Тег: van Kreveld

The (In)effectiveness of Violence

Bitarch’s Column
(with editorial edits by Ancap-chan)

When you want to achieve a certain goal, you choose one of many available tools. Suppose a hostel has opened in your house, which constantly creates noise and a criminogenic environment near your home. What can you do? The simplest option at first glance is to force the owner to close their business by using physical violence.

But what if they have at least a pepper spray? Now, in the event of your attack, your potential costs have increased. Violence as a tool no longer looks as profitable as it seemed initially. So, willy-nilly, you have to look for other ways to influence them—persuading, explaining the situation to the property owner so they terminate the lease, giving the hostel a one-star review on online resources, and calling on other residents of the building to do the same. In short, you have a incentive to act civilly.

Initially, the simplest tool of coercion, physical violence, quickly loses its effectiveness when the potential victim is capable of applying counter-violence, even in the smallest amount. The former Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, once praised violence as a tool of extremely high efficiency. But for this to be the case, he had to introduce some of the strictest rules for purchasing and owning weapons in Singapore, even for self-defense—because even a slight leveling of the balance of violence potential in society leads to a sharp decrease in the effectiveness of violence as a tool of coercion.

I can propose a hypothesis well-supported by facts: the costs of aggressive violence increase exponentially as the possibilities for counter-violence by the victim increase.

Suppose a stationary bandit (the state) wants to use violence to force someone to comply with its demands. If the victim of state aggression has no lethal weapon, a small operational group is sufficient for the arrest. But what if the victim has a pistol? Police special forces must be sent. For a minor reason, such as unpaid fines or the retail sale of psychoactive substances, no one will send special forces. In Alexander Rozov’s blog, there is a post with confirmation of this fact using the example of Sweden.

Suppose the potential victim of state aggression is not some tax delinquent, but a more significant target—for example, a clan leader in Somalia. He doesn’t just have a pistol, but a thousand fighters with Kalashnikov rifles, albeit poorly trained. As history has shown, the damage even from such “bandits” proved unacceptable for the US government.

Imagine that the followers of the Branch Davidians sect, who took refuge at the Waco ranch in 1993, had anti-tank grenade launchers in addition to shotguns and rifles. As we know, the FBI decided to use tanks at the time to ram the walls and release tear gas. If the defenders had anti-tank weapons, such an option would have had to be rejected as excessively risky.

In such a situation, the state could either turn the assault on the ranch from a police operation into an army operation, using mortars or other lethal indiscriminate weapons, or starve the ranch out, with the prospect that these fanatics would indeed all die of hunger. Both options in a democratic state are fraught with significant political damage, which for politicians is even more important than economic damage to the state. For more details on such factors, I recommend reading Martin van Creveld’s book The Rise and Decline of the State.

Finally, we have already analyzed a potential situation where a potential victim of state violence threatens the use of weapons of mass destruction. Currently, this is perceived as something extremely unlikely—not because the state effectively prevents the creation of WMDs by private individuals, but because people who have enough skills to create WMDs also have strong internal moral convictions that preclude the use of indiscriminate mass violence, including against innocent people. If a democratic state sets an example by being the first to use WMDs against its own citizens, this moral prohibition will be weakened, and over time will disappear altogether. No official in a relatively civilized state is ready to allow such consequences.

Conclusions can be drawn:

1) The costs of coercion by the state or any other aggressor increase exponentially as the means of counter-violence by the victim are strengthened. Minimal self-defense weapons, therefore, sharply raise the price of an attack, and against a cheap dirty bomb made from nuclear waste, even the nuclear arsenal of a superpower will be ineffective.

2) In order for a free society (a territorial or extraterritorial contractual jurisdiction) to protect itself from conquest by the state, it is more profitable for it not to invest in a single “wonder weapon,” but to provide incentives for clients to acquire personal weapons, skills for their use, and the readiness to use them for defense. This will also help society protect itself from its own coordinating bodies, should they decide to become a state, since it will ensure an even distribution of the potential for violence. This is discussed, in particular, in the previously translated work by Jack Hirshleifer, Anarchy and Its Dissolution.

Finally, I will provide a good quote from the book The Liberal Archipelago by Chandran Kukathas.

Take gamblers and casino owners. Their activities may be alien or even repulsive to us. However, would the fact that gambling takes place in another country be sufficient grounds for invading it?

Take “monopolists.” They may set prices for their products that we consider unfair. However, would we consider the fact that a country supplies its goods too expensively a sufficient ground for declaring war on that country?

But why are we ready in similar cases to send armed men (police) to our fellow citizens, take them captive (prison), and take tribute from them (fine)? Probably because, unlike a neighboring state, they cannot defend themselves.

The State Army and Its Meaninglessness

Bitarch’s Column

Opponents of the idea of armed struggle against the state often discourage people from it by frightening them with the power of the state’s army. In reality, however, it can be considered that the state has no army at all! And this is not an exaggeration — it is simply unfit for this task. Only the lightly armed police and Rosgvardia will be able to realistically oppose anti-etatist fighters. 

Below is an excerpt from a popular book about the decline of the era of territorial states, which every libertarian should certainly read!

“Facing armed resistance from the occupied population, the Germans soon discovered that it was the most modern components of their armed forces that were the most useless. Until then, their tanks, artillery, fighters, and bombers had experienced no particular difficulty in smashing the world’s most advanced armies to pieces (including the armies of three leading world powers, whose forces significantly exceeded their own), but, facing small detachments of partisans who were not an army, did not wear military uniforms, did not fight in open battle and tended to dissolve either into the rural landscape or among the surrounding population, the German troops found themselves completely bewildered. Like other conquerors after them, the Germans learned the lesson that when conducting counter-insurgency operations, practically the only forces that could prove useful were lightly armed police, infantry, mountain troops, special forces, signal troops and, above all, intelligence of all kinds. All of them had to move on foot or using light vehicles, preferably those that could move across rugged terrain. Outside of cities, they could be reinforced by reconnaissance aircraft, and in those rare cases when the enemy managed to be caught by surprise and forced into open battle — by a small number of artillery pieces and tanks. And there was no room in these operations for the pride of the Wehrmacht — tank and mechanized divisions, and moreover, since the scale of the operations was very small, for any divisions at all.

The discovery made by the Germans (and to a lesser but significant extent by their Japanese allies) during the Second World War has since been repeated by practically all major armed forces in the world. Some of the first to encounter guerrilla warfare at the very beginning of the postwar period were the French and the English. In terms of brutality, their operations were far from those of the Germans; and yet, especially regarding French actions in Indochina and Algeria, they were ruthless enough. In both countries, the attempt by the French, using the most modern weapons available to them, to re-establish control over their colonies led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people and the destruction by fire and sword of entire villages and even regions. Although the English did not go so far (the largest number of civilian casualties in their colonial campaigns was approximately 10,000 people during the fighting in Kenya), they also frequently resorted to the death penalty, torture, and destroyed entire villages, whose inhabitants were relocated to concentration camps! Just like the Germans, the English and French armed forces discovered that it was precisely the most powerful weapons and weapon systems that were the most useless, being either too expensive, too fast, too large, too inaccurate, too indiscriminate, or all of the above simultaneously. As for the most powerful weapon, i.e., nuclear, it was simply inapplicable against an enemy whose forces were so dispersed and so elusive”

Martin van Creveld “The Rise and Decline of the State,” p. 485

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Ancap-chan’s Comment

To be honest, specifically in Russia, it is not particularly easier for people to realize that they won’t be smeared across the asphalt by tanks, but will instead be limited to being smeared across the asphalt by clubs. Meanwhile, there are more carriers of clubs and other light weaponry, specifically hired for war against their own citizens, in Russia than there are those hired or conscripted for war with foreign powers. So I would emphasize not so much how poorly these forces are equipped and how ineffective their tactics are, but how motivated they are — this is precisely the key factor in deterring armed civilian protest.