From: yarvin@cs.yale.edu (Norman Yarvin)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: Re: Registering "Assault Keys"
Date: 12 Nov 1992 20:09:41 -0500
Organization: Yale Computer Science Department
NNTP-Posting-Host: cathy.na.cs.yale.edu

gary@ke4zv.UUCP (Gary Coffman) writes:
>In article <1dpes0INN95e@CATHY.NA.CS.YALE.EDU> yarvin@cs.yale.edu (Norman Yarvin) writes:
>>andy@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (Andy Freeman) writes:
>>>Really?  Then why have such nationwide revolutions succeeded 65% of
>>>the time since 1945?
>>
>>Because they were in third-world countries!  We were talking about the US,
>>which is still extremely far from being a third-world country.
>
>We're also talking about a country where the general population is better
>armed than nearly any other civilian population on Earth.

I see I should have been clearer on my reasons for making the statement that
a revolution would be impossible in the US.  My argument is a social rather
than a military one.  I am not disputing that a guerrilla war could be
successful using the weapons that US citizens currently possess.  I doubt
it, but I have no strong arguments.

But for a revolution to occur in the first place, a significant proportion
of the people would have to sympathize with it.  I simply do not see that
this could happen in a developed country where the press is pro-government.
The recent elections have shown me yet again that popular support for any
cause is determined mostly by the nature of the publicity it gets.

In the third world, there are a great number of people who normally never
know of political happenings.  In these people, revolutionary organizers
have had a blank sheet on which to inscribe their own doctrine.  There are
no such people unaffected by the media in a first-world culture.  A much
greater time period is required to re-indoctrinate someone than is required
to imbue the first doctrine.  Revolutionary propaganda, whether or not it
was true, would have a very hard time.

> As the US military
>found out to it's chagrin in Vietnam, jets, tanks, and battleships are of
>little use against a guerrilla force that can melt back into the general
>population by day and hit and run by night. 

One feature of the US that would make for a guerrilla war different in
character from other guerrilla wars is the road system.  But it is not clear
to me whether this would help the guerrillas or the government more.


>The important concept to keep in mind here is that the Soviets were a
>foreign army of occupation. Destroying whole villages was possible to
>them. In a civil uprising, a government can't wholesale destroy it's
>own people and their productive assets. If it does, not only does it
>lose any popular support, it loses its tax base and its source of
>troops. Thus most military weapons are useless in suppressing a popular
>insurrection.

Certainly there are costs to destroying a whole village; certainly it is not
to be done to every village; but the benefits to the government of "wiping
out a nest of traitors" may in certain cases exceed the costs.  Of course if
the news were broadcast that a village had been wiped out, people would be
horrified.  That is why it would not be broadcast.

--
Norman Yarvin						yarvin@cs.yale.edu
 "Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to
  prove that the other party is unfit to rule--and both commonly succeed, and
  are right." H. L. Mencken