I'm like 99% sure that "Violence is never the answer" is just yet ever more rich fuck propaganda.
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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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.
And his "peace" was met with an extreme act of violence. Certainly was an answer for someone(s).
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.
Exactly. The same goes for implementing social welfare in the face of the Soviet Union and local communist movements.
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?
dying at this, what a perfect demonstration
Same as it ever was.
I’m like 99% sure that “Violence is never the answer” is just yet ever more rich fuck propaganda.
"Violence (against the rich) is never the answer!" is what they really mean.
When two sides are fighting, and one uses violence and the other doesn't, side using violence almost always wins.
There is a broader strategic understanding of power, such that an underdog doing violence can afford the authoritarian government political capital to retaliate disproportionately. A peer doing violence authorizes retaliation in kind. A superior force doing violence can only realistically be retreated from until the tables can be turned.
Oct 7th is a great case in point. Palestinians revolted and Israelis spent the next year paying them back with hellfire missiles into ambulances and machine gun rounds into NICU units, while their friends in the US and Germany and Russia and Saudi Arabia clapped. Yemen and Iran interceding on Gaza's behalf might be seen as noble from a certain point of view, but it failed to halt the slaughter. Meanwhile, the Israelis and their American allies expanded the scope of violence into the West Bank, the Persian Gulf, Lebanon, and Syria.
Using violence doesn't mean you'll win. It means you'll legitimize a reprisal (which threatens to legitimize a reprisal, etc, etc). Escalate far enough and you end up with the Twin Towers in flames or a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It ends with the obliteration of whole countries and the loss of millions of lives.
Who comes out ahead after all of this? Who benefits in the long run? I'm having a hard time finding any winners.
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.
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.
Soap box
Ballot box
Ammo box <-- we are here not by choice, but we must answer
You missed jury box! Free Luigi!
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.
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.
Violence is the answer when less universal languages stop being an option