Isegoria

In explaining how to occupy and govern a foreign country, Mencius Moldbug notes that military malpractice is often not an accident:

So a Western government that uses its military as an occupying force in a foreign country, without a strong occupation based on the principle of mixed authority, without suppressing competing political and military activity, and with rules of engagement that mimic criminal-justice procedures designed for a civilized Western society, is abusing said military. I find this imprudent. You can kick a poodle. You can own a wolf. But if you own a wolf, don’t kick it.

Worse, while Professor Luttwak’s concept of “military malpractice” is technically accurate, it makes the situation sound like an accident. It is actually much worse than that.

A failed occupation, like that in Afghanistan, or a Pyrrhic half-success such as Iraq or Vietnam, is of considerable political utility to those whose theory of government predicts that military occupation of a hostile population can never succeed. This would be the “democratic,” or “progressive,” or simply “left,” side of your radio dial. Not coincidentally, this is also the side which is vending the “hearts and minds” theory, and doing its best to eradicate the “grasp the nettle” theory from human memory.

And the cycle works. When an occupation fails, it is because it failed to win “hearts and minds.” And the next occupation will be even more tender-handed. It will cower even more abjectly before the delicate flutter of the native heart. It will completely forget the fact that the native has a mind, too, and it is far easier to communicate with a mind than with a heart. It will kill more and more American soldiers, and devastate more and more foreign countries. (And other foreign countries will be devastated not by occupation, but by the lack of it — in the person of a Mugabe, a Saddam, an Idi Amin.)

Moreover, who are the soldiers who are dying in these theatrical exercises? Overwhelmingly, Amerikaners. Whose political fortunes are advanced by the repeated demonstration that “war never solves anything?” Certainly not the Amerikaners.

Thus these sabotaged occupations are revealed in their true nature: they are civil wars by proxy. The goal of war is political power. In a sabotaged occupation, the left gains political power, not in Iran or Iraq or Vietnam, but in America, by using the deaths of thousands of American soldiers to prove to the TV audience that reality and progressive reality are the same thing.

The fact that no one is thinking this consciously — progressives are overwhelmingly sincere — does not change the fact that it works.

Mencius Moldbug explains how to occupy and govern a foreign country:

[Grasping the nettle] is an old English metaphor known to all colonialists. As the rhyme goes:

Tender-handed, grasp the nettle, and it stings you for your pains.
Grasp it like a man of mettle, and it soft as silk remains.

(Supposedly the toxin injectors of the stinging nettle are activated by a light brush but deactivated by firm pressure. I have not tested this personally.)

The substance of the nettle metaphor comes from a theory of civil war that is the polar opposite of the “hearts and minds” theory. Under the nettle theory, insurgencies happen because, and only because, the insurgents perceive a chance of winning.

Like all men, they fight for glory, power, and plunder. Any government can prevent and/or terminate all internal violence by making it clear to its opponents that victory is impossible, and the only results of any struggle will be ignominy and imprisonment at best, mutilation and death at worst. To convey this message is to grasp the nettle “like a man of mettle.”

The solution to the problem of colonial government, then, is to govern: to enforce order instantly, completely and without compromise, tolerating no challenge to the occupying authority whether military or political, religious or criminal. Lord Cromer, for instance, would have been simply aghast at the fact that the US occupation authorities tolerated not only native political parties, but parties with armed paramilitary wings. It has taken five years to mostly, sort of, pretty much correct this amazing elementary howler.
[...]
In summary: the theory that it is impossible, in the 20th century, for an effective modern military to occupy and govern a foreign country is simply not tenable. This illusion has been fostered by a pattern of “tender-handed” occupations, combined with a “hearts and minds” theory of insurgency that prescribes more tenderness as soon as the nettle starts to sting. Unsurprisingly, this prescription does not work. By sustaining the illusion that the quack medicine of “hearts and minds” is effective, military experts sustain the illusion that no other medicine exists and no occupation can be successful.

This is not a novel observation. My point is the same as Professor Luttwak’s: trying to run an occupation without “grasping the nettle” is military malpractice.