As Trump mobilizes the marines to quell an “insurrection” in LA, it’s essential to be clear about how the protests started and what actually happened.
As Trump mobilizes the marines to quell an “insurrection” in LA, it’s essential to be clear about how the protests started and what actually happened.
Whether or not violence is morally acceptable isn’t the most interesting thing in my opinion, but rather “what strategy is most likely to win”. It’s not a subject I’m well versed in, but the first analysis I found showed that non violent protest movements tend to win, see https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/are-peaceful-protests-more-successful-than-violent-ones (I know I know, correlation is not causation, so digging in deeper is needed). If you read this article, you can already see that a little bit of violence is enough to help turn people against you. The more restraint, the easier it appears to be to let people join your cause (or at least not turn against you). That doesn’t mean being meek, you can still be incredibly obstructionist while being non violent. In Europe, a huge amount of rhe progress we made was because elites feared the masses. Because of the potential of violence, maybe, but not because of actual violence. Most of all because of huge union movements who could grind whole industries or even the country to a halt. What works in one place doesn’t necessarily work on another one, of course.
Financial.
The government deals in violence and knows how to handle groups of protestors, whether they originate as peaceful or violent. Don’t play to their strengths by engaging them on that level and giving them a confrontation that they can escalate.
Non-participation, boycotts, malicious compliance, quiet quitting, anticonsumption, and birthstriking are more my style. It’s not glamorous or quick, but governments are notoriously inept at dealing with situations that they can’t just beat or shoot at. They don’t know what to do when a hammer is an ineffective tool for the job.