We teach people to fight wars because we don’t have to teach people civil disobedience against an occupying force if we FUCKING KILL THEM long before they ever get close to occupying us.
I’m sorry but this is such a bizarrely naive topic that it borders on delusional. History is full of one territory invading another and if you were the territory being invaded you often considered yourself lucky if the invaders didn’t murder and rape everyone or send them to concentration camps to be worked to death.
The black population in the 1960s was almost 19 million (about 10% of the population). They aren’t a credible threat to killing all the white people and taking over the country. But that’s certainly a large enough population that there could be race riots and terrorist attacks for pretty much forever.
That level of political violence could easily escalate into another civil war.
Look what Timothy McVeigh did in Oklahoma City and he’s just one dude.
I’m not so sure about that. Wasn’t there a sense, among Northern whites especially, that they had a choice between peaceful protests and race riots - between MLK Jr. and Malcom X - and that they should support the former for their own personal safety? I think Dr. King knew this, too. It seems to me that pacifism is only really effective when it’s the velvet glove covering the iron fist.
Eh, while I agree that no government wants to encourage civil disobedience, the reason why they don’t teach it as a defense against invasion is that it wouldn’t work. At best, you end up with the enemy eventually leaving when they get tried of it, but your nation has been reduced to wreckage first. Or they just kill everyone and settle the empty land.
And then there’s the issue that such deliberate weakness invites attack. So you end up with more wars, as well as more destructive wars, since an aggressive neighbor has no reason not to attack.
I just don’t see this. The British were foreigners in India. They invaded India and set up a government in India which they controlled. How were they not foreign invaders?
I would argue that you end up with fewer wars. Since you would be unable to mount any sort of useful defense. It would be one war, and that’s it. You’re done.
Timothy McVeigh ended up dead. It’s hard to argue that he won in his war with the United States.
Black people had the capability on using violence but they didn’t have the capability of winning a violent conflict. Black were substantially outnumbered by white people and white people controlled a larger share of logistic resources. If the United States had collapsed into another civil war, black people would have lost.
I don’t want to assume too much about the OP, but generally, anyone who comes up with the idea that no military is needed and peaceful demonstration will make an invader go away has probably grown up in a nation that was very insulated from enemy attack and faced no real likelihood of being invaded. Few people who grew up next to an actual aggressor could have naive ideas like that.
There is also the simple sabotage field manual from 1944, which discussed ways for people in occupied territories to engage in resistance to make life harder for an invading force.
It would probably be fairly easy to update it to modern times. I recall reading someone who just uploaded it to an AI program and asked it to update it for 2025 society.
Regarding the US, our large population and large oceans is what truly protects us. Invading and conquering the US is not easy considering you have to travel across the ocean bringing troops. That isn’t easy.
Plus being realistic, our nuclear umbrella protects us. The Russian military is mostly destroyed but their nuclear umbrella protects them.
Our oceans, large population and nuclear umbrella protects us from a land invasion.
But if you are looking for building a mass civil disobedience movement, it would probably be pretty cheap. You’d just have to update documents like the sabotage field manual for 2025 society and give it out for free as an EPUB people can read on their phones or tablets.
Also as was proven in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, things like guerilla warfare and IEDs can be highly effective. They aren’t peaceful but they work against invaders.
Another thing to take into consideration, from a realpolitik POV, is that civil disobedience is mostly useless unless the military refuses to oppress the public. When the military decides to stop suppressing the public to support the regime, the regime’s days are numbered. But as long as the military is happy to repress the public, civil disobedience is largely ineffective. There is mass civil resistance in Iran and it is mostly useless since the military and security services support the regime. Mass civil resistance in Hong Kong didn’t work because the police supported China.
You are setting very narrow conditions for winning and losing. Real life isn’t like a RTS videogame where absolute victory annihilating your opponent is the only winning condition.
Politicians tend to want to keep their jobs have having constant race riots and racially driven bombings and terrorist attacks isn’t a great way to do that.
You also can’t remove or displace 20 million people without resorting to tactics that would dwarf the Nazis (or the pre-Civil War slave trade for that matter). Blacks wouldn’t be the only people with a problem with that.
The point isn’t whether McVeigh “won”. The point is how much chaos one made can sow, let alone thousands.
I’m not the one who brought up Timothy McVeigh. But that said, I can’t think of any reasonable definition of victory that let’s anyone claim that McVeigh won in his conflict with the United States.
I do agree that public opinion can place limits on how much force the government can use against people. But if some group chooses to begin using violence first, they would forego a lot of public sympathy. If some group started carrying out violent riots or terrorist attacks, there would be a lot of public support for the government “cracking down” on that group.
So I’m confused. Who’s being trained to disobey who? Is the populace being trained to disobey the army? The army and populace trained to disobey the evil Canuck horde that will sweep down from the north when the defense department is abolished? It is the army being trained to fight the populace who disobeying the powers that be?
I’m not OP, but I assume OP meant if the US were invaded by a foreign adversary, or the constitutional government was overthrown the goal would be to make the public as non-compliant as possible.
The problem fundamentally is that as long as the security services (military, police, secret police, intelligence agencies, etc) are willing to oppress and terrorize the public, that peaceful resistance doesn’t do much. Peaceful protest doesn’t result in regime change until the military refuses to support the regime. The vast majority of the public in Iran hate the regime, and the regime is doing fine.
I’m disappointed that so many of the replies are essentially, ‘that can’t work’ instead of something more like ‘we haven’t found a way to make that work’. Teaching our kids (and ourselves!) about the successes and failures of civil disobedience, passive resistance, etc. shouldn’t be any more dangerous to our security and might plant the seeds for some breakthroughs in strategy & tactics.
Do you have examples of when peaceful resistance worked without the support of the military, international community, security services, government itself, etc?
People talk about the civil rights movement in the US, but it was really the federal government under LBJ that forced civil rights on the south against their will in 1964. Black and white people peacefully protesting (to my knowledge) didn’t accomplish much for actually expanding civil rights without the threat of violence from the federal government behind it.
I remember some monk in Myanmar wrote a book about all the ways to peacefully protest. Well and good, but the government didn’t step down until the international community pressured them.
If the civil disobedience is public protests, the regime can send its troops in to break it up. But how does the regime respond if the civil disobedience takes the form of a general strike or a boycott? This kind of economic pressure can hurt a regime but it’s hard to attack it with military force.
I believe in most cases that was breaking up picket lines or demonstrations in support of a strike. The strikes themselves were people not going in to work and that’s a lot harder to break up.