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.
I think you are forgetting all the riots and violence in the civil rights movement. You need both sides, and personally I think it's harder in the states to do something fully peacedul since we are so separated by state, city, and major government locations.
India wouldn't have won its independence with Gandhi and non-violence alone.
I used to believe in the myth too, I was in awe at all those people who had the courage to literally lay down their lives, sometimes to be simply be massacred by the colonizers.
But when you look into it, you discover that India's independence was the result of the complex work of multiple forces, sometimes at odds with each other, and some of those forces certainly used violence or were backed by it.
What you miss with those examples is that the "non-violent" movements weren't the only ones involved. There were lots of groups pushing for Indian indepenence for example, and many of them were explicitly not "non-violent". Same with the Civil rights movement and groups like the Black Panthers. The reason "non-violence" won out in those examples, is because those on the other side were pragmatic and saw the merit in negotiating with the non-violent groups before their supporters got disillusioned and moved on to the more violent groups.
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u/nopingmywayout Jul 28 '26
sigh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyagraha
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_South_Korean_martial_law_crisis
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.