Comment on fighting evil by moonlight

• 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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    • realitista@lemmus.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      And they’ll bury you in the despotic regime your violence creates.

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      • WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Child, this is not the place for you. Go back to l/memes

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  • Objection@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The new regime faced extreme economic isolation and was forced to pay massive reparations to France, which crippled its development for generations.

    “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.

    Result: Communist State: The creation of the Soviet Union (USSR). A single-party, totalitarian state that was characterized by extreme political repression and state-controlled social life.

    Result: Socialist Republic: Cuba transitioned into a one-party totalitarian Marxist-Leninist state ruled by the Castro family for 60 years.

    Both of which were clearly and unambiguously better than the states that preceded them.

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    • 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

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      • Objection@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        It’s funny to me how most of your examples involved the USSR peacefully ceding power. If you’re up against someone with a conscience, sure.

        I don’t deny that peaceful movements can be effective (especially when backed with an implicit threat of force). I do deny that they are consistently effective, as proven by Mossadegh and countless similar stories around the world. From The Jakarta Method:

        This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask: Who was right?

        In Guatemala, was it Arbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?

        Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the d’etente between the Soviets and Washington.

        Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported – what the rich countries said, rather than what they did.

        That group was annihilated.

        Peaceful movements that challenge Western economic interests in regions remote enough for the Western public to not care get massacred. Meanwhile, violent revolutions have provided massive increases in quality of life in many countries, including China, Vietnam, and Cuba. If you want to argue that peaceful methods are more likely to be successful within the imperial core that’s one thing, but if you want to lay it down as though it’s some universal law that violence never works, I’m going to call that out as absurd.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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  • 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.

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    • WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I love it when someone actually challenges my opinions.

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      • bearboiblake@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Me too! I figured you probably didn’t genuinely hold these viewpoints, but someone reading this thread might, so I appreciate the opportunity to speak directly to those people through you.

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