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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.
I really like your comment. Gave me lots to think about. I don’t have much to say in return, other than that, and that your comment is really well written. I don’t find many comments on here that are a pleasure to read; most long ones are incoherent rambling, or canned talking points.
Thanks for providing something for my brain to chew on and making it palatable.
The US is a successful country and has almost always been at war.
Britain at its peak was holding 10s of countries at gunpoint.
Violence works best if you are much much stronger than the other party.
The US is a successful country and has almost always been at war.
The areas of the US that are most successful are those most insulated from social conflict. Areas that are subjected to state violence through overpolicing or are left to flounder in the face of industrial abuse, mafia violence, or unchecked domestic violence do much worse. Comparing Ferguson, MO to neighboring St. Louis illustrates this dynamic. One neighborhood is alternately brutalized by the city police and left exposed to domestic crime, dragging its socio-economic state into the gutter. The other is judiciously policed and socially supported by state and private largess, resulting in a far healthier and happier population.
Britain at its peak was holding 10s of countries at gunpoint.
And those countries suffered immensely. Meanwhile, Britain itself endured pockets of chronic crime and substance abuse specifically in areas that hosted military bases and other enclaves. The country saw an explosion in wealth inequality during its economic peak with the new wealth almost entirely accruing to the aristocracy. Victorian England was a hellhole for the Dickensian proletariat.
Areas that are subjected to state violence through overpolicing
Chicken, egg
Both of those are just chicken, egg
Chicken, egg
The police trace their roots to military officers, cattle rustlers, and plantation overseers.
The conception of police-as-civil-servant intent on discouraging violence rather than initiating it is a relatively new one.
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Very wise, you should reincarnate as a 2nd century Chinese warlord
China’s a great example of the Peace Dividend in action. You get a generation or two of peace and the country explodes with riches - both physical infrastructure and flowering culture.
Then warlords start poaching the wealth of the nation and the country plunges down into poverty, famine, and epidemic, immolating decades of social process.
After the burn out, you get a peaceful renaissance, and the country flowers again like a forest after a wildfire.
To quote the onion, violence is never the answer, if you ignore all of human history.
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
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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.
idk, murdering people based on their genetic predisposition to healthy living standards seems more of a literal definition of it.
I do understand (and agree with) your point though.
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As many people say, the horror of the Nazis wasn’t just that they killed so many people, but that they industrialized it, turned it into an inhuman factory process like they were mass-producing shoes.
In a similar way we have modern corporations that have brought neo liberal styles to the idea of murder. Instead of the industrial style of the Nazis, this style serves to alienate the murder from the murderer, putting a price tag on deaths and profiting from the lives they’re destroying all veiled by the size of these companies and the corporate double-speak that places all the lives they have control over into their sterile profit-centered game they play.
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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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.
Violence is not the answer. It is the question, and the answer is YES
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.
If brute force doesn’t work, you’re not doing it enough
Maxim 6: If violence wasn’t your last resort, you failed to resort to enough of it.
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.
MLK was only successful because Malcom X was the alternative, and the powers that be knew it.
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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.
I would say that both Malcolm X and MLK ultimately failed at their end goals, personally.
My bigger point was that the holy week uprising was able to progress things forward more in one week than either movement could do in the many years they were active. To be fair, I do not think the level of vigour and organization shown in the holy week uprising could have happened without the many liberation groups’ prior work.
Ultimately, the use of violence is complex and how to effectively use it is just as complex. We should be discussing how to use all tactics and methods available, and not view violence as the only important component.
Ghandi was partly successful because of the British governments violence towards thier peaceful protests.
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.
The people saying “Violence isn’t the answer” are the people who don’t want to see anything change
Allow me an argument by Doctor Who: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJP9o4BEziI
You can use violence, but when does it end, and what makes you think you are going to end up better off?
The doctor was against violence as a principle but he famously uses tons of violence (I guess in the form of trickery) but as a last resort.
House: “fear me, I’ve killed hundreds of time lords”
The Doctor: “fear me, I’ve killed all of them”
The problem here is that the war already started but just one side is really fighting it.
I would be in favour of not starting it too, but it’s too late now.
You can use words, but when does it end, and what makes you think you are going to end up better off?
Violence ends when non-violent reforms are able to succeed. The real value of violence is that it makes the non-violent option palatable to the political center.
