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There are entire Game Theory textbooks dedicated to grappling with the question of when and how one engages in violence. Because broadly speaking, violence is bad. The destructive social forces inhibit socio-economic development, degrade global quality of life, propagate disease, and cause catastrophic shortfalls of critical goods and services.
Whether you’re working at the micro-scale of domestic abuse or the macro-scale of the bombing of Hiroshima, you’re talking about a gross net negative for everyone involved.
But if a detente is one-sided, or a violent actor is free to act uninhibited, there are huge immediate rewards for looting and pillaging your neighbors, pressing ganging people into forced labor, and seizing neighboring property at gunpoint. It works great for perpetrators who engage in violence unchecked. Its only a problem when the perpetrator runs into a countervailing force.
But then over the long term, the violence takes an increasing toll. People don’t build in neighborhoods that they think will be bombed. They don’t invest in communities that are fracturing and falling apart. They don’t befriend people they feel they can’t trust or work alongside people they’re terrified of.
Go look at Yugoslavia before and after the wars of the 1990s. Huge unified economy capable of operating on par with France or Italy, only to be splintered by violence and reduced to a near-pre-industrial state for over a decade. Who won the Yugoslav Wars? Who benefited from Bosnians and Serbians and Albanians and Croats pounding their plowshares into swords and slaughtering one another?
People talk about a “Peace Dividend” and you can see it in any country that’s avoided a protracted military conflict for a generation or more. You can’t be a successful country if you’re always trying to hold one another at gunpoint.
Very wise, you should reincarnate as a 2nd century Chinese warlord
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Whenever violence is involved, either both sides are violent, or violence wins.
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When neither side is violent, violence is not the answer.
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Now both sides look at #1 and ponder if the other side is ready to be violent.
I think killing people through apathetic business practices that are specifically designed to maximize profit over human life is not just murder, it’s genocide.
I also believe that a justice system that is curtailing law for the wealthy based on some sense of increased personal worth compared to that of a “lowly commoner” goes against the fabric of our nation and is a personal attack against the culture of our country. I also believe that anyone lending support to these traitors are themselves traitorous filth that deserves to be imprisoned in a public gallows to send a message that that behavior will no longer be tolerated.
short answer though, yes violence begets violence.
It’s murder for profit, don’t dilute the term genocide. The last thing we need is people calling everything genocide and making the literal genocide in Gaza seem more normal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_of_tension
a political policy wherein violent struggle is encouraged rather than suppressed. The purpose is to create a general feeling of insecurity in the population and make people seek security in a strong government.
🤔
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Predictably, people are arguing if violence can be an answer. But the best rule of thumb is “speak softly, but carry a big stick”. If peaceful demonstration and diplomacy ran its course, then violence is the only path forward. I mean, the abolition of slavery in the United States could never be done by peaceful means (unlike what UK had done) so war was the only way.
My Abeka Book history book says God destined America to succeed, so I think you guys might be overreacting.
To quote the onion, violence is never the answer, if you ignore all of human history.
If brute force doesn’t work, you’re not doing it enough
Violence is not the answer. It is the question, and the answer is YES
The answer is violence, but to advocate for peace in principle.
Peace and principle… or else
Violence is the question? Right?
Violence is not the answer.
Violence is more of a question.
And the answer is YES! GET THINE AXES KITH AND KIN! WE GOT A DUMBASS TO GO FUCK UP!
“Do you want to be next? DO YOU?”
“Because you’re a rightfully pissed off woman who had her claim denied and spouted off over the phone, you will now be charged for using terroristic language against a poor, defenseless corporation and your bail is $100,000. But that dude who killed a homeless man on the NYC subway? Well, boys will be boys.”
“Violence is not the answer” says country that won its place in the world through violence.
The USA would still be a colony of Britain if it wasn’t for a violent revolution.
The USA would still be a native american land if millions of people had not been wiped out by Europeans
The Native Americans would have been much better off if they had simply strangled Columbus and all his crew the moment they made landfall…
I get the humor in what you say, but it’s worth noting that the Native American civilizations were collapsing due to disease brought by earlier European visitors by the time Columbus set sail.
Granted, history probably would’ve been largely the same if Columbus’ expeditions were unsuccessful, given the English, French, Dutch and Spanish appetites for empire building
There’s a saga that is about “what if Columbus arrived to America but never got back to Europe?”. It’s “the tale of the feathered serpent”.
That sounds super neat. When I google it I find these books amongst other more confused seeming results. Is that the right ones or is it something else?
You can say that about almost everywhere white explores showed up
And it’s true!
No it wouldn’t
There are PLENTY of examples where violence wasn’t the answer. Those moments made gradual changes that didn’t have epic struggles with heroic figureheads, so they’re boring, they’re not obvious, and nobody talks about them.
There are a lot more examples in history where violence was used as a tool to oppress, threaten, conquer, destroy, or completely wipe out, by great and powerful entities.
Violence is sometimes the answer, if used by cool heads on specific targets with plans on what to do afterwards.
with plans on what to do afterwards.
True. You always need a plan what to do after success.
The problem with the fetishization of non-violence is that it ignores that most transformative non-violent social movements have occurred concurrently with violent co-movements. Ghandi preached non-violence, but at the same time, violent Hindu radicals were running around slitting the throats of every British official they could get their hands on. MLK preached non-violence, but the Black Panthers were waiting in the wings, offering a much more unpleasant option if MLK failed.
Violent social movements have very real tangible value, but their value isn’t in the violence itself. We’re not going to change the health insurance system through pure violence, no matter how many CEOs lay dead on the streets of Manhattan.
On the other hand, non-violent social movements rarely succeed either. Even the most modest, centrist, and conciliatory of reforms are derided as extreme or “Communist.” Look at Obamacare, a reform designed from the ground up to NOT disrupt the profits of the insurance or healthcare industries. This was a modest market-based reform that was originally a Republican reform plan. The right spent a decade going nuts calling it the second coming of Mao. And they still oppose it to this day. In the end it tinkered around the edges, but it was hardly transformative change.
The real value of violence is that it makes modest peaceful reforms much more palatable. The civil rights amendments and acts passed in the 1960s and 1970s would have never passed if there were only peaceful movements behind them. They amended the damn constitution! That took people on both sides of the aisle saying, “damn, we really need to change some things. This is getting out of hand.”
And that kind of broad bipartisan consensus that reform was needed was only possible because of the threat of violence. Violent radicals like the Black Panthers made MLK palatable to middle America. Without them, MLK would have just been another radical socialist to be demonized. And even then, they still killed him anyway.
The real value of violent social movements is that they make non-violent social movements possible. In fact, without violence, non-violent social movements rarely succeed. You need BOTH violence and non-violence if you want to make substantial change to the system. The violence puts the fear of God into the placid middle classes and wealthy corporate interests. This allows the non-violent reformers to show up with a solution to the problem that allows these centrist factions to feel that they’re not giving in to the violent radicals. Violence and non-violence are two sides of the same coin. And they are both essential.
“If you will not listen to us, you will have to talk with THEM”.
It seems the technique you’re describing is a kind of societal “good cop, bad cop”. Similar scenario to an interrogation too (trying to get information from someone who does not want to share the information) because in this case the challenge is “how to get people to share the capacity for self-determination, quality of living, and dignity when they clearly prefer to hoard it, even to the detriment of others”.
Exactly. No group has ever won rights by asking nicely. The truth is that it doesn’t actually take too large a portion of a population, acting together, to cause a society to come screeching to a halt. Law, order, and the right to private property can only be maintained if the vast, vast majority of the populace is willing to peacefully go along with the status quo. If tomorrow 10% of the population wakes up crazy and decides to just start setting everything they can on fire, we’ll be back in the Stone Age within a month. Most meaningful reform has come down to forcing those with power to choose between modest, but potentially painful reform on one hand and “watch as we burn it all down” on the other.
The black population would not have been able to credibly win against the white population if an all-out eliminationist race war had been sparked in 1950s America. But ultimately, they didn’t have to be able to win such a war to create a credible threat of intolerable violence. The black population alone couldn’t win a total war against the white population, but any kind of wide-scale race war would have completely collapsed the American economy and society. And such a war likely would have had factions receiving military support from US adversaries such as the Soviet Union. The threat of the Black Panthers was essentially, “we may not be able to win an all out war against our oppressors, but if push comes to shove, we can turn the US into another Vietnam.” Compared to that potential nightmare, the modest and quite understandable reforms that MLK demanded seemed quite reasonable.
Same thing with workers’ rights. “Give us an 8 hour workday” seemed extreme in isolation. But if the choice was, “give us an 8 hour workday, or we burn this factory to ashes” or “give us the right to unionize, or we can start listening to those literal Communists over there promising to bring out the guillotines…” well suddenly an 8 hour workday or a right to unionize doesn’t seem so extreme.
It is very much a good cop bad cop dynamic. It’s no coincidence that unionization, workers rights, and redistributive economic programs peaked when the Soviet Union was at the height of its power. Literal Communism is a philosophy that can appeal to downtrodden groups anywhere. And when the Soviet Union was ascendant and actively fomenting socialist revolutions and violent uprisings across the globe, they were able to serve as the “bad cop” that allowed modest reformers in the US to be the “good cop” pushing for various reforms and social programs.
Thanks, that’s got me thinking
Non-violence is often and most effectively a direct threat of imminent violence.
Or as a promise for the cessation of ongoing violence.
Violence is always a valid answer. It’s just not always the best answer. The problem with violence is it’s been proven time and time again to be impossible to control and hold to a limited use since there are no cool heads at that point. Nor do specific targets exist-- just collateral damage.
And no successful revolutionary has ever had a sound plan for after the victory beyond “I want the power now.” And they can either hold the power or not. But the idea of “for the good of the people” gets put to the side pretty quickly.
Source?
History.
Give me an example.
“Violence is bad” statements are in the same vein as “stove is hot”. Both are told to children because they cannot properly gauge the consequeces of using it, but are naive and condescending when told to adults.
Violence is bad but sometimes it’s needed.
A hot stove has it’s uses as well.
Peaceful protests were meant to be a compromise to warn that something worse was coming. Black Panthers. Weather Underground. IRA and Sinn Fein.
Effective peaceful movements had potentially violent components. The more radical elements disappeared and peaceful protests became useless.
Unions were a compromise. Before unions, you’d drag the factory owner into his front lawn and exact justice.
I think this guy hit the nail in the head.
Peaceful protest only works if politicians and financial elite has fear and/or respect towards the commond man/woman. Too much elitisms strips away the respect, too many years of peaceful protests takes away the fear. Sometimes ivory towers need to come down, but violence has a tendency to spread and spiral out of control. It’s a balance trick.
Nelson Mandela was released on the terms that he would preach peaceful protest, as the movement he had formerly been leading was a serious threat to the South African Government.
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr was a proponent of peaceful protest, though it could be argued he was losing faith in it near the end when he was assassinated. right after his death, the Holy Week Uprisings occurred, which saw immediate action from the federal government to pass the Civil Rights Act.
At the same time, acts of violence lie on a spectrum, and I think there is a fair amount of conversation to be had about what degree of violence and what type of violence are most effective.
Martin Luther King Jr was able to succeed with his peaceful protests because the threat of Malcolm X was looming directly over his shoulder. One requires the other. Either of them alone would not have made nearly the progress they did.
Yeah, Mandela failed, there is nothing like a peaceful protest in SA.
Yea only under the threat of violence has power ever changed hands. You need both peaceful and violent components to any movement to make any change last though.
Also: we’ve got where we are under threat of violence. Charlottesville and Jan 6 in the USA, the recent gammon riots in the UK, everything Putin does, etc, etc. The Authoritarians have weaponised both peace and violence against us.
