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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.
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."
Agreed. Even in modern context without sympathetic media nonviolent protests are absolutely ineffective. Just a few examples, two from conservative and two from leftist side:
March for life/abortion clinics vigils. These were largely ineffective, in fact they led to oppressive laws where praying in a buffer zone around abortion clinics is punishable offense which in fact got some people arrested.
Antiglobalist protests in early 2000s in Seattle and other places. They did not achieve their goals, all the trade deals went as planned and in fact globalist agendas went through just fine. If anything meeting in places like Davos to embark upon Global regulations is even more popular than in the past.
Occupy Wallstreet was complete fiasco, a lot of ink was spent if it was sabotaged possibly by introducing woke as a new topic or what. Nevertheless this movement is dead in the water.
Tea Party and wave of protests for their policy died similarly to Occupy.
Abortion clinic protests were actually highly adaptive to their specific circumstances- local authorities that wanted to ban abortion but were prevented from doing so by their superiors. They reduced abortion access quite a bit without bloodshed.
Their success in blue states has been a lot more mixed, but they still kinda worked in mildly reducing abortion access instead of the counterfactual where a bunch of assassins and firebombers go to jail forever.
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