actively playing into its hands, repeating the tactical and strategic mistakes the defenders of Jim Crow made in the 1950s and 1960s. From this framework, the non-violent anti-ICE movement appears to both be succeeding right now and stand a good chance of succeeding eventually, assuming it retains a strategic focus. If the administration could restrain its open embrace of anti-immigrant violence, it might be able to slow that process down, but it is unclear that the administration is actually capable of doing so, since anti-immigrant violence was essentially one of its core campaign promises.
But this dilemma is, of course, the core of why anti-ICE protest tactics work: because the system itself is unjust and its basic function (armed federal agents abducting people from the interior of the United States) unpopular, protestors following a non-violent framework – often all they are doing is just filming what ICE and CBP does – can present the administration with an impossible choice: defang the protests by no longer enforcing the policy by violence (essentially conceding their demands) or continue to engage in open violence against non-violent protestors and lose the battle for the minds of the public. So long as the policy remains to enact immigration enforcement through exemplary violence in places in the United States where that is staggeringly unpopular, the policy remains vulnerable to having its inherent violence exposed by non-violence.
- A phrase I am borrowing from W. Lee, op. cit.
- Seven other aircraft were lost on the ground in Afghanistan in an attack in 2012. Helicopters, flying at lower altitudes, were at substantially greater risk and lost at far higher rates.
- One can get a sense of what these tasks can look like from one of our earliest book recommendations, Nadia Schadlow, War and the Art of Governance: Consolidating Combat Success into Political Victory (2017).
- Of course a number of affiliate ‘franchises’ of Al Qaeda persist, but the organization – particularly its central leadership originally organized around Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri – is overall dramatically weaker and less important globally today than it was in 2000 and if anything much farther away from realizing its goals.
- I am drawing this almost entirely from T.E. Ricks, Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement 1954-1968 (2022) which you should read.
- Or more correctly, if you could win a street battle with the cops, you might do that, but then you’d be waging protracted war, not a protest movement. The reason you are a protest movement is precisely that you lack access to the public legitimacy and force necessary to operate in another, more direct, way.
- Perhaps the classic example are climate protests blocking traffic: the relationship between the disruption and the protest action, while not non-existent, is obscure. When protestors are arrested, it is not because of the violence inherent in carbon emissions, but because blocking traffic is illegal which prompts observers not to assess if carbon policy is unjust (probably), but if laws against blocking traffic are unjust (probably not). It is a lot harder to protest complex economic interactions precisely because the violence sustaining those interactions (to the degree they are sustained by violence at all) is very indirect and remote and thus hard to directly and visibly surface.
- Not that this kind of system is confined to the broader Middle East, those were merely very visible examples.
- Actions which, I must stress, would almost certainly raise support for DHS immigration enforcement and so would be counter-productive for the anti-ICE movement.
- By my back of the envelope math, DHS’ entire payroll, including folks doing desk jobs and things like FEMA and the Coast Guard, is around 0.08% of the population, something like less than one seventh the size-per-population of previous fascist party paramilitary organizations in countries where they took power.
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To add my own two cents: one thing that kinda distinguishes the recent anti-ICE protests to me is how, unlike most of the protests I can remember, they seem like they might actually go away if their demands are met. By contrast, if the climate protesters actually got what they wanted…I suspect most of them would just find some other excuse to block traffic. In which case why grant their demands in the first place
What is that suspicion based on?
Yeah, I’d like to know, too.
The climate protesters feel very strongly about climate … or at least they believe that they do.
They do not have any feelings one way or the other about blocking traffic, and in fact, didn’t do that at all for a long time. They started with skipping school on Fridays.
If their demands were met, would they find a completely different cause to protest for?
That, I will admit, is likely, because they are young, and young people like to feel like rebels.
Doesn’t mean it would be an unworthy cause. Also doesn’t mean they would protest by blocking traffic. (In fact, it is very unlikely. They blocked traffic because car exhausts make climate change worse, not because they liked blocking traffic so much.)
Just that they might keep themselves busy protesting one thing or the other for a couple of years, until they age out of that wish to rebel, and the new generation takes over.
I’ve seen a lot more middle aged women then young people at protests.
Because they are right about the substance?
I once read somewhere that non violent protest only works against a government that has a conscience. The United States thought of itself as a moral nation in the 1960s so civil rights protests succeeded in getting the Civil Rights Act passed. Great Britain also had a conscience in ruling India, and so tolerated Gandhi. East Germany in 1989 was unwilling to kill their own citizens and so let the Berlin Wall come down. In contrast, what if the Nazis had conquered India in WWII? They would have simply shot Gandhi and anyone like him. Or look at Iran today. The government has no conscience, just religious fanaticism. So they will kill as many people as necessary to stay in power.
Yes, there are regimes where non-violence does not work. This is known. Pick your enemies carefully.
@JoeHale,
I think “conscience” is the wrong way to frame it- in the last analysis its just a different term for moral values, and of course “religious fanaticism” is a coherent value complex in its own right. The Iranian regime has a different set of values than you (or for that matter me), but I don’t think it’s that they “don’t have a conscience”, their value complex might persuade them that the protesters are just so evil and depraved that they deserve what they got. Likewise, I’m sure Sheikh Hasina and her followers slept easy at night after killing those 1500 student protesters in Bangladesh two years ago, and considering that now her party is banned, and that Hindus, Buddhists, Sufis and other dissenting Muslims are all seeing their religious freedoms erode, I’m sure she feels confirmed in her choices, and that if anything she should have cracked down on the protests with more force. (The party that’s in charge now, of course, is the one that killed her father and most of her family, so I’m sure her feelings about it are personal as well as ideological).
I think the better way to think about it is that Britain in the 1930s and 1940s was a liberal society, that placed a relatively high value on things like “people have a right to peacefully protest”. The ruling party in Portugal around the same time had a very different ideological framework and so it took force to get them to give up their colonial empire.
Agreed that looking at ‘conscience’ is the wrong way to look at it. People with consciences can rationalise their ways into doing horrendous things. Being at the head of a liberal democracy does not mean you’re more likely to have a conscience. I’ll point to my current prime minister Kier Starmer as an example of this (though which is up to individual assessment). He is a former human rights lawyer who is quoted as stating that Israel has the right to cut off the water supply to Gaza.
I prefer to look at the levers available to influence the decision-making of those in power.
How much do they have to care about voter perception? How much do they have to care about the sympathies of the army? How much do they have to care about international opinion? How much do they have to care about business leaders? How much do they have to care about a motivated populace? How much do they have to care about faith groups? How much do they have to care about their political opposition capitalising on the mess of it all? Etc. etc. Individual conscience of those in power does come into it, but only as one of many potential levers (and likely not a particularly powerful one).
These levers are functions of the society around the movement. As you mention, the British government had to care about voter perception and a motivated (Indian) populace, largely because the society that produced that governance system had beliefs about things like ‘the right to peacefully protest’.
The fewer of these levers available to a movement, the less likely it is for a non-violent approach to be successful (and/or the more they will have to endure non-violently to produce the desired effect).
“I’ll point to my current prime minister Kier Starmer as an example of this (though which is up to individual assessment). He is a former human rights lawyer who is quoted as stating that Israel has the right to cut off the water supply to Gaza.”
Quoted, but not accurately. https://labourlist.org/2023/10/keir-starmer-israel-palestine-gaza-conflict-councillor-resignations-lbc-interview/
Fair, I rescind that particular condemnation of him. I can see how that was quoted out of context. Thanks for the clarification.
I shall replace it with his government abusing terror legislation to proscribe a direct action protest group…despite he himself having defended an almost identical case of protesters breaking and entering to conduct criminal damage during his legal career.
This is known as “fitting the facts around the argument”.
“This is known as “fitting the facts around the argument”.”
I would agree with you if I had attempted to put forward a comprehensive essay on the intersection between individual conscience and positions of leadership within liberal democracies utilising Kier Starmer as a primary case study.
Considering that this was an aside to a short-form comment on a blog on the internet, I think claiming I am ‘fitting the facts to the argument’ is fairly disingenuous.
Did the authoritarian regime of South Korea have a conscience? Greece? Taiwan? I wanna say… Serbia?
Non-violence certainly works better against regimes that aren’t willing to use mass / overwhelming violence to end the disruption. But I don’t think it is strictly necessary for the regime to have a conscience as the regime doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
There are at least two potential paths to victory even against a “consciousness” regime.
1) Use continued non-violence not to gain gain external support from other polities, who are persuaded to support the protestors and hinder the regime (potentially by imposing sanctions or direct action against them)
2) Using sustained non-violence until the protests have garnered sufficient internal (and potentially external) support to transition to prolonged war in an attempt to overthrow the regime.
“In contrast, what if the Nazis had conquered India in WWII? They would have simply shot Gandhi and anyone like him.”
Why would they have shot their own allies?
Is this a comment on Gandhi’s relationship to Hitler in the real world? In which case I do not believe it is genuinely credible to think that Gandhi was somehow an ally to Hitler in that way, considering that he was opposed to the British Empire but did not agree to collaboration with the Nazis.
Or is this a comment on how ‘if the Nazis had conquered India in WW2 Gandhi would have been allied to them’? If so I don’t particularly follow the logic. Gandhi was first and foremost an Indian nationalist. I don’t particularly think he was particularly bothered by the flavour of Imperial overlord. Maybe there’s a counterfactual option of the Nazis advancing on British India and cutting a deal with the Indian nationalists in exchange for their support…but I’m unsure how likely that would have been to play out like that, and how long such an arrangement might last past the Nazis’ famously ethnic-hierarchical worldview*.
*Not that this is necessarily a given. The Nazis appeared to be perfectly capable of rationalising different allies into their worldview of ethnic hierarchies, and-or ignoring it when required. I just don’t think they’d have been able to resist the temptation of imperialism.
It’s a comment on the fact that one of the most famous Indian nationalist leaders in history, who both admired and was admired by Gandhi, was an outright fascist who adopted “Fuhrer” as his title, lived in Berlin during the war as a guest of Heinrich Himmler, recruited Indians into the Waffen-SS, supported anti-semitic violence, tried to block German Jewish refugees from entering India, and openly admired authoritarian leaders like Hitler and Mussolini.
I mean, maybe I am getting out a little bit over my skis here, but I kind of think he and the boy Adolf would have got along?
And if you’re going to argue “oh no but he was nothing like Gandhi”, well, among the people who would disagree with you would be Gandhi.
My argument was less about Gandhi’s qualities as a person, or his relationship with Hitler (I am not qualified enough to comment on either really, and probably should not have raised it as a point). It was more about the Nazi regime as a whole (which was wider than just Hitler) being able to restrain itself from imperialising such a tempting target as India.
I would have been very surprised indeed if the Third Reich had emerged victorious from WW2, created all the lebensraum it wanted in Europe…and then just said ‘you know what lads, we’ve done enough imperialism now. How about we just stop and leave everyone else be’.
Perhaps they would not have chosen India as a target in this counterfactual future. Perhaps they would have looked elsewhere. Perhaps Imperial Japan would come to the same conclusion that they had ‘done enough imperialism’. Lot of perhapses there.
Harry Turtledove wrote an alternate history story on this premise,”The Last Article” in 1988. Summary: Gandhi and Nehru try the same tactics they used against the British and it ends badly.
Two pedantic corrections:
Firstly, the Nazis did have the Indians pretty high up in their racial hierarchy, and in fact sent “scientific” expeditions to India to try and prove the link between the Nazi-Aryans and the Indian-Aryans.
Secondly, on the occasions when somebody made the error of getting Hitler talking about his envisioned post-war order, the Reich would have stopped at the Ural mountains. In addition, the Nazi plan was not imperialism in the classic sense, but rather genocidal population replacement in all conquered territories – so India as imperial holding would not fit with that.
@Alien@System That as may be, but my thinking is less about what Hitler’s vision of the post-world order would be, and more about whether the German high command (of which Hitler was but one member) would have resisted the temptation to stop at the Urals. Especially with the collapse of the other European empires meaning so much of the world is just there for a suitably militarised nation to take (and in fact, may need to have been taken already to ensure victory).
Perhaps they would hold fast at the borders their Fuhrer imagined. It’s certainly a possibility. It’s just a possibility I find relatively unlikely. Especially considering that Imperial Japan would also have to agree to this, and they seemed to very much be doing good old fashioned imperialism.
sent “scientific” expeditions to India to try and prove the link between the Nazi-Aryans and the Indian-Aryans.
Not that this is really relevant (since it’s not as if Hitler was a rational man), but this was and is, of course, nonsense. There’s a linguistic link (to most South Asians, but certainly not to all of us) but the link in terms of ancestry is fairly thin. Only about 15% of South Asian ancestry traces to the Indo-European migration (up to 30% in some ethnic groups, 0% in others). If I’m remembering right (I last looked at this some years ago).
By contrast, if the climate protesters actually got what they wanted…I suspect most of them would just find some other excuse to block traffic. In which case why grant their demands in the first place
Why would you ever suspect that?
Sometimes I meet someone who thinks that political protestors who support centrist or leftist causes are not protesting out of a genuine belief that they are upholding good and opposing evil, but rather out of some less respectable motivation.
One variation of this is the “paid agitator” theory, where anyone from anti-ICE protestors to BLM protestors to school shooting survivors gets accused of being “crisis actors” or something like that, hired by a vague and rotating cast of people (George Soros is a favorite) who are imagined as being behind all these protest movements.
Another variation is the “outside agitators” theory, where it is claimed that local communities produce no one who would protest whatever is being protested, and that everyone involved is coming from ‘elsewhere’ where people are presumably just inferior and have bad moral fiber. This was a common claim among white supremacists in the Jim Crow South: not wanting to admit that the local black population was both motivated and capable of organized nonviolent resistance, they insisted that all the resistance was coming from ‘up North.’
Yet a third variation is to suppose that protestors, especially young protestors, are fundamentally immature or deranged. That they are acting out of some kind of compulsive anti-establishmentarianism, a pathological ‘need’ to oppose authority and the proper order of society. That they are acting for no reason, or at least no intelligible reason.
Any of these are very convenient beliefs to hold when one finds oneself looking at the cops beating up unarmed protestors, in the name of something one has already voted for, and feeling a bit of discomfort from one’s troubled conscience. If one blames the protests on mercenary ‘hired actors’ or malicious ‘outside agitators’ stirring up trouble, one does not need to question why someone would go to such lengths to interfere with the institutions one has put into power.
If one thinks that “kids these days just don’t have values and protest compulsively without even understanding what they’re saying,” one has a free license to ignore the opinions of any ‘young adults’ opposed to oneself. This can include potentially people in their twenties and thirties who would be considered members in good standing of the community if not for the political inconvenience of listening to them.
I’m of two minds here, regarding your framing of climate protests.
On the one hand the idea that climate change isn’t a problem is contrary to all available evidence. We can debate how much is due to human intervention, but that it’s happening is as well-documented as evolution, the spherical Earth, germs causing disease, etc. (I’m not willing to debate this point, not unless you’ve got a sufficient background in paleoclimatology to have an informed opinion on the matter.) By attacking those of us who are working to mitigate environmental impacts–and yes, you attacked us, that’s a rhetorical trick as old as the Roman Republic–you very clearly are demonstrating that you don’t accept the facts of the case.
On the other hand, there are many, many “activists” who are morons. Whatever that group is that throws cans of soup at paintings, to name just one example. I assure you, those of us working to solve the problems hold such people in more contempt than you do. They make our lives harder. They make us look ridiculous, and given the extremely complicated and highly technical nature of environmental issues, looking ridiculous does not instill confidence in our peers, clients, or regulators. I’ve always said I’d rather have an open enemy than an alleged friend that I have to fight in order to do my job–at least no one thinks I agree with an enemy!
For those of us that are sane, what happens when the issue we’re dealing with gets resolved? Speaking from experience (20 years in environmental remediation), we move on to the next issue. We are spoiled for choice. If climate change gets resolved (and to be clear, even DEFINING WHAT THAT MEANS is a hugely complex issue we don’t have an answer for yet), we have to deal with soil erosion, loss of groundwater, soil salination, PCE/TCE, BTEX, PFOA/PFOS, heavy metals, invasive species, loss of native species, river migration, the balance between human needs and natural delta processes (see New Orleans), and a whole host of other issues. We’ve created multiple novel biomes (cities and agricultural areas) that never existed before, and we have no idea what these look like in the long term (say, on a scale of tens of thousands of years). Our great-great-great-grandchildren will still be dealing with many of these issues. And more, because as technology advances we discover previously-unknown issues with past technology that need to be resolved.
Some of these problems can’t be resolved. By which I mean, the resolution isn’t going to be a simple “Get X parameter to Y state and call it a day”. We’re dealing with ecology–the intersection of a huge number of nonlinear systems, none of which are well-understood. (Weather is an interesting case-study–attempts to predict the weather beyond seven days are one way we figured out nonlinear mathematics.) In many cases the solution is going to be more akin to a maintenance program than a pill or injection at the doctor’s office. And those who’ve worked to resolve the issue will be, by virtue of that extensive study, the people best suited for the maintenance role.
The morons throwing soup at paintings and other such nonsense will inevitably find another cause to “champion”. They don’t want to put the hard work into learning the issues or the data or understanding the systems in question; they’re in it for the 15 minutes of fame. Once they can’t milk environmental issues for that anymore they’ll find some other excuse to act like spoiled children. And the rest of us will roll up our sleaves, put on our PPE, and get to work.
If climate change gets resolved (and to be clear, even DEFINING WHAT THAT MEANS is a hugely complex issue we don’t have an answer for yet), we have to deal with soil erosion, loss of groundwater, soil salination, PCE/TCE, BTEX, PFOA/PFOS, heavy metals, invasive species, loss of native species, river migration, the balance between human needs and natural delta processes (see New Orleans), and a whole host of other issues. We’ve created multiple novel biomes (cities and agricultural areas) that never existed before, and we have no idea what these look like in the long term (say, on a scale of tens of thousands of years).
Right, all of the scientists and environmentally-minded people I know would love for climate change to be solved, so that they/we could move on to caring about the innumerable other threats to nature, the environment, individual species and the sustainability of our societies that are out there. It’s not as if we are short for other problems, even though climate change tends to aggravate them!
Yeah, if there’s a way that I might be able to rationalize the “they might actually go away if their demands are met” thought, it’s that “fix climate change” doesn’t have a straightforward demand the way “Abolish ICE” does. It’s going to take years, and it’s going to be hard to tell that it’s working, and it probably won’t be as good as we’d like, because it’s all of a piece with the quip about planting trees: The best time to plant one was 20 years ago, but the second best time is today.
The issue is that we as a culture are used to having easy fixes. We replace this part, we take this pill, we vote this guy into office, and everything is magically better. Climate is one example of this–we all want a magic bullet that fixes everything, when in fact the solution is necessarily going to be, at best, a dynamic equilibrium that we have to maintain. It’s not going to be a magic solution, but a shift in how we as a civilization operate.
Another place you see this mentality is infrastructure. If you ever want to scare yourself, look at the rating of the bridges you drive over every day. Or the lifespan of the powerlines that you rely on. Or the amount of water lost by your city. I don’t even need to know where you are; the problem is universal in the USA. We treat construction as a one-shot fix, and ignore maintenance. This is deeply ironic to me, because it’s a golden opportunity for the Republicans to directly benefit their base–put money into infrastructure modernization, replacement, and maintenance and you necessarily put a lot of blue-collar dudes back to work while also benefiting the nation in both the short and mid-term–but they refuse to do it.
One of the big problems is that the umbrella cause of climate activism includes a wide variety of potential solutions, and protest groups rarely list which specific things they are actually asking for. Along with that you have the issue that ‘well, it should happen faster’, which is a problem in green power production etc.
You also get the people who’ve had a long-standing commitment to a solution to an issue which turns out not to be the solution everyone else essentially already adopted, and don’t want to back off from their idea, even if it’d be harder to do at this point. For example, people who believe the solution to vehicle emmissions is cycling and public transport expansion, even though, by this point, it’s pretty clear that vehicle emmissions are in the process of being solved through electric vehicles (3 of the top 5 highest valued car manufacturers on the planet have never built non-electric cars at all).
And finally you get the people who are blocking traffic because of a wide range of issues with the automotive industry, and simply settled on emmissions as the one to stick on their shirts. This type might still be blocking traffic if all the trucks were magically replaced with cybertrucks overnight, because they do have other (often good, legitimate) issues with the car industry, and blocking roads is actually a lot more connected to their cause than it is to those who’re only doing it due to missed global emissions targets (essentially, they are doing a well targeted protest about cars, rather than a poorly targeted protest about fossil fuels).
Two things leap to my mind from this. One is how effectively the framework of attacks on will rather than resources or territory serves to help visualised the actions of conflict between groups of organised crime (and indeed, why trying to run the same against effective police forces is so much a non-starter that it often becomes a norm to render them off limits). The other is the extent to which a lot of the nuances of insurgency tactics have shown up in a lot of Star Wars series.
In contrast, the only example of displaying non-violence as a tactic that leaps to my mind was that time Quark responded to the expectation of engaging in a Klingon honour duel by throwing down his weapon, deriding the legitimacy of the duel in the face of his obvious overwhelming disadvantage, and letting his opponent’s willingness to still attack him shame the onlooking authorities into intervening.
Fiction doesn’t handle non-violence well. Star Wars where the Emperor cares about the feelings of the galactic population , or even the feelings of senators because they could remove him from office, is not Star Wars. Or it is sort of the reverse of what happened in the Phantom Menace and no one liked that.
Also non-violence doesn’t give a cathartic ending. The story of Birmingham doesn’t end with Martin Luther King arresting and imprisoning Bull Connor for his crimes. A story where the villain is forced to make concessions but remains in power will never be popular. Yet another problem with how our brains are wired.
There are examples in history of non-violent revolutions, though. Or of non-violent resistance leading to coups when the leader won’t change course.
The tyrant learning that no one will obey him anymore is always satisfying.
There are examples in history of non-violent revolutions, though. Or of non-violent resistance leading to coups when the leader won’t change course.
The coup itself is a violent act though (or even if its bloodless, it relies on the implicit threat of violence), so I’m not sure such situations (which as you note, are quite common) would really qualify from the point of view of an really hard core ideological pacifist. (As distinct from a pragmatist who thinks nonviolence tactics are useful in one particular situation).
In a way, the Emperor in Star Wars is brought down with non-violent tactics. Luke refuses to fight, inviting “spectacular violence” from the Emperor, which turns Vader against the Emperor. Vader does use violence, but he was not part of the movement with the intention to bring down the Emperor. (The Empire on the other hand is brought down in a violent battle by the destruction of the second Death Star, which would have killed the Emperor if he hadn’t been already dead at that point.)
And non-violence can give cathartic endings too (at least in the moment), where the villain is forced from power and sometimes arrested and put on trial, or forced to flee into exile. That is how Color Revolutions work. I think the reason why we rarely see the Evil Empire brought down with non-violent tactics in fiction is more immediate: the back-and-forth of action scenes is more enjoyable than a one-sided beatdown of the good guys.
Color revolutions can be almost warlike in their violence, because at that point you have majority support and can believe you can. At a certain point even police and internal security forces willing to use significant violence aren’t enough, you need soldiers willing to use live ammo. Like during the Revolution of Dignity 30,000 protestors stormed Independence Square. They succeeded, though 48 protestors were killed by live ammo.
Heck in the Iranian protests, successfully brutally crushed, the *confirmed* regime death toll is in the hundreds.
For completeness, his opponent was D’Gor, son of…whatever.
Also, that’s a fantastic example of using a non-violent tactic provoke your opponent to violence.
“Son of… whatever” is so incredibly disrespectful that if Quark had been a Klingon, it would have justified D’Gor killing him in the eyes of the High Council, even without the accusations of financial improprieties. And it probably helped enrage D’Gor to the point where he didn’t notice that the mood of the room (the Will, so to speak) was now against him and that violence would only work against him.
And once you shift the lens to “this is an execution,” then Quark’s “son of whatever” retroactively seems more like a cultural misunderstanding (wait, I’m supposed to know the full lineage of everyone I’m interacting with?) rather than an expression of disrespect (despite Quark’s tone indicating that it absolutely was intended as disrespectful).
Shows up in Star Trek, Star Trek! Fuck!
I’m not up on the latest stuff in the Star Wars series, but I think the Rebel Alliance is very solidly engaged in protracted war rather than insurgency. They have territory and military bases, they have fleets and starfighters, they can fight the Empire openly at least some of the time. Their theory of victory is “eventually enough systems will go into open rebellion that we can directly attack the Empire.”
(Doing so is made much easier by the Empire’s decision to concentrate almost all of its force into a single Death Star that can be blown up in a bomber raid.)
You and Ricks both emphasize the importance of training and discipline in the CRM. That took time. Yet in Minnesota the opposition to ICE has been (knock on wood) remarkably disciplined, even in the face of very serious provocation (murders), and there has been AFAIK minimal if any preliminary training to accomplish this. Do you have a good explanation of how that discipline emerged seemingly spontaneously?
Honestly I think the American education system provided the discipline. Every American student of the past 50 odd years has learned about MLK Jr. and the Civil Rights movement. Even if not to the extent that books like ‘Waging a Good War’ or this post engage in it, they know what ‘right’ non-violent protest looks like.
Disagree, I don’t think most Americans have a good idea of this. My experience in talking to people about this is that they know that MLK’s branch of the civil rights movement was nonviolent, and they know that it won, but they don’t understand the link between the two, how the strategy of nonviolence works.
This is borne out in how many American protestors (like the climate change protesters Bret mentions) attempt to use nonviolence but with key parts of the strategy missing, and then are surprised when it doesn’t work. (And as for the people agitating for violence, I have to assume they don’t understand it either. They like to say “we’ve tried nonviolence and it didn’t work!” — yeah, you tried a thing that wasn’t violent, you didn’t try a properly executed MLK-style strategy. Although admittedly circumstances don’t always permit those (again, see climate change example).)
Really, if everyone understood it, there’d be no bumbling opponnent playing the Bull Connor role! Not only would you get more cases where it’s done right (of which there seem to be very few), you’d get more effective Pritchett-style action against it, too.
You don’t have to understand the strategy of non violence to use it. I am confident that the vast majority of protesters choose it not out of strategic concerns but rather because they would be unwilling to engage in violence to begin with.
You don’t, but it certainly helps to understand the strategy if you want to use it *effectively*.
From my (obviously all-seeing and deeply insightful) perspective on the fringes of activist communities, and conversations with people more engaged than me, it seems that strategy is often wanting. Protests are as much about demonstrating moral rectitude, with little attention paid to winning round general opinion (on the apparent assumption that everyone at least ought to agree with them already). The lack of meaningful strategy is reflected in such movements’ general lack of success.
I think it is telling that in the UK, at least, many such types take as their political north star Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn at least appears to be a very principled man (whether you agree with those principles or not) but he is by any objective measure an incompetent politician, who has been very successful in building an attention-grabbing disruption movement (notwithstanding its Judean-People’s-Front tendencies) but has failed to parlay that into any meaningful change outside the movement itself: over his fifty-year career he has accomplished virtually none of his political goals. To listen to his rhetoric and those of his supporters when challenged on this, however, success appears to be measured in terms of the continuation of the movement, not in terms of whether the movement itself is successful.
“To listen to his rhetoric and those of his supporters when challenged on this, however, success appears to be measured in terms of the continuation of the movement, not in terms of whether the movement itself is successful.”
Corbyn supporters continue to cite, as a demonstration of their man’s effectiveness, that “he outlasted two prime ministers” – true! but rather missing the point that the job of an opposition leader is to become prime minister, rather than to remain in opposition for year upon year.
People don’t understand the structure, but they have heard and do believe in the moral-righteousness message of the original. Their actions are guided by trying to create a superficial resemblance to the original (call it “cargo cult nonviolent protesting” if you will) and the result is …hit-and-miss, but still much more functional than what they would have tried otherwise, because sometimes the circumstances do permit success.
Correspondingly, there is a supply of Bull Connors lined up, formed by people who don’t believe that moral-righteousness-of-nonviolence message.
By the way, the Civil Rights Movement isn’t even the only copy most Americans have heard. Most also encountered a distorted-to-cosmic-background-radiation version in the Bible. Which used to be, if not necessarily less distorted, at least much louder two-ish generations ago, and thus in turn could take some of the load during the CRM.
The kind of person who, in a republic, signs up to kick people in the teeth in the name of racial purity, is usually not the kind of person who paid attention in civics and history class when it was explained why the last round of racial supremacist toothkickers lost and deserved to lose. If they’d learned the lesson then, they probably wouldn’t be lining up to kick teeth now.
Also the left leaning crowd has been hearing about police provocations and right wing false flag efforts for so long that they all know getting upset is losing. Turns out that having your news based on reality not propaganda is useful for being informed.
Because coordination is so much easier today because of social media. Whomever controls Facebook, Twitter and Discord could (I suppose) point the mob in any direction they want?
I think this is backwards. Social media makes it easier to get a large number of people but harder to control who you’re getting and ensure they attend or hold to any sort of training. (I’ve seen people suggest this is a general reason protests are less effective these days.) In light of which how well things have gone in Minnesota is surprising.
There have been trainings in Minnesota and all over the country. Activists have been running them, and civilians have been turning up to,learn. There has already been at least one Know Your Rights Training in my very small village, and there is a second one scheduled for next week – just in case an ICE agent shows up here.
There’s a bunch fo more specialized stuff too, like protest first aid stuff.
There have been many trainings held by activists in Minneapolis and all over the country. There was a Know Your Rights (KYR) Training that was held in my village last week, and there’s another one scheduled for next week – in anticipation of if ICE ever shows up here.
> Yet in Minnesota the opposition to ICE has been (knock on wood) remarkably disciplined, even in the face of very serious provocation (murders), and there has been AFAIK minimal if any preliminary training to accomplish this.
A key answer here is “there has in fact been quite a lot of on the ground training, done at the community level in what the various actions being taken are and how to do them effectively”. But if you aren’t in those communities you aren’t seeing that happen, only the results of it.
Thanks.
It’s not discipline, it’s cowardice. These are middle class white people with absolutely zero stomach for pain and danger.
Until ICE agents start being killed en masse, the deportations will continue to grow in scope and brutality.
Elections will be rigged, and nobody will lift a finger over it, mark my words.
> These are middle class white people with absolutely zero stomach for pain and danger.
Absolute nonsense, and frankly insultingly so.
These are people who are willingly going out every day in freezing cold, getting pepper sprayed and physically assaulted by government thugs, and absolutely aware that others in their movement doing exactly the same things have been murdered for it by those same thugs.
Before you accuse them of having no stomach for pain and danger, maybe you should try going out with them one day and see just how much pain and danger they’re willingly going into. In the meantime, shut up with your slanderous nonsense.
“Until ICE agents start being killed en masse, the deportations will continue to grow in scope and brutality.”
If ICE agents start being killed, resources will be redirected from deportations to arresting violent people like you. Congratulations?
“Elections will be rigged, and nobody will lift a finger over it, mark my words.”
Oh they’ll be rigged alright, by Democrats and RINOs.
Oh they’ll be rigged alright, by Democrats and RINOs.
Do you have the slightest evidence that the modern Democratic Party (as opposed to say Dixiecrats in the American South back in the day) have rigged any elections, or even considered it?
I mean, I would if it was up to me- I think these people are evil enough that they need to be kept out of power by whatever means it takes- but the Democratic Party has never cared what I or people like me think, and for better or worse they seem to actually believe in, you know, liberal democracy, like the name suggests.
I spotted the narc.
I’ve seen quite a few comments advocating for ‘violent revolution’ in the comments of various protest videos in the USA. I started asking if they were bots paid for by the CIA, as it seems like the Trump administration is literally gagging for there to be something they can pin as an armed insurgency and halt the upcoming elections. They’ve jumped at every single shadow that was even slightly that shape so far.
Interestingly, only one so far has actually responded (we had quite a reasoned conversation really), but the rest…nada.
I think you are making some of the fundamental mistakes Dr. Devereaux predicted. First, misunderstanding the way that a nonviolent movement can radically disrupt a regime’s power by destroying the will of a significant fraction of its supporters and strengthening the will of its opponents. Second, by overestimating the ease with which relatively small amounts of force (either in the hands of insurgents or of a would-be fascist self-coup attempt) can overrun the populace.
If nations were easy to rule with small amounts of force, history would be very different.
In the sciences, when you are arguing for a new theory to replace an established theory, you must provide explanations for how your new theory can also explain all the *existing* body of evidence that had until then supported the established theory.
Please, if you are so confident in your position, I gently invite you to write a refutation article providing an alternative interpretation of the conduct, key events, and outcomes of the Civil Rights Movement.
Until then, I think I’ll believe the good professor’s and T.E. Ricks’ interpretation of events over yours.
There is an alternate explanation in the form of the Overton Window hypothesis of public discourse: In that framework, violent and nonviolent movements of protest that share a common goal do not work at cross purposes, but complement each other: The violent movement represents the “extreme” end of the political spectrum and, through its violent excesses, shifts the public perception of politics to where the nonviolent movement, appears as the “moderate” and “reasonable” alternative, opening up negotiation between the establishment and the nonviolent movement (with the implied promise that the violent movement will cease its activity when its nonviolent sister-movement achieves its goals).
This is most apparent in separatist movements (e.g. Basque country, Northern Ireland), where there is usually a (semi-)legitimate, political party standing in as the nonviolent public face of the movement and conducting its “diplomacy” in a sense, while the violent movement acts as a kind of informal “army” of sorts.
In that framework, the more violent portions of the anti-segregationist movement (encapsulated by the public figure of Malcolm X) and “race riots” served as the extremist branch that enabled the CRM to appear as the moderate, reasonable party that could be reasoned and negotiated with.
And when the ICE agents start being killed en masse Trump has ample reason to declare martial law and send in the army because this is basically an armed revolt and Trump has every right to destroy an armed revolt. What’s your point?
“Until ICE agents start being killed en masse, the deportations will continue to grow in scope and brutality.”
This is a testable prediction, if rephrased slightly more rigorously:
“One of two things will be true on 31 December 2026:
either at least twenty ICE officers will have been violently killed on duty while attempting to deport non-citizens;
or the current approach of geographically concentrated mass indiscriminate violent arrests and deportations will still be going on at greater intensity compared to 31 January 2026”.
Would you care to bet $50 that your statement, rephrased in this form, is true? If you lose, you can donate that $50 to the Democratic National Committee.
Or would you like to rephrase? For example, perhaps “en masse” means just ten?
Did you read the blogpost that you are commenting on?
I’d need to go looking for where I saw this, so grain of salt, but I remember reading a while back about how the depth and resilience of organization of resistance in Minneapolis specifically actually owes a lot to community organizing and network-building that occurred during/after the George Floyd protests. In which case it’s not just springing from nothing, I guess?
This is exactly what I’ve been told by organizers on the group in Minneapolis.
Good point.
And the big question from that is: in how many other cities is there a similar depth of network that could be repurposed for similar reasons? I can believe that no other city had quite as good a BLM buildout, for obvious reasons. But could the same be done by, say, repurposing local churches in New Orleans? Or trade unions in Scranton? (Examples chosen at random; I have no idea how good the union network is in Scranton.)
I feel our host has discussed this before: https://acoup.blog/2020/05/22/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-iv-men-of-rohan/
Analogously, I gather that the people in Minneapolis are mostly motivated by the defence of neighbours, colleagues, fellow Minneapolitans and so on. So loyalty and cohesion will come fairly naturally. Tactics can come from what works and is spread along social networks.
And of course, it doesn’t require superhuman self-discipline to avoid a fight you will lose.
Of course, the thing with nonviolent protests is that you’re *not* avoiding a fight: You’re going to get a beating. You’re just willing to take it rather than try to hit back.
It did not emerge spontaneously. What you are seeing is partly the mobilization of mutual aid networks built during the Black Lives Matter protests, and partly the mobilization of local cultural attitudes formed by criticizing the counterproductive parts of the George Floyd protests (and others beforehand).
What you probably don’t realize is that the police in the Twin Cities do one of these high-profile killings ~annually so people have a lot of practice.
Have such high profile killings been ongoing since the infamous George Floyd protests? I’m not questioning you, just asking if you would mind elaborating.
https://www2.startribune.com/every-police-involved-death-in-minnesota-since-2000/502088871/
Here’s the full list
Since I lack the context to easily sort out which of these killings are “high-profile” and likely to spark protest, would you mind pointing out a few examples from the period 2021-25?
Simon – unfortunately I don’t have that either, not being in the country.
No worries, Wikipedia keeps a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_Minnesota
In addition to what others have said about widespread training sessions, I think an important factor is that being an ICE observer is a less risky job than say, being on the front lines of a sit-in. Not risk-free, obviously, these people are doing hard work day after day, but “we need people to do legal but annoying things near ICE officers” is a much smaller ask than “we need people to intentionally break the law and get arrested.”
That means that you can recruit a lot more protesters and they need much less training – so long as they know a couple of well-established constitutional lines, they can provide useful intelligence and legal documentation for the more organized leaders in the movement to make use of. And that means that Minneapolis can get so many observers out on the streets that it’s impossible for ICE to go anywhere without someone showing up to yell at them and document whatever illegal crap they’re pulling. Sheer numbers are actually really useful here.
But we’ve already seen two people murdered for doing legal things near ICE in clearly documented and well publicized circumstances. They weren’t even being annoying, Renee Goode’s last words were “I’m not angry at you”. And those two people are just the murderers that were easy to conclusively prove without investigation, there are plenty of other people ICE killed and then made outlandish accusations to justify killing.
Putting yourself in front of well armed, untrained men with guns, sanction from authorities and a hateful ideology is inherently dangerous no matter the decade.
I do have to push back here on one thing – these guys weren’t untrained. IIRC, Jonathan Ross is a ten year ICE veteran and Bovino said the CBP shooter was an eight year CBP vet. It’s understandable to imagine they’re untrained, given they are murderous thugs and there should be a lot of untrained idiots in their ranks due to the GOP giving Trump’s gestapo a huge surge in funding, but it’s important to recognize that these are, in fact, the well-trained thugs, not the newbies.
Suburban mums. Used to organising a kid’s party/block party/family occasion/church supper. Water bottles, transport, reminder about place, time, expected conduct.
First, Minnesota is a part of the country that is relatively high social cohesion, which may have helped groups organize along local lateral lines and share training.
Second, this is not actually a novel phenomenon. Conspicuous, aggressive ICE deployments have been happening in various cities throughout the nation through most of 2025, as have other attempts by the Trump administration to create conspicuous shows of force to hearten supporters and overawe opposition, such as the National Guard deployments last year.
So on the one hand, people in Minnesota could see what was happening elsewhere and discuss what they might do if it happened in their home state. And on the other hand, there is presumably ongoing dialogue among anti-ICE protestors about what works and what doesn’t- and the results of this dialogue will include things that can be accessed by people trying to plan a protest in their own state for the first time.
Third and related to the second point, this is by no means the first round of nonviolent protests in recent American history. The organizers of the early Civil Rights movement were to a large extent starting from nothing- or rather, from a core of educated, very motivated people who were creating their plan of action from scratch. But things like “have a lot of people constantly making video recordings of law enforcement so they can’t do anything off camera” are standard tactics that have been emerging at protests ever since the mid-2010s, so it’s no surprise that the knowledge of this tactic is now widespread among protestors.
One of the advantages of a nonviolent campaign is that your leadership and ‘troops’ are relatively unlikely to be killed, and so are more likely to be around to continue to raise up new recruits and teach them strategy in a future campaign 5-10 years later.
People in Minneapolis have been organizing and training since George Floyd was killed, what you’re seeing is the fruit of their efforts. LOTS of training, and training of trainers, went into the self-disciplined response we see now. The networks were there from the Black Lives Matter protests, have grown over the past year, then added people, subdivided, added more people, divided again, when the surge happened.
I’m in NJ, I’m getting this from my many activist friends in MN, all of whom I knew already as SF&F fans or other “regular people”.
I guess especially in Minnesota, this is not their first rodeo. It’s a long time since 2020, much time to prepare.
“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio”
If you think that this is spontaneous, or that the USA doesn’t have a playbook and system for dealing with these things, you didn’t pay much attention in history class. Or to current events for the past several generations. It’s not like Minnesota is happening in a vacuum, or is a sudden outburst of unprecedented violence. Our culture, sadly, had a long history of this stuff–at least three generations, possibly more.
one can hope.
Ghandi is odd to me cause protest and peaceful non aggression yay, but Also the British Empire used them up in two World Wars.
Got alot of bang for their Buck on that one.
So. Course that might be the cheerful British Disregard for the fucked up borders they leave behind making everything not their problem anymore while all things on fire.
I don’t hold the British responsible for the partition of India, if that’s what you’re implying, since it was manifest from the time independence negotiations were underway postwar that Muslims and Hindus had no intention of living peaceably in a united nation. So Britain left them to sort it out themselves and they chose violence.
Africa was much the same way. Those countries are STILL squabbling over frontiers and they’ve had generations now to work things out on their own. But they always fought over borders before the Europeans arrived, too.
The problem is that it is very hard to rationalize a border once it is drawn in an irrational place. Nations have a strong incentive not to give up territory. Suppose the border is drawn in a way that is blind to the ethnographic and material realities on the ground, such as a nice neat straight line that cuts through the territory of 23 ethnic groups and results in a major river zig-zagging back and forth over the line so many times that everyone’s water rights are hopelessly entangled.
Once this is done, it is unrealistic to expect the freshly decolonized nations to be able to “just work it out themselves,” because the situation has been placed in a position that would never have happened naturally and the only way to disentangle it is for [i]both sides[/i] to give up territory to the other and then contend with their respective radicals who resent them for compromising.
“Nations have a strong incentive not to give up territory”
Nations have a strong incentive not to give up territory under coercion; they can’t afford to encourage more coercion. But there are plenty of cases of nations negotiating in good faith about territory. The US and Canadian border comes to mind.
If the only obstacle for the post-colonial nations was negotiating with each other in good faith about the borders, they probably could have pulled that off. The problem was that wasn’t anywhere close to their biggest obstacle, they colonial legacy was decades of inhibiting the emergence of civic institutions and causing violent extremism to flourish followed by massive incentives for corruption due to the relative power of international geopolitical blocks and corporations.
It is, to be fair, a lot easier to have a calm, orderly negotiation about territory in which both sides make some concessions in a case like the US-Canada border, which was negotiated at a time when the territory along the border was very lightly settled. At the time, there was no real immediate negative consequence in Washington or Ottawa to saying “just draw the border along the Xth parallel” or whatever. When dealing with densely populated territories and commingled ethnic groups, one is “playing on hard mode,” on top of all the other problems you describe.
That is a spineless and frankly a bit racist argument designed to wash your hands of the responsibilities of colonialism/imperialism.
The British do have responsibility here, for several reasons. Firstly, they were in power for almost a hundred years at that point (and another hundred years indirectly before that). At any time during that period, they could have taken serious, long-term steps to remove the religious tensions, by instituting secular public education, promoting a shared Indian identity and loyalty and passing and enforcing anti-discrimination laws. In short, nation-building, so that even if Indian Muslims and Indian Hindus have differences, they both understand each other as Indian and thus not willing to weaken the state of India over their disagreements. But of course they did not do that, because the British Empire did not want a unified India, it wanted easily ruled imperial subjects and thus it happily let these conflicts fester because a fractious subject territory can’t unite to throw off the oppressor.
Secondly, they were responsible in the most literal sense: They were the ones drawing the borders, and they did so with a mindset of “It’s a good compromise if it makes everyone unhappy”.
And thirdly, and that is something rarely considered: They did release India, Pakistan and Bangladesh into independence right as the UN was founded and thus reified the current ideas of international order, including the idea of Territorial Integrity. That meant any changes to the borders as they were at that point in the 1940’s was to be considered a gross violation of international law and subject to harsh punishment by the international community. Which also means that any communities disrupted by the borders as drawn at that point (in some places not even a generation beforehand) were now by international law enforced to stay torn apart by a border, and any state destabilised by its sectarian conflicts has to stay unstable because it’s not allowed to re-arrange its territory to fit its understanding of which communities belong together and which do not. So basically they could not “work it out” in Africa because doing so would mean erasing those straight lines on the map drawn by the colonialists and starting over anew, and international law does not allow it.
@AlienSystem,
Strongly disagree with your first point, but strongly agree with your second.
That’s perfectly fine – I’d be happy to rant about nationalism and all the bad that it’s done. My argument is not that nation-building in general would have been good, but rather that it would have been the prerequisite to then enshrining the idea of a nation-state via Territorial Integrity. But instead the colonialist powers spent the preceding centuries doing the opposite and now those non-nation states are of course functioning badly in this nation-state based international order.
Humanity has yet to see an actual example of “nation-building”.
The examples put forward are that of post WW2 West Germany and Japan. Yet those nations already had lots of cohesion. Often provided by the coercion of the regimes who were overthrown, and then supplemented by lots of coercion by the conquerors.
So there’s two examples that seem to indicate it’s possible. Against that you have roughly a hundred examples where it wasn’t done, or done poorly. And the end result is that the country involved is worse off. Yes, they’re richer, because pretty much *every nation on Earth* is now richer. But they have if anything less cohesion, since everyone is relatively closer together due to the speed of transport and communications.
“Nation-building” is really hard. Invading to “nation-build” is just not going to happen. “Nation-building” at the end of colonization, which I will remind you happened because the nations in question *ran out of money*, and then were shoved over the edge by pressure from the USA, was not going to happen due to the press of events.
The sort of nation-building you think they could have done (easily, since you assign them so much blame for not doing it) would have had to happen over a couple of centuries, of a much more peaceful world than we had.
The ordering of my arguments is chronological, not hierarchical, and I fully agree that this is not a short-term project but something that has to happen over generations. Which the British would have had.
I’m also not sure we mean the same thing with nation-building, if your examples are post-war Germany and Japan. Those are both states which already had a strong national identity, and in fact had taken the underlying racist logic of the nation-state to its extreme. What I mean is the process that happened in Europe in the centuries prior, in which basically all the states did spent centuries on the project of defining themselves of consisting of people of a common heritage and history, different than the heritage and history on the other side of the border – and these projects were successful.
If you will, my argument is less that the British did not consciously do this in India, but rather that by virtue of their imperial rule over it they prevented this process from taking place. To me there is not much distinction there – the British decided they had power over India, so they also shoulder the responsibility for failing to act as good rulers *for India*.
If you will, my argument is less that the British did not consciously do this in India, but rather that by virtue of their imperial rule over it they prevented this process from taking place.
This is exactly right, yes.
Whether you think the ideal situation for South Asia would be something like the “Europe” model of a continent sorting itself out into nation states, or the “China” model of a single giant super-state, British colonialization didn’t really do either of those things, instead they drew some borders and then sort of froze the situation as it was, preventing either kind of nation building from taking place.
@Hector To be fair the British State had just been through the two bloodiest wars in the history of humankind whose primary goal was some variety of ‘let’s sort everyone out into nation states’. I don’t particularly blame them for having a stab at trying a slightly different tack. This seems at least semi-justified by the presence of widespread sectarian violence during the partition.
Not that I’m necessarily saying that the approach the British took at that point was a good one (it kinda wasn’t), that this was their primary concern in doing it (likely not, but it’s a factor), or that they even gave it a proper go (they assuredly did not given the laziness of the drawing of borders and the haphazard approach to which groups got a state or not).
The Indian partition has major issues, but India did not devolve into 50 years of Balkans-style sectarian violence immediately afterwards (if you want an example of where people were given the opportunity to just ‘sort it out themselves’. Would it have done if the British had just left everyone to sort it out? Maybe. Maybe not. Would the end-result have been better or worse? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s difficult to prove a counterfactual. Is the risk of everything devolving into mass violence worth having the choice about what to do sit with the peoples of formerly British India? I can’t possibly comment, I am neither a member of British India at the time, nor a descendant of one (meaningfully anyway.
Note that this does not make any of it objectively good. But I feel like the context happening around all of this is useful in understanding.
Oh, and just in case you think this is me trying to garner undue sympathy for the British leadership (many of whom were likely forced into accepting Indian independence rather than doing it out of their own conscience), remember that WW1 was started because of ‘some damn-fool thing in the Balkans’, so even if it’s wholly and utterly out of self-preservation trying not to get dragged into another world war…trying something different other than ‘let them sort it out themselves’ still makes a reasonable amount of sense.
To be fair the British State had just been through the two bloodiest wars in the history of humankind whose primary goal was some variety of ‘let’s sort everyone out into nation states’.
I mean, I think our disagreement here is somewhat based on the fact that we view the World Wars differently, I think both of them were “caused” much more by the efforts of imperial powers (multiple powers in the first war, and Germany specifically in the second) to *prevent* or reverse the formation of nation states and replace them with empires instead.
Hitler is such a….strange person, and such of an extreme of evil, that he’s hard to fit into the standard categories that we think about, but I’d suggest that the kind of continental empire run by a “master race” is *not* the kind of “separate states for separate nations” ideal that I have in mind, or that the Czechoslovaks or Poles or Finns or Yugoslavs (or for that matter the Zionists) at the time had in mind, or more relevantly what Jinnah, or Periyar, or the Naga or Bodo insurgents in more recent years had in mind then or now. Jinnah in his famous Lahore Resolution explicitly appealed to the Balkans as a model and said essentially, if Eastern Europeans are entitled to their own nation states, why aren’t we?
Sure, you can definitely raise the point that in practice it’s hard to really enact the “separate states for separate peoples” ideal without some minority groups feeling like they lost out, at the margin imperialism and national self determination aren’t *totally* separable and can overlap to some degree. But there’s a….major difference, I would say a difference in kind, between the experience of, say, Roma in Slovakia today and the experience of Slavs, much less Jews or Roma, under the (fortunately, aborted) Nazi empire.
As for WWI, I guess it was driven by nationalism, rather than imperialism, if you blame the Serbs for it. I don’t, though, I think while the Serbs bear some blame, the Austrians (and Russians, and Germans and the other big imperial powers) bear a lot more.
While I wholeheartedly agree with the argument you’re making (I genuinely do), I feel like the point of ‘if the British wanted to do independence properly they should have laid the groundworks much earlier’ is a bit disingenuous.
The core of the argument against this is that ‘The British’ are not a monolithic strategic entity that could predict the future with utmost clarity. They are 200 years of a rolling caste of individual British people.
You say it yourself. For around 200 years, the British wanted to keep the Indian sub-continent as an imperial holding. This is not a morally good thing, but that is broadly what they thought, and they acted accordingly (as you have described).
Then opinion changed among the British ruling class of the immediate post-war period when they realised that continuing to operate the Indian subcontinent as an imperial holding was untenable. It is at this point that the decision of ‘right, how do we actually do this without it devolving into the mega-Balkans’ became a question that could be answered.
You say yourself that the steps to achieve that are long-term, and involve difficult things like creating robust secular institutions and nation-building. How long might that take to achieve in the face of a rising ‘piss off out of our country’ movement? The Americans took 20 years in Afghanistan and it very much didn’t work. I wonder how the idea of ‘tell you what Indian Independence Leadership, we’ll definitely let you be independent, but you’ve got to give us 40 more years because we don’t think you’re ready yet’ would have gone down. Historically poorly, I expect.
Note that this does not mean that the idea they came up with was an objectively good one (it wasn’t for a number of reasons). It doesn’t mean they implemented this moderately-dodgy idea effectively (they really didn’t). It also doesn’t absolve them of the responsibility to sort the mess they created out (it really, really doesn’t…that’s the flip-side of being an imperial conqueror: you take on responsibility for the conquered).
I just think this line of reasoning isn’t a particularly solid one to rest your argument on.
If the argument was ‘the British leadership of the time should have seen the writing on the wall in the late 1800s when public sympathies for Indian self-determination first began to bubble up in semi-significant numbers and started enacting an exit plan accordingly’ then I feel that has more merit. The answer to that is that they sort of did (i.e. the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885, and the solid opposition-party stance being pro-self-determination for India), but that the efforts by those who did see the writing on the wall were stymied by those who refused to.
Does this absolve the British of generally cocking it up in a number of fairly important ways? Absolutely not. Does this absolve the British of fostering a mega-Balkans-like situation in India to further their imperialist aims? Again, absolutely not.
But I think contextualising situations in terms of ‘this is what individual leaders at the time were faced with’ helps a lot more with understanding the decisions they made rather than treating national entities as if they were anthropomorphised immortal individual actors.
“At any time during that period, they could have taken serious, long-term steps to remove the religious tensions, by instituting secular public education, promoting a shared Indian identity and loyalty and passing and enforcing anti-discrimination laws. In short, nation-building, so that even if Indian Muslims and Indian Hindus have differences, they both understand each other as Indian and thus not willing to weaken the state of India over their disagreements. But of course they did not do that”
(clears throat) I would simply have made people not be violent bigots.
It is noteworthy that the biggest political unit to govern India directly before the British (the Mughal Empire) did manage, by and large, to have coexistence between Hindus and Muslims. It seems unreasonable to imagine that Hindus and Muslims are somehow incapable of coexisting in peace when a few centuries ago they were doing exactly that. Since most of the major changes in Indian politics and demography during that period happened under British rule, this is all the more reason to hold the British at least partially responsible for partition becoming ‘necessary.’
“It is noteworthy that the biggest political unit to govern India directly before the British (the Mughal Empire) did manage, by and large, to have coexistence between Hindus and Muslims.”
“By and large” is bearing a lot of weight here. By and large, Hindus and Muslims coexisted peacefully in the Raj as well.
A British empire that could create a united sense of Indian national identity would also presumably be able to keep them all good British subjects. The fact it failed to do so suggests this is harder than you think. On top of that, Britain struggled with creating a unified national identity between Scotland and England. Or between Ireland and England. And between Wales and England. That’s less complicated than India, and closer, AND the people in question speak the same language and largely have for centuries. And yet.
Modern India has significant controversies over language, which universal secular education would have run squarely into had it been tried by the British. That leaves aside the question of paying for it, which is definitely not trivial. It is also notable how often British social engineering attempts (or even the perception of such) in India provoked rioting, especially when it came to areas of ‘the British are trying to make us into different people.’ The idea that Britain could have somehow created a unified national Indian identity without either cultural genocide or provoking a massive rebellion (or both) is ludicrous if you think about it for five seconds. Not to mention the huge parts of India which were not under direct British administration.
A 1991 census of India recorded 22 languages with more than a million people speaking them. 2001 recorded 29. That’s either an incredibly complicated education system or a lot of angry people getting their languages wiped out.
Furthermore, the British were literally the first power to control the entire subcontinent (and even there, not all directly). You want them to create a national identity where one did not exist – there is no shared history to point to for the entire subcontinent before the British or maybe the Mughals (and ‘we have the same imperial overlord’ is not a solid basis for a national identity). There is no shared language (Hindustani is the closest, and only a fraction of the population of India and Pakistan today speak it even as a second language). There is no shared religion (though note that religion is by far the largest thing the different groups have in common, hence why things have played out the way they do).There is no shared ethnicity. There’s not even a shared alphabet. Asking the British to create a unified India where the Indians have been unable to and the British haven’t managed a unified Britain is a ridiculous expectation.
@Kevin,
My problem with British colonialism (well, one of very many problems) isn’t that they created ethnic and religious divisions. Quite the opposite. My problem (again, among many others) is that they created artificial borders grouping together ethnic groups that didn’t have jack in common with each other, and by doing so, short circuited the natural and organic process of nation-state formation that you got in Europe.
in terms of the partition of South Asia specifically, my problem is that 1) the British didn’t supervise and regulate the process carefully enough, with enough troops on the ground to ensure security, 2) that, as noted below, they didn’t acknowledge the fact that the borders might need to be changed later on to more accurately reflect demographics, and 3) that they didn’t actually spend enough time seriously thinking about the issues involved. Like, if South Asians Muslims deserved one or more states of their own (and of course I agree that they do), then why don’t Sikhs, or Kashmiris, or Dravidians (or for that matter Tamils more specifically), or Nagas, or Bodos, or whoever else, deserve states of their own as well?
really, the more *underlying* problem I have here is that the British created completely artificial entities like “India”, “Nigeria” etc. while paying no attention to the basic ethnic and/or cultural divisions therein.
“really, the more *underlying* problem I have here is that the British created completely artificial entities like “India”, “Nigeria” etc. while paying no attention to the basic ethnic and/or cultural divisions therein.”
Yes this is the cardinal sin of the British at this point in time as far as I’m concerned. Not in the idea of new national borders being drawn up in the process of independence, but in its shoddy execution.
I mean, tackling the problem would have been a complete and total utter nightmare. I can’t imagine the sheer administrative army that would have been required to catalogue the locations of all of these various groups, their potential national affiliations, and any live disputes that would need to be sorted. And I’m including the locals themselves in this. They should have been deeply involved in it. But it’s no small undertaking. I work in commissioning for the NHS, so information collection to commission things to happen is what I do day-in-day-out (that and manage the priorities of competing groups, which feels apropos). The task to sort out the borders of the former British Empire properly would have been monumental even with today’s digital infrastructure.
Still, the world would have been a much better place if there had just been the tiniest bit more thought and care put into the process. Even if it took a longer.
@Ynneadwraith,
I kind of bristle at the language of “was this worth it” because I feel like it’s usually an unfair/leading question. In most situations, the answer to “was X done optimally to get the outcome Y” is no, we could always have done things better, so no, in that sense it wasn’t “worth it”. B
I guess the other problem I have with these “was Y worth X” questions is it brackets the question of which side was *responsible* for all the costs in getting there. Vietnam is doing pretty well as a country today, so in that sense I think you could say the Vietnam War was “worth it” (to the North Vietnamese and their allies, I mean) to get the country they have today. Does that mean the 5 million deaths were worth it? I’d say that’s the wrong question. The 5 million deaths were not some kind of act of the gods, or equally the fault of both sides, they were the fault of the Americans, the French and the South Vietnamese government. It’s not some kind of inevitable cost of having a united socialist-oriented Vietnamese nation state, it’s the fault of American cold war policy and the intransigent South Vietnamese regime.
In a similar sense, I’d blame all the wars and the deaths that happened entirely on on people like the Habsburgs, and the Romanovs, and the Prussian state, and to a much greater extent the Nazis and their allies, and all the people (domestic and foreign) who sided with and supported them. Not on the ideals of “X state for Y ethnic group” in principle. I.e. on the people that were trying to *resist* the ideal that i’m defending (from their varying perspectives, obviously the Habsburgs were nothing like the Nazis ideologically or in level of brutality, not that needs saying, but they still bear a lot of blame, at least in my book).
I do think that *in the end* the ideal of separate states for separate national groups is going to work better in terms of stability and security than the ideal of cosmopolitan super states (although I think both nationalism and cosmopolitanism are features of the human experience and a stable and humane world order is going to need space for both types of model). I certainly don’t think it’s an accident that the long peace in Europe after 1945 also coincided with the borders getting mostly sorted out, involving things like the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe. But, you’re right that there are certainly normative preferences here, I think all of our choices are influenced by both pragmatic concerns and normative values.
Yeah those are fair comments, and I genuinely do understand where you’re coming from with them. I’m not so partisan in my beliefs that I think there’s no merit in the opposing argument.
“In most situations, the answer to “was X done optimally to get the outcome Y” is no, we could always have done things better, so no, in that sense it wasn’t “worth it”.”
That genuinely wasn’t the angle I was going for. I was going for more of a utilitarian basis. Is a significant amount of death worth a particular outcome? How much death is worth what outcome? How much death is worth what outcome when the outcome is only a potentiality?
These are all questions I don’t know the answer to. Questions I probably cannot answer because it is broadly not me or ‘my people’ enduring the death, or reaping the rewards.
But they are questions we collectively should be asking ourselves. As far as I’m concerned we should be asking it for literally everything we’re proposing to do (otherwise we’re not doing proper strategy, as our host has explained to us).
“I guess the other problem I have with these “was Y worth X” questions is it brackets the question of which side was *responsible* for all the costs in getting there.”
Again, not the angle I was going for. In most cases, I don’t particularly think that attempting to narrow down which ‘side’ is wholly responsible is remotely possible, let alone desirable.
Note that this is not the same as throwing my hands up in the air and saying ‘everyone was equally to blame’. Belligerents and victims are a thing, and there are many instances where this is clear-cut. Regrettably, it seems that these instances are overwhelmingly outnumbered by instances where the ‘blame’ lies somewhere between these two parties (even if its weighted more one way or the other).
This ties into a broader personal belief of mine where getting into the weeds of who’s to blame on various things broadly distracts from the thing that will actually solve problems: mutual collaborative action to improve the situation as it stands now.
You may argue that we need to reach a mutual understanding of blame in order to galvanise both sides into that mutual collaborative action, or even that my position as part of a group that broadly benefits from the current arrangement (the English) more than, say, less populous nations within our country (i.e. the Welsh). Those arguments have got some merit to them. It’s just that in my personal experience of conflict mediation (which doesn’t extend to international politics, but isn’t exactly sparse either), I’ve found that discussion tends to polarise people and entrench the conflict even deeper.
“It’s the fault of American cold war policy and the intransigent South Vietnamese regime.”
This is another point I was thinking at the time of writing. You are correct that international and local pressures conspired to turn what should have been a comparatively bloodless transition into a conflict that killed nearly 12 million people.
I think imagining a potential ‘mass sorting out of borders along ethnic lines’ that doesn’t involve the interference of various different international and local interests skewing some idealised vision of the process is hopelessly naïve.
Not that I’m necessarily suggesting this is what you’re thinking. But at the end of the day I’m fairly pragmatic and utilitarian in my outlook. This stuff is going to happen with a pretty damn high probability of likelihood, so we should factor it into our decision-making when we decide whether the whole thing is a good idea or not.
“I do think that *in the end* the ideal of separate states for separate national groups is going to work better in terms of stability and security than the ideal of cosmopolitan super states”
I thought you might, and you’re certainly not alone in that thought. In fact, I think you share your opinion with the overwhelming majority of the world for the past couple of hundred years. And it’s certainly not without merit.
From a pragmatic utilitarian approach, we do have to work out whether the cost to achieve those benefits (and the compromises it raises) outweighs the benefits or not. Every single solution to the problem of how we get along with each other is flawed in some way or another, and we need to be properly pragmatic about navigating this.
And it’s absolutely not clear-cut that ethnically homogenous nation states are the correct answer to this, as far as I’m concerned (though I do appreciate my own biases within this argument, and that these are also weighed against significant compromises).
1. From an economic perspective, at least 2 of the G7 nations are not ethnically homogenous nation states (the USA and the UK). India is also an example of a country that is fairly rapidly proving itself as economically capable without being a nation-state. For all their ills (and there are plenty of ills), this demonstrates that not being a nation-state is not necessarily an impediment to economic prosperity.
2. Most of those ethnically homogenous nation states that exist in the world today got to be that way by killing or forcibly acculturating millions of people, which is a bad thing as far as I’m concerned.
3. The idea of a ‘nation state’ being the optimum mode for governance effectively bakes in risks around violent nationalism into society, which has all sorts of issues (see the current state of the USA and its newly-minted concept of ‘heritage Americans’ as but one example). These risks are much-reduced if the fundamental expectation of human societal organisation was one of multiculturalism.
4. Divvying up everyone into Balkans-like states leaves smaller or economically disadvantaged nations at the mercy of larger more prosperous ones. Now, this is also an issue within multicultural polities. However, it plays out in internal politics where the baseline assumption is that these people should be working together to make the country function (not that this always happens, but the baseline expectation is important). It is also mitigatable by producing collaboratives of smaller nations to resist the pressure of larger ones…which is pretty much exactly the idea of multiculturalism being proposed.
5. It papers over what I see as far more fundamental issues of governance (i.e. class relations) with an assumption that just because someone is of the same ethnic group as you they will have your interests at heart (despite, I might add, quite considerable evidence to the contrary). Personally, as a left-leaning white Englishman I would have more issue if our next Prime Minister is another English public school neoliberal asset-stripper than I would if they were a Welsh/Scottish/Northern Irish democratic socialist. Hell, I would even prefer it if they were a democratic socialist that wasn’t even in the least bit British at all. At least they would be more likely to do something that would meaningfully improve my life and the lives of my children.
Though I do appreciate that I hold those opinions as a member of a multi-cultural country that is, by and large, fairly functional (for all of the issues we have in the UK, I think it is folly to claim that we are not in the upper quartile of state functionality internationally). I genuinely don’t blame people for thinking ‘yeah this arrangement isn’t working all that well for us’ if they are not in that situation themselves.
I just think people should be a bit more utilitarian and a bit less idealistic about it.
“My problem (again, among many others) is that they created artificial borders grouping together ethnic groups that didn’t have jack in common with each other, and by doing so, short circuited the natural and organic process of nation-state formation that you got in Europe.”
Good God Almighty. Have you read any European history at all?
“the natural and organic process of nation-state formation that you got in Europe”
Them’s some fancy words partner, ’round here we call that “war”.
I think he’s upset that Britain denied Nigeria the chance to work out its own borders in the natural and organic way that resulted in the current borders of, say, Poland, or Germany, or the Netherlands.
You’d never get a European power creating artificial borders grouping together ethnic groups that have nothing in common with each other!
*the Habsburgs have entered the chat
To be fair, I don’t know if it is clear which is the better method to create a functional state. It is a position you could hold that all of the war used to sort out those borders would be worth it in the end. It’s not a position I personally hold (it really was a lot of war), but it is something you could argue for.
You could even construct an argument that not doing all of that war to sort out the borders results in more death due to ongoing ethnic tensions and separatist conflicts. I’ve not seen anything that seriously attempts to do this, but it is something that you could do. Of course, disentangling all of the extraneous variables would be a hell of a job, but again it’s something you could attempt.
Of course, I personally think this is all rather short-circuited by the fact that these borders could still be sorted out without resorting to lots and lots of war. If Nigeria wanted to negotiate with Ghana to trade territory to better align their jurisdictions to ethnic and geographic features…that is an avenue available to them without trying to murder each other first. It’s not an easy avenue…but neither is ‘let’s sort this all out like the Balkans did’.
Of course, this is all assuming that an ‘ethnically homogenous nation state’ is the optimum format that a state could take…and I am far from convinced that this is the case. They’re noble and just in theory, but the moment that theory hits reality they start throwing up all sorts of nasty little horrible issues. ‘What counts as being X nationality?’. ‘What do we do with the people living here who aren’t X nationality?’. ‘What do we do with the people of Y nationality who are the same ethnic group as us?’. ‘What happens if there’s one big nation state that starts bullying around lots of little nation states on its borders?’.
Being a Brit I rather prefer divorcing nationality from ethnicity. This has its own issues, of course, but I personally prefer the compromise on this side of the fence.
@Ynneadwraith,
Thanks for the kind comments! And I genuinely do understand your perspective too. Like I said, I definitely agree that both options have their costs and benefits. Nationalism and cosmopolitanism are both part of the human experience, they both probably always will be (and at least proto-nationalism and proto-cosmopolitanism have been around for a long time), and a humane world order is going to need to make space for both tendencies. Even if we come down in somewhat different places in particular situations, I do recognize that your arguments, preferences and sentiments have a lot of merit too, and need to be taken into account.
I guess I do also tend to have somewhat more of a “heroes vs. villains” way of viewing the world than some, and more of a preference to identify a clear side on which to cast blame, but as you rightly point out, that can definitely be taken overboard as well.
I feel like diferentiating between Protracted War and Protest is not as easy as it seems here, after all recent events in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal show a sufficiently strong protest can win by breaking the police line (and subsequently brutalizing the people on charge of the state, or making them flee before you get to the brutalizing part). Actually this does happen decently often and I don’t think these people are waging a protracted war in any sense of the word.
That said I am not sure how to categorize this either.
after all recent events in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal show a sufficiently strong protest can win by breaking the police line (and subsequently brutalizing the people on charge of the state, or making them flee before you get to the brutalizing part).
The outcome in Sri Lanka was especially interesting, since it ended up with a party that was previously on the political fringe (Communist, Sinhalese ultranationalist and former Maoist, though i think they’ve moderated somewhat on both the left-right and the nationalist axis in recent years) winning the next election. They went from 4% to 61% vote share, and even won a city that’s 99% Tamil, which is all very striking, at least to me, in light of past history.
That said, I think that’s more a testament to how badly the previous government screwed up, than anything else. The previous president was an organic-food enthusiast who banned chemical fertilizers, which worked out about as well as one would expect.
Bangladesh is interesting because it’s already become clear that the new government is, at the very least, going to be significantly worse for religious minorities (not just Hindus and Buddhists but also liberal/heretical Muslims) than the overthrown center-left government. I wonder if religious minorities and left-leaning people are going to start feeling that maybe the last government should have cracked down *much harder* on the student protesters. Sometimes you have to choose between secularism and democracy.
Tyranny of the majority is a serious risk in democracies. Enshrining rights in law helps, but you really need a culture to back that up.
That’s more a matter of will is it not? They were able to break the police lines because the police and the armed forces of the state, either did not have the will to escalate, or the state itself did not have the will to do so.
I think there’s a natural transition point here which Dr. Devereaux did not address because structurally he went “First, here is the difference between protracted guerilla warfare by a force that has an army in hiding and insurgency by a force that does not. Second, here is how an insurgency can achieve goals despite the lack of an army. Third, here is how a nonviolent force can accomplish essentially the same goals without firing a shot.”
So there was no specific moment in the text that was well suited to the question of “what happens if the nonviolent protests grow so large that the protestors suddenly realize that they do have sufficient numbers to literally or metaphorically storm the Bastille and take over the country?”
Just a quick point from a French person about “storming the Bastille”.
The people that stormed the Bastille never actually took over the country: the people that went into power after Bastille Day were, first, the deputies of the Tiers Etat, then several fractions of them or inspired by them (les Jacobins, les Montagnards, les Thermidoriens, le Directoire, etc.).
The working-class revolutionaries who stormed the Bastille, while being an important political force during the Revolutionary years, never actually went in power. They even had to face state repression *from the Republic* at some point…
This was a great post!
It’s worth pointing out that even when an insurgency fails, it can still deeply affect how a society functions going forward, sometimes in positive ways and sometimes lastingly.
Peru had a communist guerrilla uprising in the 1960s, involving both peasant land occupations and armed struggle against the government, inspired by the successful example of Cuba. The guerrillas failed and were crushed by the military, but in the process of crushing them, left wing officers within the military decided that the only way to combat communism was to adopt large elements of the communists’ agenda. So, in 1968 they staged a military coup and installed a “Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces”, which, although anticommunist as well as anticapitalist, carried out a number of significant reforms. Nationalization of banks, nationalization of major industries including fishing, mining, oil etc., expropriation of landlords and land redistribution, shifts from a pro-US to a neutralist foreign policy, etc.. Even in losing, the failed guerrilla insurgency helped push the country “forward” in some ways (by their lights).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Left_Movement_(Peru)
There are a lot of counterfactuals one could raise about the success of nonviolent resistance in “British India”. Would nonviolent protest had succeeded if it wasn’t for WWII? The war had severely strained Britain’s military and economy, and the two superpowers left standing after the war were both ideologically opposed to colonialism. And would nonviolent protest have “worked” if Britain in the late 1940s had been led by a government more like Portugal or South Africa (or, I guess, like Donald Trump today?) And for that matter, if the armed 1857 rebellion had happened 90 years later, and/or if it had been better managed and had had broader appeal to more people in the subcontinent, might it have succeeded then?
I imagine that WWII also strengthened the moral case for Indian independence. If people fight and bleed and die for your cause, basic morality obliges you to treat them with respect and gratitude.
Basic morality, and also your ability to get your remaining colonial possessions to contribute to the Empire in the future. Pacta servandum sunt and all that.
Didn’t work for French Indochina, where the Vietminh did fight for the Allies’ cause, but didn’t get independence afterward.
Also parts of the Indian Independence movement like Chandra Bose didn’t fight for the British cause.
AIUI public opinion in Britain in the first years of the war was evenly split between “India should be granted independence after war” and “India should be granted independence right now”. And of course, almost everyone in India was an Indian, including the overwhelming majority of the security forces.
This sounds like an ideal case for “nonviolent resistance”, which is what we should expect to see in the first classic large-scale example.
And yet — the interesting thing is that the Indian Army remained loyal to the Raj and fought well in theatres of war ranging from the Mideast to India and into Burma. The Japanese were unable to foment a rebellion among the Indian population or even to a significant degree among disaffected Indian POWs during the war.
So the key to get independence is to remain loyal to your colonial masters until they let you go peacefully.
Because the majority of the soldiers of the Indian Army and Indian civilians were not stupid?
Neither the Nazis nor Imperial Japan were at all subtle about their intentions. The Japanese had been occupying Korea and chunks of China for several years, with disastrous consequences for the locals. The Nazis had never tried to hide their attitude towards non-whites and non-Aryans. I’d expect a lot of Indians to be unhappy with British rule, but either of those alternatives would have been far, far worse.
The nazi racial theories gets a bit wonky when it comes to India. (even moreso later, see Savitri Devi)
@Arilou To be fair, they’re wonky from our perspective that seems to prioritise skin colour as the pre-eminent determiner of racial hierarchies. It seems that the Nazis had additional layers to this (as we do as well, but our layers are different).
This is more a comment on how pretty much all racial hierarchies are wonky in one way or another than it is about the Nazis somehow having a more sophisticated understanding. The whole lot is based on foundations of jelly and prejudice.
I think part of the reason the Japanese failed to foment rebellion among Indians was because it was already fairly obvious to anyone who was paying attention that the Japanese did not value Indian independence and would happily become masters just about as bad as the British.
@Simon Jester,
That said, i think domestic attitudes towards the Indian National Army are more….nuanced today than how you see most other Axis collaborators viewed. Subhas Chandra Bose’s efforts to side with the Axis didn’t actually get anywhere, but on the other hand there are plenty of statues of him (including one on the Chennai beach, hardly a right wing bastion) and as far as I know no one is attempting to “cancel” him.
@Hector: my understanding is that’s largely a result of the *postwar* treatment of him. As mentioned he didn’t exactly succeed during the actual war.
Also (and I admit my relative ignorance here), didn’t the success of Japan, a non-European country, against the British empire encourage the independence movement? AFAIK, the Japanese advance was only barely stopped in Burma.
“Parkinson’s Law”, which is very serious under a cover of being silly, makes a convincing argument that Indian independence was seen as inevitable by the British as long ago as 1911.
I can back this up from family history: a relative of mine was involved in the construction of New Delhi before the First World War, and there was a vigorous debate at the time over what style the new capital should be built in – basically, European classical, or traditional Indian. My relative favoured the latter, and wrote, in the Pioneer (an English-language Indian newspaper) “We all know that sooner or later India will become an independent country, and we have to ask ourselves: do we want to build a capital which the citizens of an independent India can be proud of, or a capital which will merely be a constant reminder of the days of British occupation?”
I’m not saying his views were universally held among his fellow Brits – but they clearly weren’t beyond the pale.
I do think there’s an argument to be made about other groups turning to violence even as some groups do non-violence might not always be damaging, although I think it is if you combine the two together. I’m thinking of the way in which you had Suffragists and Suffragettes in the UK, Malcolm X and MLK in the US, and Ghandi and various much smaller scale violent attacks on British control. Obviously it’s very hard to say exactly if the violent groups helped (many people at the time argued they were hurting the cause) but it is certainly possible. However I think it’s worth noting that the violence used by Malcolm X, the Suffragettes, and others like them, was far more limited and targeted than the kind used by the likes of the Taliban or ISIS, and I think that is an important difference. Defending yourselves with violence, or attacking legitimate military or political targets, is much less likely to create the same levels of backlash as attacking civilian groups just to create terror in the populace.
I also worry about political polarisation making non-violent protest less effective in some places, not to the same extent as the coup-proofing of certain dictatorships, but still making it much harder to get that emotional punch from seeing the violence enacted by the state, that in turn means people have to endure even more violence before things begin to change.
Also, I think some people who argue for violence are doing so because they do believe they could win in a fight with ICE or whatever similar group, and want to escalate the protests to protracted warfare or open revolution. I understand that desire, but what I would say to anyone with that mindset is simple. If you had the public support to violently remove ICE or even Trump himself, there simply wouldn’t have been the public will to elect and support them in the first place. This isn’t 10 years down the line when elections have just been banned and before that there were armed militia intimidating every polling place, this is not even 2 years after a platform of anti-immigrant violence won Trump a majority of the popular vote. Be realistic.
Lastly, I wanted to mention a quote from someone I can’t remember about non-violence “Non-violence is fundamentally the willingness to take a baseball bat to the head for what you believe in” which, yeah, think that is important to recognise, non-violence is not cowardly, it is incredibly brave.
I think it’s easy to overstate the distance between Malcolm X and MLK – both were allies and spokespeople in what was the same movement that used a strategy of nonviolence. More fiery and less restrained-appearing figures can still have a role in non-violent movements, as there is a certain advantage in internally signalling the readiness for some violence, namely that for self-defence when the opponent oversteps the line. This is strategically sound, since when the state or state-tolerated civilian actors is willing to use terrorism to discourage protesters, the message to potential new recruits that the protest movement is willing to protect them against that shores up their side’s Will to continue. Basically, that while the movement was about taking a baseball bat to the face, it would ensure that hit would happen in their terms, and that those who did not want to take a hit in any other moment didn’t have to. Rosa Parks for example agreed to becoming the inciting incident for the Montgomery Bus Boycotts only after being reassured by a Malcom X-like figure that he’d be on her front porch with a gun for the entire duration of the protest so that she wouldn’t have to stay awake in fear of dynamite through her own window.
The important part there is of course to ensure this messaging of potential violence for self-defense stays internally and doesn’t become the public face of the movement. And I would say that Macolm X was broadly successful in this. As a non-American, my history education focused solely on MLK, while Malcolm X was not even a footnote.
I feel non-violence is sometimes unhelpfully decontextualized. The suffragettes were widely perceived as non-violent because in a society where men routinely manslaughtered each other in drunk fights, some heckling and feathering was not going to register as violent. A movement that behaves exactly like the suffragettes today would probably register as violent.
Similarly, in a society where it was normal to have blood and ethnic feuds (if you manhandled an Italian, you were in trouble with all the Italians of your neighborhood), someone sitting on their porch with a gun was as meek as it could get. While it would arguably still be considered non-violent today, it’d raise some eyebrows for sure,
While it would arguably still be considered non-violent today, it’d raise some eyebrows for sure,
I think that really depends on which US state you’re talking about. The US is, famously, a quite pro-gun country by the standards of most of the world, and this is more the case in some regions than others.
I mean, the Suffragettes also had a firebomb campaign and threw an axe at the Prime Minister. I don’t think there’s a time you would ever call that non-violent in, and people at the time in the press, politicians, and the public all attacked them viciously for it.
I think it’s telling that the real sympathy for the Suffragettes ramped up when they started going on hunger strike and being force fed, especially for those arrested for much less agressive crimes, like breaking windows.
Very much this. Window-breaking and assault short of grievous harm were long-established forms of protest in Britain. Afghanistan was (and is) a violent society, where armed feuds and deadly confrontation with the government were more or less routine (I recall an Afghan acquaintance in the 70s telling me that when his wealthy family had refused a tax demand and called in the armed country cousins to back this up, the government had – unfairly! – deployed artillery and shelled the house).
Tolerance for violence varies markedly between societies. This very much affects the strategy of insurgents – the Taliban could use car-bombs but ISIS use of them provoked pushback, the VC and IRA were fairly careful to avoid mass casualty events, preferring assassination. This affects the amount of support needed to ‘use violence” in support of (or against) the regime. Half or one per cent is not enough if a large chunk of the population is violent daily.
Acceptance of regime violence also plays a part. Assad lasted as long as he did because the Alawi, Christian, Druze and a good part of the Sunni communities saw the alternatives as worse, the more so as the war went on. He was undone by victory. The Shah faced near total opposition in 1978/79 – his few attempts at a crackdown fizzled in the face of this, while the current regime has substantial if minority support.
Violence and non-violence have often been deployed in tandem. In the Irish Rebellion the IRA ran a campaign of civil disobedience in tandem with targeted raids on Unionist supporters and officials; Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela had uMkhonto weSizwe; Gandhi the Indian National Army (not often noted that Gandhi was to a considerable extent pushing on an open door – the British were always aware that ruling India against any substantial degree of Indian opposition was a non-starter. It was more timing and form that were in debate).
Rosa Parks for example agreed to becoming the inciting incident for the Montgomery Bus Boycotts only after being reassured by a Malcom X-like figure that he’d be on her front porch with a gun for the entire duration of the protest so that she wouldn’t have to stay awake in fear of dynamite through her own window.
I was previously unaware of that, but that’s a fascinating and powerful story, and one that I think should be better known.
I think that’s very true, and MLK and Malcolm X were a lot closer in ideology, especially towards the end of their lives, than they are sometimes presented as. And an interesting detail about Rosa Parks!
The Irish experience during 1916 thru 1922 might be instructive to examine. The Irish nationalists, frustrated by the Great War’s postponement of their efforts toward Home Rule, formed militias and launched the “Easter Rebellion” in 1916 that was a military effort to overthrow British rule in Ireland. It failed fairly spectacularly. Yet it inspired others, and the resulting crackdown by British authorities, and the execution of many Irish rebel leaders, gave impetus to further uprisings and pseudo-guerilla activity. That conflict serves as a useful example of how civil disobedience and open armed clashes can coincide to form a mass movement. The 1916 uprising was unpopular with most Irish citizens; but a few years later, as a result of heavy-handed British countermeasures and atrocities, the Irish guerillas and political figures achieved a victory in forcing Britain to the negotiation table.
The conflict, of course, never fully resolved but at least as of today has reached a mutual understanding of sorts and a cessation of violence.
Point of order; the Republican nationalists who organised and carried out the Easter Rising were unaffiliated with the Home Rule agitators, and indeed liable to try and achieve full independence through violence regardless of the successes of Home Rule.
The main connection they had was successful infiltration of militias that had formed prior to the Great War, during the interim period between a Home Rule act having been passed and the delay in implementation required by the weakened veto of the House of Lords (before being postponed indefinitely due to the war). Those militias intended to ensure that the British government lived up to the obligations of the act, and to fight against Unionist militias that had formed with the pledge to resist Home Rule by any means necessary.
Even then, volunteers pulled in to provide muscle for the Rising were a minority among the whole, albeit more prominent once Irish nationalist politics in general became more radicalised.
Eh. I see the duality as being useful to the “peaceful” guy.
“If you don’t do a deal with me, then *he’ll* take over and he’s much more difficult.”
Good cop/bad cop. It works in all sorts of situations.
And yes, it may involve some under the table coordination.
That poor old William, so many people are targeting him.
(sorry)
We forgive you, it’s hard to make good jokes after that many drinks.
Ok, slow guy at the table, Gonna need this one explaan.. expplan… made simpler.
Contemporary English mostly doesn’t capitalize Nouns. German (and 200+ years old English) does. English-first people writing in contemporary English, based on German sources (but not strictly translating), often carry over the capitalization of Nouns (or at least, the few most important Nouns) into the English text, making it look as though it was the name of a person or institution. Quick sample:
This looks as though some William/Will/Bill were the referent.
I have been in a state of active mental collapse since the 2024 election and admittedly have been avoiding most posts on your blog of a contemporary political nature to try and avoid anxiety attacks, but I steeled myself to read this one and cannot state how immensely I appreciate the rational, even-handed analysis placed in a historical and global context. Thank you very much.
Hang in there. We are all in this together and must “durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis.”
The discussion of Jim Crow (especially alongside Iran and Assadist Syria) raises the question of to what degree Jim Crow was sustained on the ideological support of the white majority, with its violence directed at the black minority (as opposed to Iran and Syria which as I understand it are mostly government and its security forces using fear and violence on everyone else); it would seem that it is a lot easier to whip up violence against a group the rest of the population sees as legitimate targets than to make a security force which will on command deploy mass violence against the population at large, without external support
(as opposed to Iran and Syria which as I understand it are mostly government and its security forces using fear and violence on everyone else)
Your understanding is incorrect. In both cases, there are broad swaths of the population, especially in rural areas, who hold religious conservative views and support the government, and its violence, against more secular minded people, mostly in the cities.
(and if you meant Syria before al-Qaeda, that government was very much sustained by the Alawite ethnic group and to a lesser degree other religious minorities and secular minded people, against said religious conservatives. Hence there being a civil war.)
That makes sense (although wasn’t a lot of Assad’s violence directed against cites? Or am I misunderstanding what you said?)
One other difference is that I don’t think Jim Crow had the same kind of centralized security forces to do the repression; lynchings were usually done by mob, with the local government letting it happen
One of the main advantages of a Klan robe is that you don’t have to take off your police uniform if your shift ends too late for you to get home and change before the lynching. This is not a joke, it is a thing that people in the Jim Crow South understood which in turn helped the terrorists go less challenged.
Yeah. In a lot of cases the core membership of the Klan was literally just “most of the powerful men in town and most of the cops, only they’re all wearing a burqa and giving each other silly titles like Grand High Imperial Wizard.” Much of the reason they were scary was that they literally were the same people who by daylight wielded state authority (and so could prevent accountability or investigation at the local level) and then by night acted with a total lack of accountability (and so could crush people without being sued or easily prosecuted by any hypothetical higher authority).
“Some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses”
it would seem that it is a lot easier to whip up violence against a group the rest of the population sees as legitimate targets than to make a security force which will on command deploy mass violence against the population at large, without external support
Leaving aside Iran and Syria, where i don’t really know enough to comment, I think you’re quite right in general. There are a lot of situations in which public opinion is going to think of state violence against protestors (especially if they’re from a widely disliked class, ideology, or ethnic group) as *totally legitimate*, and say “more of that, please”, in such a situation, nonviolent protest is going to be completely useless.
Yes. On the other hand, nonviolent protests can be surprisingly effective at shifting public opinion on subjects like this. So in edge cases, one may find a lot of “good riddance” people starting to walk smaller, and “this isn’t right” people being emboldened, until the standards shift.
@SimonJester,
Yea, i think that reflects the fact that the US was already a highly divided country along partisan lines in general and around immigration in particular. It’s not like either the GOP or immigration restrictionism are supermajority popular- the 2024 election was very close after all.
I wouldn’t say that. One of the thing we’ve seen with the current US political climate is that *people don’t like to see violence*.
Like the swings around immigration is particularly noteworthy: People support harsher immigration policies right up until they’re shown (directly) what these policies actually look like.
(there are ways for rgimes to counteract this effect, too)
“To be blunt: you know because no one has yet car-bombed an ICE or CBP squad or opened fire from an elevated window on an DHS patrol.”
This is true in Minneapolis, but there have been armed attacks on ICE facilities in the past year.
https://abcnews.com/US/video-shows-moment-gunfire-erupts-ice-facility-dallas/story?id=125947524
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Alvarado_ICE_facility_incident
Fortunately, everyone seems to have taken the hint.
This comparison makes me think that there is also a form of non-violence that works as a counterpart to a guerilla or positional/attritional war in a similar way to how non-violent protest is analyzed as the counterpart of terrorist insurgencies here: the strike, especially the general strike. A strike targets the capabilities of the enemy directly, and to do so effectively requires much more support, coordination, and consensus than a protest. And significantly more complicated logistics too, because the strikers need the funds to sustain themselves and their standard of living longer than the company/government can absorb the loss of their work.
This is why strikes are typically organized by unions, hence why independent unions and union members are often considered a primary target in any authoritarian regime (including those claiming to be on the “left wing” of the political spectrum)
” and anticipates a shift to positional, conventional warfare and thus eventual victory on the battlefield (however distance)
oops.
ITYM (however distant)
Thank you for this fantastic summary. I’m going to be referring to this every time someone complains about nonviolence “not working”. It can work in theory, it has worked in practice, and it IS working right now–it’s time to keep pushing, not resort to counterproductive violence.
generally bad to be doing aimless violence in the ICE context but I doubt too many people are going to hold it against that woman who tried to burn down a warehouse that was going to be leased for a concentration camp
From the east side of the Atlantic, this is interesting to read in a UK context in reference specifically to the group “Palestine Action”, who appear to be in the late stages of inflicting a very clear defeat on the UK government from a campaign of protest which included some sabotage actions but largely trended non-violent.
The key features there appear to be a wide base of popular support to the cause they are claiming affiliation with; combined with a draconian attempt at a state crackdown where vandalism of a military base was met by proscription as a terrorist organisation equal to Al Qaeda or IS. Since that appears wildly disproportionate, it seems to have had exactly the opposite effect of dissipating support for the group. Instead, the spectacle of elderly human rights campaigners being arrested by police for sitting in Parliament square holding a sign has been incredibly politically damaging, and yesterday it was ruled in the high court that their classification as a terrorist organisation was not legal.
It’s a very clear example of triggering state repression as a recruiting tactic, and winning the battle on the field of will instead of arms.
(However, it’s still unclear whether they will achieve their underlying stated aims – that’s a much higher bar to clear and looks unlikely to me at present)
> However, it’s still unclear whether they will achieve their underlying stated aims – that’s a much higher bar to clear and looks unlikely to me at present
Last month the UK government cancelled a £2bn procurement contract with Elbit systems. While Raytheon (who got the contract instead) is hardly an ethical company (is there even such a thing as an arms dealer that doesn’t thrive on selling weapons to parties who routinely engage in war crimes?), removing a link between the UK and the Israeli military-industrial complex is an aim Palestine Action had.
As another Brit, this has been very interesting (and heartening really) to watch unfold. Some interesting observations now that I think about it:
1. The use of elderly protesters is very smart. Not only are they protected from the financial difficulty of arrest by their cast-iron pensions (which the government would be politically suicidal to challenge), it also forces the police to be very gentle with their arrests or come across as ‘brutalising the elderly’. Slower rate of arrest, and more risk for the state.
2. The heavy-handedness of the policing has definitely helped their cause. People were being arrested for sitting down on the grass holding a white piece of card saying ‘I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action’. People were arrested for wearing ‘I support Plasticine Action’ t-shirts. People were arrested for holding blank sheets of paper. All very connected to the primary injustice: misuse of terror laws to silence protest.
3. Their arrested members were frequently being acquitted by juries. Supposedly unrelatedly, the government proposed restricting the right to trial by jury for sentences under 3 years to ‘reduce the backlog for courts’. We do have a court backlog, but this change has been estimated to save as little as 2% of court time, but would conveniently mean all of those protesters they’re arresting could be sentenced without a jury. Perhaps this was an independent initiative, but it’s been connected in the minds of a non-trivial chunk of the British populace.
4. The inciting incident for Palestine Actions’ proscription was their breaking into a military base to throw paint on planes that they suspected were being used to fly surveillance for the Israelis (turns out, they were). Even though this involved breaking and entering and criminal damage, a video of their arrest has surfaced which shows security staff assaulting them and chasing them around with an Indiana-Jones style whip (notable because it’s just a weird weapon for a security guard to be using, which helps delegitimise their use of violence). So even though the actions were criminal, many people have still seen this response as excessive.
5. The current (ostensibly centre-left but really nothing of the sort) government’s biggest electoral headache at the moment is the haemorrhaging of their left-leaning voter base to the Green Party (they have outright stated this as their biggest issue). I speak to a lot of new Greens. Maybe 40-50% or so state that they used to be life-long Labour voters, but the government’s ongoing support of genocide now means that they will never vote Labour in their lives again. This isn’t entirely the effect of Palestine Action’s work…but it’s certainly been a decent contribution.
I’d say they’re doing really rather well, all told.
I am now dead from alcohol poisoning.
Fascinating article, thanks as always. I’m trying to slot this framework into my own country (Ireland’s) history of protest, insurgency, and guerilla warfare. It kinda fits, if you file off a few edges here or there:
Exhibit 1: Daniel O’Connell and Catholic Emancipation in the 1820/30: famously non-violent, ultimately (albeit slowly) successful. But there were many powerful Catholics in Britain who supported this reform too. I don’t know about massive depression by the (British) state during that campaign.
Exhibit 2: Easter Rising 1916 and subsequent War of Independence. This was an unpopular, fringe indepence movement who carried out an act of violent open warfare. The heavy-handed response by the British authorities created support for the policial object, leading several years later to something in between a guerilla war and an insurgency. When the (Irish) rebels fought in the open (e.g. Battle of Custom House) they were defeated, but these were the “spectacles” which arguably brought the British to the negotiating table.
Exhibit 3: The Provisional IRA’s campaign against the British state in Northern Ireland from 1969-98. Very much an insurgency by this framework. Grew out of a non-violent US-inspired civil rights movement for Catholics. The big debate to this day is whether the IRA’s bombing and killing (particularly its self-styled “spectaculars” in British cities in the 1990s) either a) Helped the movement by bringing the British to the negotiating table and agreeing to a compromise which entailed some wins for the nationalist side or b) Hindered the movement by setting back a political settlement by years or decades. I think, unfortunately, that the former is more likely the case, which has all kinds of uncomfortable implications.
Ah I see we had mostly the same thought, only a few minutes apart. Since you are from Ireland you are more than welcome to correct any errors on my part.
Exhibit one seems to me to be have happened pretty shortly after the long effort against Napoleon was finally over. I wonder about exhaustion there.
1916? Something else was occupying most of British attention to the east at the time. They may have been heavy-handed on the theory that they could then get back to it.
1969-1998. There was a fair bit of support from the US for “non-violent” action, but I think there was also a fair bit of money flowing from some areas in the US for deniable violent action too. We may only have seen the non-classified bit, in the back room it’s possible the Brits asked the US to clamp down and were denied. Or effectively so.
“There was a fair bit of support from the US for “non-violent” action, but I think there was also a fair bit of money flowing from some areas in the US for deniable violent action too.”
That gets complicated. Long story short, to my understanding, money kept going to groups like NORAID until the Provos got linked to various Marxist groups and the KGB, which significantly dampened Irish-American enthusiasm for 26 and 6 will always equal 1.
The US (like Libya) was important to the IRA as a source of weapons, but less so as a source of funds – most IRA funding always came from extortion and organised crime in Northern Ireland and the Republic.
The Custom House aspect is interesting to me in light of some of what has been brought up in this article. As far as I understand, that was the move that broke the premise of “recruit faster than you take losses”; too many were killed or captured in that action, and it brought the IRA to the verge of collapse. Had the British held out, they may have been able to bring them to heel.
But maybe not. So much good will and public support had been lost by then.
Incidentally, one wonders what might have happened had Lloyd George been willing to use the army against the IRA, rather than insist on them being a policing matter.
In the literature Michael Collins campaign is usually considered one of the more successful examples of an insurgency/terrorist campaign (as opposed to guerilla warfare) Ireland really is one of the prototypes for this kind of thing.
I feel a discussion of the Irish nationalists during the Troubles is lacking to bridge that gap between the two.
The IRA was obviously violent. It commited violence against civilian targets, generally with the intent of avoiding civilian deaths but it failed repeatedly (and sometimes they did not even bother phoning in, if they had a target they expected to kill. Examples invlude the assassination of Mountbatten (1979) while he was with his family, including young grandchildren, and a 15 yo employee, which kille two children, or the Brighton Hotel Bombing (1984), targeting the conservative party and Thatcher more specifically, which killed or grievously harmed the wives of several prominent cobservatives who were not themselves political leaders). Nevertheless, the members of the IRA, and Irish nationalists in particular, were not unafraid of bringing state violence upon themselves. The hunger strike campaign in 1981 was a very high profile event that was using the purest form of nonviolent tactic, by having protesters die while in the supposed car of the state.
And in the end, Sinn Féin and the IRA mostly won. They didn’t get Irish reunification, but they obtained significant rights for the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement could obviously not have been reached by armed insurgency only, but it’s not clear that non-violent tactics alone would have worked against the British colonizers and loyalist forces either, given that massacred of peaceful protesters in the 1970s like the Bloody Sunday (1972) did not move British public opinion much.
Now I am not Irish nor British, my knowledge of the Irish nationalist movement is clearly lacking. Nevertheless I think a discussion of a clear “middle ground” between violent insurgency against a distant imperial power where both sides care very little for the civilian population (such as the Taliban) and disciplined nonviolent protests against the state perceived as legitimately elected by the vast majority of the community (such as the anti-ICE protests) would be a useful follow-up.
If the IRA’s goal was a united Ireland, and Britains was to prevent that, I’m not sure that Ulster remaining in the UK is really “the IRA mostly won”. What would it have looked like if the IRA had mostly lost?
We might also remember things like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsmill_massacre.
A majority of the actual people in Ulster were protestants who were seen by the Provisional IRA (and themselves) as its enemies. This is a nationalist insurgency in which most of the people at stake are members of the *wrong nation*.
Which is not to say I have a lot of sympathy with the other violent insurgents around then:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reavey_and_O%27Dowd_killings
I think we might draw an analogy with the American Civil Rights movement, as a three-sided conflict with two local antagonists and the central power in a “swing” role. Who does it support, and why?
“And in the end, Sinn Féin and the IRA mostly won. They didn’t get Irish reunification, but they obtained significant rights for the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland.”
If the IRA had mostly lost, what would the results have looked like?
As I understand it, the IRA believe that they prevented an ethnic cleansing. Topical.
The big one would be no power-sharing formula in the NI Assembly. Without that Sinn Fein would have been stuck in permanent opposition (subject to any Major Occurrences).
That, together with the border poll provision, was the IRA’s big, structural victory, and it explains a lot of NI politics. The Unionists can win a dozen electoral majorities back-to-back and they’ll still be required to share power. The Nationalists only have to get 50%+1 twice (an assembly election and a referendum) and they can banish their enemies to oblivion.
They also need to persuade the Republic of Ireland to accept re-unification.
While I’m pretty sure the RoI has very good reasons to want to avoid having its own East Germany sewn onto it, I think the romantic notion of the unified island of Ireland is so deeply rooted in the Irish people’s political consciousness that it would be borderline political suicide to try and put off a referrendum that would surely return a majority in favour.
WJ – it is easy to underestimate the sheer financial burden that Northern Ireland would represent to the Republic. NI is very large in proportion, 2 million vs 5.3 million in ROI – so your comparison of German reunification is appropriate. Even the best defences of reunification tend to rely on heroic assumptions about economic growth in Northern Ireland suddenly quadrupling from its current lacklustre levels, and indeed outstripping growth in the Republic.
My first hand observation of most modern Irish people is that they’re typically extremely ambivalent about the idea of a united Ireland. Maybe they pay lip service to the aspiration of it, but are in no particular hurry for it to be fulfilled, regardless of the political situation in the North. I imagine that this gulf will only widen as the generations pass.
” The Nationalists only have to get 50%+1 twice (an assembly election and a referendum) and they can banish their enemies to oblivion.”
Presumably if, in a united Ireland, the Unionists in former Northern Ireland were to get a majority in that region and demand a referendum on reunion with the UK, this would promptly be granted by Dublin.
I think that would be a presumption, especially depending on who is in power. Simply because there are actually fairly solid cons from the perspectives of the people in power in the Republic.
The two ones I can think of are that the NI economy would place a significant burden on the Republic, and that the politics of Northern Ireland typically seem to lean fairly solidly towards the conservative right of the political spectrum and would likely disrupt the current position of politics in the Republic. These are both reasons that someone in power in the Republic might hesitate (especially if their party stands to lose out due to that shift in voter preferences).
Note that ‘hesitate’ does not mean ‘would refuse’. But it is a presumption to assume that it would just sail through.
The effect on ROI politics of unification is an interesting question and I’m by no means an expert on ROI politics, but I’m not sure about this:
“the politics of Northern Ireland typically seem to lean fairly solidly towards the conservative right of the political spectrum and would likely disrupt the current position of politics in the Republic.”
The last ROI parliamentary elections had Fianna Fail with 22% of the popular vote, Sinn Fein 24%, Fine Gael 21%, Social Democrats 5% and Labour 5%. In NI at the last Assembly election it was Sinn Fein 29%, DUP 21%, Alliance 14%, UUP 11%, SDLP 9%.
What that gives us, very loosely, is a right-ish bloc in ROI (FF, FG) with 43% and a left-ish bloc (SF, SD, Lab) with 34%. In NI meanwhile you have 38% left-ish (SF, SDLP) and 32% right-ish (DUP, UUP) – the Alliance is pretty centre-ish.
It’s not obvious from that that NI politics are more conservative than ROI politics, but of course a huge amount depends on two things: whether you agree with me about the leftieness or rightieness of the various parties, and whether you think that voting patterns on either side of the border would survive reunification unchanged.
Yeah agreed. I probably don’t have enough of a solid grasp of the electoral politics of the two to be making any informed decisions on this either. Especially considering that the overtone window of what counts as ‘right’ and what counts as ‘left’ does tend to vary considerably from country to country. I’ve no idea if a Northern Irish ‘centre’ is more like a Republican ‘conservative’ or not.
I was more raising the point that it’s likely that none of it is as straight-forwards as you think. Nothing political ever really is (and pretty much everything is political).
The mainstream parties of Ireland are fairly liberal in terms of social policy. Fianna Fail and Fine Gael are both “conservative” insofar as they think businesses and landlords are good things that should be kind of left to their own devices, but are otherwise fairly different from the standard of conservative politics found in most parts of the world. Sinn Fein is left wing in terms of being more cynical of capitalism, but still not quite to the extent of full on socialism; in any case, how they would translate their rhetoric into actual policy remains as yet untested.
The distribution of voting in Ireland should be recognised in terms of a populace that is kind of fed up with how the two major parties have kind of made a mess of balancing maintaining national prosperity with looking out for the common citizen (producing just enough people radicalised a bit in Sinn Fein’s direction), while not quite ready to embrace the party that still has an association with terrorist groups.
Add to this the complications of how every voting district elects multiple representatives, how our proportional representation works, and how much parliamentary reps are more advocates for local issues than things like local councils are. From that, a casual outside observer should not be too confident in what they can infer from a cursory look at the distribution of seats, especially with regards to the hypothetical injection of Northern politics.
That was the impression I had of RoI politics. Meanwhile the DUP and UUP in Northern Ireland are perpetually allying themselves with the Tories in the UK (and tend to do pretty well in elections).
Not that this necessarily says much about NI total votership allegiances. It is First Past the Post after all. But my high level understanding of NI politics is that it’s significantly to the right of pretty much anything in RoI politics. Especially among the mainstream.
“Not that this necessarily says much about NI total votership allegiances. It is First Past the Post after all.”
The Northern Ireland Assembly does not operate a first past the post system.
I suspect there is a key difference between operating against your own government vs an external one which plays into this. In center of gravity terms, operating against an external power requires you to find a way to make your actions impact their political support _on their home soil_, and a lot of the non-violent actions simply don’t have the range to do that. You can have as many sit-ins in Ireland as you like, but you’re unlikely to create any meaningful pressure in Westminster by doing so.
“And in the end, Sinn Féin and the IRA mostly won. They didn’t get Irish reunification, but they obtained significant rights for the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland.”
Yes, so they did not achieve the thing that was the main objective of their campaign. Northern Ireland is still part of the UK. In fact they even lost ground on that – the constitution of the Republic no longer includes a claim to the territory of the whole island of Ireland.
My understanding has always been that the british government was always a lot less attached to Northern Ireland than anyhting else. they were largely kept invovled by the protestants *in* northern Ireland. Hence the actual british public wasn’t really the right target; They weren’t that interested in the first place.
Learning from this post, I am nonviolently protesting with the political objective that you do a piece on color revolutions, and the silly intellectual framework that Putin et. al. have constructed around the theory that they were a CIA psyop. (And, by extension, how easy they believe such revolutions are to foment.)
Seconded!
I think Dr. Devereaux might find it difficult to do the research required to feel like he had an authoritative position from which to discuss what Putin believes, in this case.
Great essay as usual. I’d quibble that even conventional war involves a lot of “violence as messaging” and attacks on will — “total war” to destruction is, as Clausewitz said, an ideal type and in reality a lot of military victories are won more by disrupting and demoralizing the enemy force, which in turn erodes the will of the political active class to continue the war.
> some disruption is necessary to attract attention and a response by the state.
In the Scottish independence movement, mostly neither side was using violence, or even being particularly disruptive.
A large protest can be a widely seen spectacle, even when there is no violence or disruption.
The theory of victory here is that large protests, full of signs, slogans and fliers, attract the attention and support of the on-the-fence voter by attracting attention to the cause, spreading information, and by showing the cause has large amounts of support.
Yes, this strategy can have success in an open society and an unimpaired electoral system. The Scottish nationalists have no need for confrontational tactics; the existing parliamentary system allows for the will of the people to be fully expressed and legitimized through the ballot box.
Plus, the Scots are in no ways facing a similar situation as Northern Ireland/Ulster.
The leading pro-independance party has been the government in Scotland for nearly 20 years.
The aim of Scottish independence campaigners has (to the best of my knowledge) largely not been to make the British state “quit Scotland” but rather to operate within the normal frame of devolved politics under the expectation that if they can successfully hold a referrendum on independence and prove the majority of Scots support it, the British state will respect that.
Their actions to this end are less so protests and more rallies, as you point out they’re not meant to be disruptive. One might conclude that this is a viable tactic so long as the British state doesn’t take “prove support for a referrendum and then hold one and win it” off the table as a tactic and force them to change their “theory of victory”.
“eventual victory on the battlefield (however distance)”
-> however distant
“unpredictable human with their emotions”
-> humans
You mention that major “spectacular attacks” on the part of COIN forces are often counter-productive, but some COIN forces have used collective reprisals (essentially a form of “spectacular attack”) as a deliberate strategy (I’m thinking in particular of the British during the 1930s Palestinian revolt). And sometimes it works…and sometimes it backfires horribly.
I’m wondering if anyone’s done analysis on when, and why, such tactics work.
I think it makes sense to decompose Will into a) Anger – how pissed off you are and b) Hope – how likely the eventual victory is. Spectacular attacks increase anger and reduce hope, but the outcome depends on the ratio.
As in any other pursuit, you need to be systematic. One-off reprisals won’t do. Modern states mostly don’t reach that level of violence, for various reasons. Which is good news mostly.
I’m wondering what you make of the argument that non-violent movements in part rely on the implicit threat that, if their goals can’t be achieved by non-violence, some of their members will turn to violence? (i.e. https://musaalgharbi.com/2015/05/02/social-movement-requires-force/)
It would seem to go against your argument that “mixing” violent and non-violent tactics is necessarily a bad idea.
I can’t answer on behalf of our host, of course, but I wonder if it would be useful to distinguish between violence and force. Nonviolent actions can nonetheless be forceful.
The Clausewitzian objective of war, if I may oversimplify, is to inflict suffering (in the form of direct physical losses, emotional pain of terror/fear, weakening legitimacy or political support, investment of valuable resources, etc etc) on the enemy until they decide that giving you what you want is easier than continuing to suffer.
If you have nonviolent means of making the enemy suffer (to use an example from the article itself, disrupting business during holiday season by sit-in protests), that is real force, with real coercive power. The suffering you inflict is not made lesser by being nonviolent.
And if you have more ability to sustain a nonviolent struggle beyond the tolerance of your enemy than you have the ability to do the same in violent struggle (for example, because your moral superiority draws down your enemy’s support and bolsters your own), then nonviolence is the superior approach.
That would seem to be correct to me, but then I think I have priors that are substantially less squeamish about violence in support of good cause than our host. Showing, even if not on purpose as I don’t believe that many peaceful protest movements deliberately set out to incite riots, that violent consequences can be visited on agents of the state can both raise the Will of your own movement and lower that of the other side. Even Gandhi admitted that if they’d felt it would be more successful, a violent revolt against the British would have been in the offing. “We could lash out violently if things continue to get worse but we are chosing not to” is a better way to maintain the will of a protest movement than “There’s no hope of victory unless we garner sympathy from the people with actual power” even if the latter happens to be true.
“By contrast, the administration is fundamentally caught on the horns of a dilemma.”
I wonder what their Theory of Victory is. How is occupying this one city in Minnesota meant to deliver victory in the midterm elections, or after the next Presidential election?
The entire business and media elite of the country falling over themselves to prostrate themselves before the New Order, and then they do this. What’s the point?
It’s clear by now that the strategy for these occupations is to *create* “Antifa,” the violent (currently imaginary) terrorist organization that Administration figures are always fearmongering about. The poor training and poor preparedness of deployed ICE agents is a feature, and the insertion of conservative social media influencers into the chaotic confrontations is also strategic. Trump is a fascist, he therefore wants people to die on his behalf and then instrumentalize their deaths in propaganda; longer-term goals are a problem for his future self and will be contemplated then.
I’d quibble here only with you called ICE agents “poorly trained”, the man who shot Renee Good has been working for ICE since before Trump 1. They’re not poorly trained by the standards of what the organisation is meant to do, it’s just that what they’re meant to do is employ fascistic terror tactics to disappear people quietly. They’ve just been told to drop the “quietly” part and so have come under much more intense scrunity, which leads to them visiting the usual amount of violence on people they’re not “supposed” to do it to.
The Obama years saw mass deportations carried out by these goons and mainstream society mostly didn’t give a damn, because it was done quietly. They’re perfectly adequetely trained to do exactly what it is they’re doing, but what they’re doing turns out to be very unpopular when you shine some light on it.
“*create* “Antifa,” the violent (currently imaginary)”
You are entitled to your opinion about Trump’s goals. You are not entitled to your own facts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(United_States)
Now, if you want to argue that it isn’t some kind of vast left-wing conspiracy to violently overthrow America and install a Communist dictatorship, sure, yeah. But denying that it exists is like the people trying to claim that the “alt-right” doesn’t exist–anyone who’s aware of what’s going on and isn’t already on your side is goig to conclude that you’re trying to snow them.
I assure you I am entirely aware of Anti-Racist Action and its descendant organizations; that is why I made the distinction of saying that the Antifa they want to create is the currently imaginary one, because they are not trying to create something that already exists. There is no nationally-scoped Leftist terror institution organized in secret cells that uses the name “Antifa” on their formal 501 (c-terrorist) paperwork, which is what the clause, “that Administration figures are always fearmongering about” is about.
The conservatives have dreamed up an enemy that solves all of their problems (they think) and now they want that dream to exist in real life so that they can use it to justify building a 1000-year kingdom.
Duly noted, you’re as delusional as they are, carry on.
@60guilders
Are you calling Endymionologist because they believe that an organized national violent movement called “Antifa” does not exist? Or because they believe that the Trump administration desires to create such a movement and to use its existence as a pretext to establish a more autocratic system of rule in the United States?
The problem is that while there are plenty of people who will describe themselves as “antifa,” because the term literally means “opposed to fascism” and no more and no less… There is no structure of Antifa. There is no high council, there is no one issuing orders, there is no grand anti-American plot.
And yet it is very clear that Trump administration leadership figures and the right-wing media are trying very hard to sell us, and to sell each other, on the idea that such a grand anti-American plot exists and that there is a “terrorist organization” called “Antifa.”
Which is frankly absurd, because the people who identify as Antifa are, on the whole, neither terrorists nor organized.
Pretty much the first thing you read in the wiki article you linked describes Antifa as ‘a highly decentralized array of autonomous groups’. It also describes them as primarily peaceful, though with some of those ‘highly decentralised autonomous groups’ utilising more violent methods.
In what way does that fit the description the Trump administration is using for Antifa as being ‘an organised primarily violent internal insurgency group’?
Antifa exists yes. The vision of Antifa that the Trump administration has cooked up…does not fit that reality.
Way to cut off that quote before it got to the words “terrorist organisation”. Don’t see much reference to that in the Wikipedia page.
Agreed. At least in the immediate term, something like provoking an overreaction from the protesting side sufficient enough to call a national emergency and postpone the midterm elections seems plausible.
Their theory of victory is that it is intuitive that a would-be tyrannos and a few cudgel-wielding thugs can take over a Greek polis of a few thousand voters. Perhaps they have to beat a few outspoken opponents in the process. Since this is intuitive (and indeed historically possible), they need not trouble themselves with “sitting down” and working out whether it can be scaled up to an industrial society of a third-of-a-billion people. Hey, it already worked on the biz/media elite, now there are only some disorganized polloi remaining in opposition; if they make an example of one group, the others will see that they can’t individually win and they will give up.
Compare this to the current Secretary of Ares. He would feel at home leading a few hundred hoplites*, telling them to do undifferentiated physical exercise, and hyping up morale so they can win battles “at the first onset”. Unfortunately for America, he actively spurns Pallas Athene and her domains such as strategy, logistics, manufacturing, and procurement, even though these are rather more important nowadays.
*: I’m ignoring the cultural differences, from the goat-sacrificing through the gayness to the only-drinking-wine-diluted, here.
I think we are allowed to diagnose this administration with a lack of strategy and no clear Theory of Victory, but just grievance-based emotive actions that serve no purpose beyond gratification over seeing their enemies brutalised.
They don’t have a theory of victory. Trump is delusional, he’s an old man whose brain is melting out, and his supporters are puppets, who care only about staying in the circle of trust until such time as Trump dies, when they can engage in the struggle for actual power…as well as personally enriching themselves.
I feel it’s hard to overstate what a rupture the Trump regime is from most Nation States. It feels a lot like the Vandals invaded and are robbing the place, rather than a national regime change.
“To pull this all together, both violent insurgencies and non-violent protests have the same overall ‘theory of action’ – unable to defeat the armed forces of the state, they aim to instead defeat the state by striking at its popular base of support (at ‘will’ in the Clausewitzian sense).”
I am inclined to see this as an attack on the cohesion of an enemy coalition. And indeed almost all acts of war and politics can be seen as such. The romantic way of doing this, beloved of Hollywood and fiction generally, is to heroically attack their centre of mass, and gloriously slaughter the heathen supporters of the Cause of Evil. But it is generally a lot more productive to subvert the other lot and persuade their more weakly-attached members to defect, or at least desert.
The distinction between insurgents and non-violent protestors is not always helpful, especially since you include an efficiency argument here, with the latter presented as more successful as the former. For one, movements might include both violent and non-violent actors. 1978 Iran, with its mass protests and armed guerillas, is a good example. Then, many movements turned to armed struggle when the regime makes peaceful opposition impossible, like in Assad’s Syria.
PS: A note on semantics: You start by saying you will avoid using the term “terrorism” and point out the COIN bias of relevant bibliography. But you use “terror” aplenty, and always from a COIN perspective (e.g. it’s always insurgents who commit terror, never conventional forces; insurgents are uncaring of civilian victims, conventional armies only target civilians by mistake etc).
Since our host is too kind to point out your inaccuracy, I shall.
First, Dr Devereaux makes it clear that he is using “terror” as a term of art: “the targeting of the defenseless for the purpose of the ‘propaganda of the deed'”. This definition clearly leaves open the political position of the perpetrator.
He then describes the bombing of the house of Z. Alexander Looby (by white supremacists) as an “act of terroristic violence”. He also points out that “Jim Crow segregation in the American South was sustained by terroristic violence against African-American communities” and drives the point home with some 19th-century history: “Establishing the Jim Crow regime in the American South required more than a decade of terror and repression”.
Not exactly “it’s always insurgents who commit terror”, I would say.
Not sure what the “:inaccuracy” I am accused of is. My issue with the approach and the terms used is not the willingness to tackle state overreach within the US but the presentation of violence employed abroad.
Is blowing up village weddings in Afghanistan or bombing Fallujah with phosphorus rounds a problem cause by the excess of firepower? Or is this as much “propaganda of the deed” as anything else?
–
There is a point that even things you do for other purposes still have the *effects* of a “Deed”, both positive and negative and that US military forces were largely ignoring this. But no, by and large US forces seem to have tried to actually destroy what they percieved as their enemies.
they had successfully quelled a major uprising in 1857 (and smaller efforts in 1909 and 1915 had
There were also two failed mutinies in 1806 (at Vellore) and 1824 (at Barrackpur), both of which, like the 1857 rebellion, were triggered at least in part by British insensitivity to religious/cultural concerns. You would think the British establishment would have learned from that, but apparently not.
If you had to advise the DHS leadership, how would you propose they handle the resistance to immigration enforcement?
Take like half the money they gave ICE, spend it on lawyers, and do the boring stuff they need to do to legally deport people. Get judicial warrants, stop demanding people’s papers in the streets, process asylum claims like you’re supposed to, stop racial profiling, etc. Then when people show up to protest, you can reasonably say “we are following the law by deporting this person, and the protesters are breaking the law when they try to stop us.” Currently the situation is reversed – ICE is breaking the law and the protesters are generally within their first amendment rights, and that means that (1) it’s really obvious to the average voter who’s in the wrong, and (2) the courts are constantly telling them to stop what they’re doing.
But that would be boring and wouldn’t let the DHS fulfill their fantasies of brutalizing minorities with paramilitary troops, so they aren’t going to do that.
Congratulations, you’ve explained what ICE is mostly doing everywhere but Minneapolis. A+ for reinventing the wheel.
That is…not my understanding of how ICE is operating elsewhere in the USA.
That’s on you.
Sorry, but ICE is mostly operating by the book (though not as delicately as people who don’t actually want immigration laws to be enforced say they want them to), and, wonder of wonders, is still picking up lots of people, because it turns out there’s a lot of folks here illegally and you don’t have to operate dramatically to get the job done.
Is it though?
Admittedly I am somewhat distant to the problem. But from an outside perspective, even I can pick up that ICE is behaving in a similar way to Minneapolis in both Los Angeles and New York.
That’s the trouble with the modern world of media. People can literally film this stuff happening and transmit it around the world. It becomes more difficult to hide behind plausible deniabilities like ‘oh, this is just happening in that one place, everywhere else is fine’.
Is ICE using administrative warrants to enter houses outside of Minneapolis?
Except that ICE is FLAGRANTLY ignoring court orders in multiple other states. Texas is a notable example, where courts have issues orders for the release of illegally detained citizens (including not a few who’s families have been here for generations) and ICE simply flat-out refused to do it. To the point where high-ranking ICE officials are being held in contempt of court for refusal to follow court orders.
The most chilling statement out of all this, to my mind, is the reminder by the courts to ICE that the courts are not part of the executive branch. These refusals to obey court orders and other actions against the courts–and remember, this is occurring in multiple states–are very thinly veiled attempts to undermine the division of power and the system of checks and balances the US political system is built on.
There’s also the fact that the raids are concentrated in areas where Trump faces the most political opposition. Notably this does not track with areas where illegal immigration is a serious problem. I’m not going to say it isn’t–I’ve had enough issues with cartels out of Mexico, on American soil, to know that not all illegal immigrants are saints (I’ve also worked on large construction projects in the Southwest, so I’ve worked with illegal immigrants who are just like me, working hard to support their family). But….well, there’s just not a lot of cartel operations in Minneapolis.
This is, of course, leaving aside the fact that the organization is systematically covering up murders–and I hold ALL extra-judicial killing of American citizens or residents by police as murder, unless the suspect is actively shooting at the cop at the time (and even there, cops should be held to MUCH higher standards than they are). Remember, the authority ICE has is delegated by we the people, through our duly elected legislature and executives; ultimately sovereignty rests on us citizens. Any organization that protects its members from the consequences of murdering citizens is BY DEFINITION not operating “by the book”; they are, in fact, undermining the book. All the petty crap where they do follow the rules is nothing but a smoke screen. (This is a view I’ve held for a long, long time. Cops hate it, but I’ve yet to hear any arguments other than “It makes my job hard”, which means they’re afraid of accountability, and “It puts me in danger”, which means they aren’t in the right line of work.)
This is also ignoring the torture and other problematic behaviors of ICE. In some cases the MAJORITY of detainees were illegally detained (see LegalEagle on YouTube for through documentation, though the same information can be found elsewhere, including court records). Torture is not part of the playbook in the US legal system.
An organization that is systematically ignoring court orders and violating fundamental principles of our legal system IS NOT operating “by the book”. Some members may be, but the organization as a whole clearly is not.
Thanks. That’s not exactly what I had in mind. Assume that their job *is* snatching random sufficiently brown people and detaining them until prove they are US citizens. How should the DHS run the equivalent of COIN operations against mostly peaceful protestors who don’t like that? If they find a Laurie Pritchett of their own, what is their path to victory?
I think even with that framing, “actually follow the law” would be good advice. Like, it helps if you can respond to accusations of “look at ICE abducting people” with “a judge specifically gave us permission to kick in this guy’s door.”
It would still be unpopular, but you would be able to ignore a large majority of protesters, instead of needing to explain yourself in court day after day to increasingly annoyed judges.
Now, you see, they’re a little trapped by this. I don’t particularly think their voter base (or, rather, the voter base of their political leaders) actually cares about the number of immigrants in the country. They care about seeing those immigrants being brutalised. ‘Put in their place’, if you will.
You can see this reflected in UK politics, which I know a little better. Reform UK (our most popular Trumpian wannabes) bang on and on about mass immigration. When presented with the fact that immigration has precipitously fallen, the narrative does not change. Whatsmore, the overwhelming majority of the anti-migrant support stems from places in the country with very few migrants at all.
This has been true in the US as well. Undocumented immigration to the US has been in the decline since the 1990s, especially from Mexico and further south. Yet this has not stopped the moral panic about the supposed waves of illegal immigrants (coded as brown and poor) from escalating. This is why ICE has had to target legal immigrants (or legal immigrants made illegal by policy shenanigans.)
That is…certainly an opinion. One not backed by facts, considering that in 1990 it’s estimated that there were about 3.5 million illegal immigrants in the US and now there’s over 10 million, according to the notoriously racist and classist right-wingers over at Pew.
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/08/21/u-s-unauthorized-immigrant-population-reached-a-record-14-million-in-2023/
To 60Guilders:
“The increase from 2021 to 2023 was driven primarily by growth in the number of unauthorized immigrants who were living in the U.S. with some protections from deportation, such as immigrants paroled into the country and asylum seekers. About 6 million immigrants without full legal status had some protection from deportation in 2023, up from 2.7 million in 2021. In 2007, when the total unauthorized immigrant population was at its previous high (12.2 million), about 500,000 had some protection from deportation.”
So no, they can’t legally deport all the immigrants they cry about, because those people actually have, in theory, legal protections, that are simply being ignored at the moment.
@60guilders: The rate of immigration can decline without number of individuals declining. Rate is X/time–in this case, immigration over time. As time increases, the total number increases. At a slower rate, but you’ll still see an increase.
Think of it like a car. If the speed–that is, distance over time–declines, I still end up further away from where I started each subsequent minute. Hitting the breaks doesn’t move my car backwards!
Immigration has some complexities as people leave, or become citizens (and thus are no longer illegally in the USA), or die. There are also some really complex political issues, such as how to deal with Cuban immigrants (for a while they were illegal if they were caught on the boat, but legal if they made it to shore). However, immigration numbers, even as they reduce, still are significantly higher than attrition. Thus, like with the car, as rates decline, as long as the rate in exceeds the rate of attrition, the number will still grow.
I hope this explains the complex math involved in this discussion, and clears up your confusion. As a general rule–in math and science–focus more on the units than the numbers. In this case, you got your units confused.
The US’s population of illegal immigrants has increased because the US immigration system has been deliberately sabotaged to prevent people from obtaining citizenship or permanently legal status in a reasonable amount of time.
60guilders’ argument is like saying “the rate at which water is flowing into the bathtub through the faucet cannot possibly have decreased, because there’s more water in the bathtub than there used to be! But the counterpoint is “yes, well, SOMEONE decided to stick a cork in the bathtub drain, so the bathtub is filling up even though the flow of water into the tub has slowed down.”
“When presented with the fact that immigration has precipitously fallen, the narrative does not change.”
The number of people immigrating has fallen recently. The number of immigrants in the country has not. If what motivates someone is *the number of immigrants in the country” their opinions will not necessarily change.
This, by and large, is not how the argument is put forth in British political discourse. Broadly the argument is that the country is ‘full’ and should stop accepting new people in, but in an effort to assure people they are ‘not racist’ they say they’re broadly ok with the people who are already here.
Of course, I’m open to there being a plurality of opinions on the right. I’m also open to the idea that they are lying about their motivations to appear more reasonable to the rest of the population.
However, you then bump into the issue that the hotspots of this sort of anti-migrant sentiment is from places that have the lowest proportion of non white-British people living there (e.g. places like Norfolk).
So you get into the idea that this sort of sentiment is often (but not always) driven by the idea that there are too many immigrants in the country, divorced from actual lived experience of the people holding that opinion. To make it transparently clear, I have much less time for decisions being made on unrooted perception rather than reality. Especially in a world where it is now so easy to rile people up about perceptions of things rather than their own lived experience.
To conclude, I personally think that no amount of reality would change the opinions of these people, because their opinions are already built on a foundation of imagined grievance and bias-confirmation rather than reality. Not everyone in the far-right movement I’ve spoken to here in the UK thinks like that…but a hell of a lot of them seem to. And I make a point of speaking to quite a lot of them.
Personally? I would read them the text of the Declaration of Independence, perhaps highlighting, “He has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.” If they were still listening, I would tell them to form themselves up and march themselves under the waters of the Potomac and remain there for the benefit of us all.
I think the native Americans would agree with the King here…
Yeah, over the years I’ve worked with people who are, for example, not willing to forgive Lincoln for the Mankato Massacre. I have to respect that their Nations are not my nation, and that my antecedents did great crimes against their ancestors, for which there is no easy justice possible. But no Native American is helped by concentration camps.
@NVA,
Native peoples seem to have done much better off, at least from a crude demographic standpoint, in Canada (which stayed under British rule substantially longer) than in America.
Though I’m not sure how much that was due to the British being more moral, and how much was due to most of Canada being, for climate/geography reasons, less attractive to European settlers than the United States.
Take a roundabout path, earn political capital elsewhere, that they can then burn on immigration. For example, it isn’t DHS’ job, but — they are adjacent — if they could figure out where’s the snarl in municipal police forces’ ability to keep low-level disorder/crime in check, and they could untangle it, and then rolled the fix out nationwide, they would earn quite a lot of goodwill. Show uncertain or even blue-leaning voters the benefits of the law-and-order (or just order-sans-law) agenda! The sentiment “yeah they are nazis, but they made the trains not be covered in graffiti” counts as a win for the government.
The underlying problem with this strategy (they are already attempting it in a way) is that crime isn’t actually a leading cause of anxiety for most modern Americans. People are a lot more worried about not being able to make rent despite working two jobs, or about getting sick with no health insurance, in most cases.
Truly intense fear of crime is mostly the province of those who are so firmly plugged into dedicated propaganda channels that they think crime is higher now than it was in 1990 (it very much isn’t). And people like that already voted for “ICE kicks people’s teeth in,” because that’s what they want… so there’s no real way to help them except with excessive brutality because that’s what they signed up for.
Furthermore, since their fear of crime comes from for-profit propaganda channels that will always tell them crime is high, the threat is imminent, and swarms of marauding brutes are going to crawl out and attack them at any time… Well, they won’t actually stop believing in the high crime if you somehow manage to get the crime rate under control!
I mean, I don’t know how much people care *now*, since crime is down from its local peak in 2020-2021, but I can tell you I heard a lot of complaints about crime in 2020-2021, including from Black Americans who I can guarantee (statistically, at least) weren’t listening to Fox News or any such GOP-aligned news source. that doesn’t mean they trusted Donald Trump to solve the problem (obviously they didn’t then and don’t now).
“Crime” is perhaps not the right word. Let’s work graffiti through the conceptual framework. Just because it doesn’t necessarily have a political goal behind it, the analysis works almost the same.
Some guy putting up a big “Romanes eunt domus” on the forum is nowhere near as spectacular as a car bomb, but that single item can be persistent, it can be seen by thousands of people every single day until it’s removed. Sure, the Romans shouldn’t overreact to it with excessive violence, but neither can they allow the guy painting it to get away with it unpunished (and make more), nor can they allow it to stay up. Because it (together with the others) demonstrates that the government and the society it represents have lost control of public space, that the graffitinsurgents are putting out their message loud and clear without even getting pushback, and so they are inevitable.
If there is no organization and political goal behind the graffiti and the litter and the beggars and the homeless-sleeping-rough-downtown and so on, no group that could win and take over, that doesn’t mean that the existing government and society can’t lose! When that happens, the result is “nobody’s rule”, better known as anarchy. Here I don’t use it to mean some total breakdown of society (the offices are still open and the trains still run), but the ubiquitous unpleasantness has the shape of a power vacuum. (And exactly because there is just disruption, with no or little threat of violence (e.g. drunk/psychotic guy acting aggressive at nothing-in-particular), the resulting emotion looks as much like depression as it resembles anxiety, I think. Not afraid of crime, but dejected.)
Even when the e.g. murder rate is high, most people get murdered exactly zero times, so most people don’t base their impression of the crime rate being high or low on how frequently they observe murders. Instead they base it on what they can observe with a decent frequency, which almost always means the least severe kinds of disorder, such as the activity of the graffitinsurgents, or petty theft.
And, of course, your initial points also apply on the scale of the government as a whole rather than DHS. If they addressed some of the big issues — you mentioned rent. If they blew up the roadblock that is NIMBYism (hey, their big guy likes real estate, no?), even if their methods were flagrantly illegal, on net they would get the goodwill they want to spend on deportations.
I think that to a large extent, this “broken windows” theory of social collapse (that society must make an example of people who put up graffiti and commit relatively minor property crimes or social cohesion will collapse) runs up against the fact that society didn’t actually implode in past eras when the incidence rate of even these types of crimes was much higher.
The problem here, for the political right, is that their own ability to stay in power has become permanently dependent on propaganda messaging to their own voter base that crime is high, anarchy is imminent, and if the Democrats ever get in power for five minutes America will look like something out of The Purge.
This means that Republicans have very little room to earn real goodwill by being shown to lower crime rates of any kind. Because centrist and left-wing people will already know that crime was relatively low and not have panic attacks every time they see graffiti on an overpass. And because the Republicans cannot allow right-wing audiences to actually believe that the anti-crime campaign has succeeded, because they need that permanent anti-crime panic to stay in place!
The challenge for them with that is that the overwhelming cause of low-level disorder and crime is…economic inequality. Unfortunately for the DHS, that’s kinda the opposite of what their premier’s whole schtick is about.
It does work though. Part of Putin’s early popularity was down to just how sharply he managed to increase the living standards for many Russians.
Yeah, economic collapses (such as the end-Soviet event) often come with steep recoveries some years later.
I disagree about the main point. E.g. the Amish are dirt poor, but they don’t create disorder or try to rob from “the English”. I think some major factors are instead:
1) Personality. There is e.g. a type of person who, if born rich, puts his name on top of buildings in gleaming letters; if born poor, puts his tag on the ground floor of buildings in spray-paint. Luckily the people of these various types are pretty rare; but some types do antisocial acts basically independently of what is normal.
2) “Normalization of deviance”, to make an analogy with the term from accident investigation. A much larger cohort than the above who, if they see that “everyone else is doing it”, will copy openly antisocial behaviors, but contrariwise will not do things that they see others actually enforce. (The size of this cohort is very context-dependent. In an organization with a clear purpose (if it also has doctrine, even better) the large majority of people will grumble loudly if the previous two groups are allowed to run rampant, but they won’t do things that are obviously harmful. Whereas in the absence of a clear purpose, conformity is a much stronger force.)
1×2) Things that make people stupid, aggressive, etc., from drunkenness to “roid rage”.
I think 2) should be a thread that, if pulled, will eventually lead to Tolkien. If people have a part-of-world view (organizational doctrine can fill this slot) that implies a pretty obvious way for them to “do good” as defined by it, most people will try to. If on the other hand society tells lots of people they are, if not outright useless, at least …not eligible for respect(?)… then only a few exceptional people will find new ways to be useful; the vast majority written off by society will return the favor and look elsewhere. It shouldn’t be an oxymoron for Sam to take pride in doing right the humble job he has.
The presence of an outlier doesn’t disprove what is quite a thoroughly established relationship between inequality and crime. And the Amish are a hell of an outlier.
Not that the things you mention aren’t factors either, but the strong relationship between economic inequality and crime is about as supported as anything in the social sciences can be.
“The strong relationship…” — yes, observed i.e. correlational. But a correlation between A and B doesn’t tell you whether A causes B, or B causes A, or some C causes both A and B. So let me counterpropose the I think blindingly obvious hypothesis that the e.g. personality (or at that point where it is common to some obvious social stratum, is it a culture? a subculture?) that makes some people (plural of person, individual) more prone to doing something criminal (e.g. beating someone up, whether from drunkenness or because they are simply an aggressive ass even when sober) also makes them poor (because prospective employers-with-a-choice can see when meeting them in person that they are an aggressive ass, even if they haven’t yet actually beaten anyone up). Or to hew closer to the original topic of discussion, not-“criminal” antisocial disorderliness works the same way.
Which is why the Amish are an interesting datum: as a rare natural experiment, they directly intervene on A by being poor not due to the usual reason (inability to get higher-paying jobs) but because they choose to. This the observation their B is not only not elevated, but outright less than the surrounding population, is a rare valuable piece of information against the A->B hypothesis and for the rest of the hypothesis pool.
That is the alternate hypothesis yes. It may well even be a significant contributing factor.
My understanding of the current state of the field is that people are attempting to determine which of these is the stronger causal factor, and if there are causal relationships between the two. This is hampered somewhat in its objectivity by the political connotations of their findings (and broadly, we know which finding the folks with boatloads of money to fund research would prefer). But we keep plugging away asking the questions.
Is it that culture/individual behaviour causes poverty and crime? Is it that poverty causes a culture/individual behaviour that leads to crime? Is it both in a mutually reinforcing fashion? Is it neither, and some third variable causes the whole lot (unlikely, but not entirely impossible)*?
The Amish certainly are an interesting case, but there are way too many confounding variables about their way of life to be making solid comparisons to the general population.
And besides, if the suggested answer from this is ‘don’t worry, we can keep having poor people and have low crime if we make all the proles live like the Amish’…I’m not sure that’s a particularly enticing future outside the circles of Peter Thiel.
*For the record, my personal take is that it’s a set of mutually reinforcing influences, and that trying to boil it down to a single ‘inciting cause’ is largely an exercise in futility and oversimplification…unless your goal is simply to make yourself feel superior to poor people.
So far all the of the replies to this thread seem to miss the point that DHS, or rather, the pro-ICE political faction, is itself operating in a non-conventional “insurgency” sense and that messaging as defined in Bret’s post is the goal, rather than the excuse of executing immigration policy.
They want to broadcast the message that they can illegally brutalize minorities and minority sympathizers. They believe this will grow their movement. Going with Bret’s analysis of messaging to 4 main groups: their message to their own members is that they are fulfilling their ideological promise to brutalize enemies; to potential members that they are strong and the winning side to bet on; to potential enemy sympathizers that they should be feared and not opposed; and to their actual enemies that they have power and will win.
Without knowing how this will eventually play out, we can’t definitively say that the pro-ICE faction isn’t already doing the most optimal play here. The brutality is meta-level propaganda, not object-level optimization.
Given that the average person making their plans for them has consumed a diet of almost nothing but deliberate political propaganda media for something like 20-30 years, it seems very likely that many of their intuitions about how to “win” an organized political conflict are, in fact, wrong. To an extent they can compensate with those same propaganda systems, but only to an extent.
Terrorising noncitizens who cannot vote at the cost of antagonising citizens who can vote seems a bad trade.
It does on the face of it, but consider that it appears to antagonise some citizens who can vote but encourages some other citizens who can also vote.
The question, of course, is what proportion of which constitutes the American voting public (and if that voting public will get a meaningful stab at sorting this out through voting, of course).
The issue of “message” is an important one. A big problem for protest groups is that they want the numbers to make them look stronger – but a consequence is that they attract a lot of people who aren’t staying focused on what *this* protest us about.
And when your protest is simultaneously supporting Palestine, action on climate change and the rights of indigenous peoples, it’s very easy to dismiss them as just being professional protestors rather than a genuine movement.
Some time back in the late Pleistocene (the mid-1990s) I did my BA thesis (this used to be more of a thing) on the ways Clausewitz’s model of how wars stop breaks down when one or both of the belligerents are non-state actors, because without a Weberian monopoly of violence the non-state actor cannot provide any real guarantees when they surrender. I concluded that it was fortunate that we were at the End of History and that non-state actors were largely disappearing from the geopolitical stage, so the 21st century would be an era of unprecedented stability and peace. So close.
Good grief. There’s whole libraries of nonviolent strategy, operations, tactics, and theory, and you read Gandhi? That’s like reading a WWI manual and thinking you can lead an army against the US today. Go get Popovic’s *Blueprint for Revolution* at the very least. It’s short, readable, and not too outdated. Go read Gene Sharp’s mostly free library at the Albert Einstein Institute (he’s considered the Machiavelli of nonviolence for a reason). Go read Chenoweth about why nonviolence is twice as effective as violence in achieving its goals. And there are more current sources. Please. You’re writing out of ignorance on this one, and it’s not good.
In fairness, Dr. Devereaux seems to be relying on Ghandi as one of several examples, and an example far enough in the past that his success and the worthiness thereof are uncontroversial. And the point of the post is just to illustrate the basic concept of how nonviolent resistance works, at all, even as a concept, not to go into the details of how to do it best.
Is there any specific point on which you think Devereaux has made a mistake here, apart from “mention Ghandi at all?”
I think he missed some critical scholarship, notably Chenoweth and Stephan’s *Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict* from 2011. Their survey from the last 100-plus years showed that nonviolent campaigns were roughly twice as likely as violent campaigns to achieve their goal (52% to 26%).
Writing a long article about insurrections with a few paragraphs about systems that are *twice as effective at attaining their goals* at the end really is misleading. I get that he’s an expert in violent action, but it would have been more honest to either leave off nonviolence entirely, or to give nonviolence an appropriate amount of space, and explain its strengths and weaknesses. A presentation that weighs the evidence appropriately is not “oh yeah, nonviolence can also work,” it’s “nonviolence actually works considerably better in some circumstances, and here’s how and why.”
For a recent example, there’s precisely nothing accidental about Minnesotans and others beating back ICE with strictly nonviolent action. These are planned, organized, and adapting on the fly. They are also, unlike what the federal government is doing, entirely legal, which is a major source of their strength.
But he did say nonviolent action was more likely to be successful? So your main gripe is that he is right but for the wrong reasons (or the wrong citations, in any case)?
Wrong citations. Gene Sharp makes many of the same points Devereaux does, and would have provided him with additional scholarship.
On this topic, I highly recommend the COIN series board games by GMT Games. It uses a particular system to present both modern and historical irrugular conflicts based on the usual counterinsurgency model, with a strong emphasis on the Clausewitzian Will and political support.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/18749/series-coin-gmt
I have played and enjoyed many COIN games (and strongly disliked a few) but the main lessons they teach is how to play COIN games : Understand your victory conditions AND everyone else’s, Don’t get into a serious lead over the others (close 2nd is best), learn all the cards in the deck so you can evaluate the most important when available. Remember that only one player wins even though most are four player games with two apparent allied factions. ARVN betraying US or the reserve are ongoing themes of the Vietnam game.
Minor point, but still grating: it’s “Gandhi”, not “Ghandi”. Gandhi’s native Gujarati (like most other North Indian languages, and for that matter like some North Indian loanwords in South Indian languages, like my name) distinguishes between aspirated and non-aspirated consonants, and the distinction is important, they’re considered different letters just liek we distinguish G and K.
(English also differentiates them in some circumstances, we pronounce the “P” in “pet” differently than the P in “apple”, but the distinction is sort of implicit and we don’t think of them as different sounds).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gujarati_phonology
“The campaign of terror, targeting local leaders and officials, police officers, and the US-friendly Afghanistan National Army, was always far more extensive in Afghanistan than direct Taliban actions against the direct American presence.”
It seems to me that in that case the Taliban were relying on better situational awareness to compensate for a lack of firepower. In the extreme case the blind opponent, with no idea who is shooting at them, can end up like the Paras on Bloody Sunday, in a position where no amount of shooting does you any good, and any amount more than zero leaves you worse of than you were before. Another analogy might be the German submarine offensives during the world wars – firepower is a lot less dangerous in the hands of people who can’t find you to shoot at you.
Note that there is no logical reason why lack of firepower should produce better awareness, or that requires your opponents situational awareness to stay the same. It is said that by the end of the Troubles the IRAs own head of internal security was himself an informer. I presume the Taliban did not end up so riddled with informants – it is hard to believe they could have won if they had.
Sometimes spies are more use than fighter-bombers.
Although of course the current US Resistance movement owes a great deal to the Civil Rights movement, both in history & personnel, you’d get a better idea of what our strategies are based on by reading Chenoweth & Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia, 2011). Their research & continuing work shows that in civil struggles like ours, between authoritarian forces and democratic ones, nonviolent movements are far, FAR more successful than violent ones.
You can think of stopping ICE/CBP in MN (or any other city) as a battle, but it isn’t the war. The war is stopping the ongoing authoritarian breakthrough and moving to an era of democratic accountability starting in 2027, and then a new, strengthened democracy in 2029. I just posted about Indivisible’s 2026 strategy arc, which is, in military terms, about building strength for the battle to stop Trump from stealing the midterm elections. That won’t just take a Blue Wave of votes against the GOP, it’ll take at least 12 million people prepared to nonviolently protest, strike, or otherwise impede Jan6 2.0.
Agreed with the people recommending Chenoweth, Popovic (Blueprint for Revolution), Gene Sharp and friends. A Clausewitz-style analysis misses some things.
One is that the theory of power for nonviolence (as proposed by Gene Sharp, see Helvey’s On Strategic Nonviolent Conflict) is that the fundamental basis for power is the consent and compliance of the governed. In this model, authoritarians like Trump are trying to coerce consent and compliance of the governed through fear–act up and go to prison or die. The problem is, the military, huge as it is, is a tiny part of the US population. DHS is even smaller, and ICE is smaller still. So they have to invoke and institutionalize coercion and fear in order to govern as they wish.
That’s why Rule 1 of Timothy Snyder’s *On Tyranny* is “Do not obey in advance.”
If the people refuse to obey, consent, or comply, the government can’t do anything except collapse. That’s everyone. If the military and big business stay loyal, the government may survive. Helvey compares this to Samson pulling down the pillars that support the temple roof. If enough pillars get pulled towards not complying with the government, the roof of government comes crashing down.
Nonviolence is fundamentally about disempowering the opponent by removing the consent and compliance of those they govern. This especially includes persuading powerful entities such as the military, bureaucracy, religion, and major businesses to withdraw their support. There are literally hundreds of tactics for doing this, ranging from boycotts and strikes to protests and formation of alternate support networks outside the enemy’s control.
One tactic is “political jujitsu” which involves turning the opponent’s mistakes against them to alienate their supporters. One big use of political jujitsu involves publicizing the killings of innocents, such as Good and Pretti. The important thing to realize is that the strategy of nonviolence does not require such sacrifices, but if they occur, they need to be used to further the campaign.
Anyway, it’s more than a little frustrating to see nonviolence analyzed in an outside context, especially when a few hours digging and reading would have provided an insiders’ view. Gene Sharp and Helvey’s work is available for free online at the Albert Einstein Institute. Blueprint for Revolution is pretty cheap as an ebook (the paper version keeps selling out), and Chenoweth’s work is also easy to find, inexpensive, and easy to read. Given what’s going on in the US, I strongly suggest that everyone study and understand what’s going on, so that, if they need to become part of it for whatever reason, they have some idea of what to do and why.
Clausewitz strikes me as a good place to start for a military history blog. Start with what you and your audience know. And it is not obviously worse than “authoritarians like Trump are trying to coerce consent and compliance of the governed through fear–act up and go to prison or die.”
After all, segregation was not forced onto the South by fear at the behest of an authoritarian central government. Conversely, as the Civil Rights Movement wanted, desegregation was imposed on the South by central government, whether you consider it authoritarian or not.
If I had to generalise, I would say that protest is an attack on the legitimacy of an opponents acts and leaders. Legitimacy being a subjective thing, the most effective attack (if possible) will be against the legitimacy *as seen by the opponents essential supporters or superiors*.
I found General Sir Rupert Smith’s book on conventional war and insurgency helpful (although both are very different from the nonviolent resistance in the second half of this post). Maybe read it alongside Simon Akam, The Changing of the Guard: The British Army Since 9/11 to see why a senior British officer felt the need to think so hard about strategy.
I am sorry but I think your analysis lacks the analysis of a major factor in “oppositional” movements (whatever violent or not) which is “organization”. That’s hardly a surprise since you draw from a corpus of US texts and USA has SPECTACULARLY failed at this aspect during the last 80 years.
Any movement that hopes to mount any resistance to an organized state needs incentives to push people on its side. Sorry Claus but Will is not enough, it does not feed mouths nor it provides shelter. Terrorist and terrorist adjacent movements (like organized crime) actually care for their members and their families; in Italy there is the famous “submarine” figure: that’s a crime affiliate that pass a pension to families that have a member in jail. ETA and IRA used similar strategies, the vast majority of their expenses were not for weaponry but to sustain a parallel welfare to their members. Succeeding where a State can’t with, tangible, real, economic, help, works more than any flashy spectacular act of violence. During a strike or a protest an hot pot of soup or a thermos of hot tea can bring a person to your side quicker that anything else.
There is an extensive corpus of study in Italy about this phenomenon because it’s a tactic still used by organized crime (before it pivot to Government capture, but that’s another story). US approach instead was always an imperialist one: the “Our Bastards” approach of notorious war criminal Kissinger.
The enraging thing is that the Current American Regime is employing something similar with ICE recruitment: racist, incompetent, unemployable regime supporters are given lucrative positions and power by joining the brownshirts. It’s almost like socialism for nationalists, a “National Socialist” movement if you like.
” ETA and IRA used similar strategies, the vast majority of their expenses were not for weaponry but to sustain a parallel welfare to their members.”
The important caveat here is “to their members”. There is a very important distinction between an actual parallel welfare system and an organisation that pays its members a salary. Some insurgents – notably Hizbollah – have operated parallel welfare systems, where the organisation provides funds, food and other services to the general population that the official government cannot or will not, and this is a very important way of gaining support. The IRA did not do this – it paid money to its members, either directly as a salary or to their families in the case of imprisoned members. (At its largest the IRA budget was only around £7 million – not nearly enough to offer any sort of wider welfare system.) Insofar as the money was obtained from the local population through extortion and armed robbery (the main sources of IRA funding), they were essentially operating a parallel tax system, but not a parallel welfare system.
And, of course, even the funds they paid to their members were not instead of the existing official welfare system, but in addition to it. IRA members and their families were not barred from receiving welfare payments, health care, education and so on, on the same terms as the rest of the population.
Mafia and other Italian organized Crime Syndicates still works as parallel States: providing “services” to the population where the State is absent or inefficient. Sure those services are shoddy, costly and come with obedience and complicity but in some areas they are the only form of “welfare” that exists. And this is a show of power louder than the one provided by any bombing or protest.
It’s an hell of a complex topic but what’s enraging is that it’s an aspect that’s often overlook in the general COIN operation (like in this otherwise excellent article). As a rule of thumb people care about ideals but care more about food and shelter, unfortunately people in such “critical” areas seldom are seen as such, there is always some dehumanizing tag put upon them to deny even the most basic decency… And to justify dumping some hundred more billions in military hardware.
I have not read it, so can not vouch for it, but I am reminded of this book: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2017/09/20/book-review-rebel-law-insurgents-courts-and-justice-in-modern-conflict-by-frank-ledwidge/
“Observers of Afghanistan have noted previously that the Taliban built a reputation for providing justice in the context of the rampant warlordism of the 1990s: that their appeal was founded on fairness as much as the specifically Islamic character of their legal regime.
But Ledwidge explores this idea at length, and illustrates it by juxtaposing Afghanistan and other Islamic examples against an event central to modern British history: the Irish War of Independence, when Sinn Fein and the IRA set up a network of courts in Ireland as part of their boycott of the British state. Their strategy was, of course, violent: litigants and witnesses were intimidated into not cooperating with the British justice system. But, at the same time, Sinn Fein’s courts were widely seen as fair and efficient. “
Good comparison! I mentioned the Mafia providing dispute-resolution services but that’s a very interesting parallel that I wasn’t aware of.
@Ynneadwraith,
But Ledwidge explores this idea at length, and illustrates it by juxtaposing Afghanistan and other Islamic examples against an event central to modern British history: the Irish War of Independence, when Sinn Fein and the IRA set up a network of courts in Ireland as part of their boycott of the British state.
I can’t remember where but I think I read something similar about the NLF/Vietcong setting up parallel courts in the Vietnam war.
” I think I read something similar about the NLF/Vietcong setting up parallel courts in the Vietnam war.”
They did – they called them “People’s Courts” – but as far as I know they were mostly occupied with show trials of political opponents who were then murdered. I don’t think they were much used for voluntary dispute resolution by the locals.
I once had a very interesting conversation with an old chap in Sanremo, known as being a late holdout of mafia power in north Italy. I’ve no idea of his political affiliations in relation to mafia/not mafia, but he had an interesting take on it.
He effectively described the mafia as a parallel state vying for legitimacy with the Italian government at the time (he was talking about an indeterminate time a good few decades prior to me talking to him in 2007, so not super precise about when this was). Because the Italian government of the time was hopelessly ineffective (and fairly corrupt themselves), this allowed them to compete at least semi-effectively. They would raise funding through threat of violence (taxation), offer employment where there were few employment opportunities (welfare), and ‘look after their own’ (welfare again). They could not do this as effectively as a government in good shape (which includes the methods by which they achieved these things being generally more exploitative)…but the Italian government of the time was not in good shape.
It’s unsurprising that the strength and power of the mafia was strongest in the south (more economically deprived than the north), and has waned as the Italian government pulled itself into even slightly better shape. Interestingly, while I was staying there my daily walk took me past a block of flats where a cafe on the bottom floor had been burnt out by the mafia. Plastered around this were signs and placards saying ‘Together Sanremo stands united. No more’.
I’d still recommend the place to visit. You’re not going to get gunned down by mob violence in the street. It’s not the 90s. It’s Sanremo’s quality as a tourist destination that attracts the activity as there’s lots of foreign money sloshing around (plus it being close to the border with France, easing drug trafficking).
Have you read “The Sicilian Mafia” by Diego Gambetta? If not, you’ll find he agrees with a lot of what you see. Crucially though he argues that the service that the mafia provided as a parallel government was not welfare spending, but dispute resolution and contract guarantee…
I hadn’t considered that, but that’s a considerable part of the operation of a state isn’t it? ‘If I have a major dispute I can take it to court’. ‘If someone reneges on a contract I can take that to court as well’.
I suppose that’s probably even more fundamental to the operation of a state than the provision of welfare, considering that ‘settle disputes’ appears to be one of the most universal expectations of kings and councils.
And what, indeed, is the first scene of the most famous fictional depiction of the mafia ever? It is Don Corleone, literally holding court on the day of his daughter’s wedding in a style that any mediaeval monarch or Taliban warlord would have recognised; accepting fealty from his followers (Luca Brasi), distributing favours in exchange for fealty (the baker who wants his apprentice to get citizenship) and providing justice to a subject who feels that the official government has let him down. But what he isn’t doing, or at least not in that scene, is anything that fits the narrow definition of organised crime – robberies, extortions, smuggling and so on. He is operating not as a gang boss but as a parallel government.
Goodfella’s’ quality as a film derives from the juxtaposition of two systems of the provision of order.
“Both protests and insurgencies function this way, where the true battlefield is the will of the participants, rather than contesting control over physical space. That’s a tricky thing, however, for humans to wrap our heads around. We have, after all, spent many thousands of years – arguably the whole of our history and pre-history, largely fighting battles over territory. ”
I feel this is a false dichotomy. As a wise fictional character once said “A weapon is a tool for changing the enemy’s mind”. We have a history of wars over territory, but those wars are won when one side is no longer willing to oppose the other side with force – ie when their Will has been diminished. Wars don’t end when all the soldiers on one side are physically incapable of further resistance, because they’re dead or incapacitated or out of ammunition or simply in the wrong place. Almost every war ends with almost all the defeated combatants still healthy, armed, and close to the victorious enemy. They’re just no longer willing to fight – or if they are, their commanders at whatever level have decided that they are no longer willing to order them to fight.
It’s not what Napoleon originally meant, but “the moral is to the material as three is to one” is absolutely accurate when it comes to casualties. A defeated army has been 25% or so materially defeated – casualties, out of ammunition or whatever. The other 75% of it has been morally defeated. It could physically continue fighting, but it chooses not to.
I agree, but I think making the false dichotomy is helpful to ease people into the understanding here. It’s this process:
1. Joe Public #627 thinks wars are won when you kill all of the enemy
2. ‘Insurgencies and protests do not try to win by killing all of the enemy, but by persuading the public’
3. ‘Now that you’ve managed to wrap your head around how that works, which isn’t super intuitive…proper wars work that way as well’
A drip-feed into understanding can often help unseat an entrenched misunderstanding more effectively than confronting it directly.
I think it’s true to say that the main way you attack the enemy’s will in a territorial war is through attacking his material strength – the main reason that 75% of the unit will refuse to fight is that you have just killed the other 25% of them, after all! – and this obviously isn’t true in an insurgency. But it is still worth remembering that, except at the very lowest (section) level, land engagements are won with most of the defeated side still physically able to fight.
For naval engagements that is less true, or at least it is untrue to a higher level – though there’s still the point where you get something like “after this engagement the German fleet did not leave harbour for the rest of the year” which is a failure of will at the highest level.
Two relevant books that I highly recommend:
“Waging A Good War” by Thomas Ricks: the story of the 1950s-1960s civil rights movement told from a military metaphor that aligns nicely with many of the things we’ve seen on ACOUP.
“Blueprint for Revolution” by Srdja Popovic: many anecdotes of successful nonviolent resistance to fascist regimes.
You guys know what? I’m gonna support Will Stancil (Bret knows who he is) and Bret on this one. Despite my sometimes excessive rhetoric on this blog before, it’s better to have an antifascist coalition with them than let the actual ‘woke far left’ do the right wing’s work for it.
In other news, the ‘far left’ on Bluesky undermining the antifascist actual resistance’s attempts to get ICE out of Minnesota is objectively terrible and the equivalent of Stalin signing the Motolov-Ribbentrop Pact with Hitler. There, I said it.
Gatekeeper-Leftists on the internet should be treated as strawmen, as people cosplaying strawman-leftists.
Indeed. Often, it seems, folks genuinely and earnestly attempting to disrupt organisation on the left.
I very much agree with this analysis as it pertains to nonviolent movements. But I think you miss the mark in regards to what you call violent insurgencies, especially the supposed difference between “insurgency” and “protracted war.”
Most left-wing insurgencies are explicitly carried out under the assumption or with the goal in mind that it escalate over time into a full-scale protracted war. This is made very explicit in the Maoist tradition (e.g. the Shining Path, the Naxalites, the New People’s Army) but is also the case with, for example, the left-wing factions/versions of the IRA.
The criterion of different “theories of victory” is very useful when distinguishing, for example, the Taliban from the PAVN. But it breaks down when considering the above examples, which absolutely were insurgencies tactically but had theories of victory based on escalating the insurgency to a protracted conflict. You kind of just dismiss this idea by saying that insurgencies “are much further away from making that a reality,” but that’s a difference of degree and while it makes sense to analyze it that way tactically, it makes less sense strategically.
John Brown’s abolitionist activities are a good US and pre-mass-media case study. The Pottawatomie Massacre was very clearly an act of terrorism intended to function as propaganda of the deed, and I’d argue that it was successful in eroding the “Will” of the Slave Power in the Bleeding Kansas conflict. However, Harpers Ferry just a few years later was very clearly an act of insurgency meant to escalate the situation to a protracted war–Brown’s Provisional Constitution and the recollections of the others involved (including Frederick Douglass) testify to that pretty conclusively. The outbreak of the Civil War very shortly thereafter, and fact that the withdrawal of federal troops after Reconstruction allowed the South to swiftly reimpose a repressive white supremacist social order, testifies in favor of Brown’s contention that violence on a mass scale was required to achieve his ends.
It also, very critically, did not damage the abolitionist cause. Many moderates distanced themselves from Brown, but Harpers Ferry made him one of the most admired abolitionist figures not just in America but in Europe as well and actually galvanized support FOR what had always been a primarily nonviolent movement. Even the Pottawatomie Massacre, which was, again, an act of terrorism, actually HELPED the Free State cause and was not uniformly condemned by even the moderate parts of the movement.
An analysis like this really needs to take deeper account of the goals/”political objects” of these kinds of movements. This was the element of the Clausewitzian trinity given the least attention in your article. Some of these movements have bigger goals than changes to their countries’ legal codes; I’m not sure that it makes much sense to analyze the Civil Rights Movement alongside the Shining Path just because they were both similar in the sense of “being so immensely weaker than the state they challenge.” Again, it is a meaningful similarity in terms of tactics, but when you then go on to pontificate about non-violence being the morally superior and more strategically effective method, it rings hollow because you’re comparing apples to oranges.
Finally, I have to say that your parenthetical about insurgencies being “often ideologically unconcerned with civilian casualties” reads like apologia for powerful states that blame the supposed insurgents for the mass civilian casualties they cause. (Many countries have done this, but let’s be honest, we all know which one I’m talking about.) In most cases those insurgents aren’t “ideologically unconcerned with civilian casualties;” they simply place the blame for those casualties on the by-definition vastly-more-powerful-and-thus-more-responsible state for A.) directly inflicting the violence, and B.) creating the conditions that led to the insurgency in the first place. Your bias really came out here.
Surprised you got through this post without quoting the “politics by other means” line because that seems to be what protest shades into in the other direction: insofar as it’s simple advocacy *not* relying on civil disobedience and spectacular overreactions, it makes little sense to evaluate it in this framework. (Also insofar as the aim of advocacy isn’t just to resist power, but to capture it and actively turn it toward the opposite outcome.)
“Despite some hyperventilating about ‘insurgency tactics,’ anti-ICE protestors are pretty clearly engaged in civil disobedience (when they aren’t engaged in lawful protest), not insurgency. To be blunt: you know because no one has yet car-bombed an ICE or CBP squad or opened fire from an elevated window on an DHS patrol.”
Although it’s true that most anti-ICE protesters seem to be committed to non-violence, there have been multiple attempts to kill ICE agents over the last several years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Alvarado_ICE_facility_incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Dallas_ICE_facility_shooting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Tacoma_immigration_detention_center_attack
There is a rather large oversight in the model your built in your essay. You don’t talk about controlling the narrative at all. It’s not enough to just get images of agents of the state behaving violently on camera, you also have to convince people that the violence was not at all justified. You have to control the context that the video is played in essentially. Mostly this means having people in positions able to push your preferred narrative, media reporting; or social media sites that will suppress posts with alternative narratives/boost posts with the desired one.
This need to control information channels is why, for instance, Elon buying Twitter was such a big deal. Suddenly what was a site that clamped down on contrary narratives was opened up and now it’s harder to make sure only one sort of framing is allowed.
Elon buying Twitter became a fiasco because of his antics. And if you think Twitter shows a balanced view of anything….well, look up the Paradox of Tolerance. Not all views deserve a fair hearing. Some have had a fair hearing, and were shown to be quite horrific.
As for the non-partisan part of your post: Controlling the narrative is the role of propaganda. I’ve been saying since the start of the Ukraine War that Ukraine is astonishingly good at propaganda. “I don’t need a ride, I need ammo” is going to go down in history alongside Leonidas’s “If” and Churchill’s “If I were your husband madam, I’d drink the coffee”. The footage they’ve provided is also remarkably good as propaganda–compare it against the Vietnam War, or some of the other conflicts in the past 50 years (since embedded reporters became a thing).
It’s one reason I get so aggravated by environmental activists. Ideally the narrative would be controlled by people with some semblance of sense, yet currently it’s being controlled by people who think throwing soup at paintings is acceptable.
That said, it’s not hard to control the narrative when your enemies are doing stupidly evil things. Shooting unarmed citizens and mocking them as they die while wearing a body camera, for example. Or ripping children from their mothers’ arms while herding them into detention centers. Or actively insulting the military. Or threatening military action against an ally. Or putting tariffs on trade because a female world leader said something mean about you. Or documented activities involving minors that would get your or me put to death (in Alabama “Your honor, he had it coming” was an effective legal defense for such a case). Or mocking female reporters during press briefings. At a certain point, it’s no longer about controlling the narrative; finding excuses for this behavior becomes absurd.
That said, it’s not hard to control the narrative when your enemies are doing stupidly evil things.
Let’s not forget, “getting rid of foreign aid efforts to give fertilizers and contraception and lifesaving medication to poor people in Africa” and “getting rid of windmills” and “cutting off Cuba from fuel” and “having Doug Wilson preach at the Pentagon”. This regime really seems to be doing everything it can to imitate a cartoon supervillain, and I’m glad that that seems to be influencing at least *some* swing voters, although not enough.
“yet currently it’s being controlled by people who think throwing soup at paintings is acceptable”
I’ve yet to decide if Just Stop Oil are simply rather inept at constructing a compelling public image, or if they are literally funded by oil executives to make environmentalists look unhinged and kinda irritating.
Having had discussions with many an intensely principled leftist, and read about many of the shady things oil executives have got up to (and seen how effectively the mainstream media can spin things), I could believe either.
In the circumstances, this article seems apposite:
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/what-i-saw-minnesota-ice-war
When it comes to military strategy and ancient history, Devereaux takes pains to portray the consensus understanding. He clearly marks his own readings of the evidence when he is going off on his own, or when he is taking sides in an active controversy. It’s a shame that he doesn’t give the same treatment to the scholarship on “protest”.
The first hint that Devereaux lacks the background to provide a framework for how “protest” works is that he’s not even familiar with the current terminology–scholars generally prefer “civil resistance.” The second hint is that there’s not even a glancing mention of the most influential scholars in this field–Chenoweth, Stephan, Schock, and Sharp go unmentioned. Practitioners who have popularized key ideas (like Popovic and Lakey) are also largely absent (with the noted exception of Lawson, who is indeed a key figure). There’s also no mention of relevant figures from the community organizing tradition, like Sen and Alinsky.
Instead Devereaux relies primarily on a volume that exists as a tourist’s guide to protest for military historians. If you want to write civil resistance 101, you need to go deeper than that!
To be fair, a lot of what’s in here is correct: civil resistance campaigns do typically prioritize recruitment, and dramatic direct actions that draw violent reactions are an effective means for doing that.
But wedging civil resistance into Clausewitz’s framework is fatal to an overarching understanding. And portraying civil resistance as insurgency’s twin cuts away large amounts of what makes it effective. Devereaux lifts up one piece of the puzzle and declares that he has the whole thing.
Thus we get a general framework that leaves out, for example, the critical importance of movements wielding labor power. This enables the factual error that civil resistance is dependent on modern communications technology. The first recorded strike–which was successful against a government!–was in 1152 *BC*.
We also get the frankly silly idea of nonviolence-proof governments. We have hard data here! Why on earth would Devereaux cherry-pick when we have the NAVCO dataset? And the data is pretty clear: regime type has no discernible effect on the success rate of civil resistance campaigns.
We also miss out on features that contemporary organizers consider critical, especially when considering smaller-scale campaigns. For example, almost any community organizer would emphasize that you aren’t trying to persuade a general population. You identify the decision-makers on your issue, and win over the audiences that those decision-makers rely on. Your campaign for more local housing construction is unlikely to be helped by enthusiastic mayoral support if the mayor in question is two towns over.
If it were helpful for an overall understanding of civil resistance to portray it as terrorism without the terror, Chenoweth–who is a scholar of terrorism–would be the first person to do so. It is not.
There are some perfectly interesting points made here. But claiming that this piece elucidates a “shared framework” is frankly irresponsible. It should not be presented that way.
Those seeking an actual introduction to civil resistance would be well-served to start with Chenoweth’s Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know. It’s a great jumping-off point, collecting key sources on the biggest debates currently happening in the field.