On Sun, 14 Feb 2010 15:34:41 -0600 Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes:
>
>
>
> The accounts I hCW read said that the Shah's generals told him that
> the
> troops could not be depended on to fire on the marchers, and that
> was
> what at the end triggered his flight. Tiananmen Square exemplifies
> the
> opposite, when the troops would use maximum force. DeGaulle, before
> he
> be gan dealing with the 1968 near-insurrection in France travelled
> to
> NATO Headquarters in Belgium to consult his generals there on the
> dependabiltiy of the Frecn Army, and was assured of it. I
> undeerstand
> the reason there were no federal troops in Chicago at the DP 1968
> Convention was that the main available Battalion was heavily Black
> and
> could not be depended on if Blacks joined the riots. One marine I
> knew
> who was in the First Gulf War said his platoon, mostly Blacks and
> Latinos from Chicago, tacitly agreed that they would carry out
> orders in
> that w ar, but if they were ever called upon to fight in a Latin
> American country, they would refuse.
>
Another example is the Kent State shootings of May 4, 1970. I think that one reason why Richard Nixon was so vocal in his support of the National Guardsmen was that it was by no means a given that the National Guard could be relied upon to fire upon antiwar protestors. Regardless of whether the National Guardsmen at Kent State had been ordered to shoot or not, it must have been a great relief to Nixon that, whether acting under orders or not, they were willing to shoot down student protestors. If the National Guard at Kent State and elsewhere had, instead, proven to be unwilling to shoot protestors, when ordered to do so, the US ruling class would have found itself in deep doodoo.
> In other words, there are various degrees variations in the
> dependability of troops. My point is that whatever codnitions
> affect
> that dependability in a givencase, it is the refusal of the troops
> to
> fight (shoot at the rioters, reebvels, whatever) that determines
> the
> outcome. No one who thinks would argue that cvilian forces could
> militarily defeat the Army in a modern stte, nor has it ever been
> tried.
>
>
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