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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.
Since everyone's hijacking this thread to post their opinions of Brett Devereaux, I'll just join in and do the same. But first, a digression to write about someone who bothers me even more.
I used to be an enthusiastic listener to the "Literature and History" podcast, by Doug Mezger. Overall, it's a great series. Detailed, patient, well-made, well-spoken, some depth and a lot of breadth. But about 20 episodes in, it increasingly turned into a thoroughly feminist publication. He could no longer go five minutes without injecting some moral judgement about the ancients failing to live up to modern standards of egalitarianism. He'd condemn Agamemnon and Odysseus for the violence they committed, then praise Chlytemnestra and Medea for the violence they committed. And the pattern kept repeating. A nonviolent woman is wise, a nonviolent man is indecisive, etc. Every aspect of history and literature, shown through the lense of feminism. I ended up putting a stop to my listenership, and cancelling my patreon support. What started out as very promising ended up very grating, and I am still sore about it. A capable historian, literary scholar and podcaster ruined his work because he just couldn't stop using it a political soapbox.
Brett Devereaux is, to me, not the same. He doesn't do good work and ruin it with interjections. He does a ton of middling-okay work that, as it turns out, is just him projecting his prejudices onto history and selling that to the reader, and occasionally, almost by accident, something interesting is said along the way. I used to consider him long-winded and inefficient, and something of a contrarian who chose topics on which he could be highly critical because well, otherwise there wouldn't be much to say.
But then I watched a youtube video in which Brett Deveraux and a youtuber by the name of "Dr. Lantern Jack" (who runs a Podcast by the name of "Ancient Greece Declassified", which I have not so far listened to) discuss the Spartan question. Jack mostly spent his time questioning Brett about his position, who expressed the view that Spartans were not militarily more competent than any other Greeks, that they never trained for battle, and that the Krypteia was the ritual slaughter of helots. Jack cast doubt on those claims, considering them extreme and unlikely (and coming off as at least slightly Sparta-inclined in the process), and kept trying to get Brett to justify them with more than "there's no evidence to the contrary so I'm forced to assume as much". Instead, Brett just doubled down, became increasingly irritable, invoked abstractions like "that's what the current state of The Science says!", and ended up looking very much like a weaselly ass. Lantern Jack stayed polite and patient throughout, and so came out much better even though he himself couldn't make much more of an argument than Brett either.
And so I ended up developing an actual dislike for Brett Devereaux, of whom I now think that he's just a weak specimen overall and the tries to compensate by playing tough guy versus historical entities that can't fight back anymore.
And you, dear reader, just spent two minutes reading about the completely unimportant opinions of a stranger on the internet.
What the hell else would you have me do with my time?
Go outside?
Talk to girls?
Improve myself?
Fuck outta here.
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Devereaux runs a moderately successful old-style blog where he wrote a somewhat famous series of essays outlining his position on Sparta. I read them several times and found them very exhaustively researched. In a way that makes it difficult to rebut his position without going to a lot of work. But, ultimately, I thought that his theory of Sparta started with a base incredulity. He can't believe that there was ever anything about Sparta that anyone ever found admirable. So all his research is just exhaustive fact-checking to prove that whatever you the reader or other ancient Greeks liked about Sparta, well, those reasons are pants-on-fire false. A lot of historians play this game where they "prove" their moral judgments because their historical judgments are so exhaustive. (This is also how a lot of people treat Robert Caro.)
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The thing about Brett Devereaux is that his arguments tend to be right- but he likes to use them to say things his arguments don’t address. His fremen mirage series does a great job pointing out that GDP and population determines the outcomes of wars 90% of the time, but then he strongly implies this disproves all sorts of patriarchal theses. It doesn’t, he literally doesn’t address the topic. Etc, etc.
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My dear strange German, if I didn't want to read about your opinion, I would not be on the Motte. Not only am I on the Motte, but you are one of the posters I enjoy. Keep sharing your opinions, my southern kraut who is north of me.
I don't get us all. What are we doing here?
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