re reads 2nd amendment Huh. Now it makes sense.
When two sides are fighting, and one uses violence and the other doesn’t, side using violence almost always wins.
There is a broader strategic understanding of power, such that an underdog doing violence can afford the authoritarian government political capital to retaliate disproportionately. A peer doing violence authorizes retaliation in kind. A superior force doing violence can only realistically be retreated from until the tables can be turned.
Oct 7th is a great case in point. Palestinians revolted and Israelis spent the next year paying them back with hellfire missiles into ambulances and machine gun rounds into NICU units, while their friends in the US and Germany and Russia and Saudi Arabia clapped. Yemen and Iran interceding on Gaza’s behalf might be seen as noble from a certain point of view, but it failed to halt the slaughter. Meanwhile, the Israelis and their American allies expanded the scope of violence into the West Bank, the Persian Gulf, Lebanon, and Syria.
Using violence doesn’t mean you’ll win. It means you’ll legitimize a reprisal (which threatens to legitimize a reprisal, etc, etc). Escalate far enough and you end up with the Twin Towers in flames or a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It ends with the obliteration of whole countries and the loss of millions of lives.
Who comes out ahead after all of this? Who benefits in the long run? I’m having a hard time finding any winners.
Who comes out ahead after all of this? Who benefits in the long run? I’m having a hard time finding any winners.
Nobody ever really wins here. In either the short term, or the long term, with or without violence. If the clap back of oct 7th hadn’t happened, then the state of affairs would’ve remained exactly as horrible as they’ve always been, and probably would’ve slowly decomposed even further, and the population probably would’ve just died slower deaths over the course of several years. Certainly in retrospect, that maybe seems better than the alternative, but nobody knows the future, really. It could be just as likely the oct 7th was exactly the kind of pressure that started a chain of events that ultimately leads to the deconstruction of the state of israel. It’s completely impossible to know the future, completely, anything else is kind of just armchair speculation.
We have to place oct 7th into context, and to place it into context, we have to have a chain of causality. That eliminates the sort of responsibility that people like to attribute to everything. It doesn’t eliminate tactics, or the decision making process, it actually enhances it, if anything, but we do have to look at, say, how the state of affairs in gaza lead to such an attack. Both in how such a sorry state led to such an attack, obviously, and also in how Hamas was funded as their government in part by israel in order to ensure a more violent opposing force that would be more willing to mutually escalate with them, especially when that force is locked in to a specific location and can only really fight on israel’s terms, unlike most of israel’s other actors, which can fight more on the terms of the international political stage. Obviously still a deck which is heavily stacked against them, but slightly less so.
What I mean by all of this is that israel manufactured the conditions to enact their genocide, and that escalation would’ve happened either way because they’re not able to be bargained with. Under that framework, any tactic the gazans, specifically, could’ve taken, was pretty much doomed to failure from the start. Or rather, was doomed to not really have a positive outcome in the immediate short term, for them specifically. I’m not saying oct 7th was really a wise decision, right, I’m just saying that we don’t really know. Maybe attribute to me analysis paralysis, then, I’m not quite sure, ironically, but I think it’s easier to have a hindsight-accurate armchair QB backseat approach to this than to make those decisions of what to do in the moment.
You’re not wrong.
But also, a people can only retreat from a superior force for so long. When every olive branch is denied, when peaceful action is responded to with force, when people are too exhausted to know what else to do – violence becomes inevitable.
Oct 7th is a great case in point. For years, Palestinians protested Israeli settlements and soldiers with peaceful marches. And the IDF responded by sniping at the peaceful protestor’s kneecaps. All with little to no reaction from outside news outlets and governments.
When people’s back is against the wall, when their only choice is between a long, drawn out violence at the whims of others OR a sharp, intense violence with some semblance of agency – you really can’t blame them for picking the semblance of agency.
All with little to no reaction from outside news outlets and governments. But that’s where they’re mistaken. Look at the reaction on campuses to Israel’s bombing - there was plenty of will in the west to back Palestinian rights. But because it started with a terror attack, it was easy for people to support silencing them.
What if it started with the equivalent of the George Floyd video instead of Oct. 7 and protests erupted without the anchor of Oct. 7 holding them back? Biden would’ve loved to take that opportunity to finally stick it to Netanyahu and cut off Israeli funding. It may be surprising, but with the sole exception of Trump every US president absolutely hated Netanyahu. But because Democrats can’t afford to lose Jewish voters they’ve tolerated continued aid. Give them the right excuse, and it ends (I mean not under Trump, but whoever the next guy is).
What if it started with the equivalent of the George Floyd video instead of Oct. 7
I just said, for years before Oct 7th, Palestinians held peaceful protests and the response from Israel was violence and death. If Biden was just waiting for an excuse, why didn’t he do anything in 2021 or 2022, citing these shootings?
Our media and our leaders just don’t care about the humanitarian angle here, Israel represents too much of an opportunity to move weapons and keep the money flowing to the industrial complex.
Sometimes violence just makes sure the other side doesn’t win either.
Soap box
Ballot box
Ammo box <-- we are here not by choice, but we must answer
You missed jury box! Free Luigi!
Where does the beat box fit in?
You mean boombox?
You know, in the civil war, when they had the guys drumming to keep the march in time?
After Ballot and Before Ammo is Street. It’s an important stage because if you can’t get enough people in the street then the ammo box isn’t going to help you.
In the frame of the four boxes, it’s actually the jury box. But seeing how the judiciary is getting stacked against us, it’s not a big stretch to say we’re at box four
we’re at box four
I keep hearing this claim, but I see vanishingly few people with any kind of serious militant intent.
It seems like the “Ammo Box” is something nebulous ill-defined others do - be it a Silicon Valley Longtermist pilled vigilante like Luigi Mangione or a deranged horny Green Beret like Matthew Alan Livelsberger.
There’s no actual progressive militia movement in the US.
If they’re smart, then they’re keeping it quiet and not posting about it on the internet.
If you’re too terrified to flaunt your affiliations and organize openly, you aren’t a serious threat to an establishment.
Was the French resistance not a serious threat?
Not until the US/UK threatened landfall in '41. Most of French resistance activity amounted getting leadership and equipment hidden before the Nazis could secure control over territory. They died in droves to do little more than prick the German war machine.
As counterintelligence, they were grand. German military reports leaked like a sieve throughout France, once the Allies reclaimed a beachhead. But as a fighting force, they were next to worthless.
You still really, like really need to fit street in there somewhere. If you skip it you risk a Les Misérables situation. Dying on the barricade for nothing.
Is that not the soap box?
I think of the soap box more as the politicians thing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soapbox
It’s about freedom of speech, and the ability to get out and make your voice heard. That can be online, in the market square on an actual soapbox, or at a protest
I’m like 99% sure that “Violence is never the answer” is just yet ever more rich fuck propaganda.
I’m like 99% sure that “Violence is never the answer” is just yet ever more rich fuck propaganda.
“Violence (against the rich) is never the answer!” is what they really mean.
It’s also very Liberal propaganda.
Martin Luther King Jr. protested and he won so peaceful protest works!
While of course barely mentioning the Black Panthers and how MLK was suddenly a reasonable alternative to their violent resistance.
And his “peace” was met with an extreme act of violence. Certainly was an answer for someone(s).
Exactly this. The “carrot and stick” strategy doesn’t work without the stick. Every time a nonviolent movement achieves something, it’s because they were seen as the preferable alternative to a more militant contemporary.
Exactly. The same goes for implementing social welfare in the face of the Soviet Union and local communist movements.
The only reason MLK didn’t do more was because what they were already doing was illegal, and anything more could get them jail time. And this is still what they thought of him and his “peaceful” protests:
They did the same shit when they pretended that BLM burned down cities. We really don’t learn even from our recent history, huh?
dying at this, what a perfect demonstration
Same as it ever was.
Tulsa.
It’s a good motto to not get into a petty fight for petty shit because of emotion. It did not mean all violence because you also need violence as a defence against violence.
On the other hand, if the next 4 years we(as in us who isn’t from the US) didn’t see a civil war or violence protest, then people like oop that love to repeat this stuff should totally go outside and touch grass. These teasing is getting tiring.
Adventure time explained it pretty well imo.
I thought it was just something we taught children
But it’s bad to lie to children! Santa is practice God, “violence is never the answer” is practice “vote harder”.
A rich jackass with no actual government position took the podium at the presidential inauguration, did the nazi salute, and wasn’t promptly shot or arrested. That says a lot about the state of this country.
There have been times where real Americans shot at Nazis instead of voting them into the White House.
Yeah, he did a nazi salute, not admitted to being a communist. Being a nazi has never not been accepted and normal in America.
Saying "kill all landlords and ceos " doesnt violate any of the “calls to violence” on any social media and is very faschist commie thing to say.
Commies by definition aren’t fascist, no matter how authoritarian they are.
Dont give a shit. Wanna kill bunch of people for whatever reason? You are one evil mf.
Found the CEO.
“found the jew” How is this any different again? Other than you thinking the people you want to kill deserve it?
Because being Jewish isn’t a profession that hinges on the exploitation of millions of people, it’s a religion and an ethnicity. Can you honestly not see the difference?
Use authoritarian, mass-murderer or any other appropriate term
Dont use communist, fascist, nazist. These words have meaning. Using them wrong pollutes the definition and makes them useless
If everyone is a nazi, it doesnt mean everyone is evil, it means the word nazi doesnt mean anything
Ok. Come back when red terror is the topic of discussion.
Oh yes, at the time when the left needs most support its time to gain support by Checks notes Death to entire groups of people based on their demographic and not individuality.
Oh dear. Im sure you will be extremely popular and united during this trying time.
I think the Geneva conventions were also something rather new because biological warfare, civilian hostages including women and children, massacres, and destruction of vital resources like food and water were pretty standard for thousands of years of war and combat.
Of course as history has shown, no one actually bothers to follow the Geneva conventions when they face zero consequences but will totally complain if anyone else doesn’t (cough Israel cough).
Biological weapons, for the time being, are mutually banned because disease is hard to control in a warzone where anything has the chance to mutate or evolve. Gas attacks are used exclusively against civilians because every army has gas masks. Although iirc Iraq used it to create a massive untraversable barrier against Iran. Otherwise everything is apparently still the same.
I think there needs to be a bit of differentiation.
There always have been particularly ruthless and brutal armys, who would pillage, rape and murder civillians, just as there have been disciplined armys and leaders who made a point of only fighting the enemies army.
However the extent to which people could go about slaughter with swords, pikes and muskets is very different than the extent of machine guns, artillery, and carpet bombing.
Also it is psychologically researched that the further someone is to another human, the less empathy they feel. It takes much more decisiveness to slay someone with a sword than to shoot at him from a hundred meters than to press a button in your drone control room while having your coffee and the breakfast you got on the way driving to work.
War always has been brutal, but modern technologies have enabled the scaled and speed of destruction to go far beyond what was historically imaginable. So the need to create some sort of rules to limit the effects also has increased tremendously.
While I’m sure there’s some that are worse than others I’m pretty sure every conflict has involved widespread rape.
Someone please correct me if you can. It would help me like humanity a little bit more.
just as there have been disciplined armys and leaders who made a point of only fighting the enemies army.
Any examples?
Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub who liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187 was renowned for sparing Civillians.
Cool, thanks for digging this out of my memory… I learned about this dude in college and had completely forgot of his existence.
Sucks that we have to go back that far to find one though…
I would also add that weaponizing rape is not a typical (though not totally absent) characteristic of peasant revolution whereas it is an extremely widespread (but not totally ubiquitous) characteristic of conquest/colonialism and political control of minorities by state projects.
Edit: Meant to respond to @drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone
Geneva convention only applies to losers. Winners write history.
Violence is the answer when less universal languages stop being an option
It’s not the answer, it’s the question. The answer is “yes”
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#VITA
No dwarf is shitty fam, gotta love yourself. Rock and stone <3
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