War Games
On Strategies and Stabilizing Forces
In a healthy society with a functional law enforcement apparatus the government maintains a consensual monopoly on force, keeps the peace, enforces equal justice, and guarantees retributive justice for lawbreakers. These are, all of them, necessary functions for any healthy, western society.
The consent of the governed is paramount to stability, and, ethically, the only legitimizing mechanism for a government outside of force; it is all that prevents the Hobbesian nightmare of power struggles for oppressive control.
Peace is the factor that allows societies to flourish, as the predictability it brings allows for investments to be made in bargaining against the future, and thereby renders compounding wealth and quality-of-life.
Equal justice is a phrase that is very nearly redundant, as the only true justice is equal, and inequality in the application of law is definitionally unjust. The failure to bring about equal justice makes a mockery of any system that wields the word “justice” as hypocrisies stack a deck-made house-of-cards towards revolt.
Finally, retributive justice is the necessary, punitive state action that must be taken to dissuade private passions from revenge, and the ensuing tribal warfare.
In a state of natural social disequilibrium, as the mechanisms above are eroded in the face of competing ideologies, and as the rule of law recedes the gap is often filled by private citizens stepping up to enforce some form of rule of law. This may not take the form of justice in the true sense, but rather to exact revenge on those violating the current state of the social compact. As a result, this state tends to continue deteriorating towards tribalistic warfare, and the odds of the varying sides are usually dictated by their relative abundance, and access to modern weapons, with significant imbalances trending towards genocide, and relative equality trending towards pitched battles of military, or paramilitary forces.
However, in the circumstance of a (perhaps familiar) purposely driven, top-down revolution wherein the rule of law is, deliberately, bifurcated along ideological lines, the overwhelming majority of "official" forces tend to side with the revolutionary regime to enforce law, and diktat against only one side, as the other side received favorable treatment, and declination of prosecutions.
The result here is a thriving paramilitary movement on the revolutionary side, and the near-complete lack of any organized kinetic forces for the counter-revolutionaries (“CR” hereafter), as any uprising by the CR against the revolutionary regime or the revolutionary paramilitary is crushed by the official forces of the regime through either direct action, or zealous prosecution.
This is accomplished on-the-ground in much the same way that China accomplishes the destruction of fisheries in the waters of the exclusive economic zones of other nations; they simply intermingle moderate-type forces (coast guard, and patrol officers respectively) with the agitators (fishing fleets, and paramilitants respectively), while positioning heavy-type forces (battleships, and riot/mounted officers respectively) just outside the area of engagement to both deter, and crush any organized opposition. This strategy effectively cows the CR side into a spiteful acquiescence of the revolutionary regime, as nobody wants to be the one subject to the regimes force, and the odds of everyone ostensibly CR standing up at once is very remote.
This is a scenario where it would be very useful to have a preexisting, stratified political system in place – ideally one with multiple sovereigns, multiple levels of elected officials, and a firmly rooted, and long-established tradition of resistance to tyranny; perhaps even such a tradition codified in revered documents taught from a young age as part of an ethic to which masses pledged their allegiance. Maybe even such a tradition as elected officials at all levels having equal station with God in responsibility to protect those in their charge from tyrannization from all levels might be found among such a fine people. Oh, what bitter-sweet grace it would be to find yourself in the unenviable position of life under a revolutionary regime with such gifts from posterity…
Under such fortunate circumstance one might find that the establishment of state, county, and local governments as official counter-revolutionary regimes that may legitimately raise a traditionalist paramilitary e.g., an unorganized militia, as well as tasking an official military force – inherent to a hypothetical dual-sovereign – where necessary and appropriate. This may prove a necessary action to offset the advantage held by revolutionary forces, and to hold physical territory in the event of invasion. Under such circumstances zones of nullification might be established, safe from revolutionary retribution, in which institutions might be rebuilt, and people might once again flourish.
It can be reasonably predicted that the ultimate failure of CR political entities to take such actions will necessarily result in a revolutionary overrunning of the entire nation as CR regions are brought under brutal control (the only kind that would be effective) and punished.
I thus conclude my walk-through of the Command and Warcraft video game.