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Last Friday, Bret Deveraux of ACOUP waded deeper into the Culture War than usual by writing about the anti-ICE protests, and insurgencies and non-violent resistance in general.
What unites both strategies is that the difference in power between the state and the dissidents is very large, so large that both conventional military operations and even a protracted war are not an option for the weaker party.
If you can not face your enemy in the field, and can not even hope to sap his strength through a thousand papercuts until you can face him, what can you do?
As a military theorist, Deveraux naturally uses Clausewitz to identify three factors which can limit the escalation of force and thus be employed by the weaker side to hamper the stronger side.
Friction (the natural tendency of stuff to break, things not going according to plan, your forces not being where you would want them to be) is a bit of a sideshow. If you are able to weaken your enemy sufficiently through friction, you are fighting a protracted war, not a terrorist insurgency.
Will means the emotional backing of the conflict by the politically relevant part of the population, which might be the body of citizens or some elites, depending on the system. This is a prime target in these highly asymetrical conflicts.
The third limiting factor is the political object of the enemy leadership. Unlike the population, which is modelled as being emotional, the leadership is modelled as rational. The idea here is that if you can inflict sufficient costs on the enemy, they might decide that it is no longer worth it to enforce their goal.
Will is the central point to attack for the weaker party:
For terrorist insurgencies, this means that the main goal of their attacks is actually sending signals. So the point is not to weaken the enemy's military by blowing up their troops and materiel, but rather to message audiences on both sides of the conflict (as well as these in between) that their cause is viable. If you could convince everyone that your victory is inevitable, that would be a great boon to your side. In practice, this means that terrorists favor flashy targets to military relevant ones. 9/11 is a prime example.
A key strategy is to bait your enemy into striking against you while you are hiding among the civilian population, thereby causing civilian deaths which result both in local dissatisfaction as well as in winning a propaganda victory -- which is the kind of victory which brings you closer to your objective. The main dilemma for the insurgent is that they need gruesome violence to further their cause, but that such violence may also serve to alienate the local population and strengthen the resolve of the enemy. While 9/11 was great for making Al Qaeda a household name, it was ultimately bad for the Jihadist cause.
Deveraux then contrasts this with a deliberate strategy of nonviolence, which does not have that dilemma. He is actually rather realist about why movements employ non-violence:
Of course, non-violent protest does not mean staying on the sidewalks:
If your protest can be simply ignored, it is likely that it will be ignored, so you do not get the desired escalation and attention. This means that you will have to commit transgressions to goad the enemy into strikes against you which will be terrible PR for them.
Bret talks about the Nashville campaign during the Civil Rights Movement, where Blacks would organize sit-ins on segregated lunch counters. This caused violent repercussions, which eventually eroded popular support of the segregationist side.
He also concedes that there are regimes which are impervious to non-violent protests, where the political relevant parts of the population are very willing to employ and support violence, but argues that societies which are running on violence are very inefficient.
Finally, he talks about the anti-ICE movement, of which he seems sympathetic.
He continues:
He points out that mass media help the protests a lot, as their position has gained massively in popularity over a relatively short time span (compared to the Civil Rights Movement).
I think that the gist is that the median American voter -- like the median Motte poster -- is very willing to vote for Trump's anti-immigrant platform, but unlike the median Motte poster they are totally unwilling to tolerate the Pretti shooting as a natural consequence of enforcement actions. Of course, the Trump administration did not help itself by reflexively claiming that the shooting was justified instead of spinning it as a sad mistake.
Deveraux:
When he was posting this, the decision to pull the DHS forces out of Minneapolis was already made, but it would hardly have been surprising from his point of view. At the end of the day, the only political idea Trump truly believes from the bottom of his heart is that he should be president. Toughness on immigration (spouses excluded) so far was of instrumental value for him because it gained him a lot of support, but if it no longer delivers the votes for him, I expect him to change policy.
I don’t believe the Trump admin could frame the shootings as a mistake. That would imply incompetence. That makes them look weak.
One issue with social media these days is now everyone understands the tactics of protestors and thus know also the counter tactics to deploy. The media can not just control one narrative. The alt narratives gets promoted just as much. The counter to the counter movements is out there.
Furthermore, in the age of social media we now have video so protestors can’t just push until something happens. Good won’t just be lost soccer mom who happened to get in ICE way. Pretti won’t be “just directing tactic”. Someone will have video of him kicking ICE vehicles in a prior encounter. In the ‘60s. Goode would be a civil rights icon who was just dropping the kids off at school who the nazis shot.
The entire school segregation move and the evil parents yelling back in the day may have fizzled out after a few viral videos of white kids getting their ass kicked by black kids during segregation.
The two narrative world is what we live in today. The old protest movements do not work as well when it’s become trivial for dual narratives to be maintained.
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He is right about the 'horns of the dilemma' and non-violence. Another example of these kinds of protests is hunger strikes, employed effectively by British Suffragettes. If you Google this, AI will helpfully tell you the government's response was 'brutal.' I guess letting the poor girls die is the humane thing to do. Oh, wait!
Anyways, in case it is not obvious: 'nonviolence' as a strategy is simply part of using media as a political weapon. It is strange to call such an insurgency the 'weak side.' It is more accurate to call them 'militarily weak, but politically strong.'
The reason a person like this writes an ode to this strategy is because they know at a subconscious level that this particular weapon (sympathetic media) is wielded by their side.
He writes that non-violence, done properly is disruptive and unignorable. It seems to me that these qualities make it categorically similar to violence. Indeed, protesting is kind of like "political-violence," although I am using it here in a very nonstandard way. Gosh, I feel like one of those college kids who redefines words, saying "silence is violence."
Basically, the common sense idea that "violence is very bad, I wouldn't ever EVER do violence ever" is a left-adaptive meme because it means political power (=protesting, media control) wins, and the left has that.
Once we see these dynamics laid bare, why shouldn't someone like me just say, "I will judge actions based on their effects in the zero-sum power war: it matters not if you detonated a bomb and killed people, you are committing an un-ignorable act in the service of a side."
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I remember acoup guy being a huge smartass and his articles are mostly well acktuallys that let him sound smart. He totally writes like he's talking down to his audience.
I remember his series on ancient greece was getring shared around a lookoong time ago and he had an article mostly about "well acktually spartans sucked, actually" and every other paragraph he would go "look at how bigoted these stupid racist spartans were. Maybe with some more diversity and feminism they wouldn't have sucked so bad!".
But anyways I find his writing extremely hard to take seriously. In a sense he's kind of like the lazerpig of history blogging because he hides his lack of rigor under a veneer of self deprecation ("unmitigated pedantry" - "low tier youtubing") yet will get incredibly defensive and lash out whenever someone criticizes his stream of hot takes.
Same. I kept seeing ACOUP linked in discussions about ancient/medieval/fantasy warfare (classical Greece, classical Rome, LoTR, Game of Thrones, etc.), which is right up my alley, so I decided to try his series of seven articles on Sparta. Every other paragraph was about how evil and oppressive and patriarchal the Spartiates were. Making the point, once, that what we usually think of as "Spartans" were a tiny aristocratic elite and that the majority of the population of Lacedaemon was helots, would have been fine. This was... not that.
I am not in school. If I am spending my free time reading about Sparta, it's because I think Spartans are cool, and I want to learn more about them. Reading post after post from a guy who clearly hates Sparta and everything that is associated with it in the public imagination was decidedly unpleasant.
I finished the series, but I'm not gonna read anything else this asshole puts out ever again.
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Don't forget his "REAL Historian Reacts to Paradox Games?!" posts.
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I applaud his ability to keep his personal views mostly in check and approach most topics on his block with care, but he posted a link to one of his bluesky posts in this article, and I took a look. Yep, he is a very bluesky user all right.
In this article, he mentioned a police chief that fought desegregation attempts in his town with clever tactics. As you might have guessed, the only difference in the outcome was that he's not vilified by history textbooks today, he still lost. I'd rather Bret gave a different example of successfully dismantling a popular non-violent movement by a regime that is not resilient enough to just gun them down and then forbid the press to write about it.
Anti-nuclear protestors in the US have been successfully dismantled by arresting them with a gentle touch and issuing press releases that make them sound like hippie lunatics.
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If your policies are actually adaptive for society, in a darwinistic sense*, then all you need to do is hold your ground, maybe perform non-salient actions to advance your cause, and eventually people will stop fighting you. In particular, they will begin to adopt the policy voluntarily as your correctness becomes more and more obvious, though perhaps in a way just distinct enough to preserve their ego and in-group identity. (e.g., the emergency of "sex negative feminism" as traditional gender roles re-establish themselves out of pure darwinistic imperative.)
This might seem like a naively optimistic strategy, but that's just an artifact of survivorship bias in favor of how mass movements are commemorated. Pretty much every change to the status quo has some sort of popular support, and is matched by some sort of popular protest. But we only remember those changes as being "non-violent movements" when they advance motives leftists are primed to recognize. When they fail, they get condensed into a memory hole labeled "reactionaries scared about change". For example, the luddites and before them the anti-enclosure protests. Leftists would be a lot more gleeful about claiming them as proto-anarchist movements if they'd succeeded... but instead, nobody even remembers them.
* I use this terminology to emphasize that a policy being a utilitarian or moral good is neither sufficient nor necessary. Policies that help a society self-perpetuate succeed because societies without them collapse and therefore lose the ability to fight.
Amusingly, "open range" versus "closed range" remains a salient political topic in the US from time to time.
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Isn't that kind of like condemning every Confederate or Wehrmacht general, or hell condemning Hannibal and Napoleon, in that they ultimately were on the losing side?
If the story at least ended with "his town was the last place in the US to be desgregated", then I would have agreed. But he simply folded when MLK came to his town and dared to arrest him.
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One of the best examples that I've seen of this was when the IRA would warn the public ahead of time about impending bombs. Not only did it serve to keep collateral damage down, which fed goodwill, but it also showed that the authorities couldn't do much about it, even when they were forewarned.
Wasn't that like 5 minutes notice after the fuse was already lit?
I'm not 100% sure of the details. Most of what I remember, I remember second hand from old war nerd articles.
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That's pretty specific.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/07/08/attack-on-texas-ice-facility-ambush/84511708007/
https://apnews.com/article/ice-facility-shooting-dallas-immigration-d49f76ffc95572970ede58ef15769fe4
"Nuh uh, they hid in treelines and on a roof, not an elevated window, checkmate chuds!"
All that writing and it's just based on observably false premises.
Yeah the ambushers being so hilariously incompetent weirdly completely overshadowed what they were actually trying to do.
The problem with most conversations of this sort is that memory exists.
The Jan 6th protestors were also "hilariously incompetent", to the point that they forgot to bring any weapons at all. And yet, this apparent incompetence somehow failed to overshadow "what they were actually trying to do."
It's who, whom. We observably take Red violence seriously, even when it is hypothetical. We observably do not take Blue violence seriously, even (especially?) when there are multiple bodies. This is not an accident. This is the essence of Tribalism.
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Deveraux is basically right about the object level, but his severe case of TDS blinds him to quite a lot- notably the protestors have done quite a bit that a more competent regime could spin as they had it coming, for one. For another, a lot of what the protestors are doing is actually illegal. De-arrests, interfering in lawful police operations, resisting arrest, etc is all very illegal and these people have open-shut cases. It’s also a ‘page five story’ strategy that won’t generate immense amounts of controversy- he can issue warrants for US Marshall’s to go after these people once they’re identified. This is probably what the databases of protestor license plates and subpoenaing data from social media sites is all about.
He covers it in the article. Peaceful protest is not about doing legal things, it's about driving the wedge between legal and moral actions. The protesters do things that are illegal, but moral, baiting the state into meting out legal, but immoral punishment.
To give a red-colored example, only obscenely large magazines in California or publicly announcing every time you fill in a ditch on your own property that you won't even ask for EPA approval and then getting arrested for it are forms of peaceful protest, even if you the police have to taze you until you soil your pants to get you into the cruiser or if your friends block them from leaving the scene by handcuffing themselves to their bumper.
And the thing to note about these red-colored examples is they don't work. If you're arrested and put in prison for a long time for having an "obscenely large magazine", you will simply disappear and be completely forgotten except as a cautionary tale on ar15.com. Same for the ditch example except no ar15.com fame.
People are posting videos of perfectly normal looking, no brutality, ICE arrests and having them treated as atrocities by all who matter. And the protestors are doing things that are neither legal nor moral (e.g. smashing the taillight of an ICE truck) and this is accepted. People actually shooting at ICE are downplayed. It's all about control of the media, not the actual actions taken.
It's about control of the media, but also, having a mass movement of people willing to coordinate resistance. The right is bad at this because they believe in the legitimacy of the system, and in working toward the changes they want via the legitimate means provided by the system. The left basically believes that any system that does not result in their desired outcome is not legitimate, and are therefore a lot more willing to resort to extralegal means when they don't get their way.
What this means in practice is that the right will sit by and think "aww shucks it's a shame that guy got arrested for violating that magazine ban" and hope that maybe one of these days the 9th circuit will stop ignoring clear SCOTUS directives (spoiler: they won't). The left, meanwhile, will organize illegal street blockades where armed activists illegally detain motorists in order to check if they're feds, and face zero legal consequences because they elected an attorney general who self-identifies as antifa.
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It's not a matter of a "competent regime", it's a matter of having the media entirely on the protestor's side.
Getting the media on your side is part of competence. Given the existing environment, I get the appeal of throwing your hands up and saying it's impossible. But the Trump administration doesn't put in even a minimal attempt to work the mainstream media, seeing no value in it compared to building a parallel system.
The media is not an independent actor at this point; it is part of the other side.
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