Violence isn’t the first answer, but it is very often the last.
Like people say, unions are there because burning the factory down with the owner still inside was often the alternative.
Violence is always an option. It should be the last to take but it is always an option.
If violence isn’t the answer you haven’t used enough of it
If violence isn’t your last resort, you failed to resort to enough of it.
Maxim 6
Eat the rich. Shoot Nazis. Break stuff.
It’s a little more complex.
If you can win the fight, and there’s not that much to talk about, violence is the answer. The American Revolution, the Civil War, World War 2.
If you can’t win the fight, violence isn’t the answer but sometimes there is a way. The US civil rights movement, Gandhi’s movement for Indian independence. It doesn’t mean you won’t have to fight. But when the badness of the landscape is more to do with everyone’s attitudes and understand of the world, and they’re assigning “the good guys” to the wrong people, and “a good system” to something that’s destroying you, sometimes going to war against all of them without trying to correct the understanding piece is not the answer, because they are going to fight back.
If you can win the fight, but you don’t have a good plan for after, and the understanding piece isn’t there, sometimes violence makes things much worse even if you win. The French Revolution, the Russian revolution, the Cultural Revolution.
I’m not saying you won’t have to fight. Our current political class’s apathetic conviction that all they have to do is say the right words, and someone else will come in and put a stop to Trump, is pathetic. But sometimes there’s a lot to talk about, too.
This is French Revolution slander, go straight to the guillotine
Yeah fair enough. Kind of. I guess it is relevant that the end goal was okay. I’m just saying that (a) that came against a backdrop of a highly-educated enlightenment-era elite, with a genuine commitment to better government and better things, a lot of systemic structures of debate and good formal education, the specific recent example of the American Revolution to draw on, and (b) they still executed tens of thousands of people at the hands of successive waves of tyrannical revolutionary governments that sometimes chopped the heads off the previous leaders, before they eventually got their stuff straightened out.
I’m saying that the eventual success is more the exception than the rule, and there were specific reasons supporting the eventual good outcome that a lot of times don’t exist when a big bunch of people kills the government.
'The American revolution" is a very bad example in that context
Violence isn’t the answer; it is the question, and sometimes the answer is “yes”
Right now it seems the question is wether violence will be used as the 2nd amendment dictates or violence will be used to invade allies of us.
Use it on trump or behalf of trump. That will be the choice this term.
i mean, right now the question isn’t ‘violence’ it’s ‘against whom’. we fucked up all the futures that weren’t a river of blood. the fascism, the horrors, the manufactured consent and insane obedience. the question isn’t “river of blood or not” it’s “whose, and how deep?”
I personally would prefer as little as possible and none of it mine, but apparently wars where millions of conscripts die are more ethical than the assassinations of the couple dozen leaders that start them and manufacture consent to keep them going. letting people be disappeared is more ethical than stopping it. letting people die of poverty on the street is more ethical than breaking the locks on dumpsters to feed them, or putting them in vacant/airBNB’d houses.
silver lining: it is at least gonna be really fucking metal. so we’ve got at least that to look forward to.
Reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw many moons ago: “War is not the answer. It’s the question.”
Authoritarianism, racism and misogyny are not the answer either no matter how much you find examples of it in the history books.
Authoritarianism, racism and misogyny are not the answer either no matter how much you find examples of it in the history books.
Damn, so what do we use to fight those awful things
Education, economic stability and social mobility, political reforms and democracy, media and free speech, legal protections and human rights movements.
Violence on the other hand, even when it topples oppressive systems, often leads to power vacuums, further repression and new forms of extremism.
Education, economic stability and social mobility, political reforms and democracy, media and free speech, legal protections and human rights movements.
Surely the powerful can’t say no to any of that.
they wouldn’t dare
If your argument here is that violence is the answer, then please, tell me how much violence does it take for you to change your core beliefs? Because for me the answer is that no amount is enough. At best it’ll just make me hide them. Now, because I know it doesn’t work on me I thus don’t expect it to work on other people either.
I… Don’t think the violence needs to change minds.
Why not, kill enough protestors and eventually the rest won’t want to protest any more. See? Changing hearts and minds, one machinegun spray at a time. Like the Marines in Afghanistan.
/s
Education, economic stability and social mobility, political reforms and democracy, media and free speech, legal protections and human rights movements.
Surely, the arab gulf monarchs will respond well to this and not shoot at protestors 😃
On a serious note, i live in one of those countries and most of the things you list? We don’t have at all. I would love to topple the oppressive royal family, but how would violence not play a role in it?
Education, economic stability and social mobility, political reforms and democracy, media and free speech, legal protections and human rights movements.
And… How exactly do you get these things? Because nine times out if ten asking for them will get you shot.
Education, economic stability and social mobility, political reforms and democracy, media and free speech, legal protections and human rights movements.
Tell that to Allende lmfao
“Violence is usually the answer.”
- Roadhog
If violence is not the answer, that’s because you’re not using enough of it.
That’s Maxim #6: If violence wasn’t your last resort, you failed to resort to enough of it.
I hate how every story ends in a “OH WE ARE SUCH GOOD GUYS, WE SPARED THE EVIL VILLIAN THAT TRIED TO MURDER HALF THE POPULATION”
Conscripts deserve death, brutal warlords deserve redemption 😊
Test
