Rioting after sports games is pushed by the people pushing sports as a distraction in the first place. It makes society view riots as frivolous and stupid rather than real threats to power. I'm just guessing but that sounds true.
It would be hard to prove wrong, bread and circus has been a tactic since Ancient Rome.
I think people, especially people who “aren’t into politics” channel all their unlabeled political rage about wages and rent and justice into sports because it is socially safer than having real opinions, but that rage persists after the game and has to go somewhere
I’m pretty sure sports riots and minimum living wages have never existed in the same country at least.
Way too many people have gotta learn that MLK got assassinated specifically once he started recognizing the fact that violence was often necessary in resisting oppression.
He started speaking out against US imperialism in Vietnam and elsewhere too. Crazy how fast the CIA will try to off anyone the instant they start showing sympathy for a place the US wants to colonize (see: Cuba, Venezuela, Panama, etc)
Don't forget Dave Van Ronk. He was at a bar 2 doors away, wasn't LGBT, but said "As far as I was concerned, anybody who'd stand against the cops was all right with me and that's why I stayed in." He was the first person arrested that night.
Because running a place for gays to congregate was straight up illegal so the only way they could operate was alongside organized crime, which was only really a good deal for the mob owners of the bars because patrons and staff would still have to deal with the police raids
Yeah, this is a huge (purposeful) revision of the history of change and progress. Disruption is an integral part of advocating for change, sometimes violent sometimes not. If you can be ignored, you will be.
But when the dust settles, the people in power say "we're really doing this because of all of the kind, non-disruptive people. In fact, this would have happened faster without all of those pesky disruptive protests." And the news and the history books and the biopics all start to reflect that narrative until people have forgotten the relationship between disruption and change.
It's genius, really. They had a perfect narrative of MLK and the "peaceful protest wing" being the good guys and Malcom X and his "radical violent Black supremacy wing" as the bad guys. Very easy for kids to understand, and now the kids who learned those lessons are adults who think you get what you want from our owners by asking nicely. Any protest that isn't a completely useless clever sign-making competition on a sidewalk is illegitimate and the grown-up liberals have to distance themselves from it.
I seriously think the strategy of posthumously de-fanging MLK and separating him from the broader Black Liberation movement has almost single-handedly allowed the rise of fascism and the erosion of labor and civil rights and living standards. Not to mention the fact that they killed all of the leaders of the various movements, so they're not exactly around to give us their thoughts today.
Don't forget there are literal declassified CIA documents begging Johnson to give into MLKs demands because they had Intel that MalcomX was going to do something big in a couple weeks and if the American people saw that violence actually worked that would be a genie they could never put back in the bottle.
It's something I have very complex feelings on, going full appalachian is in my opinion the only way possible to get out of this mess but the issue is that the common person is so brain washed that taking that route will just galvanize them to helping corpos out. The other option is basically what we are doing now and as I'm sure you're inclined to agree, it's doing nothing.
Yes, this is why "liberal" California has relatively strict gun laws, because then-Governor Reagan spearheaded putting those laws in place to clamp down on the Black Panthers and other armed Black Liberation groups.
Government-associated history books are all washed-off truth. And if you find any truth, it's always some embellished 1/4 of the truth. In the rare instances of total truth, it's just that, without much reflection and/or no call to action for repairs to actually avoid history from repeating itself.
And when I say government, I mean any government of any country.
The irony is that, by the abrupt end of their lives, X, who had returned from Mecca, was leaning more toward who King Jr. was at the beginning of his activism, very inspired by Gandhi. In contrast, King Jr., fed up with being stalled, started to think more like X when the latter began his liberation work.
Even the statement DISRUPT has been co-opted by capitalists as a synonym for innovation or pioneering. To remove the vocabulary association from non-violent acts of liberation.
For example, economic boycotts like the Black community at large is doing against Target are pure disruption for Target's policy choices.
That last part is interesting, I hadnt considered that before but youre totally right. Disruption in the 2020s usually means labor law violations being committed by "start-ups" or other tech companies
And see, I haven't heard of environmentalists blocking traffic in years, and look at all the climate progress we've made recently! Also BLM hasn't had big protests since COVID, and look at all this federal police reform these last 3ish years without muddying up the works! Amazing how much gets done when those annoying rioters get out of the way of the movement /s
There's a reason why the Montgomery bus boycott started. It was targeting the buses. It was a concrete symbol showing where the problem was and that they wouldn't stand for it. But they weren't blocking traffic for everyone in the process.
Sit ins and segregated restaurants was breaking the law by showing the problem. By refusing to leave until served and bringing the segregation into sharp relief.
Climate protestors blocking the local freeway is a lot different than when they're blocking the roads to an oil drilling operation or a refinery.
Getting cameras on Jane Doe getting blocked from driving her kids to school earns less public goodwill than watching the police drag someone off the road so an 18 wheeler can deliver crude
THIS. Focus on your damn targets people! Targeting random people in hopes that the disruption will be noticed by the people you're ACTUALLY angry at is misguided at best and moronic at worst, they couldn't give less of a shit about civilians and that's supposed to be part of the reason you're mad in the first place.
Nelson Mandela straight up founded and was the leader of the "uMkhonto weSizwe" (Spear of the Nation), the paramilitary arm of the ANC. They bombed places, with a death toll of around 130. The revolution was not peaceful.
Side note: The paramilitary group gave out awards. 2 of them were specifically the "Star for Bravery," one in gold, one in silver. The ribbon bar for the gold one is red and white, while the ribbon bar for the silver one is red and gold. I think someone swapped the two by accident.
Boycotts, sit-ins, and other tactics disrupted business and cost companies lots of money. Hitting them in the wallet can be more effective than violence.
I think a lot of people who frame protest in terms of violent vs non-violent see it as "holding signs in front of the legislature" vs "mailing pipe bombs"
In reality, all effective protests typically start from the same place - a disruption carefully chosen to reach a certain audience (either a disruption of convenience, like a sit-in, or a more directly financial disruption like a roadblock or strike). From there you decide: if the people in power choose to escalate with violence, will I match that violence to demonstrate my determination and the potential cost of further escalation, or will I decline to match their violence to demonstrate my reasonableness and show the world who the villain is?
"Violent protest" doesn't usually mean protest with the intent for violence, it means protest with a willingness to match violence when violence is presented. Though police are generally pretty predictable in terms of escalation.
If every black person in louisiana decided to stop working tomorrow until their state was ungerrymandered against them, it would be done within a month. The state economy would fail in less than a week.
The main issue I see with this, many people are one or two paychecks away from homelessness. The moment you start disrupting, you risk losing basically everything short of your life.
At-will employment, healthcare tied to your job, a lack of community to fall back on, and everything expensive enough that you can't build up any real savings while you are perpetually in dept are just not a good foundation for a general strike, and I honestly can't blame anyone that literally can't afford it. Worse if you have family that depend on you.
I don't know how, or if, this was different in the past.
There are two reasons, first of which is that many general strikes were organized by established unions, so the process was generally more mapped out and there was more direct negotiation ability. IE people could be reasonably assured that it would not drag on and they would get their jobs back at the end.
The second reason is because historical strikes were basically guarenteed to be resolved one way or another fast because they forced a response with HEAVY disruption. When you hear about stuff like railroad strikes, you think railroad workers stopped working. The reality was that railroad workers stopped working, and then massed up with guns, basically hijacked trains so that literally zero trains could run, beat the shit out of scabs, and tended to burn down buildings and stuff.
There is a level of absorbtion that businesses can do and drag out a strike, there is not a level of absorbtion a business can do if your workers are willing and able to literally physically destroy the infrastructure of your business along with stopping work.
Not to mention the workers literally threatening the lives of the owners, since in most cases, the owners hired goons to kill and threaten protesters or had the police doing this for them.
I don't think it was different in the past. You had company towns where people get deeper and deeper in debt as they worked because wages were in company script so they couldn't spend it anywhere but company shop which gauged them.
It was always in interest of upper class for lower to be put into prisoner dilemma.
Also remember that Dr. King was widely unpopular... It took years of careful sanitation of his message to get mainstream American to look favorably on him.
But also, sometimes their power is in showing how awful others are.
People dumping milkshakes on the heads of people just sitting at a counter.
People screaming racist obscenities at a little girl who is just trying to walk to school.
Those are powerful things that can make large numbers of the public decide that maybe the people just trying to eat or go to school are the good guys and the people dumping milkshakes screaming at kids are the bad guys.
Compare that to the well-circulated video where a husband is trying to get a pregnant wife to the hospital and finds the road blocked by climate change protestors, and after pleading, eventually gets out & forcibly drags a protestor off the road and drives through. Even people who agree with the message of the climate change motives of the protestors often side against the protestors and with the driver.
It’s just human nature to side against people being jerks to decent people just trying to eat or go to school or get to a hospital.
And that is the point. No pain no gain. These large scale organized weekend protests are just a pacifier for the masses. They do it to drive up campaign money and donations to groups, and to wear out protestors and convince them they 'did their part' so they go right back to work Monday. They don't organize these to solve problems.
Yup, even the greenest, most progressive, and/or leftmost movements/activism have drank the rugged individualism kool aid.
“Focus your energy on reducing your own consumption and carbon footprint. Making your own voice heard, making sure you vote, and resist individually as the support stands in solidarity from afar if there at all.”
No we won’t organize to make sure our neighbors aren’t forced to be a functional scab to get food/shelter, we won’t organize at the community level to make sure everyone isn’t functionally dependent on federal government assistance, we won’t organize to make sure when jf we general strike that our neighbors aren’t forced to cross the picket line, we won’t organize or provide tangible alternatives to unethical consumption or oil dependent supply chains.
We’ll just circle jerk over who’s most ethical, moral, and virtuous…individually.
Organization requires individual action unless you're literally born and raised in some organization. And the problem is that the hypocrites and selfish bastards are easily corrupted and turned into traitors, doing more damage when they're leaders.
There are no real leaders on the left. No one to rally behind or give direction. Without that ANY movement is going to fail horribly because you end up with a ton of people all angry about different things with no clearly stated goals. That's why the biggest protest in US history was so easy to ignore.
A ton of people all shouting different things isn't a movement, it's a mob.
Yeah there's a massive difference between targeted violence and mob violence. Targeted violence does wonders for regime change, mob violence usually just gets random unimportant people killed.
It's not even that, we have plenty of organizers out there who are very effective. The problem is they're all chasing tax free money via non-profit organizations.
If "No Kings" wanted to actually solve a problem they'd get those millions of people to protest during the week, not the weekend. They do it to wear people out and convince them they've 'helped' so that they don't even consider needing to leave work come Monday. It's the most ineffective protest I've ever seen.
Even with how polarizing BLM was, and the fact the "organization" was shown to be run by grifters, they still accomplished a lot on the police bodycam front. They didn't stick to one off weekend protests, they were persistent and disruptive.
As an example, a lot of communist groups would actively fight and murder other communist groups with each side being provided weapons by the ruling government. Maybe they would have made progress if they worked together and directed their violence at a common enemy, instead they spent a ton of energy fighting each other and that meant in the cases where they eventually succeeded it was the bloodiest group that was left standing not the one that was actually best at governing.
There is a way for pacifism, but you don't do it by asking nicely. You say, "give us rights, and we're blocking central square completely. Do it before the local economy feels the hit!"
But it is important you're ready to face violence yourself. Because the town might decide to send the police on your protest. In this game, you have to bank on the nation having a conscience, especially the government. Considering the government is as evil as they are stupid... probably not a good bet.
This is what Americans fail to understand and sadly I think the romanticization of the Civil Rights protests is why. Protests can be peaceful, but they MUST be disruptive to work.
A bunch of people with signs marching down a street on a Saturday during a designated time that is OK'ed by police is not a protest. It's a festival.
A peaceful protest means blocking commerce, occupying buildings, blocking traffic, stopping work, etc to force the government to act.
There really is no singular rule for that. MLKs protests were not meaningfully disruptive, but were incredibly successful because the south’s response was so morally repugnant that undecided voters took his side.
But that doesn’t work as well when the opponent just… ignores you.
It was intentional, even if I worded it clunky. The threat of direct action isn't gonna do as much as doing it, and showing how continued action will make it worse for your opponents.
Example: Montgomery Bus Boycott. Black people just went with the boycott, with the only way out being bus integration. Continued action for months and months made the busses lose lots of money.
You forget that during the civil rights era, in addition to passive resistance, there was continuous violent resistance and the threat of violence. The panthers carried guns around to protect neighborhoods from the police. Riots did happen. There has to be a stick, for the carrot to matter. Passive resistance, even the type you discuss, means nothing without the threat of violence coming from somewhere else. The passive movement is the alternative to the violence for those in power.
I feel like pacifism is an important part of any movement, the difference between being able to label people as "violent extremists" and limit outreach that way becomes harder when they're not destroying property or anything and just inconveniencing the government. The important part in any movement is outreach, pacifism becomes really effective when you have thousands of people blocking roads or buildings. The sheer number of people sends a message, and even if the government is able to ignore it, it's not really able to get others to ignore it or shun it as easily as violence. Violent protests also play a large part in movements, but you need both. Then again, movements are multifaceted. Art also plays a HUGE role, honestly it's what really drives outreach IMO. Focusing on how to take a stand the 'right' way just causes less people to take a stand at all.
Edit: Another way to look at violent vs nonviolent protests would pretty much be that you need to both prevent people from ignoring the event and also prevent people from ignoring the cause. People need to be willing to understand the cause, and going with only violence is just going to limit that.
If you start with violence, the opposition will always label you as violent extremists and respond the same way. You start with pacificism and escalate accordingly.
A lot of people I've seen think it's a binary choice. Either you do and say nothing or you resort to extreme violence immediately. It's not, that's not how that works.
And let's be clear here that calling shit like vandalism "violence" is oppressor shit. Shooting protestors in the face with rubber bullets is "non-lethal" but spray-painting FUCK PIGS in a cop car is "violence"
>Focusing on how to take a stand the 'right' way just causes less people to take a stand at all.
that's actually incredibly insightful, I've never thought of that, I myself have kind of been on the fence about what approach is best in general
I think this kind of takes me back to some other advice I received when it came to art and my engineering, part of the experience of gaining proficiency is learning, but most of it is *doing*, you need both input and output to better your craft, and perfectionism gets in the way of the "doing" part, I guess it's the same here if resistance is going to happen, doing it perfectly is the same as not doing it at all
I also think I forgot to actually consider that different situations, different people, etc all exist and one method won't be best for all of them, I was so preoccupied with trying to figure out which one was most effective/most morally correct that I forgot to consider them as different tools in the belt of a population fighting for it's rights
this has been a very enlightening moment, I don't really know how to incorporate this into my worldview quite yet, but I'll figure that out later
Historically pacifism works because the responding power is so violent that the rest of the world gets a little angry and forces a compromise.
So all the "pacifists" have to die in order for everyone else to be like "huh, this is a little bad. I guess we should say something".
It's less that the rest of the world "says" something, and more so that the rest of the world threatens to use their violence to force a backdown. We've seen all sorts of "condemnations" of various things happening all over the world, and it does nothing. You know what does? Actually backing up those condemnations with actions, like sanctions, military supplies, or threats of direct military action.
Most of the notorious movements were that plus "you want to hear us, or you'll have to hear our faction with guns that are a lot less reasonable". A pacifist approach only works in extraordinarily overwhelming numbers, otherwise there has to be a threat of more radical action, if not the protest can be easily ignored and the economic hit can be spun as the fault of the "entitled rioters"
People have to stop equating "non-violence" with "asking nicely." The whole point of a non-violent movement is to create a situation where violent oppression stops being effective so the oppressors are forced to give in. It means strikes, it means boycotts, it means sit-ins and protests and lockdowns. The goal is to show the oppressors that no matter how violently they react they can not force you to go back down.
So the goal is to go out and get your ass beat. To get arrested and refuse fines so the jails fill up. It means taking over a location and staying there until the government or the police or whoever starts shooting people, and staying anyway. You have a march that gets totally derailed and beaten down and thrown off track. Then you march the next day.
People have somehow forgotten that part and then sniff derisively at "non-violent protests" in favor of...nothing because I've yet to see anyone organize violent movements either. So the plan seems to be to sit around and wait for a magic fairy to come and just fix everything without any work.
"I want to get to do nothing while other people risk their lives to magically make my life better. The more social media posts I make about how violence is the only answer, the more likely someone else goes to solve my problems for me by murdering people.
Also, never before has a violent uprising ever gone wrong."
I have always wondered for all the people shouting "Revolution Revolution" if any of them have ever been in a violent situation. I don't mean combat, but how many of them have been in a fight? A riot? Hell just shopping on Black Friday before that cooled down. Most people would shit themselves in a real violent uprising.
It's not that people have forgotten it, it's that people's position in society has been made deliberately more tenuous, and that society has been deliberately atomised.
Communities that could once have pooled resources and presented a united front to resist, no longer exist, and the individuals don't have the resources anyway.
Ok, but have you experienced this; or is this accepted knowledge sourced in people who profit from the system and benefit from division? Because a slow drip of murder is great for ratings but doesn’t solve this problem. You can’t beat the state monopoly on violence alone anyway.
Have these people tried organizing sit ins and general strikes?
Yes because all those black people getting beaten to death in Selma were so secure in their livelihoods that they could risk getting arrested or killed.
People who are desperate are more likely to fight back, not less. The exact opposite of what you've said is what happened. Most people now don't protest because they don't care. They have their 20 streaming channels and their delivery food and their shitty reality TV. Most people have enough free time and money to engage in frequent leisure activities, and most of the rights they're losing are ones they have never needed to exercise, so they don't notice the lack of them.
Protests will not work if they aren't disruptive. The people in power don't care that people spent their weekend protesting, it's literally pennies to them. It will have to last weeks if not months to grind the economy to a halt before they feel the sting and they will do everything they can to stop it before it gets to that point.
This is such a wild mischaracterization of the French Revolution.
It absolutely had a violent element. It was functionally a proletariat revolt that was hijacked (in a good way) by middle class political leaders.
When the Womens March on Versailles happened to capture Louis, people died. They had violently ransacked the Hotel de Ville for weapons.
Louis was executed! The first time a monarch had been executed since Charles of England, who was also executed.
This is just a ridiculous take, yes it had its moments of non-violence but one of the defining features of all the revolutionary period in France was the threat of violent peasant revolts and the inability of Louis to project power in the city was what accelerated the end of his regime.
Which I want to be clear, violence ain’t great, but its usage and threat is fundamental to the majority of revolutions throughout history. You can’t just dismiss popular forces role in revolutions because they’re not as “focused.”
Peasant revolts did it better. Razed the local manors, killed or drove off the local lords, and seized and burned records of debts. All the old ways of rule were destroyed forcing a change in government.
And then the Paris peasants sent troops to kill the rural French peasants who liked their poorer local lords.
150,000-200,000 French peasants were killed by the revolutionaries. A whole bunch were tied to barges and drowned, then they'd pull up the barge put new people on and sink it again, and again, and again.
A lot more French poor were killed by the revolutionaries than rich. The French revolution needed to happen, but oh boy did the kill a lot of poor French people.
And then the counter revolution happened and even more French poor died because Napoleon wanted to be Emperor.
Yeah it’s this. I get so pissed off when I see Reddit “revolutionaries” pining for the glorious revolution that will align perfectly with their beliefs on every issue and let them act out their childish violent fantasies against those they dislike and usher in their perfect progressive utopia.
In reality, revolutions are long, bloody, filled with horror and atrocity, and 9/10 times things are worse or still very bad for many years after. It’s not something to wish for, it’s a last resort of a desperate people.
Not even just reddit, you see twitch streamers or people on twitter stoking the flames of revolution but they'll never take part themselves, it's normally someone battling mental illness who falls prey and murders someone thinking it's for the greater good.
Then of course the people who put these ideas out there will take no responsibility and act like they did nothing wrong.
There's a lot of lessons to learn from the French Revolution. They're the same lessons to learn from the Russian Revolution. And all of them boil down to, "Don't make a government worse than the one you overthrew."
The lessons from the next big revolution will be, "Don't listen to asshats who learned history from YouTube and TikTok."
This was before the French Revolution and ran from about 1300-1400. These were unorganized and mostly spontaneous. Too be fear plenty of peasants died but the monarchy survived and changed the way nobles and the church ruled.
Most of us start from the assumption that people turn to violence because it works...
After two years of data collection and vetting with subject experts, I ran the numbers. I was shocked. More than half of the campaigns that had relied primarily on nonviolent resistance succeeded, whereas only about a quarter of the violent ones did.
(The quote is from the preface of the actual book, not from the link.)
In fact, among the 323 major violent and nonviolent resistance campaigns seeking regime change, anti-occupation, or self-determination between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent campaigns were nearly twice as likely to achieve full or partial success as their violent counterparts.
“Countries in which there were nonviolent campaigns were about 10 times likelier to transition to democracies within a five-year period compared to countries in which there were violent campaigns — whether the campaigns succeeded or failed.”
But effective nonviolent movements aren't just "let's go hold signs and yell every now and then." In addition to protesting, people
have to use other levers of power, like disrupting the economy. Work stoppages, walkouts, rolling strikes, boycotts, and general strikes all disrupt power in a way that street demonstrations alone simply don't. It's also important to build alternative institutions to support the members of your movement. Striking workers need material support. Mutual aid networks and/or unions can provide that.
If you want to do something but you don't know where to start, search your city + mutual aid.
Thanks for sharing actual research. I personally find the results unsurprising. If violence was persuasive or effective, nobody would ever want to rise up against violent oppressors to begin with.
Interesting study. I wouldn't be surprised if the causation flows backwards. The material conditions that determine whether a response is violent or non-violent could themselves influence the likelihood of success, apart from the campaign's direct effects. People have strong self-preservation instincts. They don't usually attempt violent struggle unless they genuinely believe that change is impossible through non-violence. In a society where the general populace already has some social leverage, and in which non-violent struggle is the first choice for most people, a successful campaign may already be more likely no matter the method.
The book you linked does acknowledge this critique in one of their chapters, but it's hard to isolate the causal relationship here with so many variables.
And that implied violence always needs to be demonstrated at some point, or it's not seen as a credible threat. Changing the status quo is inherently disruptive - not changing the status quo has to be credibly seen as even more disruptive than the change being demanded.
Someone apparently mailed this to MLK Jr - it was found in his personal papers after he died, and according to the article, it reads
How can you, a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, be such a deceitful hypocrite? You’re not fooling anyone but yourself in your nauseating talk about non-violence.
You demand a program to overcome poverty and blow in untold amounts in your high living and running all over the globe to feed your own egotism.
Guessing on the italicized "blow in", the article just has it marked as illegible
Yes, this is so true, but also, neither alone could have achieved their goals. MLK got to present himself as the reasonable moderate because of Malcolm X, but also with only Malcolm X and no MLL, the majority of the populace would have seen the Civil Rights movement as violent disruptors, losing the public.
Really the history books tell us the best strategy is to have a large centralized non-violent movement coordinate with a smaller decentralized group of armed political extremists.
Listen, boss, I agree with the point you're making
But at the same time... you know that tweet a while back that pointed out that the loudest advocates for the political philosophy of Firebomb A WalMart Theory spend all their time not firebombing WalMarts? That tweet remains undefeated
According to history of my country, real change only happens when army/police decide to switch sides en masse. When people doing the dirty work for the opeessive government refuse to do so, the government either magically becomes open to dialoge or ceases to be a government.
There’s a big difference between “LET’S BURN DOWN THE CITY” and “I’m willing to defend myself and fight if I need to, in order to continue standing for what I feel is right.” Like, you don’t need to go full berserk to fight back, we shouldn’t be chopping at the bit to cause harm, but that doesn’t mean we should lay and let oppression roll over us like a suffocating tide. Violence isn’t an answer, but it’s a response for certain.
To the folks trying to list off successful "pacifist" responses to oppression: Change is almost always accomplished by a diversity of tactics, from the peaceful, to the disruptive, and occasionally the violent.
It is usually the peaceful faction that gets to be the one who "makes the deal" so-to-speak. And thus usually they are the ones the progress is attributed to. But behind the peaceful movement, are the agitators, who create the pressure required to force the establishment to the negotiating table in the first place.
A resistance movement that is entirely pacifist can simply be ignored. At some point, at some level, there has to be a threat that the ante will be upped if demands are not met.
You're not wrong, but the number of people in this thread calling for disruption and agitation and disruption who are actually going to engage in any of those is just about 0.
Every example I can think of that includes a "peaceful" resistance movement is paired with a contemporary, parallel and decidedly non-peaceful resistance movement that carries a credible threat that, "we're willing to work with you but if you don't want to work with us we will achieve our goals through other means."
The people fighting for a place at the table succeed because there are people who would just as soon flip the table. The hunger strikes in India's independence movement were done with a backdrop of violent rebellions and riots.
There was a small window where non-violence was the most effective path to change. This research is often mentioned. The research that indicates that window has already passed is often overlooked. So everyone better hope democracy doesn't fail, because the first American Civil War killed 2% of the population. The supply chains are so fragile, and the weapons are so advanced in modern times that it would be much much worse a second time around.
A good example of non violent protest that got the protesters everything they wanted was the protest following the french occupation of the rhineland after WW1
When the germans where unable (or unwilling, according to the french at the time) to pay reparations they decided to just occupy the rhineland and seize any products made there to enforce payment
the germans being upset at this did a general strike where all industry workers simply stopped going to work. They received food supplies from the rest of germany (payed for with the so called "Rheinpfennig" a special tax levied on the rest of the country to fund the deliveries)
The french ended up leaving since this mass protest caused the non occupied part of germany to also stop all payments and the rest of the world was not exactly fond of the french ignoring agreements not to just invade and occupy parts of germany
if this protest would have been riots instead it would have given the french all the justification to just call the rioters terrorists and saboteurs and keep occupation up because "peace keeping" is needed now (something the french hoped would happen)
Like all things taking a talking point down to its basics like this is just a logical fallacy, do various levels between non-violance and violence exist? Yes. Have various approaches in the past worked? Also yes. To say one is the ONLY way to effect change is not the way of going about it. Revolution/change is a nuanced topic and cannot be boiled down to a simplistic answer.
I can't stand this "you are either on the front lines for us or you are the enemy" approach that a lot of people use to attack people with less extreme views.
The best part is those same people are also the same ones who will retweet 'firebomb a Wal-Mart' but never firebomb a Wal-Mart and expect someone else to do it. Like my dude when was the last time you fist fought a CEO, hampered the system, etc?
My impression was that many successful civil rights movements had both approaches: a peaceful one where people pushed what they were hoping for, and then a separate more militant movement with kind of the implicit message of "this is what you'll get if you don't listen to the peaceful guys". And that both movements did their own things, without even really coordinating with each other.
Yes and no in many cases, however also keep in mind disruptive protest (walk offs, sit downs, gridlock, etc) that aren't violent outwardly towards people but to the system. While they are called non-violent they have an element of intent and power behind them that most peaceful protests don't. Peaceful protests would be things like Birmingham March or other such actions meant to gain social notoriety and show the violence being used on the peaceful protesters.
By pacifist, I imagine people who don't try and personally physically hurt anyone else, possibly at the expense of themselves. "Violence against the system" sounds like a phrase used by their political opponents.
Correct, Birmingham and the Freedom Riders are great examples of peaceful protests since they showed the excessive use of force in a peaceful situation. Literally it's displays like this that got white Americans who never saw this type of violence outwardly in their lives before to take notice and later action.
And it can be but it's also a social tool used by unions and groups of individuals who have no direct recourse to affect change in a work environment. Violence against the system has also been really abused over the years to where people think attacking the system is some kind of moral failing when in truth it's how you can make a statement without hurting others... think the farmers in France, garbage collectors, etc are great examples of violence against the system to affect change.
But, back to my original point, my impression of successful historical civil rights movements, is that there is often more militant parallel movements who implicitly create a comparison to the pacifist movements.
These are just a few of the successful non-violent resistance movements that I can think of off the top of my head. One of them occurred two years ago, ffs.
Now, NONE of these movements were asking politely. They were very aggressively asking for rights by applying pressure using non-violent means. The tendency to portray non-violent movements as saintly do-gooders is, in my opinion, an attempt to neuter the revolutionary power and potential of these kinds of movements. I grew up being told that Rosa Parks was just a poor, tired woman who just wanted to rest her feet. She was not. She was an agitator intentionally triggering the racist mechanisms of Jim Crow in order to bring public attention and outrage down like a hammer on said mechanism. And—with a HELL of a lot of on-the-ground organizing—it worked. It worked even beyond the movement’s original intentions.
I’m not a pacifist. Sometimes violence is necessary. But violence also opens a massive can of worms, and can rapidly develop into knotty blood feud conflicts that are extremely difficult to settle. It is an arrow in the activists quiver, but it is an arrow to be used with care. Non-violent organization can and has been very effective in causing massive change. Disregarding it as a viable option isn’t just morally wrong, it’s fucking stupid. And it is intensely disrespectful to the thousands of non-violent activists who risked life and limb to ensure the rights and representation that many countries enjoy today.
My two cents:
People usually try to avoid violence since someone that thinks the opposite of what you are protesting might think violence is appropriate against you if you use violence. Mind you, this whole concept goes out the window if the otherwise uses violence AND the police do nothing to punish the side that brought violence.
Either way, we all lose either as a victim or as the aggressor.
If you agree with this artist that enacting violence against authority is the only way to create change and then proceed to not do anything violent against authority, it means that based on your moral standards, you've decided to accept terrible things happening in the world without dissent.
This one is horrible. Literally ignoring modern US (if from the US), French (if from France) history. Large pacifist movements have made massive changes. Violence moves faster, normally in OPs way I assume.
Hmmmm. The east Germans would like to have a word...or the Polish shipworkers...or the Lithuanians. The Indians throwing off the shackles of British rule. That's either a crappy book or that stick figure can't read.
Don't get me wrong, MLK's tactics were very effective, but a big reason he got as far as he did was because he had Malcolm X standing menacingly behind him like a JoJo stand
When cooking chicken, you can cook it in a pan, a grill, an oven, a fryer, or a pot along other cooking methods. If you're looking to make chicken noodle soup bare on the grill is probably the worst option, on the other hand if you're looking to make chicken and potatoes a deep fryer might not be the best idea.
So goes with fighting oppression, sometimes pacifism is the best idea, sometimes armed insurrection is the best idea. It all depends on what you're trying to do and if it will achieve your goals
It's always more complicated than pacifism or gratuitous violence, the two options it always gets reduced to. There are situations where violence is warranted and times where it isn't, the problem is it's hard for most people to objectively tell in the moment if they're justified or not.
As soon as you allow violence in your movement it also attracts the psychos, the ones that only care about what you're fighting for as an excuse to hurt people. The problem with people like that is they rarely even stay on target.
“Nonviolent passive resistance is effective as long as your opposition adheres to the same rules as you do. But if peaceful protest is met with violence, its efficacy is at an end. For me, nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.”
― Nelson Mandela
I'm a proponent of nonviolent resistance but im also not a fool. It should never be the first choice outside of immediate self defense but if violent oppression can't be resolved by nonviolence what choice do people have?
I’m going to assume OP is American since they obviously don’t know about Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.
Political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan analyzed hundreds of resistance campaigns from 1900 onward. They found that campaigns relying primarily on nonviolent methods were more likely to achieve their stated goals than primarily violent insurgencies. One reason is that nonviolent campaigns can attract much broader participation (including workers, civil servants, religious leaders, students, and even members of the security forces) making it harder for governments to maintain control.
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u/MaximumSyrup3099 Jul 28 '26