One of the many, many, many horrible things about what ICE is doing is that now any group of white men in tactical gear with an SUV can attack, beat up, and kidnap any random person — and nobody will stop them, because who knows, they •might• be ICE, a...
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Somewhere between pacifism that is just passivism and starting a pyrrhic hot war that only entrenches authoritarianism, there’s some kind of jiu jitsu here that is active and forceful resistance, but uses the regime’s own force against them.
I do not pretend to know what exactly that is. I do believe that a diversity of tactics is important — and that we’re all going to have to accept the work of holding ourselves together as a resistance even as people choose very different tactics we’re not comfortable with ourselves.
@inthehands Simply wait. The high school dropouts being recruited from West Bumfuck KY with the 10x Walmart wages and then dropped into the middle of the biggest city they’ve ever seen are being deliberately kettled by their own employer to make them go crazy. The game plan is one of them eventually shoots up a daycare and gets greased by the enraged parents, who will then get paraded on Fox News as an unstoppable angry mob, justifying the Insurrection Act and ending the need for further elections. That game plan isn’t working because the citizens of Minnesota are doing the right things. It may feel ineffectual but the alternatives are all worse, and eventually the citizens win. The battle here is for Minnesota, not national politics as a whole.
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@inthehands I'm going suggest reading the first half of "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife" by Col. John Nagl. https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Eat-Soup-Knife-Counterinsurgency/dp/0226567702 You're essentially fighting an insurgency of well-equipped fanatics who lack local support, logistics, and discipline. Nagl is smart, he revised the Army's counterinsurgency manual, and he compares how the British in Malaysia effectively defeated communist insurgents while still keeping the public on their side.
The book is not so much on military operation but on winning hearts and minds, showing how one army did and another army didn't in very similar conflicts.
That's essentially your challenge - direct armed confrontation will not work, surrender will not work, but the current tactics seem to slowly be working. Tracking them, getting in their way, goading them til they lose discipline, not letting them have a good night's rest, pressuring companies not to do business with them - all that corrodes their morale. The danger is someone else will snap and shoot another poet in the face again. But they've already proven they'll do that casually so there's really no additional risk.
They're an occupying force. Make them feel that every day until they leave. Make every Minnesota winter day that much colder and more miserable for them. Be like the northern Midwest winter and make them hate life.
@arclight @inthehands I’ve read this book also and I strongly second this recommendation. Sometimes you can’t make a situation better, but you can certainly make it worse. Never interrupt your enemy when they’re busy making a mistake, and this big sloppy plan to get some redneck patsy killed is a mistake.
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Somewhere between pacifism that is just passivism and starting a pyrrhic hot war that only entrenches authoritarianism, there’s some kind of jiu jitsu here that is active and forceful resistance, but uses the regime’s own force against them.
I do not pretend to know what exactly that is. I do believe that a diversity of tactics is important — and that we’re all going to have to accept the work of holding ourselves together as a resistance even as people choose very different tactics we’re not comfortable with ourselves.
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This poses a vexing problem for resistance: a direct force-on-force assault against ICE by small groups of citizens is foolish…but holding signs and waiting for the next election sure as hell ain’t gonna cut it either.
We have to find ways to fight back on the streets — but it has to look good on TikTok and on the news and to members of Congress and judges and the gaze of the whole world. Cameras and whistles are a start, but it can’t stop there. All this is not just going away on its own.
@inthehands that is the genius of Portland inflatables
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Somewhere between pacifism that is just passivism and starting a pyrrhic hot war that only entrenches authoritarianism, there’s some kind of jiu jitsu here that is active and forceful resistance, but uses the regime’s own force against them.
I do not pretend to know what exactly that is. I do believe that a diversity of tactics is important — and that we’re all going to have to accept the work of holding ourselves together as a resistance even as people choose very different tactics we’re not comfortable with ourselves.
@inthehands
Maybe the jiu jitsu move is to not let our sense of "right" be dictated by pro-authoritarism entities (tiktok, the news, congress, judges) -
Somewhere between pacifism that is just passivism and starting a pyrrhic hot war that only entrenches authoritarianism, there’s some kind of jiu jitsu here that is active and forceful resistance, but uses the regime’s own force against them.
I do not pretend to know what exactly that is. I do believe that a diversity of tactics is important — and that we’re all going to have to accept the work of holding ourselves together as a resistance even as people choose very different tactics we’re not comfortable with ourselves.
@inthehands Strategic snow plow parking (like Chicago) and black ice wherever possible to just slow them down…definitely fun to watch the wipeout videos. I think the general strike on 1/23 in MN (and anywhere else) is also a great idea.
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@inthehands I'm going suggest reading the first half of "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife" by Col. John Nagl. https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Eat-Soup-Knife-Counterinsurgency/dp/0226567702 You're essentially fighting an insurgency of well-equipped fanatics who lack local support, logistics, and discipline. Nagl is smart, he revised the Army's counterinsurgency manual, and he compares how the British in Malaysia effectively defeated communist insurgents while still keeping the public on their side.
The book is not so much on military operation but on winning hearts and minds, showing how one army did and another army didn't in very similar conflicts.
That's essentially your challenge - direct armed confrontation will not work, surrender will not work, but the current tactics seem to slowly be working. Tracking them, getting in their way, goading them til they lose discipline, not letting them have a good night's rest, pressuring companies not to do business with them - all that corrodes their morale. The danger is someone else will snap and shoot another poet in the face again. But they've already proven they'll do that casually so there's really no additional risk.
They're an occupying force. Make them feel that every day until they leave. Make every Minnesota winter day that much colder and more miserable for them. Be like the northern Midwest winter and make them hate life.
@arclight “well equipped fanatics who lack local support and logistics” is the opposite of an insurgency. The whole strength of an insurgency is local support and logistics.
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@inthehands that is the genius of Portland inflatables
@inthehands @bleistifterin I wonder how quickly one could inflate comical-looking obstructions surrounding the vans. Wacky waving inflatable tube man army to the rescue?
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@arclight “well equipped fanatics who lack local support and logistics” is the opposite of an insurgency. The whole strength of an insurgency is local support and logistics.
@standev That's right. The whole situation is reversed. If the fanatics are going terrorize the citizens and treat opposition as an insurgency, what does the citizenry do? Make life miserable for the invaders, goad them into making the historical mistakes of counterinsurgency, and avoid making the mistakes that would lose them national support.
Maybe the second half of Nagl's book is mote applicable - how US counterinsurgency failed in Vietnam. This situation seems like what happened in Vietnam except the Viet Cong and NVA aren't there.
This whole violent fiasco is unbelievably stupid but we're in the middle of it and it is absolutely vital that Minnesota prevail otherwise this will be repeated and eventually devolve into civil war.
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@arclight
This is the most coherent answer I’ve received.@inthehands That scares me. I feel the people of Minneapolis have shown remarkable restraint, courage, and resiliency, and that we're in an extremely dangerous place historically. I don't have any easy simple safe answers; the only good strategy I can think of is to break ICE's morale so their troops desert and the operation falls apart or they declare victory and go home. Morale can be broken among the troops or among the leadership. Mess with Noem's or Bovino's head enough and you might get this to fall apart with less bloodshed. Or more - who knows? We're in uncharted territory and we have to win this. Weather and numbers are on your side; keeping community morale up to keep harassing ICE will be key. You can outlast them but every day is more damage to the community.
The current strategy seems to be working - the document grab from the abandoned rental cars was some combination of genius and luck. Hopefully that helps find pain points that can be leveraged. I wish I could do more, DM me if you have some concrete suggestions.
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@inthehands That scares me. I feel the people of Minneapolis have shown remarkable restraint, courage, and resiliency, and that we're in an extremely dangerous place historically. I don't have any easy simple safe answers; the only good strategy I can think of is to break ICE's morale so their troops desert and the operation falls apart or they declare victory and go home. Morale can be broken among the troops or among the leadership. Mess with Noem's or Bovino's head enough and you might get this to fall apart with less bloodshed. Or more - who knows? We're in uncharted territory and we have to win this. Weather and numbers are on your side; keeping community morale up to keep harassing ICE will be key. You can outlast them but every day is more damage to the community.
The current strategy seems to be working - the document grab from the abandoned rental cars was some combination of genius and luck. Hopefully that helps find pain points that can be leveraged. I wish I could do more, DM me if you have some concrete suggestions.
To be clear, I meant it was the most coherent answer I’ve received •in the replies on Mastodon•. On the ground, well, I’ll just say that thinking gets a lot sharper when folks are in the thick of it.
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This right here has always been the pragmatic reasoning behind civil disobedience.
We have to find ways to fight back on the streets — but it has to look good on TikTok and on the news and to members of Congress and judges and the gaze of the whole world. Cameras and whistles are a start, but it can’t stop there. All this is not just going away on its own.
Every situation and context requires finding new ways to accomplish this. But the regime’s thirst for a shooting conflict is, as you say, the reason to keep looking. And IDK what the answer is. I do know that the real history of civil disobedience has been Disneyfied in our popular consciousness, which is dangerous.
In trying to teach anything about civil disobedience in the past I’ve found that people often have the same mistaken assumptions as when they think that being empathetic means being nice.
Civil disobedience trainers and practitioners are cunning and courageous and use techniques that are illegal. Mostly, so far, we’ve seen actions that aren’t illegal (though of course that doesn’t prevent arrests or assaults or murders - which is expected). But everything activists have been doing counts as civil. That is, activists aren’t shooting or otherwise physically attacking.
However, again, in the popular consciousness, empathy and civil disobedience are imagined as niceness, meekness, quiet objecting. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, very often, this mass delusion about empathy and civil disobedience is so opposite of true that it feels to me like the result of an intentional decades long propaganda campaign where our pop culture turns once revolutionary figures who were vilified, hated, and murdered in their times into cartoon characters at amusement parks.
Who does that serve?
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