Isegoria

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.

Carthage had Hannibal, but Rome had its institutions:

It was simply improbable that Carthage could win a military conflict with Rome over the long run because the Roman system conferred upon the Roman state material and ideological advantages which could not be overcome by military victories, even by a general as creative and competent as Hannibal. The Hellenistic king Pyrrhus learned this, and gave us the term “pyrrhic victory”. In ideological terms Goldsworthy argues that the Roman mindset was one where conflicts were viewed as wars of attrition, where only the victors were left standing. In contrast Carthage, like the Hellenistic states, operated in a more classical Westphalian framework where victory and defeat were never final, but simply instances of a continuous game between elites of distinct polities. But, if it was not for the material advantages of the Roman system its ideological orientation would have been suicidal, because wars of attrition can only be maintained when there are resources to feed them. The Romans relied upon conscript armies of free peasantry, committed to the idea of their republic as an expression of collective will, as well as Italian allies of long standing. Goldsworthy notes that no individual of the Roman elite betrayed their city, nor did any of the Latin allies (the cities who went over to Hannibal during his years in Italy tended to be culturally distant from Rome, whether non-Latin Italian or Greek). And, the citizen base of Rome was notoriously broad, because the Roman system was expansive, assimilating allies and elites of foreign polities over time. This is an ancient feature of Roman society, as at least half of the major patrician lineages are not Latin, but Sabine. This is in contrast to organization of Hellenistic or Carthaginian polities, which were not assimilative, but multicultural and cosmopolitan in a manner more resembling the later Roman system of the imperial period, or empires more generally.* The armies of Carthage and the Hellenistic kingdoms were not manned by citizens, but professionals, whether a standing army, or mercenaries and subject peoples. The army deployed by Hannibal consisted of Libyans, Spaniards, and assorted Italian peoples inimical to the Romans (e.g., the Gauls of the Po valley). Until the last of the conflicts between Rome and Carthage, which took place in the immediate environs of Carthage, Roman amateur soldiers lined up against armies in the service of Carthage, not armies of Carthaginians.

The robustness of the Roman system to defeat can be put down to the fact that like the armies of the French Revolution Rome threw its citizenry against its enemies to complete a broad mission, while its contemporaries purchased smaller professional armies to achieve specific tasks. In many circumstances these professionals could obtain victory, but the gains did not have the depth to force the concession of the Roman state, because the state was an expression of the populace, which remained defiant.