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.
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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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
Why?
The Age of Enlightenment and all the revolutions that it inspired were directly influenced by the Indigenous Critique of Native Americans. How did you think Europe thanked them after the American Revolution?
What?
Not saying you're wrong, I just have no idea how that relates to what we were talking about.
It's just one, and a big one, reason why The American Revolution is a bad example in the context of 'made the world a better place.' It could've, and that was somewhat the intention, but America would very soon again bend over backwards for wealthy "lords" and reverse all the ideals and philosophies that the revolution was based on. Where the French Revolution was bad because of all the head-choppin', American Revolution was Bad^10 because of the genocide of the peoples and ideas that spurred the Enlightenment, making sure we never read or talk about things like THIS ever since.
My assertion is not "after the American Revolution all progress was done because things were fixed." Obviously there were still massive crimes and inequalities under the post-revolutionary government (including The Big One.) My assertion was that the American Revolution made things better for the people who fought the revolution, formed a better state of being than the one they had under English rule. The brits were killing and displacing native people, too. All those pre-revolutionary cities where they were having meetings about liberty used to be where natives had been living.
I wasn't saying my examples made "the world" a better place. I'm just saying it was the answer for the people doing the fighting. Like I say I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just saying it's not directly related to what I was trying to say.
If you really look into Indian independence, Gandhi had fuck all to do with it. The british lost a lot in the war and they were making concessions. They already had extracted, exploited, and starved the poor and didn't want the overhead of managing large colonies anymore.
That is why the british marked their borders, that is why they still use british governance, that is why the ruling class are still the ones from high caste and status that helped British subjugate the lower class/caste during their rule.
And all that is why there's still a lot of corruption and class/gender/caste/religion conflicts. They just got new sheep in wolf's clothing.
It wasn't some grassroots movement that won over by peace and protest. It was a hand me down.
The US civil rights movement and MLK are often trotted out as examples of nonviolent resistance bringing change, but people forget that he was the carrot to Malcolm X's stick. MLK brought change because the threat of Malcolm X arming the black community and calling for violence was hanging just over his shoulder.
If only I had addressed that issue directly
Violence is always an option. It should be the last to take but it is always an option.
In fact that has been the implicit threat driving democracy. If you give the angry an out though voting, you can get out of the way before the threat of violence.
Attack people's democratic voice and you risk the violent answer.
Eat the rich. Shoot Nazis. Break stuff.
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 to benefit every democratic nation in the world or the russian government. Time to pledge your allergiance.
"Violence is usually the answer."
- Roadhog
If violence is not the answer, that's because you're not using 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 😊
Reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw many moons ago: "War is not the answer. It's the question."
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
we're going to be late to the party and they will be anticipating us because we didn;t take the initiative when we still had a chance to gain surprise.
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