It seems like he is accused of making shit up, which (from a credibility standpoint) is worse than plagiarism.
Resisting an organized government with an organized police and army requires more than anything else organization. An organized but unarmed resistance can do much more than armed but unorganized individuals.
It seems to me that the standard tools of historical research - diaries, recollections, state papers - could shed light on this.
Along the same lines:
Does anyone have any historical examples of this? I’ll note that one guy with a gun is a criminal, but a group of them are terrorists, at least in the eyes of the state media and invariably a share of the population.
I’m not making light of the work involved in providing historical substantiation by the way. Nor do I claim any knowledge or expertise in this area.
Consider Vietnam. They resisted France for years but never got anywhere because their populace was largely unarmed. It wasn’t until WWII when they were able to get their hands on any modern weaponry. At the beginning of the First Indochina War, many of the Viet Minh were armed only with old muskets and spears, but their military capabilities improved with the increased arms shipments to the country (either direct aid from China and the Soviet Union, or by capturing U.S. weaponry from fleeing South Vietnamese soldiers).
The thing is, even though the NVA and Viet Cong vastly improved their military capabilities over the course of their 2 wars, it’s not like they were able to match or even come close to the Americans in terms of firepower and equipment. What mattered is that they were armed enough to at least compete. As long as they were able to get their hands on modern weaponry, they could continue resisting effectively. This is why I don’t buy the argument of “Oh, it’s pointless to have guns because the government has tanks and planes,” as if the President would carpet bomb a major city to put down a rebellion. As long as you have the means to at least make things difficult, you discourage oppression.
I would think that the African nations that rebelled against colonial oppression in the 20th century might meet the definition of the OP. However, unlike the Vietnamese, I don’t know the circumstances by which the people of a nation like Mozambique (which has an AK-47 on its flag) acquired their guns.
Post WWII, the Russians went about dishing out free guns to all and sundry in various 3rd World Countries. All you had to do was call yourself the (Wherever) People’s Liberation Front and you could expect an Antonov full of Kalashnikov rifles and ammunition to arrive as soon as you could clear a landing strip for it in the jungle/desert, almost.
A lot of the guns in Afghanistan are local knock-offs of old British Lee-Enfield rifles (from the various British adventures in the area in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries), as well as the AK-47, brought in quantities courtesy of the Soviet Army in 1979, and later copied by the same people in the Khyber Pass making Lee-Enfield knockoffs.
Fun fact: Old film is often used as part of the propellant in some of the Khyber Pass made cartridges; it contains nitrocellulose which is a key component of smokeless powder.
Only if they are using stocks of very old film for the purpose. According to at least one source, the only product still made from celluloid is the table tennis ball. Page 6 of this UK government pamphletindicates production of celluloid film ceased around 1950.
I don’t understand the dichotomy being set up here. There is no need to choose between an unarmed peaceful resistance and an armed populace sympathetic to an oppressive government.
The purpose of an armed populace is not to win a fight against an organized army, it’s to allow the people to remain ungovernable. Effective use of small arms, sabotage, and peaceful resistance are all good ways to make this happen, and are not mutually incompatible.
No, the ONLY acceptable method of resistance is if everyone joins hands and sings Kumbaya. Only a bloodthirsty hillbilly would believe otherwise.
This is the question as originally asked:
And?
That’s fair. But I’m wondering if there are documented historical instances of this happening. I’m a bit surprised at the paucity of convincing examples in this thread; too many people are wandering off into hypotheticals (well, if group X had had guns, then this would have happened…) instead of presenting actual cases.
Could someone from the Khyber Pass come here to America and get a job at Winchester or something? I mean, you don’t get much better on-the-job training that that. Sure they’d have to be taught a few things but I can’t imagine they’d have a hard time of it.
Argent, I was wondering if you would be back! This seems like it would be a topic of interest to you.
Modern gun manufacturers would have little usefor Khyber Pass gunsmiths. The successful large manufacturers here do as little as possible by hand. CNC is heavily employed. Guns are designed to use out-of-the-box parts and the parts themselves are held to very tight tolerances during manufacture. The end result is a gun that requires litte to no hand fitting of parts.
Sooner or later, it seems every gun writer does an article where he went to some big name maker’s factory and assembled his own rifle. Some goofus wrote about putting together his own Savage 110 in the latest Shotgun News. These articles are all very much alike. Goofus screws a bunch of parts together, but then one of the factory workers does the only skilled bit; usually making sure the barrel is properly headspaced.
The Khyber Pass smiths have the same skill sets that the big name makers found they could do without in the 80’s and 90’s. Also, don’t overestimate the quality of their work. More than one reputable authority has noted that Kyber Pass specials, even the blackpowder models, are very often unsafe to fire. They are made from whatever scrap metal the smiths can scavenge, and heat treatment is rather hit-or-miss. The edged weapons I’ve examined from that part of the world don’t make me enthusiastic about firing a high intensity cartridge from a gun made by people with the same metalurgical kills.
The metal in Khyber Pass rifles is often scavenged from old railway lines, wrecked cars/4WDs, and so on. Interestingly, a lot of Khyber Pass rifles are built from one “Master” rifle- ie, someone gets an original Martini-Henry, for example, and copies every part of it to make a functioning rifle.
But, since the markings on it are in English and the gunmaker generally lacks a formal education in the Western sense, he makes a number of errors in the translation- Getting the “N” backwards in “Enfield” is a common one, along with “VR” (“Victoria Regina”) cyphers from years after Queen Victoria died- but otherwise, the rifle is mechanically identical to the “Master Rifle”.
Then someone else gets the first copy rifle and uses that to make their own copy rifle (since they don’t have access to an original Martini-Henry), and their copy includes the marking mistakes made by the original Copier… and so on.
It’s a fascinating subject (Khyber Pass gunmaking), but I wouldn’t be firing a Khyber Pass gun under any circumstances; except maybe one which involves the rifle sandbagged into place and the trigger pulled by string from a distance…
Well, why doesn’t the American Revolution qualify? Yes, there was outside support, but that came later in the conflict. At the outset, it was farmers and landowners with the family musket, making themselves ungovernable.
I suspect that you’re not going to find a pure example of one party holding off the tyranny of another completely by themselves, because that doesn’t happen. Other countries are always going to step in on one side or another.
I agree generally with your points but must point out that the British army was never an occupying army,it wasn’t there to force a dissident population to remain part of the U.K. against its will by force.
The majority of the population was then and is still now very,very strongly adamant that they wish to remain part of the union,it is often said that the Ulstermen are more British then the English,Scots or Welsh.
Maybe demographic changes in the future, brought about by the higher Catholic birthrate will change the majority opinion,if so I cant see Her Majs government resisting N.I. joining the R.O.I.whatever party is in power.
The Army was originally sent to N.I.to protect the Catholic population from Protestant mobs but remained to try and prevent as much as was humanly possible the two communities butchering each other.
Most of the people killed over there were civilians in every sense of the word killed by one or other of the Republican or "Loyalist"terrorist gangs.
The Security Forces operated under almost ridiculous constraints such as when first over there having to shout,I think it was, three warnings if someone was actually shooting at you before being able to return fire plus there was a very serious enquiry at one stage into whether the R.U.C. were intentionally shooting to kill when they engaged terrorists because apparently they weren’t supposed to.
(I was never a great lover of the R.U.C. but even I wondered why there wasn’t a reciprocal inquiry into whether the terrorists were shooting to kill when they were backshooting some poor sod whos crime was to have been born into the wrong branch of Christianity)
The Republican terrorists were always better armed and financed then the "Loyalist"murder gangs receiving weapons and money(millions of pounds every year) from amongst others American sympathisers (were under the impression that the I.R.A. was a bunch of plucky freedom fighters resisting the brutal oppression of the Fascist British occupation forces jackboot),Palestinian terrorists and Libya.
Both sides also made considerable amounts of money from organised criminal businesses(Protection rackets,blackmail, amongst other things,but most of all drugs.)
Ironically on at least one occassion the terrorists from both sides joined forces, though supposedly sworn enemies, to organise the drug business in Belfast(Even having sociable drinking sessions with each other in the pub after business had been concluded,I kid you not, though to be fair this was frowned on by their organisations)and getting together to divvy up the construction contracts to build the Peace Line in Belfast(A wall/fence built where the opposing communities were literally next door to each other, to stop gunmen nipping into each others areas murdering someone at random and then slipping back into the safety of their own)
But I’ll stop wittering away now especially as I’ve wandered off topic a tad.
Well, the impression I am getting from some other posts in this thread is that the militias really weren’t that effective, since a group of trained soldiers will defeat a group of ill-trained private citizens all the time, even assuming similar weaponry. And so private firearms were, in this case, not effective in ending British rule (although the intervention of trained armies was). Am I wrong?
Militia don’t have to defeat trained armies in the field to render a people ungovernable. In every engagement, the US defeated the Viet Cong. They defeated the NVA in every engagement as well. Those victories weren’t worth the blood and treasure poured out to secure them, and we ended up leaving anyway. That’s all any irregulars have to do: keep bleeding the occupiers/oppressors.
Clauswitz said that the purpose of war is not to defeat the enemys army in the field but to destroy their enemies will to fight, which is what happened to the American T.V. viewing public back home.