Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

REVOLUTIONS TODAY ARE NOT LIKE THE 20TH CENTURY

Look at how revolutions work today. Look around the world. Do you know what they ask? They ask: Are you fit? Do you have arms? Do you know what communications, energy, water, transportation, infrastructure in 25 miles of your home is fragile? Do you know how to break it? Do you have what’s needed to break it? Do you know how to do enough of it to overwhelm services? How to deprive services of the will to leave their garages? How to retreat by multiple routes safely? Can you limit you risk by doing it alone? Do you know how long it will take you to act when ‘suggested’? Do you the names of key figures. Do you know where key figures live? Where they work? Do you know how to write your plans and notes down on paper and hide them? Have you rehearsed a handful of them? That is what revolutionaries do. They don’t need to have someone hold their hand. They just need to know the timing. Armies call this ‘the general staff’ work. That’s the most important preparation you can make. Because the next civil war will not require numbers. It will require a small number of activists to do a small number of things. Terror is a bad thing. Delegitimizing government is a good thing. There are zero hours of communication, four hours of electricity, three days of water, and one week of food in the system. A box of roofing nails on a road. A series of random fires. Chains over electrical lines. Damaged transformers. Downed poles and lines. And risk to the people who would repair these things. These are easy tactics that make our civilization vulnerable in a civil war. And that’s before someone figures out how to copy the islamists and do rolling waves of crime and cash acquisition. It takes very few men, and very few vehicles to profitably create enough chaos to undermine enough confidence to crash the economy and the world confidence in the government and the dollar, and to allow foreign nations to overwhelm our government with the seizure of opportunities. And this list does not include the unkind and unpleasant things. Just the ones that don’t make us sweat. Those things will happen too. That is what will happen if we end up in civil war.