I’m like 99% sure that “Violence is never the answer” is just yet ever more rich fuck propaganda.
It’s also very Liberal propaganda.
Martin Luther King Jr. protested and he won so peaceful protest works!
While of course barely mentioning the Black Panthers and how MLK was suddenly a reasonable alternative to their violent resistance.
Exactly this. The “carrot and stick” strategy doesn’t work without the stick. Every time a nonviolent movement achieves something, it’s because they were seen as the preferable alternative to a more militant contemporary.
The only reason MLK didn’t do more was because what they were already doing was illegal, and anything more could get them jail time. And this is still what they thought of him and his “peaceful” protests:
They did the same shit when they pretended that BLM burned down cities. We really don’t learn even from our recent history, huh?
It’s a good motto to not get into a petty fight for petty shit because of emotion. It did not mean all violence because you also need violence as a defence against violence.
On the other hand, if the next 4 years we(as in us who isn’t from the US) didn’t see a civil war or violence protest, then people like oop that love to repeat this stuff should totally go outside and touch grass. These teasing is getting tiring.
Adventure time explained it pretty well imo.
A rich jackass with no actual government position took the podium at the presidential inauguration, did the nazi salute, and wasn’t promptly shot or arrested. That says a lot about the state of this country.
Yeah, he did a nazi salute, not admitted to being a communist. Being a nazi has never not been accepted and normal in America.
Saying "kill all landlords and ceos " doesnt violate any of the “calls to violence” on any social media and is very faschist commie thing to say.
Commies by definition aren’t fascist, no matter how authoritarian they are.
Soap box
Ballot box
Ammo box <-- we are here not by choice, but we must answer
After Ballot and Before Ammo is Street. It’s an important stage because if you can’t get enough people in the street then the ammo box isn’t going to help you.
In the frame of the four boxes, it’s actually the jury box. But seeing how the judiciary is getting stacked against us, it’s not a big stretch to say we’re at box four
You still really, like really need to fit street in there somewhere. If you skip it you risk a Les Misérables situation. Dying on the barricade for nothing.
we’re at box four
I keep hearing this claim, but I see vanishingly few people with any kind of serious militant intent.
It seems like the “Ammo Box” is something nebulous ill-defined others do - be it a Silicon Valley Longtermist pilled vigilante like Luigi Mangione or a deranged horny Green Beret like Matthew Alan Livelsberger.
There’s no actual progressive militia movement in the US.
You know, in the civil war, when they had the guys drumming to keep the march in time?
Violence is the answer when less universal languages stop being an option
When two sides are fighting, and one uses violence and the other doesn’t, side using violence almost always wins.
You’re not wrong.
But also, a people can only retreat from a superior force for so long. When every olive branch is denied, when peaceful action is responded to with force, when people are too exhausted to know what else to do – violence becomes inevitable.
Oct 7th is a great case in point. For years, Palestinians protested Israeli settlements and soldiers with peaceful marches. And the IDF responded by sniping at the peaceful protestor’s kneecaps. All with little to no reaction from outside news outlets and governments.
When people’s back is against the wall, when their only choice is between a long, drawn out violence at the whims of others OR a sharp, intense violence with some semblance of agency – you really can’t blame them for picking the semblance of agency.
All with little to no reaction from outside news outlets and governments. But that’s where they’re mistaken. Look at the reaction on campuses to Israel’s bombing - there was plenty of will in the west to back Palestinian rights. But because it started with a terror attack, it was easy for people to support silencing them.
What if it started with the equivalent of the George Floyd video instead of Oct. 7 and protests erupted without the anchor of Oct. 7 holding them back? Biden would’ve loved to take that opportunity to finally stick it to Netanyahu and cut off Israeli funding. It may be surprising, but with the sole exception of Trump every US president absolutely hated Netanyahu. But because Democrats can’t afford to lose Jewish voters they’ve tolerated continued aid. Give them the right excuse, and it ends (I mean not under Trump, but whoever the next guy is).
Who comes out ahead after all of this? Who benefits in the long run? I’m having a hard time finding any winners.
Nobody ever really wins here. In either the short term, or the long term, with or without violence. If the clap back of oct 7th hadn’t happened, then the state of affairs would’ve remained exactly as horrible as they’ve always been, and probably would’ve slowly decomposed even further, and the population probably would’ve just died slower deaths over the course of several years. Certainly in retrospect, that maybe seems better than the alternative, but nobody knows the future, really. It could be just as likely the oct 7th was exactly the kind of pressure that started a chain of events that ultimately leads to the deconstruction of the state of israel. It’s completely impossible to know the future, completely, anything else is kind of just armchair speculation.
We have to place oct 7th into context, and to place it into context, we have to have a chain of causality. That eliminates the sort of responsibility that people like to attribute to everything. It doesn’t eliminate tactics, or the decision making process, it actually enhances it, if anything, but we do have to look at, say, how the state of affairs in gaza lead to such an attack. Both in how such a sorry state led to such an attack, obviously, and also in how Hamas was funded as their government in part by israel in order to ensure a more violent opposing force that would be more willing to mutually escalate with them, especially when that force is locked in to a specific location and can only really fight on israel’s terms, unlike most of israel’s other actors, which can fight more on the terms of the international political stage. Obviously still a deck which is heavily stacked against them, but slightly less so.
What I mean by all of this is that israel manufactured the conditions to enact their genocide, and that escalation would’ve happened either way because they’re not able to be bargained with. Under that framework, any tactic the gazans, specifically, could’ve taken, was pretty much doomed to failure from the start. Or rather, was doomed to not really have a positive outcome in the immediate short term, for them specifically. I’m not saying oct 7th was really a wise decision, right, I’m just saying that we don’t really know. Maybe attribute to me analysis paralysis, then, I’m not quite sure, ironically, but I think it’s easier to have a hindsight-accurate armchair QB backseat approach to this than to make those decisions of what to do in the moment.
What I mean by all of this is that israel manufactured the conditions to enact their genocide, and that escalation would’ve happened either way because they’re not able to be bargained with.
They’re clearly open to being bargained with, as that’s exactly what the incoming Trump admin did to extend hostilities in Gaza through the beginning of his new term. But they can’t be negotiated with in Gaza because Gaza residents have no cards to play.
I think it’s easier to have a hindsight-accurate armchair QB backseat approach to this than to make those decisions of what to do in the moment.
I agree. And I’m not citing Oct 7th as some kind of policy blunder on the part of Palestine’s political leadership nearly so much as I’m using it as an example of the vaunted guerrilla insurgency tactics falling completely flat. The idea that you can outfight an adversary with every economic, organizational, and technological advantage seems embedded in American consciousness. Vietnam and Afghanistan are these David v Goliath stories of the little guy beating the military behemoth. But they neglect the decades of blood and tears shed along the way. What you have in these territories aren’t “winners” so much as “survivors”.
Fighting back is expensive and extremely risky. Its a move of last-resort, not a determent strategy or a power play.
