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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 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.
One of these things is not like the others - the Spartans were slightly less patriarchal than other Greek city-states, and Devereaux acknowledges this. But yes - the whole point of the Sparta series is to make it clear just how badly Sparta sucked. What else is there to say about Sparta? The Spartans themselves were clear that they didn't even try to not suck off the battlefield. Once you establish that Spartan troops have a mediocre win-lose record against peer competitors (and were not worth shit against Macedonians, despite the equal tech level) the only remaining interesting questions are
Both of which Devereaux offers answers to, although not particularly thought-out ones - as you say, he is far more interested in explaining just how badly Sparta sucked. Most of this is drumming in what the facts you used to learn in prep school classical studies actually imply - just how much suckitude (even relative to the baseline of pre-modern suckitude due to the lack of antibiotics and steam engines) is implied by the abusive nature of the agoge or a society with 80+% slavery. Neither of these facts is a secret, but classics teachers don't encourage you to stop and think about them.
If you think Spartans are cool, then you are wrong. Pop quiz - name a famous Spartan military victory not involving an alliance with Persia. Not a pop quiz - you can't name something other than military victories that is plausibly cool about Sparta. Devereaux wrote that many blog posts because he thinks that making people like you less wrong is important.
A big part of Devereaux's project is to push back against a specific wrong idea of martial virtue - what he calls the "cult of the badass" - of which Sparta is the ur-example, and Pete "Leaking war plans to journalists doesn't matter if you look as good shirtless as I do" Hegseth is the MAGA-era personification. In so far as acoup.blog has a political message rather than being a fun place to laugh at bad movie military history, that message is that you don't need to trade off the creature comforts of civilisation in order to build badassitude, because civilised beats badass on the battlefield more often than not. A number of other posts in the thread are asking about the question of "why did someone who is obviously not a conventional left-idiotarian humanities scholar get so rabidly anti-Trump?" and I think this is the answer - MAGA assumes that the pre-requisite to making America great again is to make America badass (or at least to put people who embody badassitude in charge with no consequences for testosterone-fuelled misbehaviour). Devereaux thinks that this involves giving up things that matter and not getting any strategic advantage in exchange.
I'm British, so I have the luxury of admiring the fuzzy-wuzzy's martial virtue from my armchair after my compatriots kick his arse. A lot of former world leaders who were gay for Leonidas looked at the British and thought "they may have the men, ships, and money, but we have higher testosterone so we can beat them". It is one of the ways world leaders become former.
This seems like an odd take to me? We have very few surviving writings from Sparta itself, because the Spartans did not esteem writing, but if we look at classical admirers of Sparta, it is very rarely the case that they admire Spartan merely for being militarily successful. Plato's admiration of Sparta is not for military strength alone. The case for Sparta is merely that they won all the time, particularly because they demonstrably did not, but that Sparta was in some way a uniquely virtuous society.
It should go without saying that we're not talking about a concept of virtue that a modern Westerner would wholeheartedly endorse, or that most people after the Christianisation of Rome would endorse, but it is nonetheless something that Sparta's contemporaries admired. It was the Spartan constitution and set of laws. Lycurgus was not praised for victory alone. It was the discipline of the spartiates themselves. It involved art and poetry - Tyrtaeus was highly lauded! One of our primary sources for Sparta is Xenophon's Constitution of the Lacedaimonians, which is extremely complimentary, and not focused entirely on military conquest. He praises the moderate appetites of the Spartans, their civic duty, their lack of greed or hedonism, their educational system, and so on. Xenophon is the one who tells us that the Spartans, unlike most poleis, lacked the institution of pederasty, and this is presented as a sign of the Spartans' virtue in valuing boys for their moral character, rather than in fleshly terms.
Should we take that all at face value? Probably not. Much of Xenophon's work is likely a veiled criticism of Athens itself, holding up a semi-imagined Spartan history in order to indict his present society. My point is just that it's plainly not true to say that the only thing Sparta was lauded for was its military record.
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