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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29387 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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You obviously haven't been to Northern Ireland.

I have, in fact, been to Northern Ireland.

Then you may have seen large mementos of people using small arms to get concessions from their government within living memory. Which makes the implausibility of something that did happen very weird indeed.

using small arms to get concessions from their government within living memory.

Except they failed. The express goal of the IRA was a united Ireland. Indeed there is an argument their goal would have been further along without their intervention. They accepted a peace deal that had been offered to them in the 1970's in 1998. All the violence didn't actually get them any further forward than the government had been willing to accept beforehand.

With another 25 years of (mostly) peace we are now closer to a United Ireland (polling wise) than we ever were during the Troubles.

I fail to see how that's relevant to the plausibility of the insurgency in the first place.

You can say the PIRA failed, but it did exist.

I'm just correcting an erroneous statement. Because you said in Northern Ireland you can see mementoes of groups using small arms to get (not try to get) concessions from their government.

First the Provos main and most effective weapon was arguably bombs not small arms and they failed to get the concessions they wanted, means your statement is facially incorrect.

To address the main argument, I think explosives not small arms is arguably the only plausible route for an asymmetric insurgency (see IED's, PIRA bombs in Canary Wharf etc.) Whether even that is enough is I think arguable, but small arms won't do it, for the same reason the IRA moved to bombs. Guns put your small number of people who are willing to kill at risk against government forces. Expertise and access to bombs seems much more important than firearms.

Indeed most firearm use at the end was about punishing their own side and defectors. (Kneecappings and executions). Used to maintain control of their own enclaves. Indeed, the Loyalist Paramilitaries relied on guns more frequently because they lacked big targets for bombs as they were not fighting a government. Conflict at similar (low) power levels is more conducive to firearms I think, whether that is neighboring groups or criminals.

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