The Fantasy of the Invincible Resistance

[jordan179]

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):

Comments

[chipuni]

Had the people in America ever been attacked I am sure we would have fought off the attacker, but we were not attacked.

Oh, you mean something like this:

[eric_hinkle]

OT but with this:

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.It reminds me an awful lot of how, in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, the Empire rank-and-file and the Rebels get portrayed in the (better) books. In them, the Rebels aren't always especially noble (some of them are shown as having been former pirate gangs or local warlords who just didn't want to submit to Imperial authority) and the Imperials had a lot of support due to their tendency to put down raiding barbarians, slavers, and pirates who cropped up after the Clone Wars and ran amok for the next twenty years

[unixronin]

I observe as a point of data the words of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, to the Japanese High Command, attempting to dissuade them from war:

"You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass."

[jordan179]

Well yes, but he was talking about conquering America from a baseline of their relative strengths c. 1940, in other words while America still had an army in the field and Japan was still bogged down in China. In a hypothetical situation c. 1955 in which the American armed forces had already been defeated and Japan was simultaneously drawing on the resources of all East Asia, Australia, Indonesia and Oceania, the correlation of forces would have been more in Japan's favor. Yamamoto correctly saw that to get from A to B was probably beyond Japan's power, at least in a single generation.

[ford_prefect42]

The US would be a rather inconvenient place to try to invade. The arms level of the populace at large guarantees a fight. That doesn't mean that it couldn't be done. Just that it would take a very powerful opposing force with the will to really bring the pain. In the past, 1000 to 1 kill ratios (for every german la resistance kills, the germans execute 1000 french civilians) have worked to quell insurgencies very quickly. Once quelled, if you do it right, the populace forgets that they are conquered in a generation.

[jordan179]

... and I think that an Axis victorious over Eurasia would be perfectly willing and able to do just that to America. The main hope for American survival in that situation would be that the victors might fall out among themselves and begin fighting before they conquered the Western Hemisphere, in which case cunning Presidents could play one Axis faction against the other and thus avoid defeat.

[marycatelli]

If you're seeking immortal fame in a mortal universe -- I think the problem lies much deeper than the transitoriness of given cultures.

[jordan179]

I speak of relative immortality. My point is that much of what we achieve is only of value within a specific cultural context: for instance, no one would honor Susan B. Anthony in a future in which a misogynist caliphate conquers America. The horror of the truth that cultures can be defeated and supplanted in war is that it means that one's achievements are not even relatively secure.

Think of it as the awareness of Death, on a cultural rather than individual plane.

We live with them

[carbonelle]

"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."

The United States conquered the various American Indian nations despite their best efforts at resistance. I would think the state of the reservations today would indicate what a successful invasion of the U.S. looks like.