jared wrote:
>
> Dwayne said:
>
>
> I would disagree. I think this position simplifies too much and
> overlooks the dynamics involved in a U.S. military attack on a real
> militia, which is, after all, a citizen army. The 82nd Airborne is
> composed of young American men and women. Obeying an order to attack
> Iraqis is quite a different matter for them than obeying an order to
> attack Americans. Consider that it took a 51 day standoff for the
> federal government to defeat Koresh's "army" of 80, 25 of which were
> children. Consider the implications for a more mainstream and broad
> citizen army. The U.S. government's power to inflict violence depends
> on a certain amount of racism/nationalism in those carrying out the
> orders, and for this reason alone the government's power to inflict
> massive violence on the natives is sharply diminished.
I don't know whether the films taken in Teheran during the last days of the Shah are easily available or not. I saw one of them at the time. A good deal of bloodshed (mostly of civilians) led up to these days, but at the end the Shah was overthrown essentially by something that looked more like a traditional Fifth Avenue Easter Parade than any other analogy. His generals told the Shah that they could not promise that rank and file would obey orders to suppress the demonstrations. And on the Russian Revolution, though not on the Civil War that followed (Pound's source: Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography, pp. 747-56)*:
And when it broke, there was the crowd there,
And the cossacks, just as always before,
But one thing, the cossacks said:
"Pojalouista."
And that got around in the crowd,
And then a lieutenant of infantry
Orderd 'em to fire into the crowd,
in the square at the end of the Nevsky,
In front of the Moscow station,
And they wouldn't,
And he pulled his sword on a student for laughing,
And killed him,
And a cossack rode out of his squad
On the other side of the square
And cut down the lieutenant of infantry
And that was the revolution...
as soon as they named it.
(Ezra Pound, Canto XVI)
(*Pound's immediate source was a lecture series by Steffens in Paris in 1924)
Police (and death squads) in the United States would kill hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, before it ever got to the place of mass demonstrations all over the nation, but once it got to that place (and given the unpredictable social transformations that would have to have preceded such events) no citizens' army could be depended on to crush them.
All one can depend on is a very high level abstraction, that capitalism must continue to "progress" (i.e., grow and thereby create and recreate chaos), and that that progress (barring the cossack riding out from his squad) will eventually destroy all of us.
Carrol
P.S. Revolutionaries cannot plan or predict any of this in advance; it will catch them by as much surprise as anyone else. Khomeini's followers did not predict nor create the Iranian Revolution, they assumed it and were ready to lead when they were surprised by it.
PS 2. The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens is a great book; I wonder if anyone reads it anymore. He has a hilarious story of how as a cub reporter he created a crime wave in New York City, and of how Theodore Roosevelt, then Crime Commissioner, ordered him to end it.