Stan, here's more hairsplitting...
>Under all the superficial complexity of capitalism, there are people with
>weapons, and in a fight between someone with a higher moral purpose and
>someone with a gun, the gun wins every single time. Even the mass
>non-violent strategies of Ghandi and King, et al, were acted out against a
>background of the Soviet Union's armed force. Never doubt, that in the
>absence of that mighty alternative, Ghandi and King and their followers
>would have been slaughtered en masse.
I wonder how the USSR helped King and esp. Gandhi. There was no cold war
during Gandhi's life and his followers were slaughtered en masse despite the
background of the Japanese armed forces (the only one which helped if any
helped). But the British could not kill all of Gandhi's followers and even if they
could
they would end up with huge costs for very little or no benefit. In such cases where
repression is not productive, non-violent strategies seem to work pretty well. Of
course, the more people following the strategy, the less productive is repression.
>I spent 24 years in the armed forces, and I can tell you that when we are
>talking about force, we aren't talking about assault rifles. We are
>talking about fuel-air bombs, computerized, long-range missles systems, a
>smorgasbord of hi-tech surveillance and eavesdropping capabilities, high
>mobility weapons platforms for air, land, and sea, forward looking infrared
>monitors, electronic chain guns that can rain 3000 rounds per minute, and
>all the paraphernalia of the new, militarized police.
How many people can you kill with cruise missles and the like before running out
of ammo and technicians? Probably way less than with machetes and rifles.
Biological weapons seem more of a threat.
>This is the system, and all the rest is cover, and the highest, and still
>only ultimately effective, form of struggle to sieze power is revolutionary
>civil war. Anyone that believes that can be done through the magic of
>"decentralization" or "leaderless resistance" or "non-heirarchical
>organizing" is smoking some seriously high-quality hash.
The very weapons you mentionned means that highly hierarchal revolutionary
organizations will likely quickly find themselves without leaders. Or at least it
seems so from my rather ignorant perspective.
Julien
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