How would a revolt in the modern United States go down?

AManFromEarth

Yes, I would say that if the government started killing its own people to take control that would justify it.

Marauder

Anarchy Rules! wrote:

Styrofoam Sammich wrote:

Just how often are revolutions successful and result in a better society for the revolutionaries?

The only two that come to mind are ours and the Indian Independence movement.

More often then not they seem to result in death and squalor even if they're successful.

Why does everyone on these sorts of threads always assume revolutions are unsuccessful or result in massive loss of life/undue prolonged suffering?

There have been many, almost entirely peaceful revolutions throughout history. Surely you're aware of the fall of the Soviet Union right? The Glorious revolution here in the UK saw the ending of absolute monarchy and the passing of the bill of rights.

Take a map....look below the equator. Pretty much every single country South of the Equator has experienced a bloody, violent, revolution, many of them multiple times over a very short period of time, for vastly different ideological, cultural or economic reasons. The UK and the Soviet Union are outliers, and the latter not really when you consider that most of the bloc countries gained independence merely because Moscow had no money to pay soldiers to go and keep them subjugated.

Fallout2man

override367 wrote:

Okay so your scenario requires the government to commit acts of terrorism against the populace

I guess... I guess that'd do it?

Well the thread is about a thought exercise in how an armed revolt would happen in the USA. So yes, the government would basically need to terrorize the USA, but in a situation where that same government is responsible for defining terrorism then obviously if you were in that situation you might not see it as such. People aren't going to get violent though unless they see no other way (That they trust) to survive. If our economy goes to shit then occupy would soak up the disaffected rather than there becoming riots so for us to get to open revolt?

Yes the fucking government would need to be doing some shady shit. Like stating a false flag terror incident against Occupy as justification for martial law. Because the only way we'd be able to deploy the military domestically is martial law, and the only way to declare martial law in this case would be violent mass civil unrest. But the only way you'll get that is if you can provoke violent mass civil unrest, but once enough people realize they can just sit around, do nothing, and watch as the wealthy's power disappears overnight? Violent revolution becomes unnecessary.

So the only way it would occur after that? Would be if it were directly planned and instigated by the government. The most likely way of doing that is by exploiting the mass peaceful civil unrest combined with media propaganda to blame liberals for everything going wrong until the right person, in the right place, at the wrong time says something and then an informant decides they might be useful to hand some explosives and record the whole thing. Which of course would in that case be played up through the media as a heroic government stopping the vast majority of bombings but missing one or two which happened to go off at occupy protest sites. Of course now this situation is too scary, and too urgent to address without declaring martial law (terrorism), and it's in a way that specifically provides at least a slightly plausible cover as to banning economic protest.

So all things given that to me at least seems the most plausible way to do it.

zepherin

Fallout2man: luckily our government is largely incompetent.

Fallout2man

zepherin wrote:

Fallout2man: luckily our government is largely incompetent.

As a whole? Undoubtedly! But really the most incompetent aspect of our government is in how incompetent our elected officials are at hiding their intentions these days and I do believe it drags the collective average down quite immensely.

But branches, like the military and covert intelligence can run smaller operations amazingly smoothly given how many they run. I can't remember the film but it was an Al Paccino movie regarding the CIA and he said it best "Everyone knows about our mistakes, no one, knows about our successes." In a hierarchy it only takes a few bad actors in the top to start something (and given the nature of an intelligence agency only those sorts of people know WHY a given operation is occurring) like this and once the ball is in motion the level of trust Americans have in government would make fracture inevitable so rather than going along with the fracture the bad actors would make it as violent and painful as possible on their way out.

There's enough distrust in all government levels right now that all it would take is a strongly implied presence of a conspiracy to get many to suspect that it existed and then act out accordingly, which would then cause more people to pick sides before the emergence of an actual conspiracy had even been established and by that time reactionaries at the top would declare a state of emergency of some kind and once that happened? Well at this point, if National Emergency was declared for any reason that'd just make the situation even worse and so on. So to start with all you'd need is enough people in covert intelligence to decide that it was a good thing to stage one false flag terror incident and that would shatter national unity.

The best part is that they wouldn't even need to understand what they're doing, because these operations normally hinge on giving the terrorists non working munitions so as to prevent a real terror incident. You just need one guy at the top who knows he's organizing a sting with non working munitions and maybe one or two supply clerks knowing what went where and in the flurry of events and all you need to do is prevent either from talking publicly afterwards and you could sweep it all under the rug. So the government doesn't even need to really be responsible on a whole for starting it for it to quickly turn into that sort of a situation. Just enough people need to know just enough of what they're doing to make certain conditions possible and then the situation just occurs because of what people's combined expectations are of given situations.

zepherin

Fallout2man wrote:

zepherin wrote:

Fallout2man: luckily our government is largely incompetent.

As a whole? Undoubtedly! But really the most incompetent aspect of our government is in how incompetent our elected officials are at hiding their intentions these days and I do believe it drags the collective average down quite immensely.

But branches, like the military and covert intelligence can run smaller operations amazingly smoothly given how many they run. I can't remember the film but it was an Al Paccino movie regarding the CIA and he said it best "Everyone knows about our mistakes, no one, knows about our successes." In a hierarchy it only takes a few bad actors in the top to start something (and given the nature of an intelligence agency only those sorts of people know WHY a given operation is occurring) like this and once the ball is in motion the level of trust Americans have in government would make fracture inevitable so rather than going along with the fracture the bad actors would make it as violent and painful as possible on their way out.

There's enough distrust in all government levels right now that all it would take is a strongly implied presence of a conspiracy to get many to suspect that it existed and then act out accordingly, which would then cause more people to pick sides before the emergence of an actual conspiracy had even been established and by that time reactionaries at the top would declare a state of emergency of some kind and once that happened? Well at this point, if National Emergency was declared for any reason that'd just make the situation even worse and so on. So to start with all you'd need is enough people in covert intelligence to decide that it was a good thing to stage one false flag terror incident and that would shatter national unity.

The best part is that they wouldn't even need to understand what they're doing, because these operations normally hinge on giving the terrorists non working munitions so as to prevent a real terror incident. You just need one guy at the top who knows he's organizing a sting with non working munitions and maybe one or two supply clerks knowing what went where and in the flurry of events and all you need to do is prevent either from talking publicly afterwards and you could sweep it all under the rug. So the government doesn't even need to really be responsible on a whole for starting it for it to quickly turn into that sort of a situation. Just enough people need to know just enough of what they're doing to make certain conditions possible and then the situation just occurs because of what people's combined expectations are of given situations.

As a government worker I can say this, for that situation to happen, no less than 50 people would have to be a part of it, and some of them think the Head of whatever ABC agency is doing it is an asshole and may be gunning for his job.

Fallout2man

Do these 50 people all do jobs where they are organizationally aware of exactly what everyone is doing, what they're handling and what they're facilitating? What I mean by that is, typically in a hierarchical organization where knowledge is severely compartmentalized and workers often only know the barest minimum to do their jobs it becomes very easy to bribe fifty people with no knowledge of each other's roles to make fifty small mistakes they might never question and otherwise overlook that might enable a bomb to go off somewhere.

So if you assume your typical Machiavellian conspiracy then yes. 50 people might need to be aware to all knowingly facilitate a false flag incident. But in a profession that requires those 50 people never talk to each other about what the other is doing, and where their only knowledge of their job comes from a superior who was trained to only reveal the minimum? I'd think that takes the number of required witting participants down a few notches. You just pay a number of people to make small mistakes, promise them cover if they lie and say they were mistakes and then the entire thing has the appearance of an accident or of agency incompetence.

zepherin

Fallout2man wrote:

Do these 50 people all do jobs where they are organizationally aware of exactly what everyone is doing, what they're handling and what they're facilitating? What I mean by that is, typically in a hierarchical organization where knowledge is severely compartmentalized and workers often only know the barest minimum to do their jobs it becomes very easy to bribe fifty people with no knowledge of each other's roles to make fifty small mistakes they might never question and otherwise overlook that might enable a bomb to go off somewhere.

So if you assume your typical Machiavellian conspiracy then yes. 50 people might need to be aware to all knowingly facilitate a false flag incident. But in a profession that requires those 50 people never talk to each other about what the other is doing, and where their only knowledge of their job comes from a superior who was trained to only reveal the minimum? I'd think that takes the number of required witting participants down a few notches. You just pay a number of people to make small mistakes, promise them cover if they lie and say they were mistakes and then the entire thing has the appearance of an accident or of agency incompetence.

In a highly competent monolithic organization that is exactly how it works, but sadly the government isn't any of those. Here is how it works. An intelligence analyst who has spent the last three months looking at the same 3 blocks of Tehran flags an issue with her superior, or an informant gives information to his handler on the ground, who then passes it to a different analyst. In both cases the analyst gives the information to their superior, who gets another analyst, probably two to verify information. The information if vetted is sent over a secure communication to head quarters where a secretary with a TS clearance gets the information and reads it before forwarding it to her boss a mid level manager. That person asks for permission from the chief of operations (or similar titled person depending on what is going on) to conduct an operation. The chief of operations clears it with his boss if the operation is a sizable one, and organizes the OP if it is not. The Chief of operations then holds a meeting with the team leads and various support personnel. A strategy session is formed. Money is going to be requisitioned. This is the biggest problem, you can requisition money from congress for black ops, but the intelligence subcommittees in the house and senate get to know what is in the budgets, and there are TS accountants and bookkeepers who know where the money is being used. It's why everyone that works for the FBI, CIA and NSA has at least a secret security clearance and probably a TS.

If you think the director of a major government branch gets 3 guys together, magics up hundreds of thousands of dollars, bribe a group of people who want his job, and already make fantastic salaries, reorganize personnel on a massive scale, and pull it off without word getting out. It just doesn't work that smoothly. If you pull someone off an operation the handlers are going to raise hell. If you pull people off support to run a false flag operation, their managers are going to raise hell. And it is really hard to fire a federal employee, so hostile employees will take any shot to bring you down. You have siege mentality between different departments, and it's not just some group that moves as one. You got groups of people and some of them hate each other. I'm not sure if that is true all the way around, but from what I've seen of government agencies it is. It's like any work environment.

autono-wally, erotibot300

Modern Man wrote:

Captain Carrot wrote:

Are you claiming that the dozens of voter ID bills aren't an attempt to suppress voting in demographics that are less likely to have IDs fulfilling the new criteria?

You call it voter suppression because it affects people who vote for your party. In reality, these laws are meant to prevent voter fraud, though they sometimes have unintended secondary consequences.

As if you believe that yourself for one second