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Comment by rider5 | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn’t guerilla warfare in the alleys and tight buildings be an absolute nightmare

Guerrilla warfare relies on willingness to abide by the laws of armed conflict for its effectiveness. If you’re willing to kill everyone and the rebellious population realises it you win. See Chechnya. Also, Hong Kong is a city. In cities guerrilla warfare just plain doesn’t work. If it did the Israelis would not have been able to occupy the Gaza Strip and West Bank for decades. This without the willingness to disregard international law that harvesting Falun Gong organs or keeping millions in concentration camps in Xinjiang shows the CCP very obviously has.

Guerrilla warfare only works against weak states or strong ones that will follow international law. The British won the Boer war. The PLA has more men and Hong Kong is a lot smaller than South Africa or even just the Orange after State. Hong Kong cannot win a guerrilla war.

Total BS. Irish War of Independence is a good example of guerrilla warfare beating the oppressor, and the British did not subscribe to 'laws of armed conflict' in the slightest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1920)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_and_Tans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Cork

The British had just finished WWI, they were broke and they had narrowly avoided having a civil war over granting Irish Home Rule by virtue of WWI breaking out[1]. If they had been willing to follow the same tactics in Ireland as they had in South Africa only 20 years before they’d have won. Armed irregulars cannot win against a well trained regular army that has massive superiority in terms of training, discipline and logistics if the regular army is willing to kill everyone and the irregulars know that.

People are generally not willing to die when they know defeat is certain if life is an option. If the British had been willing to be as brutal as Cromwell to retain Ireland they’d have won. They weren’t.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curragh_incident

> If you’re willing to kill everyone and the rebellious population realises it you win.

Would the Vietnam war not be a counterexample of this?

The US was emphatically not willing to kill everyone in North Vietnam. Not even close.

Interesting. My view must have been tainted by Oliver Stone.

Because I care about having true opinions, I completely avoid film makers that in the process of producing and sustaining strong emotions in their audience rely heavily on beliefs about the real world without caring much whether those beliefs are true or false. Oliver Stone is one of those film makers. (I never saw any of his films. It was possible to learn enough about them to know I wanted to avoid them by watching a few trailers and reading a review or two.)

I prefer for my filmed entertainment to be completely fictional rather than to try to "teach" me about reality. When I want to refine my understanding of reality, I usually read nonfiction. It is too easy for filmed entertainment to "hack my brain".

Anyway, US bombers were forbidden to drop bombs within 15 miles or so of Haiphong harbor, probably because Russian ships were known to visit there regularly. Hanoi was also off limits for the vast majority of bombing missions. The directives forbidding these things came right from the top, i.e., from LBJ. In fact, LBJ would involve himself in the planning of individual missions, giving instructions such as approach this target from this direction because if you go in this direction, you fly over a school.

I'm not saying US soldiers and US pilots never committed atrocities in Vietnam, but the leaders of the US war effort were certainly never unrestricted in their willingness to kill North Vietnamese (although they probably would've chosen to kill every North Vietnamese communist combatant if there were a way to do that without killing any noncombatants). Consequently, it would've been rational for the US to continue the war effort in Vietnam even after it became obvious the war was unwinnable.

George Friedman says that the reason the US spent so much blood and treasure in Vietnam was . . . Charles de Gaulle. When de Gaulle was the leader of France, he was telling the other Western European nations that the US could not be relied on to come to the aid of Western Europe if the Soviets attacked. So, the US stayed in Vietnam to show Europe that a US military guarantee means something. Note that in order to achieve that goal, it was not necessary for the US to win the Vietnam war, only for it to try to hard enough and long enough. In other words, it was rational for the US to continue the war effort even after everyone realized that the US was unable to win the war (because the real goal was not to save South Vietnam from communism, it was to save Western Europe from communism).

The leaders of the US war effort certainly did not explain this reasoning in an effective way however to the American people -- maybe because there was no way to do so without severely demoralizing US soldiers, sailors and airmen.

I'm of the opinion America lost that conflict and it was so terrible because officials chose to be restrained in overt military action, out of fear of direct conflict with the Soviet Union, and at the same time unrestrained in covert action. It was a poisonous mix that achieve nothing but years of death and misery; that said a full scale push by America could have spiraled into nuclear war.

When pondering guerilla resistance it should be noted that Hong Kong is not Singapore - they have no army or any military trained population. There's just angry civilians.

There won't be any guerilla resistance in Hong Kong in the case of an armed intervention.

the result then basically being that they just end up destroying what they sought...

> they just end up destroying what they sought

Cities are people, not buildings. This underlines the Swiss defense strategy, for instance [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Redoubt_%28Switzerlan...

The Chinese government likely cares more about the capital contained and produced in HK, which they would ruin if they were to bust up the place.

They don’t only seek to incorporate HK but also as important or moreso to quash what they see as an incompatible political system.

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