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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
MLK was only successful because Malcom X was the alternative, and the powers that be knew it.
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?
“Violence is not the answer” says country that won its place in the world through violence.
The USA would still be a colony of Britain if it wasn’t for a violent revolution.
The USA would still be a native american land if millions of people had not been wiped out by Europeans
The Native Americans would have been much better off if they had simply strangled Columbus and all his crew the moment they made landfall…
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.
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.
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.
Areas that are subjected to state violence through overpolicing
Chicken, egg
Both of those are just chicken, egg
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 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.
It seems the technique you’re describing is a kind of societal “good cop, bad cop”. Similar scenario to an interrogation too (trying to get information from someone who does not want to share the information) because in this case the challenge is “how to get people to share the capacity for self-determination, quality of living, and dignity when they clearly prefer to hoard it, even to the detriment of others”.
Exactly. No group has ever won rights by asking nicely. The truth is that it doesn’t actually take too large a portion of a population, acting together, to cause a society to come screeching to a halt. Law, order, and the right to private property can only be maintained if the vast, vast majority of the populace is willing to peacefully go along with the status quo. If tomorrow 10% of the population wakes up crazy and decides to just start setting everything they can on fire, we’ll be back in the Stone Age within a month. Most meaningful reform has come down to forcing those with power to choose between modest, but potentially painful reform on one hand and “watch as we burn it all down” on the other.
The black population would not have been able to credibly win against the white population if an all-out eliminationist race war had been sparked in 1950s America. But ultimately, they didn’t have to be able to win such a war to create a credible threat of intolerable violence. The black population alone couldn’t win a total war against the white population, but any kind of wide-scale race war would have completely collapsed the American economy and society. And such a war likely would have had factions receiving military support from US adversaries such as the Soviet Union. The threat of the Black Panthers was essentially, “we may not be able to win an all out war against our oppressors, but if push comes to shove, we can turn the US into another Vietnam.” Compared to that potential nightmare, the modest and quite understandable reforms that MLK demanded seemed quite reasonable.
Same thing with workers’ rights. “Give us an 8 hour workday” seemed extreme in isolation. But if the choice was, “give us an 8 hour workday, or we burn this factory to ashes” or “give us the right to unionize, or we can start listening to those literal Communists over there promising to bring out the guillotines…” well suddenly an 8 hour workday or a right to unionize doesn’t seem so extreme.
It is very much a good cop bad cop dynamic. It’s no coincidence that unionization, workers rights, and redistributive economic programs peaked when the Soviet Union was at the height of its power. Literal Communism is a philosophy that can appeal to downtrodden groups anywhere. And when the Soviet Union was ascendant and actively fomenting socialist revolutions and violent uprisings across the globe, they were able to serve as the “bad cop” that allowed modest reformers in the US to be the “good cop” pushing for various reforms and social programs.
apart of me still holds out that we don’t need this type of system to push progress, taking america for example, this will not go well and many lives will be lost as there will be “both sides” and they will stay divided. The propaganda machine from Eurasia has worked. There plans are moving quite well, and i for one, will not play into that hand.
Lives are already being lost. Today, approximately 186 people will be murdered by their insurance companies through the wrongful denial of life-saving, medically necessary care. By raw body count, Brian Robert Thompson killed far, far more people than Osama Bin Ladin ever did. The health insurance industry racks up a 9/11 worth of deaths every 16 days or so. That is how many people are currently being murdered by the private health insurance industry.
Violence is always a valid answer. It’s just not always the best answer. The problem with violence is it’s been proven time and time again to be impossible to control and hold to a limited use since there are no cool heads at that point. Nor do specific targets exist-- just collateral damage.
And no successful revolutionary has ever had a sound plan for after the victory beyond “I want the power now.” And they can either hold the power or not. But the idea of “for the good of the people” gets put to the side pretty quickly.
