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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.
Very wise, you should reincarnate as a 2nd century Chinese warlord
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Whenever violence is involved, either both sides are violent, or violence wins.
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When neither side is violent, violence is not the answer.
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Now both sides look at #1 and ponder if the other side is ready to be violent.
I think killing people through apathetic business practices that are specifically designed to maximize profit over human life is not just murder, it’s genocide.
I also believe that a justice system that is curtailing law for the wealthy based on some sense of increased personal worth compared to that of a “lowly commoner” goes against the fabric of our nation and is a personal attack against the culture of our country. I also believe that anyone lending support to these traitors are themselves traitorous filth that deserves to be imprisoned in a public gallows to send a message that that behavior will no longer be tolerated.
short answer though, yes violence begets violence.
It’s murder for profit, don’t dilute the term genocide. The last thing we need is people calling everything genocide and making the literal genocide in Gaza seem more normal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_of_tension
a political policy wherein violent struggle is encouraged rather than suppressed. The purpose is to create a general feeling of insecurity in the population and make people seek security in a strong government.
🤔
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My Abeka Book history book says God destined America to succeed, so I think you guys might be overreacting.
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.
To quote the onion, violence is never the answer, if you ignore all of human history.
I thought we were supposed to learn from history and NOT repeat it.
Learn from history and do it better this time
yeah, and although sometimes violence is required sometimes, its best we avoid that.
If brute force doesn’t work, you’re not doing it enough
Violence is not the answer. It is the question, and the answer is YES
The answer is violence, but to advocate for peace in principle.
Peace and principle… or else
Violence is the question? Right?
Violence is not the answer.
Violence is more of a question.
And the answer is YES! GET THINE AXES KITH AND KIN! WE GOT A DUMBASS TO GO FUCK UP!
“Do you want to be next? DO YOU?”
“Because you’re a rightfully pissed off woman who had her claim denied and spouted off over the phone, you will now be charged for using terroristic language against a poor, defenseless corporation and your bail is $100,000. But that dude who killed a homeless man on the NYC subway? Well, boys will be boys.”
Violence leads to counter-violence.
The only thing that will improve something is to put meaning into the world.
Your statement is too vague to convey an actionable suggestion. I’m intrigued by the thought you seem to be hinting at. Would you expand on this, include a recommended method, and reason about why it’s an alternative to violence?
“Violence is not the answer” says country that won its place in the world through violence.
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.
I think this guy hit the nail in the head.
Peaceful protest only works if politicians and financial elite has fear and/or respect towards the commond man/woman. Too much elitisms strips away the respect, too many years of peaceful protests takes away the fear. Sometimes ivory towers need to come down, but violence has a tendency to spread and spiral out of control. It’s a balance trick.
Nelson Mandela was released on the terms that he would preach peaceful protest, as the movement he had formerly been leading was a serious threat to the South African Government.
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr was a proponent of peaceful protest, though it could be argued he was losing faith in it near the end when he was assassinated. right after his death, the Holy Week Uprisings occurred, which saw immediate action from the federal government to pass the Civil Rights Act.
At the same time, acts of violence lie on a spectrum, and I think there is a fair amount of conversation to be had about what degree of violence and what type of violence are most effective.
Martin Luther King Jr was able to succeed with his peaceful protests because the threat of Malcolm X was looming directly over his shoulder. One requires the other. Either of them alone would not have made nearly the progress they did.
Yeah, Mandela failed, there is nothing like a peaceful protest in SA.
Yea only under the threat of violence has power ever changed hands. You need both peaceful and violent components to any movement to make any change last though.
Also: we’ve got where we are under threat of violence. Charlottesville and Jan 6 in the USA, the recent gammon riots in the UK, everything Putin does, etc, etc. The Authoritarians have weaponised both peace and violence against us.
