How do you judge which side has popular appeal in a war-zone?
It's necessarily a tough question to answer because truth is the first casualty of war, information is hard to find and no voting is going to happen when tanks are rolling past. Also, a side controlling a recently contested territory, isn't going to do a referendum that anyone should trust.
I do have a theory of sorts though: If a side has an volunteer army prepared to put bodies on the line and a local population prepared to support it, then it's a regime with some serious popular appeal.
Someone asked if Assad was popular in Syria. He clearly wasn't, given how quickly his regime collapsed after a major defeat. Like them or not, the rebels against his regime kept fighting long after they'd seemingly lost the war in 2019 and has been reduced to guerillas on the fringes of their country. Guerillas can only survive at all as long as local people support their cause so they clearly have (at least) regional hegemony.
It's similar with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The western military was never able to take them out because rural Afghan communities hid them, fed them and supported them. For contrast, the well-founded pro-western army lost as soon as American military left the country.
People who say that Ukrainians resisting Russia are mere tools of western imperialism are wrong by this hypothesis. Why would they keep fighting and dying in a war they are losing if they didn't care about Ukrainian nationalism? Zelensky would win an election against a pro-putin Ukrainian. The people's reaction to the war tells us that.
Obviously there are other geopolitical issues in all these conflicts and my own opinions are different. Though I do think my general hypothesis is true.
I do have a theory of sorts though: If a side has an volunteer army prepared to put bodies on the line and a local population prepared to support it, then it's a regime with some serious popular appeal.
Someone asked if Assad was popular in Syria. He clearly wasn't, given how quickly his regime collapsed after a major defeat. Like them or not, the rebels against his regime kept fighting long after they'd seemingly lost the war in 2019 and has been reduced to guerillas on the fringes of their country. Guerillas can only survive at all as long as local people support their cause so they clearly have (at least) regional hegemony.
It's similar with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The western military was never able to take them out because rural Afghan communities hid them, fed them and supported them. For contrast, the well-founded pro-western army lost as soon as American military left the country.
People who say that Ukrainians resisting Russia are mere tools of western imperialism are wrong by this hypothesis. Why would they keep fighting and dying in a war they are losing if they didn't care about Ukrainian nationalism? Zelensky would win an election against a pro-putin Ukrainian. The people's reaction to the war tells us that.
Obviously there are other geopolitical issues in all these conflicts and my own opinions are different. Though I do think my general hypothesis is true.
41-45, M
