Like they agree with me in terms of being “team Palestine”, and understands my analogies of the initial Hamas attack being like if slaves in the 1800s had tried to stage an uprising etc but still “you can’t tell me terrorism is good because it’s never good”, even when I explain to them how non-violent protest actually working (like when schools taught us about MLK JR/civil rights etc) is propaganda…fun times.
Ya’ll don’t like Gene Sharp around here? I know I don’t agree with all of the politics from this instance, but I feel we have more in common than separates us.
It’s a Sisyphus with the boulder thing with peaceful protests. Occupy Wall Street, put stickers of Joseph Kony, glue your hands to roads, whatever. Appealing to the better nature of your oppressors works so rarely it might as well be co incidence. But you keep trying because you were raised to believe violence = bad and peaceful = good. Peaceful resistance can’t fail, it can only be failed!
Pacifism is also so extremely easily infiltrated and re-directed by feds/wreckers to burn out the frustration and momentum into doing something so utterly pointless it not only does nothing for your cause, liberal media will spin it as you being clueless idiots and shift the narrative away from your cause.
In small scales, yes, it won’t accomplish much. When you can build a large enough movement, however, I believe it can be successful. With modern warfare, I don’t really see how you can directly face the violence of the state and be successful. There are current examples of this. I will grant that some of these uprisings are facing a state propped up by foreign powers, some are even actively involved, but that furthers my point. How does an armed resistance usurp a government in the modern era?
This pretty much only works when the oppressors give in because they’re afraid of any future potential violence if they refuse
One good recent example is the UPS giving into the Teamsters’ demand before they even striked. Yes, you could argue that the entire process succeeded without economic violence through a strike but really, it was the threat of violence that won
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I would ask you the exact same question about nonviolence.
they just have to
really hard, duh!
Gene Sharp is a CIA stooge.
Why would we like a USian cold war theorist funded by the Defense Department to cook up theories the CIA and State Department then weaponized to run colour revolutions and regime change ops against official enemies of the United States
I can understand that take, I just feel his writings could be used by many people to affect national changes in society and political structure. The end result could be whatever the people want it to be.
Can you give me an example of when his theories were used to affect real change without the support of the State Department?
The Arab Spring saw the fall of US propped regimes in the Middle East. The Serbian uprising in 2000.
No no no, he said without the support of the State Department.
Lol, my understanding was that the US wasn’t happy about much of what occurred, but I accept I could be wrong.
Vincent Bevins’, who wrote The Jakarta Method, just published a book called If We Burn that covers the Arab Spring and really goes into detail on Egypt. The premise of the book is that the past decade has seen more protest than at anytime in history so why did they often have the opposite of the intended effect?
I’ll add that to my list, thanks.
Given that nobody in the Middle East saw it as an ‘Arab Spring’ or decoupling from U.S. interests and that political repression is generally worse there since the so-called Arab Spring, I think you need to revaluate some things.
And less then two years later the region was put back under US propped regimes, you know why?
Because sustained organization trumps unguided spontaneity every single time