
The U.S. Civil Rights Movement as an Insurgency - phsr
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/the_us_civil_ri.html
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akamaka
I find this kind of high-level thinking about hierarchy and conflict in
society to be pretty silly.

It's true that there's always some insight to be gained by bringing ideas from
different times and places together, but in this case, the comparison is
completely arbitrary. Conflict and oppression has been going on for all of
human history, and in theory, all of that combined knowledge could be put to
use in helping resolving present problems.

Why compare the Iraq war to the American civil rights movement when you could
equally well bring up the French Revolution, the Tuareg Rebellion, or the War
against Gallus?

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chaostheory
because those are both traditional and obvious comparisons; this one is
neither - not to mention it's good to discuss given the times

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hegemonicon
This comparison doesn't seem particularly valid.

Insurgencies operate by leveraging small-scale, decentralized groups against a
large, slow-moving beaurocracy. They succeed by operating faster than the
beaurocracy (inside their OODA loops), leveraging the environment to their
advantage and attacking critical points of failure. They're difficult to fight
against because of their speed and the fact that they don't readily present
targets to be attacked.

Granted, the Civil rights movement was largely grass-roots, but it's not clear
to me why a comparison to an insurgency is apt.

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jwb119
by this definition most elections could be classified as insurgencies as well

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lmkg
The founding fathers used the word 'revolution' rather than 'insurgency,' but
yes, that's sort of the point. It's better to have a structured, nonviolent
way of overturning the current social order, as the alternative ways are
rather messy and ill-thought-out.

