What follows is the Brecher Two-Stage Martyr-Killer Theory of Insurgency:
The example that led me to this pattern (and which consumed a miserable decade of my life) is early 20th century Ireland. Imagine George Patton repeating his line, “No son of a bitch ever won a war by dying for his country” to the handful of literary weirdos, sentimental Celticists, and assorted other freaks who had occupied downtown Dublin in the name of “…a 32-county, Irish-speaking Republic” on Easter Monday 1916.
What kind of response would Patton’s bad-ass pragmatism have gotten from the eager martyrs holding out in Dublin, waiting for the inevitable retaliation by the British Army? They were a strange group, but then most Europeans were a little insane around 1916, and this lot had decided it would be better to die in Dublin, which they actually knew and liked, than in some unpronounceable Flemish town on the Western Front. As Yeats said, “They…decided, ‘We will sell our lives at a better market” than the one run by the German machine guns and artillery.
So they sold their lives, as planned. The British Army, not in any mood to fuck around with this home-front insurgency in the middle of the fight of its life, shelled the occupied buildings, shot the survivors, and declared the matter closed.
So far, this looked like the worst debacle among debac-ulous Irish rebellions, which is saying something. But that’s where it gets interesting; that’s where the notion of effective martyrdom via tactical debacle starts to play itself out. Because, weirdly enough, these guys won. Nobody had managed to leave the British Empire by force since America did it in 1783, but Ireland did (26 counties’ worth, anyway) in 1922, just six years after those freaks got themselves killed in downtown Dublin.
And it was martyrdom that won, the whole cult of martyrdom. At first, Dubliners cursed and jeered the survivors of the Easter Rising — I mean, you’d be mad too if a handful of nutters had brought the world’s most powerful army’s revenge down on your home town. But then the songs started — and if you know the Irish, you know it’s all over once they start singing. Soon there were a half-dozen songs celebrating every martyr who died in 1916.
These pub songs were the social media of rural Ireland, circa 1920, and they were very effective. They inspired a whole generation of saner, smarter, more cold-blooded and effective revolutionaries thinking about how to try another rebellion — one that could actually succeed. A guy named Michael Collins came up with the concept of urban-guerrilla warfare, focusing on killing spies before going after soldiers, and next thing you know, Ireland’s independent, the first country to exit the Empire against the Empire’s will in over a century.
And this pattern is being repeated, right now, across the planet: A first-wave insurgency that seems insanely quixotic, totally doomed, useless…which then inspires a second insurgency, more effective, more cold-blooded, more interested in killing than in dying.
You can see the pattern in the weird differences between the first and second Intifadas against Israeli rule. The First Intifada, from 1987-1993, was mainly about Palestinians dying, often by choice, at the hands of much-better armed Israeli forces. Casualties were typically lopsided: 160 Israelis killed vs. more than 2000 Palestinian dead.
The image this first Intifada tried to engrave on the world media’s eyeball was of Palestinians, unarmed or with nothing but rocks, getting mowed down by expensive military vehicles. Again — it looked crazy, but it wasn’t. It was a typical first-stage sacrifice.
The Second Intifada, or “Al-Aqsa Intifada,” starting in 2000, involved armed Palestinians not just dying but killing. Casualties for this rebellion were much more evenly distributed: 1008 Israelis killed vs. 3034 Palestinians.
That’s a ratio of 3:1 (almost precisely 3:1, in fact), and though it may seem to favor the Israelis, it actually terrified them, because the better-armed occupying force expects something more like the 13:1 Palestinian/Israeli KIA of the First Intifada.
This two-stage formula is playing out right now, in parts of the world most people don’t pay much attention to — like the slow-burning Muslim/Malay insurgency in Southern Thailand. In the Southern Thai town of Su So in 2004, a Muslim insurgency announced itself in a way that made the Easter Rising look cunning and practical by comparison: the local men and boys simply stood around outside the Thai National police stations waving machetes and yelling until they were shot down.
Crazy, right? Not really. The insurgency is burning very well in that part of Thailand now, and the hundred-odd men who were mown down in that apparently pointless, suicidal demonstration outside the cop-shops knew exactly what they were doing. They were offering themselves as kindling, to get something bigger, colder, more effective started.
So — Sorry, General Patton, sir, and I admit I’d never have the courage to tell you this to your face — but the fact is, you CAN win a war by dying. There are several ways you can do that: in conventional war.
Brecher has a point, but it’s important to note that the Irish would never have won had the British not been demoralized by WWI. Had the same thing happened in 1785, the result would have been precisely nothing. And the last time I checked, Israel was still there, and the Kra peninsula was still part of Thailand. Martyrs work best against an opponent that is already politically weak and divided, and that has a domestic faction that sympathizes with the rebels.
I don’t read him very often anymore, but has Brecher ever explicitly acknowledged just how high a proportion of insurgencies, revolutions, and guerrilla wars are total failures?
The Palestinian war was not a war for Palestine; it was until the recent Islamization surge a Marxist war to destroy Israel — the apostate of Socialism — transformed into an icon of the West and White Men. The War against Israel was a war within the Western Political World (including obviously Russia or the Soviet Union) by proxy.
Palestinians in fact only exist because Israel exists. Without Israel they would be just like Druzes, Bedouins, Kurds, Copts without any Social or Political Construction. They would be ruled by the Hashemite tribe, and no one would care if the king would killed 10x more of them.
All this is to say that the logistical base of the Palestinians is not in Palestine; it is in Western Leftism and now in Western Islamism. It doesn’t seem the author understand this.
Seems the long way around Patton’s principle. In the end, after several phases of insurgency, you still have to kill enough of the enemy to obtain victory.
If we’re being picky, the “Against the Empire’s will” clause is a bit questionable: the Government of Ireland Act was passed in 1914, but suspended because of Ulster disturbances and the First World War. Home Rule was less independence than the rebels wanted, but then so also was the 1921 Treaty — hence the Civil War.
The debates over the Treaty make fascinating reading; I find I have to keep reminding myself that these people were actually serious and not some student union debating society.
I previously wrote about another peculiarity of the Irish independence process, and what it tells us about the causes of the First World War.
“you still have to kill enough of the enemy to obtain victory”
I think it depends; depending on historical trends, geographical accidents, and the like, the enemy may not be all that hungry for your territory, so that perhaps it suffices to convince him that holding on to you will be not just a significant military nuisance but a drain on the public treasury for at least the next generation. And internal politics and public choice theory tradeoffs change, too: in the 1700s a war whose aftermath involved handing out estates in Ireland as party favors might be a good way to strengthen a powerful coalition in England, but in the early 20th century probably everyone who mattered could see which way the wind was blowing and wanted sinecures and unaccountable aristocracy-of-pull power, putting a huge discount on open formal property rights that would just be taxed away.
“just how high a proportion of insurgencies, revolutions, and guerrilla wars are total failures?”
Very true, and this is also one of the problems I have with William Lind’s “4th Generation War” thesis. There’s no doubt that Lind is on to something, and that modern media and the West’s deranged immigration policies have added a new dimension to Low Intensity Conflict, but the simple fact of the matter is, most insurgencies still lose. The modern insurgent, while a formidable foe, is not unbeatable.