What if I just want violence in general there is no end goal?
Comment on fighting evil by moonlight
realitista@lemmus.org 3 weeks ago
The problem is that violent revolutions rarely produce anything other than more and worse chaos, and are usually settled by the biggest despot in the room who is often worse than the guy being deposed. The vast majority of actual social progress made in history was due to peaceful, not violent revolution.
wabafee@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Objection@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
how_we_burned@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Yet 20 million Chinese had to die to achieve that life expectancy.
Objection@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Are you blaming the deaths from Imperial Japan’s invasion and genocide on China?
bearboiblake@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
I agree, but every non-violent movement needs an underlying threat of the willingness to escalate and ultimately become violent to succeed. We need people who are willing to use violence.
realitista@lemmus.org 3 weeks ago
I disagree . The moment violence happens, the whole movement loses its credibility and high ground and opens the road to despotic overthrow of the movement. This is why it’s so important to guard against the tactic of your enemy installing agitators to discredit your movement and open the door to violent suppression of it.
bearboiblake@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
Disavow the violence all you want, but you need the threat of it to succeed, that’s just the reality. The Civil Rights movement never would have succeeded without the Black Panthers. The LGBTQ+ movement needed the Stonewall Riots.
Scubus@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Well, I’m sure they’ll bury you on your moral high ground while they install countless systems to disenfranchise you and everyone you know. But I’m sure if you just ask them kindly not to do that, it’ll all work itself out.
realitista@lemmus.org 2 weeks ago
And they’ll bury you in the despotic regime your violence creates.
Objection@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
“Faced” “was forced to” why the passive language? Yes, France indefensibly forced Haiti to pay reparations for Haitians “stealing their property” (freeing themselves from slavery), a debt which it still, unbelievably, upholds.
I’m not sure how it’s discrediting for a revolution to be crushed by an overwhelmingly powerful outside source. It kinda seems like you’re just trying to intimidate people into falling in line at that point.
Of course, we should also look at what happens to peaceful reformers who achieve some degree of success at decolonization. Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran, for example, is the perfect example of the approach people like you advocate. Peaceful, democratically elected, didn’t crackdown on anyone’s rights. Guess what happened? He faced, as you put it, “economic isolation” as the British blockaded them in retaliation for exerting control over his own country’s oil. Then he was overthrown by the CIA. Shit like that is exactly why anybody with any sense who gets in a position like that does the sort of thing that makes you denounce them as “totalitarian.”
Convenient, isn’t it? The peaceful people who oppose colonialism get quietly deposed or exterminated, while the violent ones get condemned and economically isolated. Almost as if you don’t want anything to change at all.
Both of which were clearly and unambiguously better than the states that preceded them.
realitista@lemmus.org 2 weeks ago
My point in the Haiti point is that you ended up with an Emperor for life, as in all the other cases where you ended up with kings or single party systems. And yes, I can accept that from the very poor starting points of many of these countries, maybe the shakeup at least loosened something that could have opened up improvements in the next century or something.
But the USA is not at that kind of starting point yet. They still have an (admittedly flawed and likely compromised) democracy with a strong economy and still very high living standards, even if they aren’t evenly distributed. They do still have some checks and balances and rule of law that has not yet been subverted. Moving from this to a full autocracy, single party system, theocracy, military state or monarchy would not be a step up by any stretch of the imagination. It would be a disaster that would take decades if not a century or more to recover from.
So yes, sometimes things get so bad that you really
zikzak025@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Exactly. There needs to be a stick to accompany the carrot. But if the carrot is refused, then the stick does its job.
WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Bullshit. Once all the dark tetrad are helping grow sunflowers, there is no one left to take over (that won’t end up the same).
You just need a willingness to commit constant, never-ending violence that would make the Nazi camp guards faint.
Keep giving the bad guys CPTSD, the one reason a despot took over after, was that people stopped fighting, believing they had won.
They believed that things will be good because they “earned” it.
No, safeguarding humanity requires eternal vigilance, and the tree of liberty to be constantly watered with the blood of psychopaths.
bearboiblake@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
I disagree with this. Violence always leads to more violence, so it should always be our last option on the table. Remember that those who commit violence will also suffer from PTSD.
We need to be willing to escalate, but also to de-escalate. We need a peaceful revolution which is willing to defend itself. An implicitly violent revolution does not remove the ruling class, it simply replaces the existing ruling class with a different ruling class (e.g. the American Revolution, the USSR). We need to completely abolish the ruling class and prevent them from ever returbing.
WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
I love it when someone actually challenges my opinions.