morality of "do or die" resistance

[Darksider]

Inspired by the "morality of resisting an occupation" thread.

The question is this:
Is it moral to resist an invading power to the complete and utter ruin of your own nation and the deaths of millions of your people, simply to retain your independence? Or is it better to surrender and save more lives.

Consider the following situations:

1. You are an elected leader of a small democratic country that is being invaded by a much larger dictatorship. Their armies are much larger than your own and you have no hope of victory. If this empire conquers your nation, they will enslave your people and delegate them to the level of second-class citizens as they make way for their own colonists. They will not seek to exterminate your people wholesale, but their occupation will be fairly brutal and cost many lives. Do you fight to the end, or surrender to save lives?

2. Same as above, except your military forces are vastly superior on a per unit basis. Think Finland vs. Russia in the winter war here. You're outnumbered, but if you fight to the last, you might convince them that your nation isn't worth the trouble and they'll ask for a settlement. Even if you do succeed in resisting the invaders, you will suffer massive casualties and surrendering to the enemy will save more lives, but your people will still suffer greatly under their occupation.

Honestly, I don't know what i'd do in the first situation. Personally, i'd rather die than live as a slave to an occupying power, but that's just a personal choice. I don't know what i'd do if I had to choose for an entire nation.

in the second situation, i'd almost certainly try to fight. The slim chance of victory makes fighting worth it.

What say you?

[Eulogy]

Is death preferable to living under the occupators?

[Junghalli]

Offhand my response would be:

Scenario 1: Surrender is better. Since there's no hope whatsoever of victory resistance won't improve the situation at all and will only cause unnecessary deaths and suffering. This goes counter my first gut feeling which is that it's better to at least go down swinging than to just roll over, but that's just instinct/social conditioning speaking.

Scenario 2: Resistance is better. If you can save your nation from destruction it may result in enough future benefit to outweigh the short term added suffering and death created by resistance.

Responses may change depending on the specifics of the situation.

[Lord of the Abyss]

1: Probably it's better to resist, for a variety of reasons. For one, because resisting makes it that much harder for them to conquer the next country. You have a moral obligation to more than just your own people.

Another would be because if they are brutal enough to kill your population for resisting life under them is likely to only be barely better than death if at all; and there's no reason to assume that they just won't end up exterminating your people piecemeal instead. After all, people WILL resist here and there regardless of your official surrender; especially as they are being abused and exploited.

And another reason would be that this is a situation where the right decision is likely for you to be irrational and make your enemy know you are irrational. If the enemy knows that you'll fight pretty much to the last, burn your own resources ( like oil wells and crops ) and so forth in a scorched earth policy, they are less likely to attack at all. If they know that regardless of whether or not the sensible thing to do would be surrender that you won't surrender, they are more likely to hold off rather than take possession of a ruined land. A real world example of the principle that irrational resistance can be good would be the MAD nuclear standoff; a "rational" power would have surrendered upon threat of nuclear attack because the alternative would be devastation, and retaliating wouldn't change that. But both sides knew that instead if they tried to conquer the other the other side would have resisted even to the level of nuclear war no matter how suicidal that would be; so the standoff continued.

2: Yes; for the reasons above but more so because you can win. And if the enemy knows that you are willing to resist to the last they may well decide not to attack at all, or pull back after doing relatively little damage.

[Simon_Jester]

An enormous amount depends on how brutal you expect the new conqueror to be. If they're planning to kill everyone, you obviously might as well fight. If they're planning to enslave everybody in the country and scatter them to the far corners of the empire (the way that, say, the ancient Assyrians did sometimes), then you still have something to lose, but not much. It might well make sense to fight and hope you get lucky somehow, because even a low probability of NOT being conquered by the empire offsets the increased cost of fighting them.

Smart empires, of course, know this, and generally try to avoid being so brutal that their subjects can't come up with a good answer to the question "how could things be worse if we were fighting the empire?"
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Realistically, powerful empires that have to deal with fractious provinces full of people who just will not quit often back off a bit, because it's easier and more profitable to rule the province with a light hand than to actually march an army into the place and "pacify" it by killing off half the population. That doesn't always work out well for the fractious people, but it can work, so it's a strategy worth considering.

[Junghalli]

1: Probably it's better to resist, for a variety of reasons. For one, because resisting makes it that much harder for them to conquer the next country. You have a moral obligation to more than just your own people.

<snip>

And another reason would be that this is a situation where the right decision is likely for you to be irrational and make your enemy know you are irrational. If the enemy knows that you'll fight pretty much to the last, burn your own resources ( like oil wells and crops ) and so forth in a scorched earth policy, they are less likely to attack at all. If they know that regardless of whether or not the sensible thing to do would be surrender that you won't surrender, they are more likely to hold off rather than take possession of a ruined land. A real world example of the principle that irrational resistance can be good would be the MAD nuclear standoff; a "rational" power would have surrendered upon threat of nuclear attack because the alternative would be devastation, and retaliating wouldn't change that. But both sides knew that instead if they tried to conquer the other the other side would have resisted even to the level of nuclear war no matter how suicidal that would be; so the standoff continued.

These are good points and ones I hadn't thought of. However, in regard to the second point, wouldn't it be more logical to adopt this policy only as a bluff? What you really want to do is make the enemy think you will resist but if they actually decide to attack anyway it would be more logical to capitulate because once the bluff has been called actually following through on it harms you and probably gains you nothing (it'd mean you'd lose the ability to use the bluff, but that only matters if your country survives).

Then again, a potential enemy would realize this and logically not take the bluff seriously, which suggests that occassionally demonstrating irrational actions to make yourself less predictable would indeed be a good idea. The question is whether this would be an appropriate time for that. You want to limit your irrational actions to cases where the fall-out from them can't seriously harm you ... but do that too much and you risk making yourself predictable.