14 ms·
Nonviolence
- mystraline 9mo ago"Nonviolence" only works when a group is doing that, AND there is also a contingent of violent folks with the same aims. Nonviolent folks can be negotiated with. Its not permitted to negotiate with criminals/terrorists. We need both violent and nonviolent forces, but we're not permitted to say that out loud. But historically, thats what works.
- alphazard 9mo ago> Nonviolent folks can be negotiated with. Its not permitted to negotiate with criminals/terrorists. This is definitely true to some extent, especially when non-violence has been used in the more distant past. But in recent history, the non-violent approach creates a sympathy for the cause among impartial 3rd parties, who find violence against non-combatants to be unpalatable. You can turn the world against an enemy by putting the enemy's asymmetric use of force on display. This doesn't work in a lower empathy society.
- pixl97 9mo ago>reates a sympathy for the cause among impartial 3rd parties Only if you have good advertising for your cause. Violence is typically good advertising, most news is simply salivating to cover it. Which means in any non-violent group seeking a goal, it is optimal to have a small violent 'unassociated' group cause just enough problems to get noticed in the global media.
- direwolf20 8mo agoDoes sympathy effect change or does it merely effect emotions?
- andy99 9mo agoIs anyone aware of a more thorough argument for why this must be the case? Is it a commonly held view? It sounds realistic, but not necessarily and immutable law, I’d like to know what thought has been given to this.
- peppersghost93 9mo agoIt's because people in positions of power can safely ignore nonviolence. They can't ignore the other option. Nonviolence on it's own is not productive.
- mystraline 9mo agoThats what disturbs me about yesteryears's protest marches, like MLK's March on Washington, compared to 50501 and No Kings. MLK wanted a non-violent showing of force as to stay "legal", but a strong implicit threat of "well, you know, theres a LOT of us. We're peaceful for now". The bus boycotts almost bankrupted down in Atlanta, so money attacks also work. But now, we have No Kings and 50501. The whole idea of mass protest as a 'nonviolent but imminent threat' is completely gone. Protests were a prelude to something to be done. Now, its more of a political action rally, with not much of anything to follow up the initial energy. Which is also why the protests; pussy hat rebellion, 50501, No Kings - they've all failed. Theres no goals. Its just chanting and some signs.
- andy99 9mo agoImo this is what happened once protests became a “right”. I know most people here won’t agree with the Canada trucker protest, but I remember when it happened, people were saying “ok, you’ve had your protest and exercised your rights, you’ve been heard, you can go home now” - framing it just like that, as a rally to show an opinion rather than a threat. It felt to me like “the establishment” just treats them as peformative, because as you say they usually are, and then doesn’t know what to do when it’s actually something they have to react to.
- lurk2 9mo agoIt’s an incentive problem. If even one party defects in a society of pacifists, the pacifists have no real method of recourse besides refusing to interact with the defector, and how many people are going to do that if the defector starts killing people to enforce compliance? Some subscribe to a soft pacifism where non-destructive violent resistance like disarming the defector or disabling the defector using less-lethal technologies like a tazer would be fine. Pure pacifists who don’t believe in any kind of physical resistance whatsoever are almost exclusively religious practitioners who don’t ascribe a high degree of value to life in this world because they believe non-resistance will bear spiritual fruit in the next world.
- lurk2 9mo ago“YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FnO3igOkOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FnO3igOkOk
- EA-3167 9mo agoSorry, are you suggesting that violence doesn't also require coordination of a group? I think the record of lone gunmen solving institutional problems remains kind of scarce. Whether you want to be a guerilla group, terrorists, or take a peaceful approach the first step is always going to involvefinding confederates.
- XorNot 9mo agoThe lone gunmen mythology has basically been key to getting America en masse to surrender it's rights. So many complaints about government have the form "I'll hit my breaking point and then I'll shoot a bunch of people". No plan to join a militia, no plan to engage in coordinated action before that. Just a plan to commit a mass shooting and then be gunned down as another statistic. And probably kill a bunch of people who have nothing to do with whatever the problem is.
- ubertaco 9mo agoSomewhat relevant Cautionary Tales episode, wherein a slight variation on your same point is made from history and survey data: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/a-deadly-day-at-the-races-what-radical-protest-can-and-cannot-do https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/a-deadly-da...
- throw0101d 9mo ago> We need both violent and nonviolent forces, but we're not permitted to say that out loud. But historically, thats what works. [citation needed] There are multiple studies and books that go over how the less a movement uses violence the more likely it is to be successful: * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44096650-civil-resistance https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44096650-civil-resistanc... * https://global.oup.com/academic/product/civil-resistance-9780190244408 https://global.oup.com/academic/product/civil-resistance-978... The above book has a chapter about how if a movement is non-violent, but a contingent/faction wants to use it, various ways to handle it.
- kgwxd 9mo ago> but we're not permitted to say that out loud. You just said it out loud. Are you one of "them"?
- direwolf20 8mo agoHe said it, but he's not permitted to say it. The comment will be dead soon.
- Jensson 8mo agoWomen got their rights without a large group of violent female terrorists threatening violence, so you are wrong. Feminism has been the most successful liberating movement in history and it happened basically without any bloodshed.
- kstenerud 9mo ago[flagged]
- nathan_compton 9mo agoKing was definitely not protesting in a rules based order, at least not one which applied to black people. Nor was Gandi.
- dpc050505 9mo agoHe also died from a bullet to the head and 60 years later a statement as simple as 'black lives matter' was controversial.
- tptacek 9mo agoNonviolence was never proposed as a shield for activists against violence. He knew what he was up against.
- dripdry45 9mo agonot so sure he did. Both King and X were “allowed” to speak out as much as they wanted… until each of them, realize the war they were fighting was not the real war. The real war was against the rich. Once Malcolm realized this, and that he was being played, and once MLK realized that non-violence was BS he started to drift more toward Malcolm’s end of things and direct that anger toward class warfare? That’s when they were each killed.
- SV_BubbleTime 9mo ago[flagged]
- dpc050505 9mo agoIt was a bad faith argument to shut down discourse about summary executions of black men in the streets of the USA. It's been about 10 days since they executed a white soccer mom who had not committed any crime, the people who were harping on about 'All lives matter' are still no where to be found. The whole time it was empty rhetoric, people who care about human life understand that sometimes there's a group in particular being oppressed.
- bflesch 9mo ago[flagged]
- nathan_compton 9mo agoI wouldn't use this as a metric. With social media almost any opinion whatever will surface some weirdo advocating violence even before you factor in trolls. Not saying things are ideal in the US by any stretch of the imagination, but the mere presence of people making threats online is not itself deeply indicative of a population ready to get into it.
- mikepurvis 9mo agoFacebook's utter failure to moderate itself (as documented many places but especially Careless People) is bigger than just a few weirdos advocating violence. The much more important piece is the fake news that says over and over again "group X did Y", "group X did Y", "group X, they're out there doing Y again". It's the echo chamber that magnifies and amplifies and reinforces untrue and half-true narratives, chasing engagement and fury and ad impressions with zero sense of civic responsibility. It may be that no individual report is damaging enough to be censor-worthy, but the total effect is massively radicalizing, so that a huge group of people are primed to eventually interpret even true news stories in the maximally negative light and may even see their own eventual jump to violence as being justifiable self-defense given what they believe has preceded it.
- nba456_ 9mo agoHave you experienced this in real life or just on social media?
- 9x39 9mo agoOr it's a distraction from the message. If your argument is strong, I can try to change the conversation to you by finding some artifact and magnifying it through some creative interpretations - imply negative associations to X, suggest your references aren't allowed because of Y, or try get the group to attack ad hominem until it chokes out everything else. We've collectively gotten pretty good at this in the last decade.
- SilverElfin 9mo agoI feel like the role of non violence is over emphasized. It plays a part in these social and political movements. But the MLK era civil rights movement and even the Indian independence movement MLK drew inspiration from, involved a lot of violent resistance sustained for years. People paid with their lives to create unrest and draw attention to their oppression and and gather supporters. We shouldn’t ignore their contribution or forget that it’s part of the overall path to getting justice, alongside non violent resistance.
- proshno 9mo ago[dead]
- 1123581321 9mo agoAgape could be discussed as a philosophy between disagreeing figures like King and Carmichael. Today, fewer people have encountered the idea so they can’t choose it as a philosophy. Without agape, political activism is more zero-sum and utilitarian. Non-violence becomes a gambit that is only appealing as long as it is making obvious gains against the current winners, and there is little motivation to remain nonviolent after becoming winners.
- bnlxbnlx 9mo agoI've spent a lot of time with people who seem themselves operating within ML Kings lineage and have their lives committed to this kind of nonviolence work, and they defintely operate from within the an "agape mindset", even though they wouldn't frame it like that. in my understanding some people use 'non-violence' to describe the more utilitarian version, and 'noniovlence' for that which exits the entire 'domination paradigm'
- 1123581321 9mo agoInteresting; you observe a drawn distinction between the hyphenated and non-hyphenated spelling?
- zkmon 9mo agoSometimes, I suspect that Gandhi was helped by the global developments of that time, specifically the British context at the end of the war. Gandhi could have been lucky, in part, to find the British in a mood to relinquish their holdings. Bose, on the other hand, decided to fight by all means, though being no match against the British. Maybe, both strategies would have been equally weak, if there was no world war.
- Rperry2174 9mo agoThis is a good articulation of mlkjr's theology and dicipline around nonviolence, but I think its incomplete if you read it in isolation. His strategy worked because it existed alongside MANY other voices, IMO the most underrated of which is Malcolm X, that rejected this "gradualism" outright and refused endless delay. They weren't organizing violence but they were instead making it credible that there is a world where those "peaceful" people do not accept complicity or "no" for an answer. This shifted the baseline of what a "compromise" could look like (as we today see baselines shift very frequently often in a less just direction) Seen that way, nonviolence wasn't just a moral stance, it was one side of a coin and once piece of a broader ecosystem of pressure from different directions. King's approach was powerful because there were alternatives he was NOT choosing. You cannot have nonviolence unless violence is a credible threat from a game-theory perspective. And that contrast made his path viable without endorsing the alternatives as a model
- atoav 9mo agoEssentially "good-cop-bad-cop" on a political level?
- oceansky 9mo agoHe also had a 75% disapproval rating at the time of his killing. The violence against him, in contrast with the nonviolence stand, made it stand out.
- Rperry2174 9mo agoyeah the crazy part about that is one uncomfortable point many through history (and in threads today) have made is that nonviolence implicitly assumes a moral audience. And that injustice, once clearly exposed will provoke people's conscience. History obviously shows that that "moral audience" was certainly the minority then. MLK was already forcing that confrontation and by most accounts was succeeding slowly-but-surely. But it wasn't until his assassination that people were forced to confront the contrast he had been trying to illuminate all along. Even his disciplined non-violence he was met with brutal force (as were the peaceful protesters) and this forced some sort of moral reckoning for those who had deferred or were complicit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKnJL2jfA5A&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKnJL2jfA5A&feature=youtu.be
- throw0101d 9mo agoIn a survey of ~600 movements since 1900, it was found that those that tended to use violence more succeeded about 25% in achieving their goals, while those that used less violence succeeded over 40%: * https://global.oup.com/academic/product/civil-resistance-9780190244408 https://global.oup.com/academic/product/civil-resistance-978... * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44096650-civil-resistance https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44096650-civil-resistanc... You also almost double your odds of success by not using violence. Further, less violent movements are more likely to end up more democratic / less authoritarian. The/A thesis of the author is that people are turned off by the use of violence/force and are less likely to agree with, and/or get involved in, movements that use violence. So if a movement wants to grow the 'coalition' of people that will help and/or join them, that growth is best achieved by eschewing violence as much as possible. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%25_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%25_rule The book is 'minorly academic', but it's an easy read and probably more geared toward the general public. (The studies/book recognize that "violence" exists on a spectrum. The book also talks about generally non-violent movement(s) that have factions that attach to them that want to use violence, and various other scenarios.)
- InitialLastName 9mo ago> You also almost double your odds of success by not using violence. Admittedly having not read the 400-page study, I don't think that's a causation that is necessarily supported by the correlation. It would be extremely surprising if the prior of "how likely is this movement to succeed" were not a determining factor in whether a movement tends to use violence, with the a priori less-promising movements being more likely to take violent action. C.F. the difference between me demanding you give me an apple or your car.
- pixl97 9mo agoYea, causation here depends on a whole lot. If you're movement is going to 100% cause a reaction of violence with the opposition regardless if you're violent or not, then there is zero reason for your movement not to use violence themselves. Simply put, you'd be rounded up and exterminated simply for existing.
- specproc 9mo agoI have an undergraduate degree in Peace Studies, and have spent extensive time in and around conflict or post-conflict zones. Violence, particularly civil war, is utterly destructive to a society, completely tears apart the social fabric and creates wounds that never really heal. That said, when you look at America, India, both movements required the threat of violence to succeed. MLK had the Black Panthers, and whilst Ghandi himself preached non-violence he did so against a background of riots in which thousands of British officers were killed and wounded. The social reforms Western Europe and America saw in the post-war period were an capitulation to the implicit thread of violent communist revolution. Non-violence is effective as an alternative to violence.
- derektank 9mo agoI think you are confusing the BPP with some other organization. All of King’s substantive achievements were accomplished before the formation of the Black Panther’s and he died before they came to national prominence.
- specproc 9mo agoHeh, did I mention that peace degree was a loooooong time ago. Totally appreciate the correction. I remember reading an argument along those lines at the time that resonated. Perhaps not the Black Panthers? Or am I just totally wrong here and there wasn't a shred of political violence in the background?
- foogazi 9mo agoYou tell us - you started this thread Do you still want to sustain your argument or retract ? Otherwise your comment above still stands with false information + made worse by a flimsy appeal to authority (peace “degree”)
- pixl97 9mo ago>Non-violence is effective as an alternative to violence. I have a feeling you probably should have put a bunch of caveats for both like "if you're willing to wait a few generations for your aims to be met". When talking about both the American civil war, one side had engaged in violence for antiquity and had the force of the state which came to state that violence was the expected behavior. This violent behavior was very profitable, and the people profiting from this realize they were in a weak position so they started propagandizing was what they were doing was "in the name of god", "is good for the common man", etc. It moves the conversation from one looking at the violence of slavery to "Why do you hate god and country". Simply put the US civil war was a temporary increase of violence that preceded the war with slavery and followed the war in neo-slavery.
- ChrisArchitect 9mo agoRelated: Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46683205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46683205
- HNisCIS 9mo agoBeware that while you may choose nonviolence to protest this regime, your local police department will water you like a row of daisies with giant cans of mace and CS while TikTok users get bored and swipe to the next video.
- Atlas667 9mo agoThere is a quote by Gandhi where he is talking about the Holocaust and he says: "The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs..." This is very idealist of him. And that, I find, is the fundamental problem of nonviolence. It depends on a notion of "good" existing, or that, at the very least, the people in power will care about the appearance of their policies and revert them for "goodness" sake. This is a fundamental problem. It is not that good cannot exist, it is that most evil is done for material reasons, and nonviolence does not take that into account. Try stopping a war, that are done for economic reasons, by appealing to "goodness". Try stopping racism, that has economic roots (profits), by appealing to "goodness". It won't take you very far. The defining feature of this dilemma can be found right on the edge of where the definition of defense become offense.
- zahlman 9mo ago> Try stopping racism, that has economic roots (profits), by appealing to "goodness". It won't take you very far. When the British outlawed slavery and made their moral arguments against it, it seems to me that that worked pretty well everywhere except the US. I mean, sure, they might have had to invoke military force against other Europeans, but the idea spread within Britain easily enough, and they didn't lack sympathetic ears elsewhere (e.g. in Canada; the Underground Railroad was possible for a reason).
- Atlas667 9mo agoIndustrialization killed slavery not morality. The reason for abolishing slavery was that it was a backwards system that prevented the super exploitation that came naturally for the proletariat. The abolition of slavery was the proletarization of slaves. It absolutely was economic in nature. There was no economic need for slavery anymore, it didnt end racism tho, which was the ideological weapon that permited slavery. Racism was simply repurposed for the black (and other) proletariat. Industrialization killed slavery not morality. Where is the goodness? You have an idealist conception of history. How would this allow superexploitation? When capitalism becomes more productive than the market can handle it just shuts down the factories or when it gets more efficient it just gets rid of workers. Try doing that with slaves. Proletarization created a pool of unemployed and a labor makret that benefited capitalists.
- jmyeet 9mo ago[flagged]