I don’t want to write a very long post, but I just wanted to remind everyone about this.
I recently learnt about protest on February 5th, and just wanted to spread this. The wiki page has a huge table of non-violent protests.
I know many people are disheartened, and in such circumstances, people often resort to violence (sometimes to send messages, sometimes in response to another violence, sometimes in catharsis).
I am from land of Gandhi, and a huge admirer of his work. Many people even in my country today feel Gandhi was useless or found him problematic for n number of reasons, some partially valid, many not, but this post is not about him. What I want to highlight is his idea of Satyagraha - it is essentially a exercise in (and for) truth. 2 famous non violent movements of his time being civil disobedience and non-cooperation. Names give the core ideas away - but essentially - break laws peacefully. To elaborate - 1 of them was against a salt tax law. They just made salt, and did not pay tax. It was both literal and symbolic, in the sense that they stopped paying taxes - and EIC were hit both financially and political power wise.
And these are not the only peacefully protests our land, one of the most recent ones was a farmers protest (for context, in India, majority people are still employed by farming), and roughly after a year of protest, they got there demands met.
I wanted to add a US specific example, and I can’t think of anything better than Stop War protests regarding Vietnam War.
TL;DR - Peaceful protests work, you just have to be persistent
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“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.” ~ Stokely Carmichael
Peaceful protests don’t work I’m so sick of this ahistorical scam propaganda being shoved down people’s throats.
Violence works. all our hard fought for labor rights were won with violence. Our elites are above the law and the only way to touch the untouchables is through violence. See Luigi.
Note to the mods (which ironically autocorrected as kids…) this isn’t advocating violence, this is correcting historical misinformation and propaganda.
Peaceful protests only work if they carry the threat of turning violent. They need massive amounts of people desparate for change, and pressure from non-peaceful groups serving to risk turning the whole movement into a revolution.
Peaceful protests allow a government to change their ways. But they also legitimize violent resistance if the government does not.
The Black Panthers were able to grow because of MLK’s peaceful protests. While MLK achieved nothing on his own, Malcom X was able to transform the activist movement into a revolution.
Highly recommended video explaining the past and accurately predicting the future we are currently in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69pEzsfX8Aw
US citizens need to be very careful about their next steps.
If you do this wrong you will hand Trump all the reasons / excuses he needs to enact martial law (and have support for that) and then say bye bye to term limit. You need to think about the next 20 years, about a Trump dynasty etc.
I don’t believe it is actually helpful to proselytize nonviolence. I appreciate your position and your contribution, and your experiences have value independent of the validity of your assertions about nonviolence writ large.
I’ve left links to full books at the bottom of this comment. Here is a quote from the introduction to the first:
Nonviolence has lost the debate. Over the last 20 years, more and more social movements and rebellions against oppression and exploitation have broken out across the world, and within these movements people have learned all over again that nonviolence does not work. They are learning that the histories of purported nonviolent victories have been falsified, that specific actions or methods that could be described as nonviolent work best when they are complemented by other actions or methods that are illegal and combative. They are learning that exclusive, dogmatic nonviolence does not stand a chance at achieving a revolutionary change in society, at getting to the roots of oppression and exploitation and bringing down those who are in power.
At best, nonviolence can oblige power to change its masks, to put a new political party on the throne and possibly expand the social sectors that are represented in the elite, without changing the fundamental fact that there is an elite that rules and benefits from the exploitation of everybody else. And if we look at all the major rebellions of the last two decades, since the end of the Cold War, it seems that nonviolence can only effect this cosmetic change if it has the support of a broad part of the elite—usually the media, the wealthy, and at least a part of the military, because nonviolent resistance has never been able to resist the full force of the State.
EXACTLY. ALL OF THIS.
Protest peacefully, but keep a rifle in reserve should you meet violence.
