There are entire Game Theory textbooks dedicated to grappling with the question of when and how one engages in violence. Because broadly speaking, violence is bad. The destructive social forces inhibit socio-economic development, degrade global quality of life, propagate disease, and cause catastrophic shortfalls of critical goods and services.
Whether you're working at the micro-scale of domestic abuse or the macro-scale of the bombing of Hiroshima, you're talking about a gross net negative for everyone involved.
But if a detente is one-sided, or a violent actor is free to act uninhibited, there are huge immediate rewards for looting and pillaging your neighbors, pressing ganging people into forced labor, and seizing neighboring property at gunpoint. It works great for perpetrators who engage in violence unchecked. Its only a problem when the perpetrator runs into a countervailing force.
But then over the long term, the violence takes an increasing toll. People don't build in neighborhoods that they think will be bombed. They don't invest in communities that are fracturing and falling apart. They don't befriend people they feel they can't trust or work alongside people they're terrified of.
Go look at Yugoslavia before and after the wars of the 1990s. Huge unified economy capable of operating on par with France or Italy, only to be splintered by violence and reduced to a near-pre-industrial state for over a decade. Who won the Yugoslav Wars? Who benefited from Bosnians and Serbians and Albanians and Croats pounding their plowshares into swords and slaughtering one another?
People talk about a "Peace Dividend" and you can see it in any country that's avoided a protracted military conflict for a generation or more. You can't be a successful country if you're always trying to hold one another at gunpoint.
The answer is obviously codifying the position of power that violence granted you in a set of laws, hoping they won't be challenged by further violence
Predictably, people are arguing if violence can be an answer. But the best rule of thumb is "speak softly, but carry a big stick". If peaceful demonstration and diplomacy ran its course, then violence is the only path forward. I mean, the abolition of slavery in the United States could never be done by peaceful means (unlike what UK had done) so war was the only way.
My Abeka Book history book says God destined America to succeed, so I think you guys might be overreacting.
Violence is the question? Right?
We overthrown Pinochet with music and in the polls and since then most of our problems have been resolved in the polls too.
Democracy is the answer.
fall of the berlin wall...not a single shot was fired.
this sounds like a genZ meme
Peaceful protests were meant to be a compromise to warn that something worse was coming. Black Panthers. Weather Underground. IRA and Sinn Fein.
Effective peaceful movements had potentially violent components. The more radical elements disappeared and peaceful protests became useless.
Unions were a compromise. Before unions, you’d drag the factory owner into his front lawn and exact justice.
There are PLENTY of examples where violence wasn't the answer. Those moments made gradual changes that didn't have epic struggles with heroic figureheads, so they're boring, they're not obvious, and nobody talks about them.
There are a lot more examples in history where violence was used as a tool to oppress, threaten, conquer, destroy, or completely wipe out, by great and powerful entities.
Violence is sometimes the answer, if used by cool heads on specific targets with plans on what to do afterwards.
To quote the onion, violence is never the answer, if you ignore all of human history.
Anyone who believes that violence doesn't solve anything has clearly never paid attention.
There's a lot of evidence that says that non-violent resistance is more often effective, and when it is effective it's more effective, than violent-based resistance.
Can't grab the source info link at the moment, but this video talks about it.
Edit:
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/why-civil-resistance-works/9780231156820
https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/about/civil-resistance/
Everyone knows violence isn't the answer....its the question. And the answer is yes!
Further reading: How Nonviolence Protects the State
I haven't read it yet but I read another book by that author
Violence is not the answer. It is the question, and the answer is YES
It’s a double edged sword, because people who you don’t agree with will resort to violence as well. Like the Taliban.
History nerd here, can confirm.
For sane news, that covers important domestic and international news on a daily basis, look at PBS Newshour or Democracy Now on YouTube. Sane. Journalistic. Thoughtful.
Abandon the legacy billionaire media, but don't abandon journalism.
It really isn't though. It's always two steps forward three steps back. Anything good that arises out of the destruction, always comes at an immense cost, and usually corrupts the revolutionary leaders who made it happen.
Is there any violent revolution in history for which genuine peace followed in the immediate aftermath?
I think violence is often necessary. But I wouldn't say it's ever the right answer.
