• CITRUS@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    Oh boy am I glad we are all getting a resurgence of interest on military theory recently.

    I am with the assumption we are speaking economically and geopolitically too, duh.

    Now other than nukes, which is a loss for everyone, I don’t see a scenario where China loses either. I don’t think the question is if China can win, it is can it win before climate change destroys humanity.

    We can see already China emerging as the leading power. Peace deals in the middle east which feel like they came from nowhere from the major regional powers. Now European leaders are making visits to Beijing to discuss solutions for the Ukraine conflict. Even the Ukrainian government is shy to criticize China’s close relationship with Russia, due to their hopes of economic rebuilding. THE FUCKING FACIST PUPPET STATE WITH THE US COMMANDING IT!

    I believe with China now truly established as a DOTP and soon to be leading power, it will guide the intertwined multipolar world against the new threat of natural disaster. In a way mirroring the struggle of primitive communism, it will once again be humans vs nature, except it will be trying to.

    Though most of the periphery is becoming more stable with industrialization and nationalization, the core is becoming increasingly unstable while deindustrialized and privatized. They have switched places in a way. And that is right as we are tipping over the edge of Western economic collapse.

    With the rolling back of child labor laws, women and queer rights disappearing, continued ecological destruction, decaying infrastructure and industry, economic collapse, and Florida to vanguard fascism in the states. Are we at a point to see the possibility of a Protracted Peoples War? With its balkanization seeming eminent, huge swaths of a mountainous terrain, and easy access to firearms, are the proletarian forces able to carry out an organized armed struggle?

    I am under the impression, the left in the core will form as two intertwined groups, Indigenous Liberation and Ecological Warrior Melons (green on the outside, but red on the inside). I don’t feel I have to explain why Indigenous liberation and ecological protection go hand and hand. We are at a point where the majority of Americans realize we are running out of time with the system we have, and will begin to resort to desperate measures. With all the major chemical spills, nuclear leakage, and continued oil drilling, industrial sabotage seems like a reasonable means to an end for the public. There needs to form a radical guerrilla group with the goal of disrupting environmental devastation, a sort of carbon partisans. As these carbon partisans grow, they will open up with more and radical ideology and missions.-------

    I realize I have completely skirted off the original topic, oh my lord. Hey at least its some discussion on this community haha. So what do you think, will Protracted Peoples Wars be possible?

    • QueerCommie@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      I know some people are predicting a sort of civil war scenario in the US, and I wonder if that would be an opportunity for PPW. We could be like Lenin exploiting help from the Germans to take down Russia. The current surveillance network could be weakened in that event allowing us to do some actual guerrilla fighting.

      • Navaryn@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        I think people REALLY romanticize guerrilla fighting a lot… It’s not just about surveillance, there are several modern advancements that make guerrilla fighting in a modern nation ineffective at best and suicidal at worst.

        Just look up any video of the ukrainian war. The ease and precision with which modern militaries can locate and hit targets is so high that even modern, trained soldiers find themselves with a thermobaric grenade on their lap while sitting inside a camouflaged bunker.

        Also, the western population just does not have the skills to survive in a guerrilla settings. Most americans can barely cook, you think they have a chance at surviving and maintaining a healthy body while living as guerrillas? Vietnamese villagers definitely had that in them, Jaycee from the free greater Seattle area maoist polycule most likely does not.

        The only people in the west who might have a chance at guerrilla fighting are former soldiers and such - a demographic which is not gonna be on our side

        • cayde6ml@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          I understand your cynicism for lack of a better term, but I think that things will turn out better than you expect. Just eyes up and don’t give up.

      • KiG V2@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        This would be a good place to remind ourselves that the American Empire is largely built off of illusion and projection. It’s true relative power peaked and has since only continued to wane.

        Recruitment is decaying, basic training standards are decaying, even the quality of potential draftees is sharply decaying. US military gets less bang for its buck as corruption ensures it is stocked with weapons and equipment that are heinously expensive and yet laughably unreliable and ineffective (in relation to its cost). Like everything under such unadulterated capitalism, like every major facet of the US empire, its military is killing itself. All leadership positions are filled by corrupt cronies and nepotist gloryhounds who are constitutionally incapable of making sound and pragmatic decisions. The military rank and file is composed of the desperate, the directionless, the deluded and cowards who quiver unless they fight alongside overwhelming odds.

        Likewise, fascists in this country are complete cowards. Their only experience doling out violence is against the most softest, vulnerable targets, again only executed comfortably when they have overwhelming odds; if they don’t have their dozens of thousand-dollar toys with all the attachments and a score of buddies goading them by their side, they are too scared to even harass a grandmother. They are all bark and no bite. They are bullies and they are insecure.

        The surveillance state was built solely to collect information…and it does. But, as usual per the complete lack of capitalist foresight, it collects so much information it is not effectively filtered, let alone processed, assessed, and sound decisions made from it. We now have every facet of politically-involved society casually making remarks of violence, treason, and terrorism, and there is little they can do beyond flagging buzzwords and telling the algorithm to boost/suppress in response. Their large scale social engineering projects have been wildly successful and have made tangible enforcement of capitalist hegemony unnecessary for decades…and they are out of practice. The CIA and FBI is not as sharp as they were relatively a half century ago. Again we can see the rot of capitalism is manifesting at a perfect time.

        These are all generalizations. USian communists of course have our own severe problems, we too are weak and our minds are poisoned. Not all of our enemies will be teddy bears. But there is a desperate psyop to maintain USian military supremacy in the mind’s eye of those who flirt with the idea of challenging it…but it is a paper tiger.

        We as individual communists can learn urban warfare, gardening, and how to speak to the general USian, we can physically train our bodies, we can mentally improve to withstand hardship and to be proactively brave. We can evolve, and adapt, and grow, and we will.

        But the USian Empire? It will only continue to rot. It will become more brutal, cruel, and insane as it draws its last breath. But it will be defeated easier than we imagine, when our imagination is only fueled by inescapably powerful dystopian nightmares that the CIA wants us to think of when we imagine our enemies. Our enemies are brats and twisted nightmares. They are sick dogs that need to be put down, not competent ultrawarriors operating an omnipotent Matrix.

        • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.mlOPM
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, it’s important to understand the US does not produce weapons for self-defence. If you look at Russia for example, or Belarus, they’ve outright told weapons manufacturers that they’re doing their duty for the country and if they fail they would be jailed. The US is in a strategic position to prevent its soil being attacked, and they are the main purveyors of war today, so they don’t need to actually be efficient with their military tech and production.

          In the end the bloated military budget just gets redistributed to the contractors who make a ton of money on it and deliver subpar weapons and equipment.

          We see now that Russia, for example, is not anywhere close to running out of ammo and missiles in Ukraine, but NATO is finding it difficult to keep pumping equipment to Zelensky.

          It’s the same thing in China – amplified by the fact that China also produces a TON of things. They know how to get supply lines going. The PRC has never started a war, what they produce in their military is for local use and for actual defence purposes.

          That’s why when people tell me you can’t beat the US because they spend trillions on the military, I tell them this is not an indicator of efficiency. If anything, it’s an indicator of inefficiency.

          Some years ago, they had to replace so-called “dumb” bombs (just the plain old bomb that you drop from a plane to hit a land target) with “smart” bombs (that could essentially hit their target with 100% accuracy or close to). The US spent billions of dollars retrofitting every single bomb in their arsenal with a device that could steer the bomb and report its location on GPS in real time. This means every bomb manufactured in the US today, as well as the whole existing arsenal, needs this single-use device to be manufactured, bought, attached, and spent.

          Russia instead developed software for their jets that would calculate a trajectory for the bomb, using surrounding data (like wind speed) and their GPS variants, and then drop the bomb at the right time. It works just as well.