The Fantasy of the Invincible Resistance
Recently, in a thread started by polynarch (http://polyanarch.livejournal.com/320745.html), deadpansev expressed the opinion that America could safely have stayed out of World War II, without fear of what a victorious Axis might have done later to America, because (quoting deadpansev, with the spelling cleaned up):
Had the people in America ever been attacked I am sure we would have fought off the attacker, but we were not attacked. The US cannot even conquer Afghanistan and yet you are confident that the US could be conquered by Germany or Japan, you must really not think very highly of Americans if you think that the Japs could have just walked in and taken over and everyone would fall down to obey their every whim.
which embodies several historically and militarily naive assumptions, but it struck me that all of it be boiled down to "When a country is invaded, it generates a Resistance, and that Resistance will inevitably win in the end, so no country can ever really be conquered." It is this argument which I propose to examine.
I. Refutation of the Argument
The most basic reason for supposing that the conclusion is false is that it does not match the evidence. Over almost any signfiicantly long (decade or more) period of history that one cares to name, one can find instances of countries conquering other countries with local resistances being unable to reverse the decision. Specifically, during the period of history implicitly under question in deadpansev's (the 1940's and 1950's) there are numerous cases of successful conquests and resistances which were either completely unsuccessful, or simply rode the coat-tails of the liberating armies of stronger Powers.
As an example of the first case, consider all of Eastern Europe in the period from 1939-1956, which was successfully conquered by the Soviet Union, which in turn successfully crushed all resistance movements. None of the countries occupied by Soviet forces, with the exception of Austria, were to regain their independence until 1989, and their ultimate freedom was due to the American victory in the Cold War (which induced the Soviet armies to withdraw) rather than to their native resistance movements (save possibly in the case of Romania, and even there the expectation of the absence of Soviet intervention was a key factor in demoralizing the regime troops).
As an example of the second case, consider the French Resistance. While the French Resistance did play a useful role in harassing and slowing the movement of German forces, and provided much valuable intelligence to the Western Allies, at no point did the Resistance directly defeat, or even attrition to defeat, any major element of the occupying forces. The French Resistance was effective only because it enjoyed direct military support from Britain, and ultimately triumphed only because the US, Britain and other Western Allies (including the Free French, who were a conventional army operating from American and British bases, or French territory freed by the action of American and British forces) directly defeated the German armies in France.
More generally, most guerilla armies lose their wars, and in the case of those that win, there is one key factor which brings them victory: the backing of powerful foreign allies. This is because guerilla armies by definition cannot defend secure bases from which to operate until they reach the "main force" stage of guerilla warfare, and they cannot reach that stage without secure bases from whcih to operate. Sometimes, an extremely skilled guerilla army can "bootstrap" itself to main force operations, if it is fighting an extremely unskilled regime or occupation force, but this is chancy and difficult, and in the case of fighting an army of occupation must face the fact that the occupier originally beat the country in the first place (otherwise it would not be occupying that country) and hence may be presumed to be stronger and more competent than the resistance, all other things being equal).
This is observable in both the recent cases of wars in Afghanistan. The Afghans were able to resist the Soviet invasion mostly because Pakistan let them base out of their country, and both America and Pakistan armed their forces. And even then, the Afghan resistance failed to drive out the occupiers, the Soviets instead withdrawing due to exhaustion in their larger conflict with America. Likewise, America successfully drove out the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2001-02, but they were able to retreat to northwest Pakistan owing to Pakistani sympathy for and consequent weakness against the Taliban forces, enabling the Taliban to return to the fight given the shift of US empasis to Iraq for several years.
Even in wars of secession, where the seceding faction has a big advantage over any merely guerilla army because it starts with legitimacy over a coherent territory and hence the ability to raise main forces from the beginning, rebel victory is usually dependent upon continued foreign support. The Continental Congress of the USA and the Republic of Panama both won independence (from Britain and Colombia respectively) because they were able to gain strong foreign backing (from France and America respectively); the Confederate States of America and Katanga both failed because they were unable to gain such support.
To summarize: resistance to conquest and occupation usually fails, and if it succeeds it usually does so because the resistance is backed by powerful foreign allies, or because the occupier is distracted by a powerful foreign enemy (obviously, both may be the case). The historical evidence is very clear on these points. Consequently, it is naive in the extreme to base one's national defense on a theory that, should a foreigner invade, he will simply be defeated by popular resistance, because such is RARELY THE CASE.
II. The Costs of Resistance
Strong Powers are generally the victors, and the victors write history. Even when a stronger Power loses in a particular instance, that Power still tends to be the overall victor internationally, and hence a focus of attention.
One consequence of this is that we tend to acquire a rather one-sided impression of guerilla wars of resistance -- specifically, we tend to learn about them either from the POV of liberating armies marching in with the aid of the resistance, or from that of occupying armies suffering harassment and attrition from the resistance. In particular, we rarely see them from the POV of the occupied countries themselves, because the sort of countries which get occupied rarely get to write the history books (obvious exceptions: the CSA, France and Western Russia).
No part of the United States of America has had to fight a guerilla war of resistance for some 145 years -- the last such war ended with the surrender of the Confederate States of America and the demobilization of Mosby's and other guerilla forces which operated in support of Confederate regulars. Consequently, we as a nation tend to be more than a bit naive regarding the effects which conducting a guerilla war of resistance has on the occupied nation -- even if succesful.
To begin with, since guerillas cannot maintain a front line and hence cannot defend the supporting society, the whole country is open to reprisal by the occupying forces. This may take the form, in the case of humane occupiers, of anti-guerilla operations some of which will inevitably claim innocent lives or destroy innocent property; in the case of less humane occupiers, of the deliberate mass murder or destruction of whole neighborhoods or towns suspected of aiding the resistance.
This means that, if one is an inhabitant of the occupied country attempting resistance, that one may at any moment randomly suffer death or impoverishment. There is literally nothing one can do to avoid this fate: there are things one can do to make it less likely (mostly, avoiding politics) but even the most neutral person may wind up paying for the partisan activity of another with his or her life or fortune.
To make matters worse, the occupying army is not the only source of this peril. Since guerillas do not have a securely controlled territory (if they did, they would be a "main force" in fairly short order), the Resistance has to somehow enforce its authority to collect taxes and otherwise receive the support and loyalty of the people. This necessarily requires at least some terrorism -- at a minimum, collaborators must be neutralized, and a guerilla army is not well equipped to conduct elaborate trials with respect for the rights of the accused.
This means that the civilian may well be caught in a double-bind. If he aids the Resistance, the Occupiers may hunt him down and kill him. If he fails to aid the Resistance, the Resistance may hunt him down and kill him. Survival may require walking a tightrope, aiding the Resistance but not too openly, and this is a tightrope from which he may drop at any random gust of wind (resistance or occupier offensive).
This would be a hellish enough situation to endure even for a few days, weeks or months -- and, due to their slow and indecisive nature, guerilla wars commonly last for many years, sometimes even decades. This puts an enormous strain on the collective sanity of a culture and the individual sanities of its people: indeed, one common reason for guerilla armies to disintegrate is that their supporting populations just get tired of all the stress.
Now, note that since resistances usually fail, a country is very likely to go through all this anguish and LOSE in the end, making it all pointless from its population's POV. What's more, even if the Resistance does win, the strain may cause partial to total societal collapse -- most of the "failed states" of the Third World failed in part because of protracted guerilla warfare.
A successful resistance generally means that the Resistance leaders will form the new regime. These are people who have been hardened by years, maybe decades of constant death and suffering, and are used to collecting taxes and enforcing loyalty by terrorist murder. How likely will they be to rule democratically, or respect the civil rights of their people, even if the country was a liberal democracy BEFORE the invasion? This is one reason why so many African states, in partiuclar, are horrible dictatorships -- their culture-heroes, who freed them from foreign domination, were murderous terrorists and ruled as such after independence.
This is less true of successful secession movements. Such have the advantage of starting with political legitimacy and coherent territories behind front lines, and hence can get away with milder treatment of their own populaces. The primary historical example of a secession enjoying these advantages is the United States of America -- but even then, our struggle for independence involved more terrorism, and inflicted deeper scars on our society, than is generally known to those who are only acquainted with the sanitized version of the American Revolutionary War. (It is of course worse for a failed attempt at secesion, as witness the sad history of the American South from around 1865-1965).
Resistances, even successful resistances, cost a society dearly. Any country which has ever waged one wishes that its conventional armies had managed to repel the original invasion. Even a successful resistance will leave a society scarred -- for decades, perhaps even centuries.
III. Then Why Is the Fantasy So Common?
Given the overwhelming historical evidence that resistance against occupation is a more unreliable and costly way than conventional defense to maintain one's independence, why does one so often hear the argument that we need not worry about conventional defense, because if invaded we will merely mount a resistance? There are three reasons, which are related.
The simplest reason is that most people are ignorant of military history. Their concept of how a resistance works comes from Hollywood, and Hollywood features clearly noble heroes of the Resistance (who scorn terror) fighting clearly evil villains of the Occupation (who are usually inept) and winning (so the issue of a wasted effort never comes up). What's more, all sacrifices are worthy and there are no long-term consequences suffered by characters who did not actually die, so upon victory civil society is resumed without impairment.
The reasons why Hollywood takes this view of the world deserve an essay in themselves. I could summarize them as lazy writing, writing to please the lowest common denominator, and the influence of (Allied) WWII and (Soviet) Cold War propaganda on the American film-making subcultures.
I will add to this a strong academic-educational prejudice in favor of the Resistance over the Occupation. This derives largely from the World Wars (in which the former were usually on our side and the latter our hated enemy) and the Cold War (in which the Soviets successfully subverted our own academic-educational establishments with agents of influence, so that this establishment consisently supported Communist rebellions).
The important point is that a lot of people believe things which aren't so about guerilla warfare. And it can be very difficult for them to abandon these preconceptions, even if they know a little military history.
But why do people stick to these misconceptions? Basically, because they're comforting.
Consider reality. We live in national cultures, each of which we are deeply attached to, each of which embodies many of the principles that we consider sacred. These national cultures are subject to destruction and reconstruction should an invader succeed in both defeating our armed forces and overcoming whatever additional resistance can be put up by our originally-civilian population.
We know of countries to which this has happened. Even famous and powerful countries, such as Carthage and the Roman Empire and the Aztecs -- and if we really study history, countless more less famous and powerful ones.
What does this mean? Well, most achievements for which we strive, especially "immortal fame," are relevant only within a particular cultural context. Defeat may mean the effective annihilation of all that we have achieved. Who cared if a particular Carthaginian improved their sewage system or had an insight into the relationship between Man and the Gods, after the Romans tore down the city and sowed the ruins with salt?
Does this frighten you? It should. It certainly frightens me.
What's more, the only way to be safe from such a fate is to build a powerful army or make powerful allies -- and even then you're not really safe. Your powerful army may be defeated by the even more powerful one next door; your powerful allies may be unable to save you from the even more powerful allies of your enemy.
And even if your powerful army or powerful allies save you, there is a price for power. You will have to pay heavy taxes to maintain the powerful army, and risk that the generals commanding this army may stage a coup and take over your nation from within. Your powerful allies will make demands on you, which may lead to your having to support causes with which you do not agree, or even violently oppose.
Far, far more comforting to live in a world in which one's national culture is indestructible because a Resistance will automatically be generated upon one's defeat, and will as automatically WIN. In such a world, one could be sure that what one loved would last forever.
It's a beautiful thought (at least until one reflects that some of what the Aztecs and Carthaginians loved was mass human sacrifice). It might be a beautiful world.
But it's NOT the one IN WHICH WE LIVE. Reality trumps fantasy, and pretending that nations can never be defeated when they fight in their own defense does not make the pretense into fact.
The truth is that we live in an uncertain and dangerous world; we must sometimes fight to survive, and often the fight fails. Yes, even if we have the Right on our side.
Welcome to reality.
Had the people in America ever been attacked I am sure we would have fought off the attacker, but we were not attacked. The US cannot even conquer Afghanistan and yet you are confident that the US could be conquered by Germany or Japan, you must really not think very highly of Americans if you think that the Japs could have just walked in and taken over and everyone would fall down to obey their every whim.
which embodies several historically and militarily naive assumptions, but it struck me that all of it be boiled down to "When a country is invaded, it generates a Resistance, and that Resistance will inevitably win in the end, so no country can ever really be conquered." It is this argument which I propose to examine.
I. Refutation of the Argument
The most basic reason for supposing that the conclusion is false is that it does not match the evidence. Over almost any signfiicantly long (decade or more) period of history that one cares to name, one can find instances of countries conquering other countries with local resistances being unable to reverse the decision. Specifically, during the period of history implicitly under question in deadpansev's (the 1940's and 1950's) there are numerous cases of successful conquests and resistances which were either completely unsuccessful, or simply rode the coat-tails of the liberating armies of stronger Powers.
As an example of the first case, consider all of Eastern Europe in the period from 1939-1956, which was successfully conquered by the Soviet Union, which in turn successfully crushed all resistance movements. None of the countries occupied by Soviet forces, with the exception of Austria, were to regain their independence until 1989, and their ultimate freedom was due to the American victory in the Cold War (which induced the Soviet armies to withdraw) rather than to their native resistance movements (save possibly in the case of Romania, and even there the expectation of the absence of Soviet intervention was a key factor in demoralizing the regime troops).
As an example of the second case, consider the French Resistance. While the French Resistance did play a useful role in harassing and slowing the movement of German forces, and provided much valuable intelligence to the Western Allies, at no point did the Resistance directly defeat, or even attrition to defeat, any major element of the occupying forces. The French Resistance was effective only because it enjoyed direct military support from Britain, and ultimately triumphed only because the US, Britain and other Western Allies (including the Free French, who were a conventional army operating from American and British bases, or French territory freed by the action of American and British forces) directly defeated the German armies in France.
More generally, most guerilla armies lose their wars, and in the case of those that win, there is one key factor which brings them victory: the backing of powerful foreign allies. This is because guerilla armies by definition cannot defend secure bases from which to operate until they reach the "main force" stage of guerilla warfare, and they cannot reach that stage without secure bases from whcih to operate. Sometimes, an extremely skilled guerilla army can "bootstrap" itself to main force operations, if it is fighting an extremely unskilled regime or occupation force, but this is chancy and difficult, and in the case of fighting an army of occupation must face the fact that the occupier originally beat the country in the first place (otherwise it would not be occupying that country) and hence may be presumed to be stronger and more competent than the resistance, all other things being equal).
This is observable in both the recent cases of wars in Afghanistan. The Afghans were able to resist the Soviet invasion mostly because Pakistan let them base out of their country, and both America and Pakistan armed their forces. And even then, the Afghan resistance failed to drive out the occupiers, the Soviets instead withdrawing due to exhaustion in their larger conflict with America. Likewise, America successfully drove out the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2001-02, but they were able to retreat to northwest Pakistan owing to Pakistani sympathy for and consequent weakness against the Taliban forces, enabling the Taliban to return to the fight given the shift of US empasis to Iraq for several years.
Even in wars of secession, where the seceding faction has a big advantage over any merely guerilla army because it starts with legitimacy over a coherent territory and hence the ability to raise main forces from the beginning, rebel victory is usually dependent upon continued foreign support. The Continental Congress of the USA and the Republic of Panama both won independence (from Britain and Colombia respectively) because they were able to gain strong foreign backing (from France and America respectively); the Confederate States of America and Katanga both failed because they were unable to gain such support.
To summarize: resistance to conquest and occupation usually fails, and if it succeeds it usually does so because the resistance is backed by powerful foreign allies, or because the occupier is distracted by a powerful foreign enemy (obviously, both may be the case). The historical evidence is very clear on these points. Consequently, it is naive in the extreme to base one's national defense on a theory that, should a foreigner invade, he will simply be defeated by popular resistance, because such is RARELY THE CASE.
II. The Costs of Resistance
Strong Powers are generally the victors, and the victors write history. Even when a stronger Power loses in a particular instance, that Power still tends to be the overall victor internationally, and hence a focus of attention.
One consequence of this is that we tend to acquire a rather one-sided impression of guerilla wars of resistance -- specifically, we tend to learn about them either from the POV of liberating armies marching in with the aid of the resistance, or from that of occupying armies suffering harassment and attrition from the resistance. In particular, we rarely see them from the POV of the occupied countries themselves, because the sort of countries which get occupied rarely get to write the history books (obvious exceptions: the CSA, France and Western Russia).
No part of the United States of America has had to fight a guerilla war of resistance for some 145 years -- the last such war ended with the surrender of the Confederate States of America and the demobilization of Mosby's and other guerilla forces which operated in support of Confederate regulars. Consequently, we as a nation tend to be more than a bit naive regarding the effects which conducting a guerilla war of resistance has on the occupied nation -- even if succesful.
To begin with, since guerillas cannot maintain a front line and hence cannot defend the supporting society, the whole country is open to reprisal by the occupying forces. This may take the form, in the case of humane occupiers, of anti-guerilla operations some of which will inevitably claim innocent lives or destroy innocent property; in the case of less humane occupiers, of the deliberate mass murder or destruction of whole neighborhoods or towns suspected of aiding the resistance.
This means that, if one is an inhabitant of the occupied country attempting resistance, that one may at any moment randomly suffer death or impoverishment. There is literally nothing one can do to avoid this fate: there are things one can do to make it less likely (mostly, avoiding politics) but even the most neutral person may wind up paying for the partisan activity of another with his or her life or fortune.
To make matters worse, the occupying army is not the only source of this peril. Since guerillas do not have a securely controlled territory (if they did, they would be a "main force" in fairly short order), the Resistance has to somehow enforce its authority to collect taxes and otherwise receive the support and loyalty of the people. This necessarily requires at least some terrorism -- at a minimum, collaborators must be neutralized, and a guerilla army is not well equipped to conduct elaborate trials with respect for the rights of the accused.
This means that the civilian may well be caught in a double-bind. If he aids the Resistance, the Occupiers may hunt him down and kill him. If he fails to aid the Resistance, the Resistance may hunt him down and kill him. Survival may require walking a tightrope, aiding the Resistance but not too openly, and this is a tightrope from which he may drop at any random gust of wind (resistance or occupier offensive).
This would be a hellish enough situation to endure even for a few days, weeks or months -- and, due to their slow and indecisive nature, guerilla wars commonly last for many years, sometimes even decades. This puts an enormous strain on the collective sanity of a culture and the individual sanities of its people: indeed, one common reason for guerilla armies to disintegrate is that their supporting populations just get tired of all the stress.
Now, note that since resistances usually fail, a country is very likely to go through all this anguish and LOSE in the end, making it all pointless from its population's POV. What's more, even if the Resistance does win, the strain may cause partial to total societal collapse -- most of the "failed states" of the Third World failed in part because of protracted guerilla warfare.
A successful resistance generally means that the Resistance leaders will form the new regime. These are people who have been hardened by years, maybe decades of constant death and suffering, and are used to collecting taxes and enforcing loyalty by terrorist murder. How likely will they be to rule democratically, or respect the civil rights of their people, even if the country was a liberal democracy BEFORE the invasion? This is one reason why so many African states, in partiuclar, are horrible dictatorships -- their culture-heroes, who freed them from foreign domination, were murderous terrorists and ruled as such after independence.
This is less true of successful secession movements. Such have the advantage of starting with political legitimacy and coherent territories behind front lines, and hence can get away with milder treatment of their own populaces. The primary historical example of a secession enjoying these advantages is the United States of America -- but even then, our struggle for independence involved more terrorism, and inflicted deeper scars on our society, than is generally known to those who are only acquainted with the sanitized version of the American Revolutionary War. (It is of course worse for a failed attempt at secesion, as witness the sad history of the American South from around 1865-1965).
Resistances, even successful resistances, cost a society dearly. Any country which has ever waged one wishes that its conventional armies had managed to repel the original invasion. Even a successful resistance will leave a society scarred -- for decades, perhaps even centuries.
III. Then Why Is the Fantasy So Common?
Given the overwhelming historical evidence that resistance against occupation is a more unreliable and costly way than conventional defense to maintain one's independence, why does one so often hear the argument that we need not worry about conventional defense, because if invaded we will merely mount a resistance? There are three reasons, which are related.
The simplest reason is that most people are ignorant of military history. Their concept of how a resistance works comes from Hollywood, and Hollywood features clearly noble heroes of the Resistance (who scorn terror) fighting clearly evil villains of the Occupation (who are usually inept) and winning (so the issue of a wasted effort never comes up). What's more, all sacrifices are worthy and there are no long-term consequences suffered by characters who did not actually die, so upon victory civil society is resumed without impairment.
The reasons why Hollywood takes this view of the world deserve an essay in themselves. I could summarize them as lazy writing, writing to please the lowest common denominator, and the influence of (Allied) WWII and (Soviet) Cold War propaganda on the American film-making subcultures.
I will add to this a strong academic-educational prejudice in favor of the Resistance over the Occupation. This derives largely from the World Wars (in which the former were usually on our side and the latter our hated enemy) and the Cold War (in which the Soviets successfully subverted our own academic-educational establishments with agents of influence, so that this establishment consisently supported Communist rebellions).
The important point is that a lot of people believe things which aren't so about guerilla warfare. And it can be very difficult for them to abandon these preconceptions, even if they know a little military history.
But why do people stick to these misconceptions? Basically, because they're comforting.
Consider reality. We live in national cultures, each of which we are deeply attached to, each of which embodies many of the principles that we consider sacred. These national cultures are subject to destruction and reconstruction should an invader succeed in both defeating our armed forces and overcoming whatever additional resistance can be put up by our originally-civilian population.
We know of countries to which this has happened. Even famous and powerful countries, such as Carthage and the Roman Empire and the Aztecs -- and if we really study history, countless more less famous and powerful ones.
What does this mean? Well, most achievements for which we strive, especially "immortal fame," are relevant only within a particular cultural context. Defeat may mean the effective annihilation of all that we have achieved. Who cared if a particular Carthaginian improved their sewage system or had an insight into the relationship between Man and the Gods, after the Romans tore down the city and sowed the ruins with salt?
Does this frighten you? It should. It certainly frightens me.
What's more, the only way to be safe from such a fate is to build a powerful army or make powerful allies -- and even then you're not really safe. Your powerful army may be defeated by the even more powerful one next door; your powerful allies may be unable to save you from the even more powerful allies of your enemy.
And even if your powerful army or powerful allies save you, there is a price for power. You will have to pay heavy taxes to maintain the powerful army, and risk that the generals commanding this army may stage a coup and take over your nation from within. Your powerful allies will make demands on you, which may lead to your having to support causes with which you do not agree, or even violently oppose.
Far, far more comforting to live in a world in which one's national culture is indestructible because a Resistance will automatically be generated upon one's defeat, and will as automatically WIN. In such a world, one could be sure that what one loved would last forever.
It's a beautiful thought (at least until one reflects that some of what the Aztecs and Carthaginians loved was mass human sacrifice). It might be a beautiful world.
But it's NOT the one IN WHICH WE LIVE. Reality trumps fantasy, and pretending that nations can never be defeated when they fight in their own defense does not make the pretense into fact.
The truth is that we live in an uncertain and dangerous world; we must sometimes fight to survive, and often the fight fails. Yes, even if we have the Right on our side.
Welcome to reality.