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Comment by akamaka | Hacker News Reader

How often do violent uprisings turn out well? A thorough reading of history shows that they aren’t very effective, either.

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A thorough reading of history shows that violent uprisings are de facto _what_ is effective, and certainly in post-industrial modern times. Empires cede control of territory when they become too expensive to maintain. Usually, that is in terms of violence, which threatens mercantile stability and integrability.

Unfortunately, the violence and instability that often accompanies secession doesn't always end up resulting in prosperity after independence. That is because violent or not, uprisings do not necessarily upset the power balance between the colonizer and the colonized. Some say the alphabet agencies that form the worldwide practice of SIGINT operate on this inertia -- well, I don't want to speculate about what I don't know about, but I think that at least my own country's declassified documents are telling. The USA has had a hand in kingmaking much of LatAm and the Middle East. Historically, I think this kind of proxying only ends when the empire itself shrivels.

There have been many successful insurrections, but have you truly taken into consideration all of the failed ones?

We obviously can’t make a long list here, but here is one that might be relevant to think about:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_28_incident

As it pertains to statecraft, what is the point of bringing up "insurrections"? It just seems like a pedantic red herring to avoid discussing war. Insurrections are either aborted attempts to start wars and brutally suppressed, or they become protracted wars, which folds into the empire cost benefit analysis I pointed to. When it comes to wars, I think that territory, violence, the threat of it, and its costs are the attendant free variables in which decisions are made.

Worked in the US and France as I recall.

The US is a great example to consider: compare the odds of success of a violent secessionist movement in Hong Kong to those of the Confederacy winning the Civil War.

Or perhaps a French example might be more relevant, with a single city at stake: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune

Revolutionary war. Not civil war.

Call it what you like: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_American_Civil_...

Talking about a different war dude. History didn't start in 1860.

Sorry I wasn’t clear about what I was trying to say. My argument was that most violent independence movements aren’t successful, an example of which was the Civil War, which was also called the “War for Southern Independence” by the rebels. Having a revolution sounds great if you expect it to turn out like 1776, but the majority of the time it doesn’t work out that way.

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