- cross-posted to:
- usnews@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- usnews@beehaw.org
Summary
Following a February 7th neo-Nazi rally, residents of Lincoln Heights, a majority-Black Ohio town, formed an armed Safety and Watch Program to protect against hate groups.
The rally, where participants waved swastikas and shouted slurs, received little police intervention, sparking fears of future threats when no arrests or identifications were made during the incident.
Volunteers now patrol bus stops and neighborhoods. “I’ve never felt safer as a Black man in my community,” said spokesperson Daronce Daniels.
The historically underserved and self-governing community shows strong support for the initiative with yard signs and sees this as a continuation of its legacy of self-reliance and community defense.
I’m not thinking about self defense against some burglar. I’m talking about self defense in the sense the US gun nuts have been talking about for decades. Now that tyranny has actually arrived, they’re very quiet all of a sudden. Who would have thought.
WWI more than a hundred years ago demonstrated conclusively the military worthlessness of a bunch of dudes armed with rifles, when faced with the real elements of state military power: artillery, tanks and airplanes. The US government has no fear of a bunch of fat old dudes with closets full of peashooters.
Oh yes, on an open battlefield against declared combatants, absolutely. However, that’s not how it’s going to go down in the US. This is where we get to dredge up that old quote about a rifle behind every blade of grass.
Take a look at any “anti-insurgency” operation in the last ~80 years or any situation that devolved into door-to-door warfare in a city full of both nongovernment combatants and also where basically every single civilian also hates you and your army. Except in our case about a third (32%) of those civilians are armed.
Even if only half of those civilians are on our side, we’d outnumber the entirety of the US police and military forces combined by a little over 13 to 1. Nobody wants to fight a war of attrition and I’m not recommending one, but the fascists would have to achieve an unrealistically ludicrous k/d ratio to succeed. There’s no way around it other than this would outright require indiscriminately blowing up large sections of their own cities and infrastructure to get us, surely killing a handful of combatants each time but also taking out at least double their number in uninvolved civilians.
That sort of thing does not tend to go any way towards making the rest of those civilians left get less involved.
TBH I don’t think us Americans would actually have the stomach to be on the receiving end of anti-insurgency operations in the way that, say, the Vietnamese and Afghan people were - enduring 20 or 30 deaths for every oppressor killed. Also, I don’t know that very many of us would understand the need to handle all communications and organizing without using social media or the Internet at all. Today’s fascists have tools of social control that were undreamt of in the past.
That must be why they beat theTaliban so decisively.