• N0body@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • Random_Character_A@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I think this guy hit the nail in the head.

      Peaceful protest only works if politicians and financial elite has fear and/or respect towards the commond man/woman. Too much elitisms strips away the respect, too many years of peaceful protests takes away the fear. Sometimes ivory towers need to come down, but violence has a tendency to spread and spiral out of control. It’s a balance trick.

    • JayDee@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • skulblaka@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        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.

        • JayDee@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          I would say that both Malcolm X and MLK ultimately failed at their end goals, personally.

          My bigger point was that the holy week uprising was able to progress things forward more in one week than either movement could do in the many years they were active. To be fair, I do not think the level of vigour and organization shown in the holy week uprising could have happened without the many liberation groups’ prior work.

          Ultimately, the use of violence is complex and how to effectively use it is just as complex. We should be discussing how to use all tactics and methods available, and not view violence as the only important component.

        • Venator@lemmy.nz
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          2 months ago

          Ghandi was partly successful because of the British governments violence towards thier peaceful protests.

    • Alex@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Yea only under the threat of violence has power ever changed hands. You need both peaceful and violent components to any movement to make any change last though.

      • HowManyNimons@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Also: we’ve got where we are under threat of violence. Charlottesville and Jan 6 in the USA, the recent gammon riots in the UK, everything Putin does, etc, etc. The Authoritarians have weaponised both peace and violence against us.

  • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    The people saying “Violence isn’t the answer” are the people who don’t want to see anything change

      • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Violence ends when non-violent reforms are able to succeed. The real value of violence is that it makes the non-violent option palatable to the political center.

      • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        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”

      • TheEighthDoctor@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        The problem here is that the war already started but just one side is really fighting it.

        I would be in favour of not starting it too, but it’s too late now.

  • PineRune@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    “Violence is not the answer” says country that won its place in the world through violence.

    • Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      The USA would still be a colony of Britain if it wasn’t for a violent revolution.

        • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          The Native Americans would have been much better off if they had simply strangled Columbus and all his crew the moment they made landfall…

          • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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            2 months ago

            I get the humor in what you say, but it’s worth noting that the Native American civilizations were collapsing due to disease brought by earlier European visitors by the time Columbus set sail.

            Granted, history probably would’ve been largely the same if Columbus’ expeditions were unsuccessful, given the English, French, Dutch and Spanish appetites for empire building

            • bufalo1973@lemmy.ml
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              2 months ago

              There’s a saga that is about “what if Columbus arrived to America but never got back to Europe?”. It’s “the tale of the feathered serpent”.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • Track_Shovel@slrpnk.netOP
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        China’s a great example of the Peace Dividend in action. You get a generation or two of peace and the country explodes with riches - both physical infrastructure and flowering culture.

        Then warlords start poaching the wealth of the nation and the country plunges down into poverty, famine, and epidemic, immolating decades of social process.

        After the burn out, you get a peaceful renaissance, and the country flowers again like a forest after a wildfire.

    • nooneescapesthelaw@mander.xyz
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        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.

  • Tattorack@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      The problem with the fetishization of non-violence is that it ignores that most transformative non-violent social movements have occurred concurrently with violent co-movements. Ghandi preached non-violence, but at the same time, violent Hindu radicals were running around slitting the throats of every British official they could get their hands on. MLK preached non-violence, but the Black Panthers were waiting in the wings, offering a much more unpleasant option if MLK failed.

      Violent social movements have very real tangible value, but their value isn’t in the violence itself. We’re not going to change the health insurance system through pure violence, no matter how many CEOs lay dead on the streets of Manhattan.

      On the other hand, non-violent social movements rarely succeed either. Even the most modest, centrist, and conciliatory of reforms are derided as extreme or “Communist.” Look at Obamacare, a reform designed from the ground up to NOT disrupt the profits of the insurance or healthcare industries. This was a modest market-based reform that was originally a Republican reform plan. The right spent a decade going nuts calling it the second coming of Mao. And they still oppose it to this day. In the end it tinkered around the edges, but it was hardly transformative change.

      The real value of violence is that it makes modest peaceful reforms much more palatable. The civil rights amendments and acts passed in the 1960s and 1970s would have never passed if there were only peaceful movements behind them. They amended the damn constitution! That took people on both sides of the aisle saying, “damn, we really need to change some things. This is getting out of hand.”

      And that kind of broad bipartisan consensus that reform was needed was only possible because of the threat of violence. Violent radicals like the Black Panthers made MLK palatable to middle America. Without them, MLK would have just been another radical socialist to be demonized. And even then, they still killed him anyway.

      The real value of violent social movements is that they make non-violent social movements possible. In fact, without violence, non-violent social movements rarely succeed. You need BOTH violence and non-violence if you want to make substantial change to the system. The violence puts the fear of God into the placid middle classes and wealthy corporate interests. This allows the non-violent reformers to show up with a solution to the problem that allows these centrist factions to feel that they’re not giving in to the violent radicals. Violence and non-violence are two sides of the same coin. And they are both essential.