“How would they deal with the army?” Probaby even better then other folks in shitty technicals like Afghanistan and Vietnam did to be honest. They aren’t going to nuke American rebels because then they’d win a big radioactive pile of shit. Think they’d shoot missiles in NYC? Fat fucking chance. Even tanks rolling down Main street is gonna set off alarms.
The soldiers, firing into the crowds, brought death to tiananmen square. Survivors were simply run down. The tanks never fired a shell, because they didn’t need to. In the decades since then, nothing has emerged to shift that power dynamic in the favor of the people.
We’re not worried about missiles, stealth aircraft, armor penetrating rounds, their stupid microwave cannons, drone strikes or whatever other sci-fi bullshit looks good on television. We’re worried about armored vehicles rolling down mainstreet while there are thousands of people there, and the crowd crush that results. We’re worried about one zealous national guardsman with an M2 firing blindly into a march as it crosses a bridge. We’re worried about any leaders that emerge being quietly disappeared overnight, about our families being singled out by a teen at a fusion center that’s watching Joe Rogan on their phone, or about the simple fact that the military could just turn off critical infrastructure and our cities would grind to a halt. We have no way to stop that.
The Oligarchy can only roll over one protest. After that it is guerilla time.
The US is prime real estate for that. Large thinly populated areas, large remote mountain areas, densely populated urban areas. Population with access to guns at large, access to chemicals for explosives…
Tiananmen worked, because it crushed the resistance. Once the resistance decides not to be crushed, it is usually game over for the Oligarchy. It won’t be pretty though and it can take a while.
The key is that in asymmetric warfare, the regular army needs to defeat every single resistance fighter. The resistance just needs to survive as it pecks away at the regular army.
The US only fights insurgencies it creates - and on terms it dictates. A civil war is invariably the bloodiest kind, and should one break out in the US there would not be a coalition to help reign in the ROI this time. It would not be vietnam, or afghanistan - both wars that were lost in congress, not on the battlefield - it would be palestine.
The wars were lost on the battlefield. It was impossible to achieve any of the goals set out by military means. The military failed in its objectives and there was no reason to believe, that tossing another trillion dollar and another half a million soldiers onto it, would have changed the equation.
The US pulled out because it lost. As we have seen time and time again it is not that the politicians were reluctant to engage in another attempt in another country later. They did it time and time again. So it is not for a lack of political will, but for the ability of the US to achieve any of their stated or real objectives by a prolonged military occupation on the other side of the globe.
I don’t want to trade rhetorical quips with an ally - we both gain nothing from me waxing didactic about doctrinal warfare. I just want to caution that the political landscape shapes all wars, and the metaphorical terrain on which a US civil war would be fought would be abjectly alien to what you’re envisioning.
And the majority of people are libs and conservatives that think ”capitalism isn’t perfect, but it’s the best we got.”
Forget blackjack, we’re just gonna let the Hookers run this one. They will always do a better job than those fascists.
Every single honey I’ve ever met had more of a moral compass than the US far right, so I’m with you there.
My biggest fear is what emerges after.
No, no, don’t you know, this time it’ll be different. Every time a government was violently overthrown by the local population what came after was either dictatorship or warlordism. But this time it’ll be different! Trust me, bro!
I’d be willing to accept help from France again
Maybe rephrase the question, given the American Revolution?
Those guys weren’t Americans, they were brits. In the end it was a war of brits fighting brits.
I’m sure there were people in Rome that saw the fire, looked around and realized they were surrounded by self destructive fools.
30 years ago when I learned about the fall of Rome, I thought “how cool would it have been to be there in person and see what happened live?” Fuck me if I’m not finding out
Americans were bred not to fight for anyone except the master. There is no real God(s) here.
The other thing to consider, and maybe this is already addressed, is that there’s a stunningly large proportion of the population that is not only okay with this, they want it. And it’s not a situation where those people who approve or simply don’t care are segregated out by regions, they’re literally living next doors and up stairs. They’re cousins and sisters and fathers and bosses and coworkers and so on. This is not some super easy “why doesn’t the larger of the two simply eat the other?” kind of situation, and no matter how hard anybody wants to try and reduce it down to that, sorry, that’s just now how things work.
So more in line with Nazi Germany than confederate 1860s USA
Most of the people here live paycheck to paycheck and can’t afford a $500 emergency.
So the risk of even just getting arrested, and held in custody for a week, would be enough to ruin one’s life.
That puts a damper on protesting, until you or your family are directly impacted. It also inhibits willingness to strike.
And it also explains why so many protesters are of retirement age – they don’t have a job to lose if they miss work unexpectedly for a few days.
In a lot of ways, we were already conquered.
Ultimately the same for all other authoritarian states with a “docile” population. Fragile living conditions threaten their livelyhoods, preventing many from joining the fight.
Until those fragile living conditions are threatened. Then people will think “I’m fucked if I do nothing and might not be fucked if I do something. So I will do something.”
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I disagree that ‘comfort’ was a cause. That line of thinking comes from the same puritanical austerity narrative that has been used to tell the working class that our circumstances are due to poor character rather than because we were talked out of demanding more.
It’s victim-blamey, but like all victim-blaming narratives it has the virtue of restoring a sense of control, a sense of “this is the thing that I can decide to do that would have prevented this.”
…which isn’t to say that I don’t think we can’t identify things that could have stopped this. But I don’t think a vague assertion that people here are more distracted or ‘comfortable’ than elsewhere helps. Also - a lot of people are not comfortable. But they may deal with that by at least enjoying the distractions or not staring into the sun of things they don’t think they can change.
Ultimately, we ended up here through corrupt systems. The Trumpers were right to want to ‘drain the swamp’, they are just so blinded by antimosity that they fell for a grifter because he promised to hurt people.
All the pillars of democracy have been under attack since Reagan - high quality journalism and education to maintain an informed voter base, a voter base with enough time to research issues, and political campaign laws to keep government working in the public’s interest.
Occupy Wall Street tried to sound the alarm, but journalism was already too corrupt and the movement was successfully sold to the public as ‘annoying college kids demanding free things’.
So now we have a significant chunk of the voter base that doesn’t know what habeas corpus is, or anything about how our checks and balances are supposed to look, and thinks what makes this country “a free country” is that we blow shit up with fireworks on July 4th - and doesn’t see why authoritarianism would be so bad.
And the rest of us who are looking on aghast are honestly afraid of our police, of Trumpers openly talking about lynching us (and yes - they have more guns than us. Most liberals still refuse to consider becoming armed), and of losing everything and dying in a prison cell run by a for-profit corp.
This is a stage-4 cancer diagnosis on a social scale, and people are still figuring out if we want chemo or to try to ride this out as long as we can.
On top of that, while conservative social media spaces are full of people threatening violence, all of the platforms are coming down hard on any space that discusses anything more provocative than holding a sign in a nonn-threatening manner in a way that abides any police order given.
There is no place to organize, and no one is proposing or organizing any serious strategy. Seriously – I’ve gone to local meetings, and all any activist org or politician will say is “organize with your neighbors (organize what?) and try to do mutual aid”.
That is not a meaningful response to an organization like the Heritage Foundation.
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but when I see all the people actively turning off their higher-cognitive functions on purpose
Counterpoint, it’s not all the people. You and I are depressed as fuck, our brains like to tell us that everybody is against us, it’s all worthless, and the only good part is the end, but that’s not very accurate.
I burnt out as a caregiver for developmentally disabled adults, due to lack of support in the community. I was working nights, working with clients that had violent behavior (unfun fact, 100% of people with Down’s Syndrome will develop early-onset dementia), and my friend group imploded with the stupidest drama. It’s too easy for me to think “most people have never had a client have a seizure in the shower and spray shit and vomit all over them, blah blah addicted to comfort”, but it turns out that’s a really terrible way of getting people on your side.
I’m going to a local meetup this weekend to discuss plans and mutual aid in my rural town. There’s not a lot of us, but nobody can argue it’d be better to stay home.
Agreed, it’s so many wrongs built upon a foundation of awful; I think the internet magnifies and accelerates this enshitification. Thank you for your work
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Yes, it’s hard and it is getting worse. But the revolution will not be televised. There is an overwhelming interest in keeping people from knowing about each other, they’re not going to make it easy for us to organize. The internet is complicit, as it’s controlled by only a handful of companies, who don’t want to lose their monopoly either.
One of the ways in which to drive a wedge is to highlight the failings of the other side. It’s more personal for you and I, and therefore more effective. We cannot focus more on the failings than on the successes, even if there is more fail than success, because success is birthed from failure. Yes, it feels weird, it feels like you’re ignoring how badly we’re all doing, but we have to keep our eyes forward and not get bogged down with despair.
I saved more than a handful of young men from falling into that darkness
It is just a small thing, but you are only one droplet in a cascade. People who have stood on the precipice and stepped back are in a more valuable position to reach others on the edge of darkness, and you have enabled that to spread. If darkness can spread like a mind-virus, so can the sun.
Not to mention, “how is someone supposed to organize any of this without getting disappeared by the FBI or CIA.”
Easy. Get disappeared by ICE instead.
We are in the middle of a revolution, just not one of, for, or by the people.
Now that corporations are people, they are “fighting for their rights” to make obscene profits; it’s a “Cash is King” plutocratic revolution.
I’m not sure the answer to this question but I’ll be ready with my de-ICE-ing agent.
And further, while voting is made difficult by those in power to protect their power base, it is far easier to convince people to vote than to fight a war.
Also, voting doesn’t mean you can’t still protest or do other forms of organization.
To be fair it’s not a “somehow”. Nearly every democracy on Earth is more functional than the USA.
The simple fact that we can’t form coalitions like in a parliamentary system has the liberal left deadlocked. Democratic leadership feel like they don’t have to compromise with their left flank to win, while chastising them if they lose. Actually having a system where two parties have to hammer out an agreement to share power would at least turn the fuckin’ page already.
Of course, to get a system like that in the States just puts us right back at the image heading this post.
If the US collapses before I die. I can die happy.
This is an evil country. It makes war on the world. It threatens the world via control of the reserve currency. To say nothing of the abuses it visits on its own citizens.
Total collapse. Balkanization. Don’t care how. No expectation of surviving the fall. But as long as it falls I can die happy knowing that life on this planet has a brighter future than it did with the US at the till.
They should just disunite and become 51 independent states. Then they don’t have to project their internal differences onto other countries any more.
I agree, Balkanization would be for the best at this point; there’s no longer any legal solution
Every state has its own government and the feds have become more trouble than they are worth.
I should add that even if the states get a right to secede, but don’t use it, that improves people’s lives.
Because the states can constantly pressure the federal government to be nice to the states or the states will secede. This way, the federal government is forced to treat states somewhat better, if it wants to retain power.
Laws don’t mean anything any more, so states should just go ahead and dew it regardless of legality.
as long as at leadt one state fully commits to doing the dew. Baja Blast style.
Putting aside reality, the day New Jersey decides to bounce, I will fight for New Jersey. When people ask the general “What are you waiting for,” I’m waiting for NJ to declare war on the world.
if mamdani wins he has the opportunity to do something incredibly funny
