rofltehcat said:
Pretty brutal stuff there. Things like that really shouldn't be necessary on either side of an internal conflict. I always wonder when hearing about protesters arming themselves if it'd actually protect them (would these do much against riot shields and riot armor, possibly assault rifles and machine guns?) or if it actually weakens their position because of how these things look to the general public.
I'm a bit surprised at the different flails. One one hand they are possibly useful to reach around riot shields but on the other hand using one of those probably requires a lot of training so you don't injure yourself and others fighting on your side.
Quite to the contrary. See, the thing about protests is that they are meaningless unless your willing to engage in violence. Non-violent protest is at it's core a threat and a show of strength. Typically most successful non-violent protests have a lot of extremists actively engaged in terrorism on their behalf as well, a sort of "good cop, bad cop" type of thing. This was incidently the civil liberties movement in the US at it's core, you had guys like Martin Luthor King Jr. leading his non-violent protests, and hippies with pipe bombs and racist terrorists like The Black Panthers wrecking havoc at the same time. One of the big reasons why things like "Occupy Wall Street" fail is because there is no real threat inherent in them, nobody cares if you want to freeze your butt off looking stupid and not bathing or whatever. You can sit on your arse and get stoned all day, and it means nothing, except your sitting on your arse getting stoned. Another point to a lot of this as well is how a lot of Unions run into problems, without a threat of violence there is no reason to negotiate, or for the government to want to mediate (when it benefits from dealing with the business owners) to avoid large scale violence.
In short the guys in Ukraine more or less know what they are doing, the whole point is that if they don't get what they want, there will be violence. Sure, in an open confrontation between a mob with clubs and a well armed riot control force, the mob will usually lose. However once that open fighting takes place it rarely stops there, that's simply the declaration of intent. The people that die in the initial clash become martyrs, the surviving protestors and those motivated start taking to the buildings to snipe people, light property on fire, set off pipe bombs, and all kinds of things.
In this case the guys in Ukraine know what they are doing besides, and as the article points out that while they are brandishing relatively harmless weapons, they also have guns and such too. They aren't waving those around because they don't want an accident, and to be seen as firing the first shot. The clubs make a show of strength without them being quite that much of a general threat. This is why in a lot of decades old clashes with unions and such, when you'd have "strikebreakers" going toe to toe with factory workers and such, things got so nasty, the protestors did have guns (shotguns, etc...) they just didn't just wave them around on the picket lines and such, and that's also why mercenaries were needed (old school Pinkerton men and the like) because the police, even state police units, just didn't have the firepower when you were dealing with people that were prepared for it (especially in a country like the US where guns are legal).
From the way this sounds if things get that bad they probably won't even try and use riot police or whatever. Half the point of this is that they are basically facing military forces, it will be a much bigger slaughter (of the protestors) followed by Gueriella warfare if it comes to that. Largely because riot police would fail, guaranteed if these guys are prepared enough to be sitting on guns, some of them have probably prepped plenty of pipe bombs, IEDs with propane tanks (or whatever), and other assorted things. If they came in with armor and shields and tried to advance a line, even with shotguns, chances are the cops would be blown to hell... and again, that doesn't seem to be who they are really protesting at this point.
That said my thoughts on the conflict overall are already well known, so I'll leave it at just what I'm saying here. It's not about protest anyway, it's about the region about to explode into civil war, especially since Russia just came in and re-conquered half the country (forcing a 95% positive vote no less... I see Saddam's "AK-47s at the polling stations" electoral strategy still works), and all the guys who said they would prevent that from happening are no shows.... the clubs and stuff ARE cool, but in part that's kind of their purpose at this point... simply to look cool and make a statement until one side or the other breaks or violence starts.
