Does nonviolence work?

Does nonviolence work?

Ask Sweden.

Depends on the race of your enemy. If it's a nigger or a jew, I wouldn't bury the hatchet.

Not in our current social order.

Yeah if you want to be exterminated. If you want real change the only way to do that as history shows is to use violence.

Nope.
Kill people. Get results. - history

only if all parties involved in the issue are non-violent, and there is an entity that keeps a party involved in the issue from becoming violent

Ask us

>Does nonviolence work.

Of course it can silly. Peace if preferable but you'll always need the threat of violence to keep things in check though.

It didn't work very well for Gandhi.

Sometimes. "There's a time for war and a time for peace"

If the other party is violent then no. Force is the ultimate power in the world, no matter how much people will harp on about the pen being mightier than the sword.

Only against those that are ultimately willing to seek peace. Against those that seek your destruction and nothing else, it will never work.

Ask the Swiss. Neutral since 1815.

>american education

Only if you are willing to respond to violence with violence.

Otherwise, you have allowed your enemies to have a monopoly on violence.

I don't know but I damn sure hope so. Otherwise we are doomed when we push AI beyond our control.

Fuck off kike

We actually have been neutral since 1515, 1815 it was merely formally accepted by other states.

Those are fairly extreme circumstances. Suppose your opponent's goal for you isn't extermination but slavery or imperial subjugation. Would nonviolent resistance (like refusing to work for, do business with, or even take orders from your would-be conquerors, even on pain of death) have an effect?

Yes, because if as a group you practice nonviolence, but are ready to respond to violence with violence, when your opponents try to use violence against you to try to compel you, either you, or the people around you if you happen to die or whatnot can respond appropriately.

Look at it this way: if I'm a farmer who you depend on for food, and I can refuse to grow food anymore with the result that we both starve, would that be violence?

ask MLK

A better question would be, does nonviolence exist?

The answer to that is probably no.

Honestly, that's where I'm starting to lean. Virtually every method of "nonviolent" resistance is only "nonviolent" if you use an extremely (one might even say conveniently) limited definition of "violence." There's a reason I put Gene Sharp in the OP: his basic idea is that if everyone in a society agrees to just stop doing shit (stop growing food, stop using money, stop complying with authorities), and let everything devolve into chaos as a result, the leaders will have no choice but to listen to their demands.

If you could actually manage to pull something like that off, it could theoretically work (assuming the leaders aren't crazy enough to let their own civilization collapse rather than give into the demands of others they deem beneath them), but can you imagine the collateral damage as a result? Famine, epidemics, and economic failure at the very least, potentially resulting in millions of causalities; and this is somehow more ethical than war? Threatening to starve someone to death is morally superior to threatening to shoot them?