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Peaceful protests were meant to be a compromise to warn that something worse was coming. Black Panthers. Weather Underground. IRA and Sinn Fein.
Effective peaceful movements had potentially violent components. The more radical elements disappeared and peaceful protests became useless.
Unions were a compromise. Before unions, you’d drag the factory owner into his front lawn and exact justice.
Nelson Mandela was released on the terms that he would preach peaceful protest, as the movement he had formerly been leading was a serious threat to the South African Government.
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr was a proponent of peaceful protest, though it could be argued he was losing faith in it near the end when he was assassinated. right after his death, the Holy Week Uprisings occurred, which saw immediate action from the federal government to pass the Civil Rights Act.
At the same time, acts of violence lie on a spectrum, and I think there is a fair amount of conversation to be had about what degree of violence and what type of violence are most effective.
Martin Luther King Jr was able to succeed with his peaceful protests because the threat of Malcolm X was looming directly over his shoulder. One requires the other. Either of them alone would not have made nearly the progress they did.
There are entire Game Theory textbooks dedicated to grappling with the question of when and how one engages in violence. Because broadly speaking, violence is bad. The destructive social forces inhibit socio-economic development, degrade global quality of life, propagate disease, and cause catastrophic shortfalls of critical goods and services.
Whether you’re working at the micro-scale of domestic abuse or the macro-scale of the bombing of Hiroshima, you’re talking about a gross net negative for everyone involved.
But if a detente is one-sided, or a violent actor is free to act uninhibited, there are huge immediate rewards for looting and pillaging your neighbors, pressing ganging people into forced labor, and seizing neighboring property at gunpoint. It works great for perpetrators who engage in violence unchecked. Its only a problem when the perpetrator runs into a countervailing force.
But then over the long term, the violence takes an increasing toll. People don’t build in neighborhoods that they think will be bombed. They don’t invest in communities that are fracturing and falling apart. They don’t befriend people they feel they can’t trust or work alongside people they’re terrified of.
Go look at Yugoslavia before and after the wars of the 1990s. Huge unified economy capable of operating on par with France or Italy, only to be splintered by violence and reduced to a near-pre-industrial state for over a decade. Who won the Yugoslav Wars? Who benefited from Bosnians and Serbians and Albanians and Croats pounding their plowshares into swords and slaughtering one another?
People talk about a “Peace Dividend” and you can see it in any country that’s avoided a protracted military conflict for a generation or more. You can’t be a successful country if you’re always trying to hold one another at gunpoint.
I really like your comment. Gave me lots to think about. I don’t have much to say in return, other than that, and that your comment is really well written. I don’t find many comments on here that are a pleasure to read; most long ones are incoherent rambling, or canned talking points.
Thanks for providing something for my brain to chew on and making it palatable.
The US is a successful country and has almost always been at war.
Britain at its peak was holding 10s of countries at gunpoint.
Violence works best if you are much much stronger than the other party.
The US is a successful country and has almost always been at war.
The areas of the US that are most successful are those most insulated from social conflict. Areas that are subjected to state violence through overpolicing or are left to flounder in the face of industrial abuse, mafia violence, or unchecked domestic violence do much worse. Comparing Ferguson, MO to neighboring St. Louis illustrates this dynamic. One neighborhood is alternately brutalized by the city police and left exposed to domestic crime, dragging its socio-economic state into the gutter. The other is judiciously policed and socially supported by state and private largess, resulting in a far healthier and happier population.
Britain at its peak was holding 10s of countries at gunpoint.
And those countries suffered immensely. Meanwhile, Britain itself endured pockets of chronic crime and substance abuse specifically in areas that hosted military bases and other enclaves. The country saw an explosion in wealth inequality during its economic peak with the new wealth almost entirely accruing to the aristocracy. Victorian England was a hellhole for the Dickensian proletariat.
There are PLENTY of examples where violence wasn’t the answer. Those moments made gradual changes that didn’t have epic struggles with heroic figureheads, so they’re boring, they’re not obvious, and nobody talks about them.
There are a lot more examples in history where violence was used as a tool to oppress, threaten, conquer, destroy, or completely wipe out, by great and powerful entities.
Violence is sometimes the answer, if used by cool heads on specific targets with plans on what to do afterwards.
The people saying “Violence isn’t the answer” are the people who don’t want to see anything change
Allow me an argument by Doctor Who: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJP9o4BEziI
You can use violence, but when does it end, and what makes you think you are going to end up better off?
The doctor was against violence as a principle but he famously uses tons of violence (I guess in the form of trickery) but as a last resort.
House: “fear me, I’ve killed hundreds of time lords”
The Doctor: “fear me, I’ve killed all of them”
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Whenever violence is involved, either both sides are violent, or violence wins.
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When neither side is violent, violence is not the answer.
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Now both sides look at #1 and ponder if the other side is ready to be violent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_of_tension
a political policy wherein violent struggle is encouraged rather than suppressed. The purpose is to create a general feeling of insecurity in the population and make people seek security in a strong government.
🤔
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There’s a lot of evidence that says that non-violent resistance is more often effective, and when it is effective it’s more effective, than violent-based resistance.
Can’t grab the source info link at the moment, but this video talks about it.
Edit:
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/why-civil-resistance-works/9780231156820
https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/about/civil-resistance/
Random, generalizing comment:
The people saying “Violence isn’t the answer” are the people who don’t want to see anything change
50 upvotes. Comment actually based on real data that happens to show that the original premise is actually wrong: 0 upvotes. Why is Lemmy exactly like Reddit? I thought people coming here were a bit more aware of ideologies etc.
This whole UHC/Luigi thing has really outlined how dangerously toxic Lemmy is. I mean “dangerous” very literally, too. It should not incite the amount of vitriol I have received because I dared to say “I don’t like killing”.
Pacifism is only good for aggressors and cowards
