Ed Huntress wrote:

"Pete C." wrote in message
ster.com...

Ed Huntress wrote:

"RBnDFW" wrote in message
...
Don Foreman wrote:
On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 16:51:25 -0400, "Stormin Mormon"
wrote:

I will be watching with interest, and with a lot of distance. While I
support liberty, and the Constitution, I'm also not interested in
challenging the power of the US Government.

Challenge of the government is essential to democracy. Fear of
retribution for challenge of government is clear evidence of
submission to and acceptance of tyranny.

Very well put, don.

That's not to say that challenges should be by fire. That's revolution
or anarchy, doomed to fail against vastly superior force unless done
with considerably more coordination and fieldcraft than is evident
among noisy dissidents clamoring for attention or trolling on usenet.

There was a time about 200 years ago that a rabble assembled into a
formidable force.

That was around the time that George Washington marched 16,000
federalized
militiamen into western PA, put down the Whiskey Rebellion, and indicted
a
bunch of them for treason, wasn't it?

Are you wishing for a repeat?

--
Ed Huntress

Say what you want about your beloved founders, constitution, laws, etc.,

Thank you, I will. I think very highly of them -- unlike the phonies here
who make up fantastical tales about endless usurpations and create fantasies
for themselves of becoming terrorists from within.

but having watched world events in recent years, can you honestly say
that you think the US government could withstand a home-soil insurgency
of even 10,000 (0.001% of the population) coordinated, committed
insurgents? I'm not so sure.

Yes. The Sons of Timothy McVeigh would find out in a hurry that most of us
would do everything we could to help wipe them out. Out-of-shape blowhards,
largely ignorant, stupid, and delusional, and much too impressed with their
own skills and abilities, the "insurgents" would never have a chance to
coordinate before they were found out and suppressed. And their commitment
would collapse in a heartbeat when they saw the trouble they'd unleashed.

That's the reality.

The reality is that the US has completely lost the national cohesiveness
that allowed it to win WWII, which is why we have essentially lost every
war since then and are loosing the two or three we are currently bogged
down in.

In the time since WWII, a lot has been learned about waging an
asymmetric war, except how to effectively counter one. We've been
fighting an asymmetric war in Iraq and Afghanistan for quite some time
now and not really making much progress.

Iraq / Afghanistan is an asymmetric war on foreign soil where our troops
have no personal loyalties. As we've seen trying to get Iraqi and Afghan
troops mustered to support their own governments, personal loyalties are
a big problem in fighting an asymmetric war on your own home soil.

We have also seen that various foreign countries are quite willing to
support such an insurgency if it seems to further their aims. The US has
of course done the exact same thing in the past, supporting such groups
as the Talliban when it seemed to further our aims in fighting a proxy
war with Russia.

You like to point to a few kooks like McVeigh and convince yourself that
all potential internal threats are of that ilk, but I don't see that as
being the case. If you look at the many cases of attacks in the US by
environmental or animal rights terrorists, you find a very different
picture of perpetrators who blend in, who have supporters who will
assist them and who in a great many cases have not been identified or
prosecuted.

It is important to note that most of the perpetrators of the
environmental and animal terrorism fit closely with the profile of the
terrorists and insurgents you see in Iraq and Afghanistan, young, angry
and disillusioned and with a cause they have convinced themselves
justifies violent attacks.

I think the most likely source of an insurgency is not from geriatric
anti-government ranters on newsgroups, but rather from a relatively
young group with a religious or religion like ideology.