[yellow, a finger up, looking smug]
The answer to oppression is NEVER violence
Turn the other cheek
Pacifism always wins
You could earn rights by asking nicely instead
[yellow, proudly showing us a huge book]
Don't believe me?
Open a history book!
[yellow, looking frustrated as they are shuffling through the book's pages]
Ok so…
Uhm…
Not this page…
Wait…
The next one…
Awkward…
Another…
Yeah but…
For sure this time…
[yellow, sweating, protecting their book, a hand raised towards us]
Can you stop looking?
You're being rude
That's my book
A popularist movement is core. This should be non-violent and as welcoming to new members as possible.
A political group then acts as a focus for the group. It translates the mob grievances into politically actionable demands.
A radical group acts as the teeth. It forces the government to take proper notice of the other 2 groups.
The Irish troubles would be a good example. The popular movement was ignored by the UK government. It bubbles over into riots etc at times, which actually hurt their message in many ways. The Sinn Féin party focused the discontent and gave the UK government someone to negotiate with. Finally the IRA provided the force on the UK government.
Take away any leg and the whole movement stutters. If the popularist wing gets violent, then it bleeds members fast. Without a political wing, the movement is unfocused and will achieve nothing. The violent wing can be dropped IF there is sufficient threat of its existence/creation to keep governments motivated. Unfortunately, most governments that let things escalate that far will just dig in their heels, rather than do the sensible thing.
In an examination of 323 violent and nonviolent resistance campaigns, between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent campaigns achieve partial or full success at twice the rate of violent campaigns
Here, I opened the book (research paper) for you. and look! violence was involved in the successful outcomes!
especially in light of the enduring violent insurgencies occurring in some of the same countries—begs
systematic investigation.
In many cases, both nonviolent and violent campaigns exist simultaneously
among different competing groups.
you can't isolate the non-violent campaigns from the violent campaigns in such an analysis, they're part of the same environment.
I'll also note that the research paper doesnt clearly identify how they generated their numbers. the underlying dataset they used is enitrely absent. so we can't make any inferences on how well they actually isolated and calculated their values.
It's rarely one or the other, eg. Suffragettes demonstrations were made much more threatening by the bombing campaigns that were happening in parallel, Gandhi was made much more threatening by the HSRA campaigns, MLK wouldn't have achieved jack without urban uprisings and the black panthers turning up the pressure in the background, etc.
We’re rapidly heading towards an inflection point where no amount of town halls, lawsuits, etc will fully halt the wave of destruction. So while these resistance campaigns are needed and should continue, how long are they going to work within the part of the timeline where democracy and all of the mechanisms have been fully eroded, reversed, and proven to be placebos?
I still find the meme funny, even if this is all far more nuanced. Some examples:
A lot of cities are rejecting and shutting down Flock cameras, but in some cases the cameras quietly returned after the uproar died down. They simply waited for people to forget. At what point does it become justifiable to either cover all of the lenses or destroy them altogether?
Similar with data centers. The billionaires are going to keep pushing them through, and in one case I saw recently, a town’s leadership even overturned votes against data centers, which was a clear-as-day example of democratic erosion. What good is democracy if it can be arbitrarily overridden? At which point is it justifiable to try and destroy a datacenter’s functionality in order to preserve life, especially when future generations are at stake?
I think eventually we’re going to need a combination of both, but it needs to be lead with structure and intelligence. Billionaires are going to continue to erode and ignore democracy, while a bunch of city officials will continue to fold to the almighty buck, similar to how AIPAC has turned tons of politicians into useless genocidal drones. We’re going to be pushed into a corner where we can either fight back with everything we have access to, or we can keep pulling on levers they’ve systematically destroyed in order to nullify our democratic power. It could be 5, 10, 20 years from now. We don’t know when but authoritarianism—especially now in such unknown times—makes it inevitable.
The TL;DR here is that we need to clearly define what counts as violence. Destroying Flock cameras and hindering data centers is in the same bucket and it’s self-defense, but it’s not violence in the sense that we think about it. If someone automatically thinks that “violence” means “overthrowing the government,” they’re willfully (or maybe not; probably a good time to educate and share knowledge with fellow working class folks) ignorant to a whole bunch of smaller, more focused acts.
I appreciate you expanding on examples. All of this paints a clear picture, and even Peter Thiel has said the quiet part out loud: the ruling class see democracy as a problem because it prevents them from owning everything and keeping us as wage slaves.
Looking at their chart near the top, it appears as if violence scores higher in most categories except for "non-violence security force defections" which eclipses every other datapoint by 20x-40x which probably realllly skews the average in favor of non-violence.
The Black Panthers did more to advance gun control laws than any "radical left hippie kumbaya" ever did. Let minorities have the same freedoms and suddenly things need to be toned down for everybody.
I too would have an easier time achieving major changes through non violent means if I had my jojo stand Malcom X standing menacingly out of sight behind me at all times threatening more violence and more uprisings if my peaceful demands were not met.
FYI, there is a difference between nonviolence and pacifism. Pacifism opposes violence altogether and is predicated on the idea that there is a peaceful way to settle all disputes. That is to say, it's a philosophical or ethical position. Nonviolence is a strategy to achieve your goals without employing violence. Nonviolent protesters do not take violence off the table altogether. Rather, they believe that violent actions are not as likely to achieve their goals as nonviolent action would be.
In general, nonviolent action is taken by groups who are opposing an oppressor that has a significant power advantage over them. By resorting to violence immediately, they play into a game that they are destined to lose. Instead, they strive to use nonviolent means to make their struggle impossible to ignore. It relies on the oppressive system being vulnerable to a change in public opinion. In general, it also involves an implication that they may someday resort to violence if things do not change. That is, it differs from pacifism in that it does not deny that violence may be necessary.
It depends at what stage of oppression we are in. There's a point for both a soft touch and for violence, wisdom is knowing what to do and when to do it.
The ruling class didn't get to be the ruling class by being convivial. If you want a peaceful, classless society you need to treat it like a bonsai tree: occasionally you must nip things in the bud.
"The people in charge insist that rising up physically against the people in charge is always wrong, and so they've made rules against doing that, or suggesting it online, or making any sort of plans to do it. As always, the folk with all the money and power have all of our best interests in mind."
That's the best example, he was defeated by people basically singing and dancing and telling him NO In the polls.
As horrible the dictatorship was, I love deeply and profoundly the wholesomeness of how that monster was brought down, I always like to listen at the NO's campaign when I feel sad or depressed because it just gives me so much hope and joy.
I don't want to say about the frequency or which way is more effective, but there have been nonviolent revolutions. Wikipedia even has a page about it. It took me only a few seconds of searching to find it.
So, the comic author is mocking people who make conclusions without actually looking at the data, and meanwhile, they seem to have written the comic making the opposite conclusion ironically without actually looking at the data, either.
It would be so nice if things were always one way or always another way, and people love to assume that their common sense and existing knowledge will be enough to make conclusions, but the comic is right in that regard. If you tell other people your conclusions but you haven't done the research, you really do open yourself up to looking foolish.... Not that it seems like most people care about that these days.
That section of the Wikipedia page is pretty weird looking right off the bat. The first two are the cedar in Lebanon and the Mirabal sisters which are circumstances that are hard to call nonviolent.
The cedar revolution can only be called nonviolent if you disregard the 01 protest wave that preceded it and established with violence that everyone was actually on the side of ending syrian occupation and not having car bomb attacks all the god damned time.
And el jefe was fucking assassinated by the military at international urging. That’s not nonviolent!
I didn’t look any further but it really seems like a bad list that’s written with incredibly rose-colored glasses.
Erica's original hypothesis was that violence was more successful, but was convinced to do research on the topic and found that while it does work, nonviolence on a mass scale is more effective.
Why not both?? Brought to you by a radical flank theorist.
Imagine a group of people that is perceived as violent agitators. Lets assume they have demonstrated that they will escalate their violence if their demands aren't met. However, the people in power do not want to negotiate with terrorists, do not want to legitimize violence and their only answer to it is oppression.
Now imagine a second group of people that has adjacent demands but obeys to non-violence principles and to methods generally regarded as civil disobedience. This second group will point at the violent radicals and position themselves as a reasonable alternative. The people in power will see them as a way out of the violence and will be willing to negotiate with them.
Overall, the first group might not get all it wanted, but there will be compromise and change towards their demands.
This can only work with people in power who eventually, bottom down, have a conscience and semblance of ethics. Dictators don't care about repressing their own people and will avoid the false dichotomy by lumping both groups together and send them to prison camps.
In practice it is also really hard to navigate as the opposition to the people in power is de facto divided, creating double opportunities to tank each group with various techniques like media manipulation, attacking leadership with lawsuits, blocking funding etc.
This also only works if both the violent and non-violent groups have matching demands. In a case where the violent group has demands that pertain specifically or mostly to their own group, then they can be separately appeased by those in power which leaves the non-violent group without any leverage and they can thus be cracked down on.
This is what happened to a lot of Native American tribes in the past 200 years. Given two different tribes in the same geographical region, one violent and the other non-violent, the violent tribe got some concessions like official reservation land in a better area in exchange for peace, while the non-violent tribe often got nothing except brutal genocide. This is more true in the American Midwest and West coast—the Eastern tribes often got nothing at all for either approach.
Repeat after me: Carrot or stick. If a group has been wronged, they are only responsible to offer one of the two, you can decide which you will take when it becomes time to talk about solving the problem
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