• Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    It’s possible. But still better than the alternative. The thing with standing armies is they are no ultimate determinator themselves. Both Russia and the United States ended up getting their ass handed to them in the end. By rural Warlords in afghanistan. Even England and Spain lost control of their colonies because of this simple fact. At the end of the day the people who live here will always be here. Those who invading only generally want to be there as long as they have to be.

    Heck it doesn’t always hold up locally either. The Czar lost to the Bolsheviks. The Chinese emperor to the peasants. You won’t find more committed fighters than those defending their lives and livelihoods.

    The thing with balancing autonomy and consent is that it gets exponentially harder for every person you add to a group. At city levels it starts becoming outright impossible. Hamlets, villages and Commonwealth’s can still cooperate and band together where it makes sense. The point is to keep the structures small and answerable to those they represent.

    • HelixDab2@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      Both Russia and the United States ended up getting their ass handed to them in the end. By rural Warlords in afghanistan.

      Sure, but at what cost to the Afghanis? 176,000 Afghanis (some fighters, some non-compbatants) were killed during the US occupation. In contrast, the US saw 2,459 people lost. That’s pretty brutally asymmetric. Same thing in Vietnam; yes, we lost 50,000 troops while we waged war against the people of Vietnam, but around 400,000 Vietnamese were killed. IMO, unless you want to maximize losses, resistance by the population is not the ideal way to go. An enemy that is willing to commit atrocities can certainly do far more harm, more quickly, than a non-military defense force can stop.

      The Czar lost to the Bolsheviks.

      …Who were, IIRC, recently pulled from combat in WWI. If I remember my history correctly–and I’m quite fuzzy on WWI–the war was very unpopular in Russia, and it was people deserting and mutinying from the army that gave the Bolsheviks the ability to win a revolution. If the tsar hadn’t signed on to the war in the first place, it probably would have staved off the revolution for years, possibly long enough for Russia to turn into a constitutional monarchy. Or maybe not; the peasantry was really upset with the tsar for other things too.

      The thing with balancing autonomy and consent is that it gets exponentially harder for every person you add to a group.

      I’m very, very aware of that. Which is why I say that the whole thing is incredibly complicated, and involves a lot of tradeoffs. It takes a lot of people working together to make a stateless, classless society work well, but it only takes one or two people to fuck it all up. The whole thing is a version of the prisoner’s dilemma; when everyone trusts everyone else (e.g., small societies), it works, but as soon as trust starts getting broken it tends to fall apart quickly.

      Again, I don’t know how to solve the problem; I’m not even sure that there is a single solution that perfectly preserive individual autonomy and liberty, while also ensuring that the needs of society as a whole are met.