Please resist responsibly

That's a well done analysis, thanks for the insight.

If a person wanted to learn more about this idea ans others like it, what should i go searching for?

Another important aspect is that the radical group isn't denounced by the popularist or political group. They don't have to be friends, but they can't be enemies. What I'm seeing these days is protestors actively shutting down any potential violence from their side, self-governing to the point where the people in power don't have to do anything to keep the whole thing in check. Without that fear for their life, the people in power can ignore the civil resistance members while allowing them to keep their more violent peers in check, along with a bit of police presence for good measure.

Thank you for pointing out that the radical flank theory usually omits the political, more conservative, flank to the right of the mainstream group.

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.

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:

• A lot of cities are rejecting and shutting down Flock cameras, but in some cases the cameras quietly returned after the uproar died down. They simply waited for people to forget. At what point does it become justifiable to either cover all of the lenses or destroy them altogether?
• Similar with data centers. The billionaires are going to keep pushing them through, and in one case I saw recently, a town’s leadership even overturned votes against data centers, which was a clear-as-day example of democratic erosion. What good is democracy if it can be arbitrarily overridden? At which point is it justifiable to try and destroy a datacenter’s functionality in order to preserve life, especially when future generations are at stake?

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.

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.

Don't show him facts now, you'll scare him!

How dare you dispute the genuine value of this conversation that literally has never happened!? We need to other anyone who disagrees with us by way of making a ridiculous and disingenuous caricature of their viewpoint! /s

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.

The black panthers had guns and actively leaned on people, they courced people, with VIOLENCE.

and it worked, maybe people citizens should do the same.

I think you're right, much better that way.

Thanks, useful advice on writing/pacing is rare.

i like the fourth pabel. it shows someone loudly proclaiming the status-quo establishment line, being shown to be embarassingly, catastrophically wrong, and rather than changing their ways, their worldview, or owning up to their mistake, they change subject, deflect, and get defensive. i think that's a well-observed comic panel

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.

Ghandi too

BRICK BY BRICK

Unfortunately, the idea of "then we go into the board room and execute all those assholes" has a certain emotional appeal that's absent from "we'll boycott, vote, run better candidates".

More active resistance like strikes or blocking production are a little more poetic, but tend to draw violence

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?

Can't trial legally? Ball chipper time.

You are at the paint the streets red stage or you are going to be enslaved.

Your just a coward too scared to actually nut up and pick up a gun or destroy billionaire assets, nothing more.

You are correct in the swift rebuke + forgiveness wins. I remember reading about that when some people were war gaming during the Cold War.

I don't know much about Gandhi but didn't the British grant independence to other countries just as they did to the Indians(ok, probably better than they did it with the Indians)? I mean they just couldn't support their troops due to the ww2. Would it be violent they would have probably left sooner. If there was no peaceful independence movement at all, well they did leave like that in other countries. So I don't get Gandhi praise, it's not like he did anything(also he was a pedo).

That also relied on the military NOT pulling a Tianemen Square Massacre.

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

I'd say a full 100% of us are considering both guys are yellow guy.

Non violent resistance is a priveledge provided to us through past violence.

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.

Ask any product of the public school system about protest and they’ll [...] start babbling on about the most PG version of MLK and/or Gandhi imaginable

Case in point

Well I'm french, in my country strikes are considered violent actions.

As is always the case, it's the oppressors not the oppressed that set the level of violence.

You don't get to decide whether your actions will be violent or not, it's all about how the state will react to them. If they start sending riot police at you with orders to be as brutal as possible, legislating against your strikes, sending organizers to jail, killing some of your protesters, the non violent aspect might collapse quite fast. Or at least that's what happens when we organize mass strikes or student protests in France, and we have a pretty big history of that :)

Who said anything about overthrowing the whole system? There are plenty of examples of people who got what they wanted by violence, like the suffragettes or the IRA

is this where you say none because all governments are inherently repressive (which is true and based)

The idea that "only violent regimes overthrow violent regimes" proves OP right.

As soon as you tell me the number of instances where the peaceful overthrow of a repressive system did resulted in it being replaced by another one, but also: Ireland, both times. Also Italy, again both times. Almost as if violence or the lack thereof isn't actually the deciding factor.

Violence is not the answer, it is the question and the answer is YES

And WiFi

This is just the classic “four boxes of liberty”, rephrased.

You have no economic power, you have no soft power, your political power is limited to some states and people are being pulled from their positions, protesting has been doing fucking nothing, cultural power = 😂 irrelevant.

I reality your deluding yourself.

Black Panthers are out resisting ICE but you don’t hear about it because the government certainly doesn’t want you hearing about it.

I came hear to check whether someone already gave this answer. Thanks. :)

EMPs are cheap.

Anti drone guns exist.

Sure it is.

I mean hell, you just might become the first people on history to win their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of their oppressors. But I'm betting on plenty of violence being the only practicable alternative to the ruling class shuffling is right past serfdom and into actual slavery.

Pretty much everything I draw is observational satire, so the odds someone else has already drawn something on the same topic are pretty high yes. Comics communities are full of accidentally (or not so accidentally) derivative content. It's the nature of the medium.

I've seen this exact joke with better drawings somewhere but I can't figure what comic it was.

Well yes, the issue is precisely with what you are taught in school vs what is in history books.

Gandhi was the culmination of centuries of violent anti-colonial struggle. While he was doing non-violent resistance in the wake of a war, the HSRA and Anushilan Samiti acted as violent threats to incentivize the UK to work with Gandhi or risk more terrorist acts, while various extremely violent soldier mutinies weakened the british grip on the country.

MLK only worked because of the implications. The panthers, urban uprisings, Malcolm X were setting the country ablaze. MLK's platform was that there were two options, dealing with him or dealing with the rioters. The white house had no choice due to the scale of the riots and the threat of an escalation in violent tactics (panthers were starting to show up with big guns).

In both cases, what won was the diversity of tactics. The non-violent face of those events are all that's taught in school, but the full picture of those movements can be found in the history books. You are in no position to be dismissive of others when you are the person in the comic.

Remind me how that King thing turned out, again?

"You can't negotiate with a tiger when your head is in it's mouth." -Winston Churchill on Appeasement Strategey

That wouldn't have worked 50 to 70 years earlier though, they would have just been massacred. Those were post ww2 for a reason.

"So love me love me love me, I'm a liberal"

"Political power grows from the costume of a dancing frog"

Mao Zedong if he'd been a brainrotted Liberal.

General strikes that do real economic damage would work. They would round up the leaders and prosecute them as terrorist each time.

Um... the independence process that culminated with Gandhi started with an armed uprising.

Ever heard of the HSRA? Anushilan Samiti? The post-WW2 mutinies? All the other sources of pressure by indian nationalists and independence fighters that allowed Gandhi to exist as a credible threat while staying peaceful?