Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Age of War and Revolution Page 1 of 23

China is a Rich Society. No Western Country Is.

By

On August 20, 2025

Comments

Chinese and American flags flying together

Saw this recently, from the University of Chicago:


The commentary is a bit of an exaggeration. But not too much.

Now if this was just one data point, it wouldn’t matter, but the bottom line is that funding for universities, including university research, in being massively cut in America and the UK, with issues in most Western countries. It’s not just about the humanities, science is getting hit hard, as is engineering.

As best I can tell, China has opened about 1,700 new universities and colleges in the past 25 years. Those that existed have expanded enrollment. It’s very reminiscent of the post war period in America. And the best of universities are excellent.

Americans are ostensibly rich, yes, but the society is not. A lot of the apparent wealth is false: if it costs one fifth as much to get dental or health care or one tenth as much to buy a good pair of earphones; if it costs one-third as much to buy an electric car, well, all of the extra cost in America goes to GDP, and Americans have higher incomes, but who’s actually richer?

And when you look at Chinese cities and provinces they are building infrastructure massively. The cities are beautifully lit up at night. There is a huge space program, even as the American space program is cut, and cut and cut. There are dozens of EV companies and in general there is competition in most of the cutting edge parts of the society. Coffee is cheaper (which is why Starbucks is getting shellacked in China). Everything is cheaper, there’s more of it and the government and private actors spend money on huge new projects, on research and on infrastructure.

China is a rich society, because they can do things. America’s last real gasp as a rich society was the Apollo program, ever since then, it’s been in retreat. Europe, well, Europe had a good time in the post war period, but since then, despite some success in the 90s and early 2000’s, it’s been in retreat and it has recently chosen the path of de-industrialization and xenophobic isolationism, which is not going to serve it. University cuts in the UK, in particular, have been savage, but Europe, even taken as a whole is behind China, the US, Japan and South Korea in research and technological advancement.

 

 

The Chinese have built massive high speed rail, lead in civilians drones, in robotics and are competitive in AI, which is 20x cheaper to run (more importantly, it uses FAR less energy than American AI, which draws more energy than entire countries.) They are ahead in most material sciences, catching up in civilian aviation (soon they will be ahead), have vastly more shipbuilding capacity, are ahead in missile technology, will soon eat SpaceX’s lunch  in launch costs (no, I will not be wrong about this.)

China does thing. The government is rich. Corporations are not spending all their money in stock buybacks and acquisitions, but are actually competing and trying to create new and better products than their competitors.

The best parallel is probably not post-war America, but pre-WWI America. China has taken the lead from America, there is zero chance of America catching up absent a large meteor hitting China, but they don’t actually spend much on their military. I was shocked to find out that the Chinese military has about 2.2 million soldiers out of a population of 1.4 billion. All of this with a sincere effort to provide a decent standard of living to everyone and a genuine attack on inequality. (Chinese inequality is very high, but it is concentrated in the top 10%, not the top .01%, which is being attacked by the government.)

China is a civilian society, with a civilian economy. It is in a vastly expansive phase, one which could last as much as sixty to eighty years, assuming environmental or international issues don’t derail it. (They will.)

China is where the future is. If you are younger, learn Mandarin. It will be as essential as English was for the past hundred and twenty years.

Hope for the future now rests in China. You may not like that, but it’s just a fact. They’re the country that can actually do things, and whether our problems are fixed, or mitigated (more likely) is up to them, just as for a long time it was up to the US (which failed almost completely, play “I see no evil, I hear no evil” every since 1980.

I don’t know if I for one welcome our Chinese overlords, but it doesn’t matter. They’re here. The West has already lost the race and is retreating into a poorer, more backwards second world situation, similar to the late USSR and Warsaw Pact.

It will end as well for the US and NATO as it did for the USSR and the Warsaw Pact.

***

If you’ve read this far, and you read a lot of this site’s articles, you might wish to Subscribe or donate. The site has over over 3,500 posts, and the site, and Ian, take money to run.

Trump’s Budget & The NATO 5% Of GDP Requirement Have The Same Effect

By

On August 18, 2025

Comments

Despite all the flakiness and back and forth Trump’s actions have a unified purpose. Like the Democrats, but even more so, they disproportionately benefit the rich. (We’ll leave aside the pandemic response, which is complicated and an emergency.)

This table is older, and based on the House version of Trump’s budget and tariffs, but should be substantially correct:

Tariffs effect the rich less, because they spend less of their income on goods. The biggest companies often get exceptions to the tariffs as well. Currently that includes Apple, Coca-Cola, Stellantis and GM.

We are also seeing signs of “Greedflation”, using the tariffs as an excuse to raise prices faster than costs. This was huge during the pandemic,and it will be huge this time. Overall the really reach will benefit from tariffs, not be hurt by them. Trump talked a good game about making sure companies wouldn’t use tariffs as an excuse to raise prices, but that’s all it was, talk. For tariffs to improve the lives of the working and middle class, they would have to translate into well paid jobs, and there is no effective mechanism for that in America.

Let us turn then to the “NATO nations must spend 5% of GDP on their military.” That’s a lot, and it means that either taxes must be raised (they won’t be except for consumption taxes on the poor) or other priorities must be slashed. So the poor and middle class in those countries will get it in the neck.

Now, if that 5% was spent on domestically produced weapons and on hiring more soldiers and support staff, at least it would get back into recirculation. Indeed, there’ll be some of it, but most countries have agreed to buy Americans weapons and equipment.

And who will that benefit the most? The American rich.

In some cases buying American is so foolish it boggles the mind. Canada’s only real active military threat is America, and American weapon systems these days are mostly online and can’t be used if America doesn’t want them to be, even leaving aside the possibility of simply bricking them with an update.

But in general, increased military spending was an opportunity for industrial policy and to cut the aprons to the US, and actual statesmen would smile at Trump, make the promises and use the 5% in ways that would benefit their own country. Instead most of the benefits will flow to America.

As for the idea that America is a reliable security partner, well, they couped Ukraine, built its army up massively, encouraged it not make peace when easy and favorable terms were offered and is now cutting a deal with Russia after extorting mineral concessions from Ukraine.

Never ally with America if there is any other option.

But the core point here is simply that the “does it make the rich even richer” metric, which works for American politicians as a group, is even more predictive of Trump. Oh sure, he’ll throw the hoi polloi some social policy red meat, and yes, some of the moderately rich are being hurt by his policies, but the real rich, they’ll mostly make out like bandits.

Until China eats their lunch, which they are and will.

Right now America’s policies appear to be “loot the satrapies and form a non-Chinese bloc which is smaller, weaker and poorer than the China bloc.”

Smells like the USSR to me, except the USSR started out very strong and with higher economic growth than the West. America is trying the strategy as its in terminal decline.

 

***

If you’ve read this far, and you read a lot of this site’s articles, you might wish to Subscribe or donate. The site has over over 3,500 posts, and the site, and Ian, take money to run.

 

Elite Opinion In Canada Begins To Shift From America To China

By

On July 16, 2025

Comments

The Globe and Mail is one of the two main “newspapers of the elite” in Canada, and the older of the two. (The other one is the Nation Post). So this article is important:

Canada’s “deal” with the U.S. to drop the digital services tax, which benefits U.S. tech giants such as Meta and Netflix at the expense of Canadian fiscal sovereignty, and the Trump administration’s latest threat of a 35-per-cent tariff on Canadian goods perfectly encapsulate our current predicament: Washington no longer views Canada as an ally, but rather as a subordinate from which to extract concessions. It’s a stark reminder that trade diversification is no longer optional – it’s an urgent national imperative.

 

The rub is that our longstanding subordination to the U.S. is also holding us back from partnering with China, one of the world’s most important economies. To achieve economic sovereignty, Canada must break free from the made-in-Washington narrative that China is an unreliable trading partner bent on world domination. Instead, Canada must forge its own relationship with China – a relationship anchored in Canadian, not U.S., interests.

As the largest economy in the world on a purchasing power parity basis, China is set to be a core driver of future global economic growth. It also now accounts for a third of the world’s manufacturing output, more than all the G7 countries plus South Korea and Mexico combined. And not just low-cost manufacturing, but rather advanced production and world-beating technology. China leads in 37 of 44 critical technologies, from AI to green energy.

Everything said above is correct. I’d add that China is not an existential threat to Canada. They have never threatened our sovereignty the way Trump and the US has, and they never will. They cannot conquer us and are not stupid enough to believe they could, we are too large and too far away.

Of course we’ll have to kiss China’s ass if we want to move towards them. We’ve been very hostile for the last decade or so (we were friendly before that, it’s a policy change made by Trudeau).

I can’t see that kissing China’s ass is any more obnoxious than the deep tongue action we’ve been applying to America’s behind since 1984, with only a brief interregnum under Prime Minister Chretien (who used lips only.) In fact, China is likely to demand a lot less: mostly we have to stop discriminating against them economically (we can and should negotiate some carve-outs) and shut up about Taiwan. Given the size of our Navy our opinion on Taiwan is meaningless, and China isn’t going to Gaza the Taiwanese when they finally do unify, so this isn’t a very big concession.

It should be noted that Chinese military equipment appears, overall, to be superior to American and if we really intend to move away from the US, we shouldn’t be using American military gear. (I hope the reasons are obvious.) Moreover, China’s lead in military technology will just continue to grow.

Canada has three main geopolitical problems:

1) How to disentangle ourselves from America without getting invaded or economically crushed; and,

2) how to regrow our manufacturing capacity, so as to not become a 21st century Argentinian-style basket-case.

3) How not to go down with America.

We also have a number of serious domestic issues, a lot of them coming from American cultural, political and economic influence on Canada. Basically, we’re neoliberals, and we need to stop that, but America is dead set against it.

Anyway, America wants to cannibalize its allies to slow its decline and Canada would be stupid to go along, whether or not we fix our domestic issues.

It’s interesting to see that Canada’s elites are beginning to realize the bind. There is zero chance the Globe And Mail article would have been published if there weren’t powerful people in Canada who want the shift.

If you’ve read this far, and you read a lot of this site’s articles, you might wish to Subscribe or donate. The site has over over 3,500 posts, and the site, and Ian, take money to run.

Imperial Presidency Watch: Congress Loses Control Over The Purse

By

On July 15, 2025

Comments

So, the Supremes have decided, without even bothering to write an opinion, that the Department of Education can be massively reduced without Congressional approval:

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the Trump administration may fire more than half of the Department of Education’s workforce — mass terminations that, in Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s words, are “the first step on the road to a total shutdown” of the entire department.

The Court’s decision in McMahon v. New York, was handed down on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other expedited matters that the justices often decide without full briefing or oral argument. As is often the case in shadow docket decisions, none of the Republican justices explained their decision.

This is, in my opinion, and in line with most lawyers, 100% unconstitutional.

The McMahon decision is particularly unnerving because it suggests that President Donald Trump is allowed to “impound” federal spending — unilaterally refusing to spend money or to continue federal programs that are mandated by an act of Congress. While McMahon does not explicitly authorize impoundment, it allows the Trump administration to fire so many federal workers, in so many key roles, that the practical effect is to cancel entire federal programs.

Most of the creep of imperial presidency has been Congress giving its powers away: war acts which make it so the president can go to war without Congress, for example, or giving the President tariff authority (which Trump has misused, pretending everything is “national security”) and so on. Some have been unilateral grabs, such as using “signing statements” to change the clear intend of laws.

But this is a Presidential grab that the Supremes are waving thru. Even if they later rule that some stub of the Education department must remain, it’s clearly allowing the President to over-ride spending that Congress has mandated. I am unaware of any reasonable reading of the Constitution that allows this: the President is to execute Congress’s directives and does not have the authority to say “nah, we’re just not going to do that any more.”

Especially of interest here is that the Republicans didn’t bother to explain the ruling and didn’t give it a full trial. They know it’s completely indefensible on legal grounds, and they aren’t even going to try.

Ever since Citizen’s United I have told Americans to get out if they can and if not to prepare for horrific times. Children, we are now at the start of the collapse. Before this it was mostly gradual, but this is the real thing.

I mention Citizen’s  United (which allowed unlimited cash into US elections under the proposition that money is speech) because, of course, smashing the Department of Education while it’s something that Christofacists want, so they can ban books and write fantasy textbooks and fire teachers and Professors for saying things like “gay sex might not be bad,” or “American slavery was terrible” and so on, it’s also about privatizing as much of the education system as possible.

Remember that Trump’s main act, amidst all the Kabuki, was his budget, which slashed four trillion in taxes from rich people while cutting health care for poor people to partially pay for it. Trump’s priority, as per his actions, is to make the rich, richer. (His tariffs, while real, have been TACO: Trump chickens out when rich people start screaming.)

Make the public education shit for poor people, let the middle class have vouchers for some shit “charter” school and the upper class, as always, will send their kids to elite private schools.

A Republic, If You Can Keep It – Benjamin Franklin

Kept it for almost 250 years, but if this stands, if Congress loses its last real power, it’s over. A Republic is something rather specific, a divided form of government. And if one of the three branches has no effective power left, it’s not a Republic, especially since the Supremes, in other orders, are gutting the Judiciary’s power. The end of nationwide injunctions is particularly instructive. And let’s not forget the President’s Gestapo force, ICE, arresting Judges who try to interfere with immigration snatches.

Nothing is over till it’s over. But no one with sense would offer good odds that the US is going to come out of this era as the sort of place anyone with sense would want to live. Say what you will about China, but it’s light authoritarianism and actually delivers prosperity. At this point everyone not in the top 1% is seeing declines in wealth in America, plus you’re losing your civil liberties (citizenship revocation is very likely), plus you’re losing your Republic.

I consider it my duty to try and give a clear picture of the world to my readers so they can make good decisions. Other than the necessity of eating and not dying of exposure, it’s why I write. So… If you can get out. Get out. If you can’t, make preparations for Hell.

If you’ve read this far, and you read a lot of this site’s articles, you might wish to Subscribe or donate. The site has over over 3,500 posts, and the site, and Ian, take money to run.

JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER
And get new posts emailed to you once a day.
No Spam, just new posts and the rare admin notice. See our  privacy policy..

The Middle East Is Hastening Ukraine’s Fall & The End of the European Era

By

On June 25, 2025

Comments

The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

Rarely spoken of is the effects of the Middle Eastern wars on Ukraine. For a long time, Ukraine got everything it wanted, but since Oct 7th, it has been , or worse, on America’s priority list. Mossad has a great deal of influence in America, just short of control, almost certainly due to a sickening collection of videos and pictures, and Israel has received the first cut off everything it needed: most especially of interceptor missiles.

Even so, the reason that Israel and the US called for a ceasefire and Iran did not (though it accepted one) is that Israel was less than a week from running out of air defense missiles, and as best I can tell, the US could only have supplied about another 7-10 days worth.

What this means for Ukraine is simple enough, they’re being absolutely hammered by Russian missiles and bombs. They don’t have enough air defense, they don’t have enough missiles for the air defense, and there is no reasonable prospect of re-stocking. The West’s larder is empty.

The tempo of Russia advances continues to increase. It’s still slow, but it’s at least eight times as fast as it was a year ago, and as Ukraine runs out of men, weapons and ammunition (Western shortages go far beyond air defense), plus as morale continues to plummet in Ukrainian armed forces, the prospect of “big arrow” warfare grows closer.

As I’ve said before I expect that period will arrive next year. The fighting age male population is decimated, those willing to fight are or will be mostly dead, and Russia will win the war decisively, taking whatever they want to. The only danger of this not happening is Putin accepting a peace offer before that: like Khameini, he is very cautious, doesn’t like war and wants it over. If Zelensky ever gets his head on straight, or is replaced, he’s likely to accept a peace deal much short of what can be accomplished by arms and an unconditional surrender.

This will be a HUGE loss for the West. The first war they have decisively lost on the battlefield in generations. There will be no concealing it, and the inability to ramp up production of weapon systems and munitions will leave the collective West so weak that no one will be able to believe they could win a conventional war against China, or even Russia.

It will, psychologically, be the end of Western hegemony. For almost 400 years the West has been dominant, and since Industrial Revolution, overwhelmingly dominant.

That era is almost over. The economic aftershocks will be huge: the end of American dollar hegemony is likely within five years, ten at the most and the entire world except, perhaps, Canada, the US and Europe, will re-orient to China. The US will even lose South Korea and Japan as reliable allies, indeed, it arguably already has (more on that another time.)

This is a literal epochal period. The “nothing ever happens” fools are missing that this is the end of a literal era: the era of European supremacy (the US is just a European settler state and Britain’s successor.)

The new era will be multipolar only if China wants it to be. They are approaching “America after WWII” levels of industrial and technological power. However, for at time, they will probably allow a multipolar world, as they are smart enough not to want to be a superpower or “world cop.”

Normally this would cycle to a superpower period, but environmental issues are likely to short-circuit normal macro-geopolitical cycles. Everyone will wind up in survival mode, and the question will be who manages this best. Whoever does will lead the next cycle, which will occur long after most or all of us are dead.

So, as best you can, you may as well be interested. You are living in truly interesting times, which come around only every half millenia or so.

If you’ve read this far, and you read a lot of my articles, you might wish to donate or subscribe. I’ve written over 3,500 posts, and the site, and Ian, take money to run.

The US Continues to Accelerate Its Decline (+Iran)

By

On June 18, 2025

Comments

I wavered between writing another Iran war update and this article, so I’ll say a few things about the Iranian war. There’s evidence that Israeli intelligence networks in Iran and elsewhere are being compromised fast. It appears that:

 

That India, a Hindu/Brahmin supremacist state which is increasingly treating its minorities the way Israel used to treat Palestinians before it went full genocidal, is allied this deeply with Israel is not a surprise. That they were willing to flush their intelligence network down the drain for Israel shows that they’re as stupid as the US.

This will, of course, lead to Indian tech and guest workers being unwelcome, and a massive crash in foreign earnings sent back to India.

Meanwhile, the US is sending vast numbers of planes and supplies to the Middle East. Only B-2 bombers can deliver munitions powerful enough to actually crack Iran’s underground nuclear enrichment. Trump is screaming “unconditional surrender,” the propaganda operation is in full echo of the Iraq war, and it certainly looks like the US is going to enter the war, though Trump is so fickle that nothing is certain until it happens.

Still, my guess is that TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) rankles with Trump, and since he’s too gutless to stand firm on tariffs, he’ll start a war.

Likewise, as Bush Jr. understood, war-time Presidents are popular. Trump’s polls are atrocious, and he will expect a rally around effect from being a war President to repair them and save him in the mid-terms.

Now, to the larger picture. A US war against Iran, combined with Ukraine and all the munitions sent to Israel, means that the US will not be able to directly fight China or Russia for years.

The non-secret weakness of the US military is how little munitions they are able to produce, a weakness which extends throughout NATO. Western militaries are expeditionary forces, even the American one, intended for fighting non-peer adversaries who are expected to collapse quickly. This means that production of war materials is low.

For example, the US produces the following quantities of air defense missiles every year:

  • Patriot: 500-550, expected to go up to 650 by 2027 (the rate of increase is itself pathetic.)
  • SM-6 (Aegis naval AD): 125-150 a year
  • SM-3 (Aegis again): 20-50  a year
  • Stinger (man-pad AD, important in Ukraine): 600-700 a year.
  • AIM-120 AMRAAM (middle-range A-A): 800-1,000
  • Sidewinder (short-range A-A): 1600-1800 a year
  • THAAD (Air ground for intercepting short- to medium-range ballistic systems; Israel uses these, Ukraine doesn’t): 50-100/year

Numbers for offensive missiles are similar:

  • Tomahawk missiles (sea-launched vs. ground targets): 68-100/year
  • JASSM missiles (long-range precision cruise missile): 200-300/year
  • Javelin anti-tank (man-portable): 1,200-1,500/year
  • MGM-400 ATACMS (ground-to-ground, launched from HIMARS and MLRS launchers): 50-100/year
  • Hellfire (short-range air-to-ground, laser-guided, launched from helicopters): 500-1000/year

Exact numbers are hard to determine for obvious reasons. Stockpiles of most of these missiles (but not all) have been drawn down vastly throughout the Ukraine and Israeli-everyone wars. If Iran is attacked, multiple years’ worth of production will be used up.

This means that China will have complete dominance in the their part of the Pacific, definitely around Taiwan and the first island chain, for years. Indeed, by the time the US re-stockpiles, China will be so far ahead in numbers of missiles that it will be hopeless, and that’s before we get to the fact that China can replenish stocks much faster than the US.

All of this goes without even discussing drones, where China’s lead is astronomical.

Empires do not go gentle into that good night. What the US is doing and enabling is monstrous.

But it is also accelerating American decline.

That is in foreign affairs. Domestically, Trump is systematically destroying the basis of American advancement in tech and science. The idea that private enterprise, which does not do basic research, can make up the difference is ludicrous to anyone who knows how science and tech works. Indeed, the current AI boom is based on university research from the 80s (Granted, it’s from research in Canada (!), a country the US has decided to turn from an ally into an opponent.)

Trump is also dismantling the social welfare system, turning the US into a police state (and not the sort-of-good kind, yes, they exist, China is one of them), massively increasing inequality and basically destroying any remaining social solidarity between Americans.

I can’t think of a more destructive US President except maybe Reagan (but that was long term). Even Herbert Hoover looks good. (He didn’t cause the stock market crash, he just responded badly.) Trump is just so actively malign. He’s not a Russian agent, but the cold war KGB couldn’t have put someone in place who was more damaging, even in their wildest dreams.

So, all of this is awful. But the US’s days are numbered, truly. Unless you are very old, or die an early death, you will see the end of the American Empire and even of American hegemony over the Americas.

***

If you’ve read this far, and you read a lot of my articles, you might wish to donate or subscribe. I’ve written over 3,500 posts, and the site, and Ian, take money to run.

State & Police Vulnerabilities in an American Insurrection Scenario

By

On June 12, 2025

Comments

As unrest spreads, I think it’s worth looking at the weaknesses of American police forces in particular. Most of these vulnerabilities also apply to the National Guard.

Non-violent protest has been the dogma, especially on the center-left, for generations now. It wasn’t always thus; old time unions fought pitched battles with police and, in one case, coal miners straight-up fought the military. Blowing up buildings was not verboten, nor was assassination. US history is not what pansy-moderns think it is, and the same is true of Britain, Canada, and so on. Our forbears did not think that letting the state beat you, shoot you, torture you, imprison you, and kill you without fighting back was either virtuous, or in many cases, smart.

Modern Americans, increasingly impoverished (average Chinese have better standards of living, more on that in a later article) and living paycheck to paycheck, increasingly homeless, and with less and less to lose may decide that dying on their feet is better than lying there and letting cops beat the shit out of them, or than having ICE deport them to some third world torture prison.

If they do, and I, of course, would never suggest such a thing, then American police have significant weaknesses. The most important weakness is simple:

Modern American Police have been trained to be cowards. This sounds like rhetoric, hyperbole, or at the least, like exaggeration for affect. Let me assure you it is none of these. American police are trained to care about their own safety more than anything else. As a result they are trigger happy and unwilling to risk themselves against anything that looks genuinely dangerous.

This means that they travel in packs, and when threatened, they clump up in large groups for their own safety. This was shown when cop-killer Christopher Dorner, a trained soldier, killed a cop and her fiance. The police immediately clumped into large groups and used most of the force to protect themselves and their families.

Nor is this just a matter of extreme circumstances. Anyone who’s watched how police act around demonstrations will see that even tiny demonstrations attract much larger numbers of cops than necessary. Modern police, unlike those of fifty years ago, almost always wait for SWAT teams or at least backup before entering situations they consider dangerous and their threshold for what they consider dangerous is often very low.

This makes the police easy to deal with by any coordinated group which has not been infiltrated. Simply set of a bomb or use a drone attack on police or their families. Then do it again. Then again. Make threats against a number of targets. They will clump up, be unable to search from their own fear and become ineffective.

Then the group simply hits whatever the real target is.

This speaks to the basic principle of guerilla warfare: Attack where the enemy is weak. It’s just that American police, and I’m betting the National Guard, won’t be much better. They are especially easy to move around, because American police are cowards and because their doctrine is one of overwhelming force and caution, it’s easy to push them into a defensive posture or to push them off balance.

Simple, standard insurgency techniques will work well against American police. A few IEDs near where police can be expected to go, remote triggered as police drive over them, will see the police retreat even further into a shell. Civilian drones can easily be used to make helicopter operations dangerous, as well. The police will move slowly, in force, and retreat easily when something explosive happens.

All of this will work well against US paramilitary organizations as well. ICE would be trivial, as their movements are very predictable, and they are likely even more cowardly than normal American police, as their job is almost entirely about brutalizing unresisting people.

During the Irish revolution, assassins would walk in on British officials eating breakfast with their family, kill the official (leaving the family unharmed) and walk away.

A little fear goes a very long way to gumming operations up completely.

Smart insurrectionists will not, of course, do what Dorner did and target family members, as propaganda is always part of any successful guerilla organization. (Mao discusses this at length in his class work on guerilla warfare.)

Other principles of operation should be obvious. Use a cell organization so that damage from discovery is limited. People can’t reveal what they don’t know. In the modern environment, don’t use or even carry mobile phones, except perhaps ones that are deliberately damaged so they have no connectivity. (Everyone carries a mobile phone, so operatives should appear to do so.)

Do everything old-style. The modern state is excellent at electronic intelligence, but has let human intelligence wither to a large extent.

Successful insurrectionists will have a rule that they 100 percent kill any informants or undercover operatives. No deal will be made with prosecutors or police; they always backfire in the longer run.

Of course, I hope that none of this happens, and this article is just a look at what smart insurrectionists would do, taking natural advantage of police weaknesses. The police are welcome to read this and decide to change their doctrines and training to be less cowardly and avoid the worst of these weaknesses. As a side effect, they’d also kill less people because of their fear, and that would make insurrection less likely.

Ideally, American elites will realize that they are better off and safer if everyone is cared for. From enlightened self-interest, they might start taxing themselves again and make sure that ordinary people have enough money for rent and food. They will end predatory pricing, be fair and kind, and make medical care easily available. The American people, who, like all people, would rather live a good life, will respond and prospects of insurrection will fade like mist against the noon-day sun.

But if they refuse to discontinue their policy of mass impoverishment backed by fear, it should be understood that those who finally do decide on insurrection will not find, contrary to various myths about American impregnability, which repeated losses against men in pajamas should have put to rest, that American forces of law and order (or repression, depending on your politics) are not without weakness.

May God grant that it never comes to this. If it does, may the side of good, which cares for the welfare of the people, win.

***

If you’ve read this far, and you read a lot of my articles, you might wish to donate or subscribe. I’ve written over 3,500 posts, and the site, and Ian, take money to run.

The L.A. Riots/Protests & the Paradox of Protest

By

On June 9, 2025

Comments

The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

So, there were protests in L.A. over Trump’s immigrant removal strategy, some turned violent, and Trump is calling in the National Guard and talking about using the military.

It’s worth pointing out that Trump has deported less undocumented immigrants than Biden did over comparable periods. But this isn’t about deportation, as such.

What it is about is Gestapo tactics: Sending people to torture prisons without due process; wearing masks and refusing to show badges or warrants; giving ICE the right to create its own warrants without judicial oversight (clearly unconstitutional), and; seizing people who are showing up for meetings at immigration facilities or immigrant courts.

It’s not what Trump is doing, it’s how he’s doing it —- in the cruelest, most lawless, and unconstitutional way possible.

The message is, “We can do whatever we want, and you can’t stop us.”

Thus, the protests, and, thus, Trump escalating immediately to the National Guard (i.e., military force –that’s what the Guard is. Military.)

Protestors are caught in the paradox of protest in a fascist state: If you don’t protest the powers that be, they assume they’ve gotten away with it and will escalate. If you do protest, they use that as an excuse to escalate.

(Forget the whole violence / non-violence thing. That’s just another excuse.)

The US isn’t a meaningful democracy, and even oligarchic elites who aren’t Trump-aligned are under assault right now, as in the case with Harvard.

The choice is to bend the knee or fight. But ordinary people, especially immigrants, unlike Harvard-aligned elites, don’t have much to fight with. All they can do is put their bodies on the line.

At which point, those bodies will be assaulted, locked up, and otherwise abused, because cruelty with impunity is how the fascist right shows its power. Again, “We can do anything we want to you, and you can’t stop us. No one can.” It’s a toned down version of what Israel does to Palestinians.

There are three ways to go.

  1. Keep throwing bodies into the grinder and pray that the legal system still works with a stacked Supreme Court.
  2. Give in. Hide, stop protesting, and go with the legal attempt.
  3. Move to real violence, which this is not.

The police and National Guard have huge, easily-exploited weaknesses if anyone does decide to get serious, and there are plenty of people in immigrant and immigrant-adjacent communities who have the necessary experience and skills to exploit those weaknesses.

Of course, if real violence is used, Trump and his allies will escalate even more. At the extreme end, part of the country turns into “no go” zones, and the monopoly of force is broken. This is more than possible: the US is huge, their military is overrated, and their police are weak and have been trained to be cowards.

Trump’s trying to bring Americans to bridle. Some are already there, the natural fascists, the people who would have signed up with Hitler as soon as they realized he was serious and stood a chance.

But others? Others need to feel the whip.

So, will Americans kneel, then fall to their bellies? Will the legal system and the constitution work? Or will this escalate until the US is a failed state?

***

If you’ve read this far, and you read a lot of my articles, you might wish to donate or subscribe. I’ve written over 3,500 posts, and the site, and Ian, take money to run.

Page 1 of 23

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén