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Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

Protesting and other symbols of resistance are fine but it won't change anything until they form an insurgency. If they are serious about change it will take a violent course of actions to make it happen. Kosovo wouldn't have become an independent country if it weren't for citizens arming themselves and waging a guerrilla insurgency against their enemies.This of course means many thousands will have to die.

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This is ridiculous nonsense.

Eg the entire European concept of "social democracy" came about through unions doing non-violent strikes in the early 20th century. Sure, there was some violence here and there but no armed insurgency. They tried it armed in Eastern Europe and look where that got them.

I know less about American history but it is my understanding that equal rights for people of colour, various sexual preferences etc all came about through non-violent protest (not the abolishment of slavery, obviously, but I mean after that).

Comments like yours share the shit out of me. "oh, well, many thousands will have to die ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

>unions doing non-violent strikes in the early 20th century

My aunt's father (in the US) had the duty of keeping the stockpile of firearms hidden to quickly hand back out to all the union members if the Pinkertons tried to start killing people. In the mid 1900s.

Hurray for labor day

But since the CCP will not respect their autonomy, they need to fight for it.

Plenty of examples of European nations who had to fight violently for their autonomy in the recent two centuries.

Were any of them against an adversary as large, heavily armed, and motivated as the CCP?

Yes, one example would be the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire. The Greeks had no chance until they got help from the French, Russian and British empires though.

I hope it doesn’t turn violent, and even if it doesn’t I think the West can offer good help to stave off the influence of communist dictatorship in Hong Kong.

This is especially true of Hong Kong where the authoritian goverment is foreign, enormous, next door, and highly motivated to keep Hong Kong from leaving.

Hong Kong would be a bloodbath, and even then I don't know if China would let them be free.

If people of color or those with non-mainstream sexual preferences wanted independence then they would likely have to wage armed conflict to get it. Asking for equal rights is something that can be done through the democratic system. Asking for liberation from an authoritarian government is quite a bit different in estimate.

Workers rights like striking (while still very violent in many cases) is not an apples-to-apples comparison to liberating yourself from an authoritarian regime. The Balkans illustrate this well if you want recent European history.

This is a terrible and impractical idea. Nearly all insurgencies fail. And among the few that succeed, the new rulers are often as bad as or worse than the old. (Mainland China itself being a good example of that.) If the HK protesters start an insurgency, they will destroy the city and gain nothing in the process.

>This is a terrible and impractical idea. Nearly all insurgencies fail. And among the few that succeed, the new rulers are often as bad as or worse than the old.

This is an unfortunate perspective which seems to rule out any possibility of real qualitative change, and it's downright ridiculous to see when the people themselves are formally disenfranchised by the law to make semi-meaningful change, i.e the most change Western democracies allow. In other words, for the sake of freedom, "it's worth a shot" should be the perspective, not "let's not try". The fact is that we can learn from our mistakes. As it happens, despite your claims of nearly all insurgencies failing (failing in what respect? not succeeding? or succeeding but being worse?), the ones that have succeeded and live on to this day generally aren't that bad. The French, American and German revolutions, and with some qualification the Russian revolution were great.

You can only learn from the mistake if you're alive at the end.

Revolution doesn't only lead to improvement or no impact. It can also make everyone's life much worse.

was CCP an insurgency from some authoritarians?

In some respects, yes.

It worked for Gandhi and his followers...

And not so well for the Moriori[0]:

Moriori embraced a pacifist culture that rigidly avoided warfare ... On 19 November 1835, the brig Lord Rodney, a hijacked European ship, arrived carrying 500 Māori (men, women and children) with guns, clubs and axes...

A Moriori survivor recalled : "[The Māori] commenced to kill us like sheep.... [We] were terrified, fled to the bush, concealed ourselves in holes underground, and in any place to escape our enemies. It was of no avail; we were discovered and killed – men, women and children indiscriminately." A Māori conqueror explained, "We took possession... in accordance with our customs and we caught all the people. Not one escaped....." The invaders ritually killed some 10% of the population, a ritual that included staking out women and children on the beach and leaving them to die in great pain over several days.

During the following enslavement the Māori invaders forbade the speaking of the Moriori language. They forced Moriori to desecrate their sacred sites by urinating and defecating on them. Moriori were forbidden to marry Moriori or Māori, or to have children with each other.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori#Invasion_by_Taranaki_M...

I agree, peaceful protest against an oppressor who has just won your land by violent conquest and who slaughters your people without fear of reprimand by third parties seems unlikely to be effective.

Well they should just accept a two state 'solution' then. /s

Britain's destroyed economy after WW2 probably had more to it. A peaceful resistance can work against an enemy that is distracted with other matters, no longer interested in occupying, or demoralized. In the case of India, the UK managed to maintain business connections quite well in the region and colonialism was becoming outdated and expensive to broke Europe.

Agreed. Although he did have to count on the British having a sense of morality. I'm not sure that exists at the top-level in the PRC.

India did.

If China were to get involved in a war the scale of WW2 like the UK did and then end up nearly bankrupt afterwards, then Ghandi's approach may work.

How on Earth would that work without guns?

They need to begin by finding sympathizers that will smuggle weapons into the country for them. As a resistance begins the enemy is sure to create an atrocity which will inspire many people to fight and make for foreign (and native who live abroad) sympathizers to fund and smuggle weapons into the area to equip the forces.

China's proven incapable of stopping, preventing or outlawing peaceful resistance so why would the populace invite them to a gun fight?

One of these days, China is likely to bring the gun fight to the peaceful resistance. The question is, does the peaceful resistance want to be on the receiving end of a massacre, or do they want to have a gun fight? (Note well: It is unclear to me what the right answer is, either from the point of view of achieving political goals, or even from the point of view of minimizing the number of casualties.)

In 1989, the PLA lost tanks to artillery fire in Bejing not because the populace had been stockpiling artillery, but because PLA units deserted when they learned that they were supposed to be fighting civilians. A one-sided gun fight is bound to turn into a two-sided gun fight as long as soldiers aren't 100% on board with the massacre. From that perspective, the development of separate national identities between Hong Kong and Mainland China is worrying, as it makes it easier for soldiers to emotionally distance themselves from what they're doing.

If China pursues atrocities against HK they will be financially strangled by the international community's sanctions, having the mainland population freefall back into poverty is an existential threat.

Taiwan is more powerful than anything HK could ever muster and all their actual military might is barely an inconvenience in CCP planning. Hong Kong arming itself is probably a best-case scenario for China.

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