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Revolutions can happen if enough people show up. Massive amounts of people are difficult to deal with. Smaller groups you can outright kill in daylight, but b

Revolutions can happen if enough people show up. Massive amounts of people are difficult to deal with. Smaller groups you can outright kill in daylight, but better to get to them first to torture and kill them out of sight. Once you need to kill 500.000 who are protesting and if violence to quell the hoards wakes up more people who want to see the regime fail.

sigmoid10 2y ago
Belarus had 500.000 people show up. But they got beat down. Hong Kong had millions of people show up. But it just led to massive crackdowns. Numbers mean nothing when the guys who own the guns are not on your side.
- matwood 2y ago
  > Numbers mean nothing when the guys who own the guns are not on your side. Not saying it will turn out differently, but there are more guns circulating in the US than there are people. Nearly everyone has or can easily get access to a gun. US culture is also quite a bit different, celebrating violence, don't tread on me, etc... Again, it might not make a difference, but I'm not sure those other situations are comparable. Something else to note is that military officers swear an oath the constitution, not POTUS (like enlisted do). Asking someone to order or to shoot fellow Americans, particularly if unarmed, would definitely be a test. If something like that did happen, we would be entering a second civil war.
  - sigmoid10 2y ago
    If it actually does come to a new civil war, my money is still on whoever owns most of the military. Small arms are nice and well, but they don't help you a lot when the other guy has got APCs and tanks.
    - matwood 2y ago
      I think it would be an open question as to which side ends up owning most of the military. Bases are all over the US along with national guard. The people in the military are also a pretty diverse group. In a civil war situation I don’t think it would be an automatic siding with DC.
      - sigmoid10 2y ago
        One of the reasons the military has so many independent branches is that it would take all of them to rebel and join the opposing side in order to win. It's impossible to tell how they would side in a real internal conflict and the whole apparatus probably has to break down first before they will ever officially take sides of a force that opposes the federal government. At that point there will be total chaos and the wealthiest people can once again swoop in, amass the most powerful force and take over.
    - esseph 2y ago
      It's always the people who have never fought in a war that say things like this. APCs take fuel, require men to run, and need tires or tracks. For $10 worth of chemicals or a little bit of camouflage and some earth work you can make the APC irrelevant very quickly. Happened in Iraq all the time. The US military and its members have spent almost 25 years fighting through insurgencies. There are millions of combat vets.
      - esseph 2y ago
        (If you spend a lot of time learning to fight against an insurgency, you also spend a lot of time learning how to wage one against a technologically superior force.)
    - mmooss 2y ago
      In the US's two most recent wars, the people with small arms outlasted the US military. It happened in 3 of the 5 U.S. wars since WWII, and in the other two there was nobody with small arms.
  - esseph 2y ago
    Enlisted swear to defend the constitution first, in order of precedence. This is the way it is commonly understood.
- 6510 2y ago
  But when they are it is easy and simple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibrahim_Traor%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibrahim_Traor%C3%A9 https://youtu.be/wq14Vrz7ax0?t=73 https://youtu.be/wq14Vrz7ax0?t=73 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brice_Oligui_Nguema https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brice_Oligui_Nguema https://youtu.be/4JU1W6dep_8?t=400 https://youtu.be/4JU1W6dep_8?t=400
throwawayqqq11 2y ago
If the power gap between angry peasants and fully autonomous killer robots is big enough, why not kill 500.000? I always wondered why north korea is so stable. I think its a mix of military power, media control and chinese support.
jgilias 2y ago
The people of Belarus put this to test not that long ago. Massive numbers of people came out, factories went on strike, even people from the military and police spoke out against the regime. Turned out that in this day and age when the governments have unprecedented powers of surveillance and the ability to cut anyone from the respective financial system, a revolution is a really hard thing to pull off. If the British had the kind of power that even half-competent governments have today, the American revolution would never have succeeded.
- DecoySalamander 2y ago
  You have to both outnumber the loyalists to certain degree and show significant determination. Euromaidan did that with 800,000 protesters at its peak. As a percentage of the population that's less than what Belarus saw, but at the same time Yanukovych had significantly fewer people willing to do his bidding than Lukashenko.
  - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
    >Euromaidan did that with 800,000 protesters at its peak. Euromaidan succeeded because it also had massive support and influence from the western powers and from the western(mostly US) itelligence agencies to make the pro-Russian regime change happen. Similar to the fall of the Berlin wall and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, it was a decades long effort from the US itelligence agencies, they didn't just sit around and wait for the local population to revolt. People ignore how much external interference these revolutions get in order to make regime changes happen.
    - jgilias 2y ago
      I was following the events very closely. The most obvious foreign interference I saw was Russian spetznaz being brought in as reinforcements to try and suppress tbe protests for longer.
      - FirmwareBurner 2y ago

sigmoid10 2y ago

Belarus had 500.000 people show up. But they got beat down. Hong Kong had millions of people show up. But it just led to massive crackdowns. Numbers mean nothing when the guys who own the guns are not on your side.

matwood 2y ago
> Numbers mean nothing when the guys who own the guns are not on your side. Not saying it will turn out differently, but there are more guns circulating in the US than there are people. Nearly everyone has or can easily get access to a gun. US culture is also quite a bit different, celebrating violence, don't tread on me, etc... Again, it might not make a difference, but I'm not sure those other situations are comparable. Something else to note is that military officers swear an oath the constitution, not POTUS (like enlisted do). Asking someone to order or to shoot fellow Americans, particularly if unarmed, would definitely be a test. If something like that did happen, we would be entering a second civil war.
- sigmoid10 2y ago
  If it actually does come to a new civil war, my money is still on whoever owns most of the military. Small arms are nice and well, but they don't help you a lot when the other guy has got APCs and tanks.
  - matwood 2y ago
    I think it would be an open question as to which side ends up owning most of the military. Bases are all over the US along with national guard. The people in the military are also a pretty diverse group. In a civil war situation I don’t think it would be an automatic siding with DC.
    - sigmoid10 2y ago
      One of the reasons the military has so many independent branches is that it would take all of them to rebel and join the opposing side in order to win. It's impossible to tell how they would side in a real internal conflict and the whole apparatus probably has to break down first before they will ever officially take sides of a force that opposes the federal government. At that point there will be total chaos and the wealthiest people can once again swoop in, amass the most powerful force and take over.
  - esseph 2y ago
    It's always the people who have never fought in a war that say things like this. APCs take fuel, require men to run, and need tires or tracks. For $10 worth of chemicals or a little bit of camouflage and some earth work you can make the APC irrelevant very quickly. Happened in Iraq all the time. The US military and its members have spent almost 25 years fighting through insurgencies. There are millions of combat vets.
    - esseph 2y ago
      (If you spend a lot of time learning to fight against an insurgency, you also spend a lot of time learning how to wage one against a technologically superior force.)
  - mmooss 2y ago
    In the US's two most recent wars, the people with small arms outlasted the US military. It happened in 3 of the 5 U.S. wars since WWII, and in the other two there was nobody with small arms.
- esseph 2y ago
  Enlisted swear to defend the constitution first, in order of precedence. This is the way it is commonly understood.
6510 2y ago
But when they are it is easy and simple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibrahim_Traor%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibrahim_Traor%C3%A9 https://youtu.be/wq14Vrz7ax0?t=73 https://youtu.be/wq14Vrz7ax0?t=73 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brice_Oligui_Nguema https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brice_Oligui_Nguema https://youtu.be/4JU1W6dep_8?t=400 https://youtu.be/4JU1W6dep_8?t=400

throwawayqqq11 2y ago

If the power gap between angry peasants and fully autonomous killer robots is big enough, why not kill 500.000? I always wondered why north korea is so stable. I think its a mix of military power, media control and chinese support.

jgilias 2y ago

The people of Belarus put this to test not that long ago. Massive numbers of people came out, factories went on strike, even people from the military and police spoke out against the regime. Turned out that in this day and age when the governments have unprecedented powers of surveillance and the ability to cut anyone from the respective financial system, a revolution is a really hard thing to pull off. If the British had the kind of power that even half-competent governments have today, the American revolution would never have succeeded.

DecoySalamander 2y ago
You have to both outnumber the loyalists to certain degree and show significant determination. Euromaidan did that with 800,000 protesters at its peak. As a percentage of the population that's less than what Belarus saw, but at the same time Yanukovych had significantly fewer people willing to do his bidding than Lukashenko.
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  >Euromaidan did that with 800,000 protesters at its peak. Euromaidan succeeded because it also had massive support and influence from the western powers and from the western(mostly US) itelligence agencies to make the pro-Russian regime change happen. Similar to the fall of the Berlin wall and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, it was a decades long effort from the US itelligence agencies, they didn't just sit around and wait for the local population to revolt. People ignore how much external interference these revolutions get in order to make regime changes happen.
  - jgilias 2y ago
    I was following the events very closely. The most obvious foreign interference I saw was Russian spetznaz being brought in as reinforcements to try and suppress tbe protests for longer.
    - FirmwareBurner 2y ago