Technology

In which country?

I keep on remembering a line from an old anime: "An unjust peace is better than a just war." It keeps on floating through my head because it's true for most people most of the time. Things have to get really bad—really bad—or at least you have to persuade people that they are, before you start seeing organized, armed insurrection on a large scale.

So what does it take? Lots of people being killed, maimed, or raped, at random and without any recourse, usually. Stealing enough children might also do it. Or a faction deliberately whipping the less-intelligent part of the population into a frenzy. Or really poor quality of life over the course of decades that makes people think they have nothing to lose. And even then it takes time if everything was peaceful for a generation or more before that, because at first people will hunker down and claim they're dealing with "isolated incidents", and that it can't happen to them.

On the government side, what most governments want is to keep the economy running, because these days GDP is the measure of national success. For that, they need live workers and functioning civilian production equipment. That makes tear gas, handcuffs, and rubber bullets their weapons of choice and first resort.

For the government to haul out the big guns, one of two things has to happen. The first possibility is that it thinks it's losing control to a point where it no longer has enough jack-booted thugs to keep its interests protected, and starts killing people and destroying material assets to make sure that at least no one else can have them.

The other possibility is that the upper echelons go completely Nazi Germany/Khmer Rouge level batshit, and enact bizarre murderous policies founded in deranged idealism. At that point, they often cease caring how they kill. (This includes governments that define some group of the people living in their country as subhuman.)

Are we going to see heavier munitions deployed in Canada over civil insurrection in the near future? I doubt it (and if it does happen, it'll be in Alberta, not over the judiciary mistake from the original post). Is it going to happen anywhere in the world in the next decade? Possibly, because there are countries out there where people really do have nothing to lose and no way out, and governments whose grasp on power is shaky.