This seems like a good place to put this. think of it as an expansion on my thoughts from yesterday, with insights taken from another deep-dive into the black-bloc corner of the Intenet:
WHY WE DON’T MAKE DEMANDS
Even if your intention is simply to negotiate, you put yourself in a weaker bargaining position by spelling out from the beginning the least it would take to appease you. No shrewd negotiator begins by making concessions. It’s smarter to appear implacable: So you want to come to terms? Make us an offer. In the meantime, we’ll be here blocking the freeway and setting things on fire.
As the essay moves on, it become obvious that the
real goal is a regime change. Like I said yesterday, straight from the "color revolution" playbook:
In times of upheaval, when everything is up for grabs, one way to defuse a burgeoning revolt is to grant its demands before it has time to escalate. Sometimes this looks like a real victory—as in Slovenia in 2013, when two months of protest toppled the presiding government. This put an end to the unrest before it could address the systemic problems that gave rise to it, which ran much deeper than which politicians were in office. Another government came to power while the demonstrators were still dazed at their own success—and business as usual resumed.
During the buildup to the 2011 revolution in Egypt, Mubarak repeatedly offered what the demonstrators had been demanding a couple days earlier; but as the situation on the streets intensified, the participants became more and more implacable. Had Mubarak offered more, sooner, he might still be in power today.
You wouldn't offer those as examples unless you were aiming for a fundamental change to the structure of government, because—
contra the essay—protest movements in the US are often very successful in getting what the participants want. The whole essay reads like 140-IQ CIA handlers "explaining" why they need to stay in the streets even though the local government is promising them everything they asked for.
The obvious strength of a "movement" like this is that it has no clear leader. There is no one man to buy off, subvert, capture, or kill. However, this can also become a big problem for the movement as well.
In normal warfare, each side has a clear chain of command, and the soldiers from 4-star general to the lowest private all obey those commands. When Emperor Hirohito surrendered to the US, that was that. The war between the US and Japan was
over, period. The only Japanese who kept fighting were those who had been operating outside the chain of command, and simply didn't believe the Japanese had surrendered.
When fighting a decentralized leaderless movement, there is no chain of command—no one who can say "OK, we got what we wanted, we won, stop fighting, it's over." There's no one Supreme Commander of Antifa for the US government to surrender to.
Even if, say, Trump resigns the Presidency and all cities divert 75% their police budgets to "minority outreach," some of these people won't be satisfied, and will demand complete eradication of the police. And when they get that, someone else will step forward and coldly declare that it was a good first step,
but not nearly enough. More—
much more—must be done. It becomes a sort of competition for each faction to see how far they can push their local government, how much can they get. Since there are no consequences, and pushing people around and burning stuff is fun, there's no reason to ever stop.
The main problem will come if the government realizes this is a never-ending spiral and
there's literally nothing they can do to buy off or satisfy the revolutionaries. In normal warfare, when the pain for one side becomes too great, that side surrenders. Since the government couldn't surrender even if it wanted to, it will have no choice but to "snap" and crack down with overwhelming force. By that time, God willing, Antifa will have pissed off the average person so much that we're all laughing at the TV and cracking a beer in celebration.
