NOTE: My brain is melted right now, so I'm not at my feeble best.
I've written up a collection of alternate realities set in the near future entitled for obvious reasons "Grim Futures". These range from 'Black Box Imperium' which is about a Chinese-American CoDominium combined with a Total Surveillance Society to a description of the likely effects of a smallpox martyr attack on the US. One recent addition to the collection of about nine worlds is 'Red and Blue'.
I wanted to do two things in R and B. I wanted to use nuclear weapons, and I wanted to capture the point revealed in the first Civil War. Each side thought they would be home by Christmas. Each side disrespected the other side's capabilities.
One commenter, cskendrick, opined that the best chance of the Red was to hope for stalemate, and that Blue would eventually build up and overwhelm the other side. I'm doubtful. Perhaps its my own prejudgices in action.
Then again, with the Blue being locked up in cities (even most of Blue states is actually Red), and nuclear weapons in play....
I do agree that it would be terrifically nasty.
Another commenter, WO9, a Ron Paullist, asked me what I thought of a Populist Revolution. What if the Army and the People decided to enforce Constitutionality?
Lets give it a try, eh?
Things began with a charming man of little skill whose solution to all problems was to expand the reach of government. If he had been Otto von Bismarck, this might have worked.
American prestige, or fear of American retribution, which is often the same thing, plummetted. As Macchiavelli pointed out, it is better to be feared than loved for you can control fear. North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan all became rogue states armed with nuclear missiles on his watch.
He tried charm. It failed. He tried bluster, but no one took him seriously. He tried force, but like President Carter before him, he was not used to it, and so he was very bad at it.
Meanwhile the leadership of the opposing party was running scared because he kept calling them bad names, and they kept thinking that if they earnestly signed on to yet another of his plans that he would accept them as decent human beings. It was a carrot and stick experience for the elephant with the donkey in the driver's seat.
Naturally, a lot of people fumed. Some became conspiracists (and there were conspiracies going on behind the scenes tis true, but some just donned their tinfoil hats.) Others fought, but they could do little against the reinstated Fairness Doctrine, or the Free Speech Enhancement Act of 2011, against lawsuits for hate speech brought against them by the DOJ, against cyberhackers destroying their companies and not being investigated, against pictures of their house and their children being posted on the Net with suggestions on how to torture them, against private investigators hired by reclusive billionaire ex-Nazis to find their skeletons, against black masked men with leather gloves, against the MSM which blasted any deviation with 'racist', against the hordes of gov't funded private entities flush with cash from the Stimulus Bills who overwhelmed the few volunteers with their pitiful equipment by hiring the best mercs money could buy.
Amnesty for illegal immigrants was passed, and suddenly the Donkeys had twenty million more legal voters. Add in the dead recruited by Acorn, and things looked like a 55% Donkey victory was very possible.
The government had bailed out the newspapers, and the papers were duly grateful. They had long ago passed the point of 'worship of the new messiah' and now descended into absolute ignominy as they heaped superlatives on the Great Leader.
But, there were problems. One, the nation was still essentially not on their side. It rained monsoons of propaganda, but still most people were privately rather dry even if they didn't say so in public. Of course, encrypted email lists and Yahoo groups enjoyed a huge rise as people sought for places to discuss what they really felt outside the omnipresent hailstorm of words which ran from nickel a post trolls who spammed conservative sites all the way up to the NYT.
Another problem was that the ideas behind the Legal Revolution as it was generally called, were bad ideas. A plane can't fly without wings no matter how many 'learned men' say it can.
There was a division between public harranguing and private rebellion, between public cries of 'Best Evar' and private despair.
And then a shoe dropped.
We had withdrawn from Iraq. Been forced out of Pakistan and Afghanistan unless we were willing to radically increase our committment. We weren't.
We were still in the House of War. And we were still the richest, most powerful nation on the planet. Envy is a dreadful thing. Add in the trade wars we created with our new policies, and real injury was added to insult.
Some say a Coalition formed. Cold-blooded snakes in one nation, hot-headed martyrs in another.
In any case, a nuke got passed from one hand to another hand. It got 'stolen'.
It found its way to Los Angeles via way of transport boxes. It was never opened, or even glanced at more than ten seconds by security.
At least, thats what we think happened. Hard to say with all the evidence floating in the stratosphere.
The City of Angels went up to the thirty thousand angels before settling back down to earth as a fine radioactive dust.
Shock. Horror.
The evildoers will be punished, but....what have we done to merit this rage?
Some ineffective things were done. Most of them seemed to be mostly effective at dealing with the conservatives and other internal political enemies. A certain popular talk show host, the leader of the conservatives in many ways, 'committed suicide'.
It turned out to be impossible to verify just who did what. We could track the bomb down to where it originated with the Russians, but they had already months gone by claimed to have it stolen. It might even be true.
Another bomb. This one in Jacksonville. Alert locals almost stop it, but the police get in their way. We know this because of cell phone transmissions from just before the explosion. Listening to them, to the arguements between the police and the clued in citizens enrages and breaks the heart at the same time.
It lit the fuse.
Now all of the Mid-East was laughing. They handed out candy on every street in the House of Peace.
Impeachment proceedings started.
The President decided to launch a 'serious reprisal'. Unfortunately, the trimmed down military with its low morale, and his general lack of skill as a leader and perhaps deliberate sabotage by multiple sides (including terrorists and military) left the 'reprisal' as an embarrassment that left President Carter's hostage rescue attempt in the dust.
A dozen fighter planes crashed, several into the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier.
Some people say that when the JCOS, the leading generals and admirals of the nation, came to the White House, and presented their ultimatum, which was really a polite coup d' etat, that the Glorious Leader looked relieved.
Perhaps.
That presumes that he had enough self-knowledge to realize he was drastically over his head.
The day after General William Mayfair took over as Temporary Governor, another nuke went off in Philadelphia. The response was limited by several facts.
America simply did not have the Army or the will to invade. Nor was our Air Force in sufficient good health to support a truly massive bombing campaign. So Mayfair ordered the subs to launch.
Three-quarters of a billion people died in the next hour.
After this, Mayfair called a Constitutional Convention. However, he weighted the dice. No one was allowed to vote who had not owned property in excess of five acres as an American citizen for at least five years. In other words, he disenfranchised the recent illegal immigrants, and pretty much everyone who lived in a large city, and most everyone below the age of thirty, to boot.
But everyone who was in the military had a special dispensation to vote.
A version of the Constitution was re-enacted, but with stronger safeguards against gov't tyranny, indebtedness, etc., etc.
Getting involved in a foreign war, unless invaded, now required a 2/3rds majority. However, simply nuking someone was a bare majority. US policy became isolationist, and if you managed to tick off the US, no longer did we send Marines. We sent nukes.
Getting involved in a foreign war, unless invaded, now required a 2/3rds majority. However, simply nuking someone was a bare majority. US policy became isolationist, and if you managed to tick off the US, no longer did we send Marines. We sent nukes.
That's something I will NEVER understand about warfare. Why send in ground troops AT ALL? Just drop napalm and high-explosive bombs on every square inch of the country. If anyone survives, they can rebuild from the rubble. No lives lost on our side, and the war is over in 20 minutes.
Mercy. Loss of productive faculties. And bombing is not as effective as all that (or at least it wasn't in WW2) is some people's viewpoint.
L.E. Modestit is a kinda liberal, but he writes SF books about what you would be willing to do to defend your country. And he makes the arguement that sometimes the only way to convince a country bent on aggression to seek peace is to level a city. And that then they will complain about how harsh the victor was, but the victor was trying to live in peace, and trying to be reasonable, and finally gave it up, and went for annihilation.
And he makes the arguement that sometimes the only way to convince a country bent on aggression to seek peace is to level a city.
I'd say that Nagasaki and Hiroshima Japan are perfect examples of this methodology.
I'm certain you've seen Red Dawn, where the US is invaded by Soviet and Cuban forces. I know some folks that are actually preparing for the day when they will have to go "head for the hills" and live out in the woods. I used to think like that, but after a while, I decided that if I had to live like that, then it probably wasn't worth living at all. I do stay prepared for things like that (I've enough canned food to last for a month, easily) You never know.
(Doing Therapy)
Two Posts
Ya know, Eric, something I used to fantasize about was a second revolutionary war. Where the people decide that the government isn't doing their job, and the people uprise and take it back. I imagine if it got to that point, most of the police and armed forces would probably be assisting the citizenry. The one weapon that a person has against a tank is the feelings of the people inside the tank.
(Doing Therapy)
I think your second post was Wo9's point.
NOTE: My brain is melted right now, so I'm not at my feeble best.
Eric, I gotta ask, what did this mean? The reason I ask is because when I label a post with (Doing Therapy) it means that, at the time of that writing, I am heavily intoxicated and in a psychotic state. Your brain doesn't get much more "melted" than that.....
(Doing Therapy)
There is an understanding in Western warfare that military actions target only military targets.
You can shoot an enemy soldier to get him to stop, but you can't shoot his mother. You can bomb facilities that are supplying food to the army, but you cannot destroy the crops on which the populace is dependent.
It is in a sense our own version of honor and chivalry and bushido: those who are not part of the fight may not be attacked.
Some would say that these codes are the weakness of those who hold them. A knight may easily be assassinated by a peasant woman; a samurai is vulnerable to a poisoned needle; American ground troops can be blindsided by ordinary villagers. At the same time, because we are the most powerful nation, others expect us to uphold these codes. We want to be able to say that it is criminal to attack civilian homes and offices; thus we do not attack civilian homes and offices of others. As long as we take the high road, we can glean some support from others by pointing to the underhanded tactics of our enemies. We can say that those terrorists committed a criminal act by crashing civilian planes into the World Trade Center, but if we carpet bomb civilian properties in the Middle East, we nullify our objection.
Either we fight fairly and complain when others cheat, or we all cheat and there are no limits in war. If there are no limits in war--well, it really was Albert Einstein who said that World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones.
--M. J. Young
Either we fight fairly and complain when others cheat, or we all cheat and there are no limits in war. If there are no limits in war--well, it really was Albert Einstein who said that World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones.
Yeah MJ, that was an episode of Star Trek Enterprise. War CAN in fact bring about peace. If everyone is dead, it's pretty frigging peaceful, ya know?
(Doing Therapy)
Melted. Well not as bad at that, John. I was tired, and my creativity was at a low ebb, and I could feel that. My precision, and insight is also low. That's why this particular post is more ranty than the Red and Blue American Civil War article that has been getting discussed. Its less balanced, less wise, more 'Scummy Liberals!!'. Its not necessarily dishonest because much of what I outlined could take place--liberals do frequently play politics as something close to a blood sport.
MJ. You're a lawyer. Law of Land War. If Side X breaks the LLW, then Side Y has the perfectly legal right to engage in reprisals, or to consider what had been a protected object to be not protected any longer.
Otherwise Gresham's Law prevails.
So...shoot from a mosque. Now the mosque is legally unprotected, and we can legally drop a bomb on it.
Engage in deliberate acts against the LLW, and we're entitled to execute prisoners of war as a reprisal. This was done in the Civil War. A Union general had issues, it seems to me, and he mistreated Confederate prisoners. So a Confederate general captured some Unionists, and had them draw straws, and hung ten of them.
Which put a stop to the lawbreaking by the Union general.
Last category is there are certain behaviors which have specific punishments in the LLW. Being a spy=death. Legally, we could capture terrorists, and execute them, pretty much on the spot. They are the legal equivalent of pirates, the enemies of mankind, and any military force that captures one could shoot them (perhaps they might get a court martial on the spot, I'm not sure.)
We obviously are not using the LLW. But we could. We're being far more gentle than that, and I have to wonder if this is a good idea.
The LLW has very strong incentives to obey it. Use a hospital as a gun platform, and watch the whole hospital be blown up along with all the patients and the attacker is considered guiltless by the LLW.
Interestingly, I read at one point, that the Arabs have their own notion of balance. If you kill a thousand of them, they are entitled to kill a thousand of you.
I read of one European who described the American way of dealing with the Indians as the 'law of savages'. Americans did not want to be threatened on their borders so they made sure they weren't by killing any threats. The Europeans of that time had threats all about themselves in the other nations of Europe.
I think the LLW is superior to the Arab notion of balance because the LLW makes peace desirable. The balance idea means you can have your fun, but it doesn't break you. A good comparison is the Original Star Trek episode where the two warring planets have a virtual war, and the people of both planets walk into suicide chambers to enact the rulings of the computers. Kirk decides that a good Real War might actually produce peace.
The Arab way of war is more off and on, raiding, and such, I think. This corresponds to the virtual war.
Western war shatters its opponent, especially the American version which is more extreme perhaps than the Europeans most of the time.
And yes, I'm making extremely broad blanket statements which have lots of holes in them.