In Pacifists Suck, I attempted to point out the fundamentally delusional worldview and the internal inconsistency of exclusivist nonviolence proponents. I hope this provides a useful framework for analysis and leads to an effective rejection of exclusivist nonviolence from any future, revolutionary effort. However, this is only part of the intellectual process that needs to be undertaken before a real and effective revolution could be sustained.
We also need to de-mystify violence.
If we consider the question of what violence is, and by that I mean what it really is and not what it has been conveniently re-defined to mean by those who wish to keep us in our assigned seats, we have to recognize that violence is pervasive in life.
Lions eat gazelles. That’s violence. It’s ultimately violence of a non-moral quality because we don’t ascribe concepts of “right” or “wrong” to life in the wild, but violence is violence. Likewise, we eat organic things.
The burger we eat wasn’t delivered by the burger-stork. Somebody hit a living creature in the head and killed it and harvested its meat as a resource to meet your demand for physiological re-fueling. Those carrots and potatoes were living and, if we believe the fascinating research recounted in Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen, plant life is also sentient.
Your stomach is a graveyard.
Your very existence demands violence—lethal violence—in order to be maintained. That’s a simple reality. A fact.
If you oppose all violence, the only course of action open for you, to put your money where your mouth is, is to stop eating all together…which leads to the extermination of your own biological machinery.
Violence.
Catch-22. Your choices are to (A) kill other living things to continue your life, or (B) preserve other living things by killing yourself. Your choices are violence or violence.
An inherently “nonviolent” existence is composed of the same materials as farie dust and magical beans.
Then, of course, if we confine ourselves to the specifically human world, recourse to “pacifism,” as I argued in “Pacifists Suck,” is really a reality-denying delusion where adherents simply ignore the fundamentally-violent social and political situation that continues if we decide not to shoot the state agents that shoot us. Again, violence is violence. The default situation we all face is one of violence and the “moral-choice” of “nonviolence” only ensures that the situation of political violence will remain unilateral rather than bilateral.
So now, if we accept the legitimacy of political violence in the form of armed resistance, there are questions that confront us—such as, what kind of numbers would be needed for a successful revolution in the United States? How bloody would it be? Would success be worth the costs.
Often, when contemplating this, we have the natural tendency to consider the civil war as the model of Americans fighting Americans, and we therefore anticipate astronomical body counts and gruesome violence—huge, desolate expanses of moonscape littered with corpses and disembodied limbs; whole cities laid waste with rockets and bombs.
But can we anticipate that rebels would face military troops in regular warfare, forming battle lines? That is the civil war model, and I cannot imagine it implemented in any future armed struggle. Rather, the model is probably something more like the irregular warfare employed in the Cuban revolution, where much smaller numbers of rebels relied upon the strategy and tactics of irregular warfare, ambushing government forces at their weakest points, yielding ground, harassing, avoiding encirclement or direct fighting. This, combined with a campaign of sabotage, would serve as a much more effective model than the civil war and its battle lines.
So let’s consider what we know of the Cuban Revolution.
At the time of the revolution, Cuba had a population of roughly 11 million. Its military consisted of about 80,000 troops. The rebels never numbered more than 5,000 and inflicted somewhere in the vicinity of 300 casualties. Fighting spanned two years before the existing regime toppled and the rebels claimed victory.
These are the kinds of historical facts that are useful for our own analysis, and we’re fortunate that there exists a wealth of information on the Cuban revolutionaries’ experience. We can attempt to use those numbers to make a very general prediction about what might happen if the rebels in the U.S. took up arms in irregular warfare to topple the government. To be clear, I’m not presenting that we will end up with some laser-accurate predictions, but I would argue that this gives us a kind of analytical framework as opposed to simply imagining how such a rebellion would look based upon video games or Hollywood movies. Granted, we could list a million factors that distinguish Cuba 1958 from the U.S. 2014, some that would mitigate for the resistance and some that would mitigate against (for example—the prevalence of privately-owned weapons in the U.S. mitigating for resistance, while technological advances used by government troops mitigating against. So, what we undertake here is an exercise, not an exhaustive treatment.)
Let’s first get a sense of the size of the resistance. In Cuba, the resistance numbered 5,000 guerillas at its peak, from a population of 11 million. That’s a percentage of .045% For the U.S. in 2014, where the population is 300 million, that would equate to 135,000 rebels.
So, by the Cuban standard, for what it’s worth, a successful armed resistance in the U.S. would require only 135,000. That means 299,865,000 Americans would not participate in revolutionary violence.
We’re talking about a group one-third the size of the audience of Woodstock. A population segment roughly the size of the crowd that will attend the next Michigan-OSU football match-up.
There’s your rebel forces for toppling the U.S. Government.
In Cuba, the rebels faced a military 16 times the size of the rebellion. For the U.S. in 2014, that would equate to a military of 2.16 million.
I don’t know, but I have some serious doubts that the U.S. government could muster the political will to deploy 2.16 million troops domestically to quell a grassroots rebellion. I don’t have facts or figures, so  have no idea the current size of the U.S. military, but I believe at the height of the Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL) the U.S. didn’t deploy even a million troops. Deploying more than 2 million would be quite a feat…and by the Cuban example, the U.S. would lose. The 135,000 rebels would win.
Now, to the question of casualties. Again, using the Cuban Revolution as a guide, in the U.S. in 2014, in two years of combat between 135,000 rebels and 2.16 million U.S. troops, we would expect 8,100 casualties.
Nope, you read that right. That’s not a typo. Toppling the U.S. government after 2 years of guerrilla warfare would cost 8,100 lives, based upon the casualty rates of the Cuban example.
Again, I don’t have statistics here, so I challenge you to look and see. How many kids will drown this year in swimming pool drain accidents? How many people will be killed by drunk drivers within 5 miles of their own houses? I suspect more than 8,100 people. So, that would mean toppling the government is less deadly than swimming in the suburbs or driving to the local McDonalds.
The point I’m attempting to make is that the violence of revolutionary violence is not quite what we likely imagine it to be. If we had to conceive of a body count required for taking down the government of the United States, we’d likely guess in the millions, and even the optimists among us would likely estimate hundreds of thousands.
But…less than ten thousand casualties? To remove the greatest military powerhouse in the history of the world?
Consider: a government cannot carpet bomb its own population; it cannot nuke its own food supply. It has to put reluctant boots on the ground that likely sympathize to no small degree with the rebel cause.
8,100 casualties. By the Cuban example, anyway.
That means if just 135,000 of the protestors against the Iraq war has taken up arms, after toppling the government and removing George Dubya from office (and possibly from existence) the rebels would have saved a net total of thousands of American lives that were otherwise flushed down oil wells for Halliburton profit margins.
More U.S. soldiers died because we didn’t rebel than would have been killed if we had rebelled.
Show that math to the pacifists who made such a rebellion impossible. The blood of tens of thousands is dripping from the heights of their moral high ground, and continues to drip on all of us.
My point here is, given a historical precedent which may be something of a predictor of expectations for armed struggles in the future, we could anticipate just over 1% of the population taking up arms. There would be casualties—.00073% of the population, less than the number of suicides among military veterans this year.
The ultimate point being that bloody revolutions aren’t so bloody. There are rational, logical reasons for this. I’ll expound on just a few factors that serve as “limiters” to violence in a revolutionary conflict.
POLITICAL LIMITS. A government must proceed cautiously when ordering troops to fire upon their own people. There exists a threshold where the fighting forces become disillusioned and turn their weapons another way. To avoid that, governments generally err on the side of caution and avoid presentations of force that would engender hostility toward the government. This would be particularly true in a nation where the population’s gun ownership exceeds 200 million firearms.
PSYCHOLOGICAL/EMOTIONAL/”TOLERATION” LIMITS. For the rebel focus, the psychological and emotional capacities of the rebels serve as a limiter to violence. Prolonged combat or particularly intense combat has psychologically- and emotionally-traumatic impacts on the fighters. Thus, any volunteer force has a kind of “toleration” limit that, when exceeded, begins the process of abandonment by the fighters.
LOGISTICAL LIMITS. Rebels must develop systems for transporting food, clothing, ammunition, and medical supplies to a variety of different fighting groups. Without any one of the four of those, fighting comes to a standstill. Frequent interruption of supply acquisition leads to a lot of down time.
CONDITIONS/CLIMACTIC LIMITS. In irregular combat, guerilla forces use the element of surprise to overwhelm a weak spot in state forces. By this strategy, every engagement is extremely abbreviated, as guerrillas must disengage before reinforcements arrive.
This limits each engagement to just a few minutes. Also, to strike under conditions most advantageous to the rebel, guerrilla strategists typically advise ambushes at sunrise and sunset, when there is a limited light and the enemy forces are either waking or preparing to retire. If a guerrilla column fought at dawn and dusk, they would still be limited to about an hour of fighting, per day.
We must also consider that any given fighting force today –say 135,000 rebels—would require 50% of their personnel to engage in noncombat support. So, a fighting force of 135,000 at peak would amount to 67,500 rifles pointed at the enemy. And those fighters would spend a great deal of their time in nonviolent activities.
Let’s not forget, guerilla fighters have to sleep, eat, take care of personal hygiene, clean and maintain their weapons and gear; after an offensive they must treat the wounded, pack-up, and travel to a new location; before the next engagement they must arrive at the new location, unpack plan the offensive, train, and prepare the attack.
That, of course, is in addition to the predictable “waiting around” and bullshitting.
The point here being that even the guerilla fighter taking up arms for violent resistance spends almost the entirety of his or her day completely occupied in essentially nonviolent activities. In the final analysis, a guerilla probably spends more time moving his or her bowels in the course of a guerilla campaign than in actually firing a weapon.
Considering all of this, it should come as no surprise than in analyzing the data from the Cuban revolution, less than 6% of the guerrilla force actually killed anybody. Of the 80,000 government troops, roughly 79,700 of them were still alive when the guerillas claimed victory and the government, toppled.
This, then, serves to also expose the false assumption that a political victory requires a military victory. It doesn’t. In fact, according to the information the U.S. government relies upon in its counterinsurgency manuals for the School of the Americas, military outcomes are largely irrelevant to the rebellion’s success or failure. The guerilla does not fight to exterminate the military—the military is only a tool of the real enemy, the existing regime—but to inspire the populace to recognize the illegitimacy of the political powers.
All of this reinforces the idea that we get from crunching the numbers that the U.S. government would be toppled with fewer than ten thousand casualties.