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Pinochet.
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 lllk at the NO's campaign when I feel sad or depressed because it just gives me so much hope and joy.
Public Education in the US LOVES Martin Luther King Jr.
Barely ever any mention of Malcom X.
I hold that nobody would've listened to MLK if the alternative wasn't Malcom's approach.
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.
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.
There is liberal anti fascism and autonomous anti fascism. Liberal (e.g. using lawsuits) anti fascism is good, but never enough alone.
You have to deny fascist speech, because fascist speech equals fascist recruitment. You have to deny them platforms. The early age of the internet made that impossible, and many nerds like me had no clue about this. Freedom of speech warriors against stupid governments etc. Much of that was correct, but what got forgotten is that you need active moderation and laws to limit hate speech from proliferating. And neoliberal governments never pass those. Like fascism, neoliberalism believes in inequality.
This current wave of fascism is a long time in the making with the ultra conservative and christian talking points and rural talk radio. When talk radio started ranting against abortion, THAT was the time you should have started autonomous action to stop their continued broadcasting abilities.
I learned the political theory for anti fascism way too late. This is a good book review on this.
What about like 10 years after that inflection point?
Violence is always the answer. Plus it makes the best airplanes.
And WiFi
Peace is only an option when the social contract is maintained.
When power structures violate it or make sure you're excluded from it, it's time for bricks
You don't need violence to achieve meaningful resistance.
Literally just flash mob to the capitol and stop them from doing anything. They will most definitely use violence to stop us but we literally outnumber them.
You want your rights?
You have to be willing to throw bricks.
For best results, you need a trifacta.
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.
If a person wanted to learn more about this idea ans others like it, what should i go searching for?
Thank you for pointing out that the radical flank theory usually omits the political, more conservative, flank to the right of the mainstream group.
That's a well done analysis, thanks for the insight.
It's high time for a riot.
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.
Workshop: arguments for keeping the fourth panel? I feel like ending on #3 is a lot stronger.
I think you're right, much better that way.
Thanks, useful advice on writing/pacing is rare.
Prisoners dilemma. Turn the other cheek all but guarantees oppression. Cooperation, and tit-for-tat (swift rebuke + forgiveness) wins
You are correct in the swift rebuke + forgiveness wins. I remember reading about that when some people were war gaming during the Cold War.
The real reason MLK Jr is posthumously a hero.
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.
Malcolm X posed as MLK j(oesta)r's stand is an amazing image lmao
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.
in short: doesnt show its work.
Sure, and where does diversity of tactics rank?
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.
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.
As usual, nonviolence only works if enough of the opposing force is not ruthless and unscrupulous.
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:
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.
Other examples:
And those are just very recent examples.
Requisite link directly talking about this:
The success of nonviolent civil resistance: Erica Chenoweth at TEDxBoulder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w
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.
The two papers:
Non violent resistance is a priveledge provided to us through past violence.
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.
right but that doesn’t change the fact the results are bleak
"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."
