> An armed populace can defend against any sort of 3GW attack with really basic 4GW concepts (see Afghanistan)
I disagree. The reason the Afghans were able to fight the USSR and USA to a standstill was that neither of those powers were prepared -- largely for moral reasons -- to be as violent as was necessary to quell the insurgency. How violent would have been necessary? Clearly, killing every single person in Afghanistan would have done it, and probably killing a significant fraction would've worked too.
There have been plenty of historical societies that would have been ruthless enough to beat an insurgency in Afghanistan: The Romans wouldn't done so by Romanising the ruling class, and if that didn't work, enslaving/killing everyone. The Nazis would've skipped the first step and just enslaved/killed everyone. Modern China would create a total surveillance society and any dissenters would be enslaved in concentration camps until their organs turn up a match, at which point they'd be harvested.
So I don't think that armed citizens would be able to hold off an invading army, if that army had enough military potential and determination.
>Nationalism, like most other isms, is an indoctrinated mindset
What about tribalism? Isn't international conflict just a slightly higher, more evolved form of what Goodall saw in the Gombe War? Surely the chimps aren't indoctrinated by culture. Nationalism is just a small extension of what's already there in our heads - and in fact, if the word "nation" is taken in its original meaning and not in the sense of the "National Security Agency," (which is then really as much of a semantically twisted euphemism as the "Department of Defense") then it's no extension at all, but rather a tribalism with larger tribes. Isn't "nationalism" more baked in to primate psychology than you suggest?
And if so, does anything change about the ethics of it?
> An armed populace can defend against any sort of 3GW attack with really basic 4GW concepts (see Afghanistan)
I disagree. The reason the Afghans were able to fight the USSR and USA to a standstill was that neither of those powers were prepared -- largely for moral reasons -- to be as violent as was necessary to quell the insurgency. How violent would have been necessary? Clearly, killing every single person in Afghanistan would have done it, and probably killing a significant fraction would've worked too.
There have been plenty of historical societies that would have been ruthless enough to beat an insurgency in Afghanistan: The Romans wouldn't done so by Romanising the ruling class, and if that didn't work, enslaving/killing everyone. The Nazis would've skipped the first step and just enslaved/killed everyone. Modern China would create a total surveillance society and any dissenters would be enslaved in concentration camps until their organs turn up a match, at which point they'd be harvested.
So I don't think that armed citizens would be able to hold off an invading army, if that army had enough military potential and determination.
>Nationalism, like most other isms, is an indoctrinated mindset
What about tribalism? Isn't international conflict just a slightly higher, more evolved form of what Goodall saw in the Gombe War? Surely the chimps aren't indoctrinated by culture. Nationalism is just a small extension of what's already there in our heads - and in fact, if the word "nation" is taken in its original meaning and not in the sense of the "National Security Agency," (which is then really as much of a semantically twisted euphemism as the "Department of Defense") then it's no extension at all, but rather a tribalism with larger tribes. Isn't "nationalism" more baked in to primate psychology than you suggest?
And if so, does anything change about the ethics of it?