OBJECTION!

I can understand that perspective, but I’m looking at things from more of a class based and realpolitik perspective. The international order, I would say even now, but especially at that time of peak colonialism, was pretty much like this.

The Allied powers dominated the world, and they achieved that through force, brazen, unapologetic aggression. Germany didn’t have a problem with that, except for the part where they weren’t the ones on top, that they didn’t have colonies to exploit like everyone else.

From my perspective, the real problem is that socialists at the time didn’t follow through on the Basel declaration of 1912 where socialists of every country promised to oppose the coming war. When the war actually broke out, everyone rallied around their respective flags, the British and French socialists talked about Germany invading neutral countries and not being as democratic, but the German socialists justified it by talking about serfdom in Russia and the colonialism of Britain and France, and at the end of the day, tons of regular people got drafted to go die in the trenches over these power games.

Admittedly, I’ve never really considered it from a Belgian perspective before, but I think the bigger nations were all more motivated by power than by a genuine commitment to upholding neutrality and national sovereignty.

I think what they’re looking for in terms of methodology is what objective criteria they use to determine if a protest is violent or nonviolent, as well as what constitutes success or failure. These are not trivial questions, and there’s lots of debate surrounding virtually any given movement, so to make objective determinations about a large number of such movements raises the question of how they’re resolving all these questions and debates. Some might argue that such questions are inherently political and up to interpretation.

As another user in this thread pointed out, it may be a case of confusing correlation with causation: if a movement is popular, it may be more likely to succeed and more likely to be considered nonviolent, as compared to a less popular movement employing the exact same tactics.

The lack of distinction between strikes shutting down entire industries vs walking around for a bit with a witty sign is one of the many reasons the study is kind of silly.

Love Blackadder, especially that season ❤️

Pretty sure nobody was fighting before the Germans attacked Eben emael with gliders.

That’s the wrong war. Fort Eben Emael wasn’t even constructed yet, and there were no paratroopers on any side.

Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on June 28th, 1914. On July 28th, Austria-Hungary began shelling Belgrade, in the first shots of the war. Germany occupied Luxembourg August 2nd and invaded Belgium August 4th.

But regardless, the European powers were always going to end up fighting each other after running out of places to colonize, building up enormous militaries, and forming a bunch of secret alliances. No nation was the “good guys” in WWI, they were a bunch of imperialist colonial states jockeying for power, and sending ordinary people into awful conditions to die for no good reason.

Yes, but it’s complicated. I’ll use Iran’s long tradition of nonviolence as a case study.

In the late 1800’s when the shah tried to sell out tobacco farmers to foreign exploitation, and virtually everyone in the country opposed it, resulting in a tobacco boycott. Virtually everyone in the country participated it, including members of the shah’s own harem, and religious leaders issued a fatwa condemning anyone who violated it. The shah was forced to cave to pressure and reversed the decision.

This boycott movement helped for organization that would set the stage for later (largely peaceful) protests that led to the shah signing a constitution and establishing a democratic parliament. Unfortunately, he died shortly afterwards, and his son was much less cooperative, and called on foreign assistance to shell parliament, and successfully restored himself to power.

During WWI, Iran was invaded by the Ottoman, British, and Russian Empires, and the country suffered greatly from disease, famine, and the Armenian genocide, leading to over 2 million civilian deaths during the period. The Qajar dynasty collapsed, as did the Ottoman and Russian Empires, allowing Britain to dominate the power vacuum. They supported the new Pahlavi dynasty into power, there was a parliament, but the shah generally appointed whoever the British told him to as prime minister.

At this point, oil had been discovered in Iran, and the Iranians were stuck with an awful, exploitative deal that the previous dynasty had signed, as part of their general policy of selling out every part of the country to foreign colonizers so the shah could have a bigger harem. This deal was substantially worse than the general deal the US offered (which was generally 50/50 between the country that owned the oil and the country that built the infrastructure to extract it). But the terms didn’t actually matter because the British violated them all the time, vastly underreporting how much oil they were extracting so that they paid virtually nothing, and the Iranians had zero oversight of their records. Britain relied on this oil to be one of the richest and most powerful nations on the planet, while the Iranians remained some of the poorest people in the world.

For the next several decades, the Iranian people repeatedly asked Britain very nicely if they would possibly consider not stealing all their oil. And for those decades, the British completely stonewalled them, refused to consider any sorts of concessions whatsoever. Even with their own, hand-picked prime ministers, they still stonewalled them.

Finally, in the 1950’s, and a peaceful democratic movement successfully pressured the shah to appoint a popular leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh, as prime minister - the shah finally became more afraid of popular discontent than he was of the British. Mosaddegh, after making attempts to negotiate, made a decision with overwhelming popular support, to nationalize the oil industry. This, however, led the British to impose a blockade, crippling the country’s economy.

Mosaddegh was an idealist, and he believed the Americans would see his cause as just, connect it to their own revolution, and back him up against the British. At this point, most Iranians had neutral or positive views of the US, seeing them as well intentioned, if naive, not understanding how long the Iranians had been struggling against British colonialism. All of these perceptions were proven completely wrong, because, rather than backing them up, Eisenhower agreed to use the CIA to overthrow Mossadegh to protect BP’s profits and to ensure British cooperation with NATO and the Korean War. This was the first of the CIA’s coups of democratic governments.

A stark example of this betrayal is that, the day before the coup, a US ambassador called Mossadegh and fed him a false story about how his supporters had been calling the embassy with death threats, and he was afraid he’d have to shut it down. Mossadegh - who had refused to crack down on (CIA funded) protests, or censor the (CIA controlled) press, or seek aid from the Soviets, or otherwise do anything to disrupt the infiltration out of concern for principles and respecting dissent -then issued as public statement calling for his supporters to cool it and stay off the streets. When his residence was attacked, no one was on the streets to come to his aid. He lived out the rest of his life under house arrest, while the shah used his absolute power to hunt down and exterminated the Iranian left - until he finally crossed the US and was himself overthrown by the current government.

When the stakes were low (from a geopolitical perspective), like, some poor tobacco farmers trying to maintain their (still quite poor) lifestyle, nonviolence worked. When the stakes were higher, like, changing the whole structure of the government, nonviolence worked better than one might expect, but generally encountered violent resistance and counter-revolution and fell apart. When the stakes were very high, like, trying to get a world-spanning empire to stop stealing the resource it needed to dominate the world, nonviolence was not very effective at all.

Being in Iran’s position, it really wouldn’t matter what they did to try to appease Westerners, so long as they assert control over their natural resources - so they don’t really bother. The goal of nonviolence is to be “in the right” but Iran’s history proves that you can be 100% “in the right” and still lose because foreigners don’t know/care about what’s being done to you, or are propagandized to side with the oppressor.

This doesn’t necessarily apply to protests in the US, but it can. If you’re a nonthreatening old white lady and your goals are not too disruptive to the empire, then sure, do nonviolence. But if you’re someone who the news could villainize, who people will assume the worst of just because of your race or religion, then they’re probably going to characterize you as violent whether you are or not. And if your goals are something that would disrupt the ruling class’s hold on power, then understand that the only reason they aren’t gunning you down is that they aren’t afraid of you - the real dangerous part about nonviolence is that it can be effective, and if power is threatened it will respond with force.

You’re absolutely valid and not overreacting. Unfortunately, depending on where you live, you might not have many other options - but if you can look into other modes of transportation you should.

Driving is dangerous, and not everyone is cut out for it. The great thing about public transit is that it’s much safer and less stressful, it doesn’t demand focus and attention - and that benefits drivers too, because it means fewer bad drivers will feel like they have to drive and it reduces traffic in general.

It all comes down to what the alternative is. If your alternative to driving is relying on others to drive you places, it’ll reduce your independence or be expensive (if you use rideshares). But if the alternative is biking or taking a train, then by all means go for it. There’s lots of reasons cars suck, danger, stress, insurance, gas, traffic, pollution, lots of reasons to look into other options.

100%. A credible threat of violence is the real sweet spot, it’s the currency that the whole world operates by. Actual violence is primarily only useful for establishing that threat.

Like, Brian Thompson was an evil person but he was just a cog in a machine and not that hard to replace. However, his killing spooked the industry, and at least for a time, they stopped denying so many claims, which saved many lives - because there was a credible threat that if they deny someone’s claim, they (or someone who cares about them) might kill those responsible. On the other side of the equation, the state was very concerned about finding the killer/someone to pin the blame on, because they needed to establish a credible threat of violence against anyone who might follow his example.

People in America seem to love “going postal,” just one big dramatic act that only you know about and that you won’t walk away from. But that doesn’t really set up a credible threat for the future. Thompson’s killer at least had the good sense to try to get away - if he did, then he could continue providing a credible threat, and he would also provide a “proof of concept” for people looking to fight back without necessarily dying.

Ideally, if you could have a more formal organization that could lay out demands and red lines, it would add to predictability and help keep the threat of violence consistent and predictable. Otherwise, there’s just a vague sense that maybe someone out there will be set off by something, but it’s hard to negotiate with that, hard to say which actions might set someone off. Stochastic violence isn’t ideal, but if more formal organizations are subverted in the various ways they are, then violence becomes less controlled and directed, and the credible threat of violence becomes harder to establish.

Eh, if Israel did not exist, the United States would just invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.

Germans were no more responsible for WWI than the British, French, etc.

Interesting how the paper picks East Timor/Indonesia as a case study but makes no mention of the massacres of the PKI and suspected communists, which the US was ambivalent, if not supportive about.

Any serious study of resistance movements around the world will paint a very different picture, one in which nonviolence is frequently met with slaughter, and people turn to violence specifically because nonviolence failed.

The fact of the matter is that people living in the imperial core cannot be well versed in the history of every country in the world (to the extent that we can even exert influence in the first place), and this allows the media to either ignore things like the massacres in Indonesia, or spin them in such a way to justify the preferred side through biased framing. The thing the paper cites as a major determining factor of success or failure is defections from security forces, but what if those security forces come from thousands of miles away?

Trying to assert a universal principle on a tactical level regarding such broad categories is kind of silly in the first place. It’s too broad. You have to assess what you’re trying to accomplish and formulate a strategy to get there based on the particular situation you find yourself in.

From “The Jakarta Method:”

This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask:

“Who was right?”

In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?

Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.

Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported—what the rich countries said, rather than what they did. That group was annihilated.

It does not. Where?

Tbf, the article should probably mention the fact that machine learning programs designed to play chess blow everything else out of the water.

Thank you, brainfart on my part.

tl;dr Because that’s communism.

Let’s look at the history of labor movements in the US.

At first, yeah, you started with a pretty broad cross section of society (the Knights of Labor, for example), as well as some more radical elements. Then you had the Haymarket Affair, where people were protesting for an 8-hour work day, and the cops started killing protesters, and someone (possibly a provocateur) threw a bomb at the cops. The press went wild with it and it kicked off a red scare where many labor organizations kicked out and distanced themselves from Anarchists and Marxists.

Fast forward to the Great Depression, and you’ve got a new wave of radicalization because people are seeing the failures of capitalism, and that led to the New Deal. There was another red scare as the US and USSR became rivals, and that served as “the stick,” while the New Deal policies served as “the carrot.” The labor movement once again distanced itself from the more radical elements on the promise of a cooperative government. All the communists, who were more concerned with a broad movement of solidarity, got kicked out of groups like the AFL-CIO, and the unions were considered acceptable because they were (at least to a degree) narrowly self-interested.

These unions flourished in the 50’s, 60’s, and early 70’s, during this post-New Deal, Great Society era. They weren’t necessarily the most inclusive, but they worked well for their members. However, in the 70’s an economic phenomenon emerged that was termed, “Shrink Stagflation” - a period of high inflation and high unemployment at the same time. The Keynesian economic model (which had had a broad consensus up until that point) said that you deal with unemployment by having the government spend more money, and then when unemployment drops, you reduce spending to avoid inflation. It didn’t have a clear answer for what to do when both were high at once, that wasn’t really supposed to happen.

The Carter administration made the decision to focus on inflation instead of unemployment, which screwed over the labor unions. But this was a broad bipartisan consensus among the Washington elites, and when Carter was replaced by Reagan, he did the same and pushed it further. Under this new paradigm of “supply side economics,” people’s identities as consumers was emphasized over their identity as workers. Even having purged radical elements and having become relatively toothless, unions were vilified and blamed for making goods expensive, and they didn’t really have the power to do much about it.

Question of economics were increasingly moved outside of the realm of public accountability and influence, being left to “experts” and both parties having broad agreement about things, but we still had to vote over something, and so we had the emergence of the culture war. Around the 90’s you had some rather boring presidents and debates, because it was the height of “the end of history,” where there was this idea that all the big questions and conflicts had been resolved and it was just a question of little tweaks here and there.

However, in the 2000’s, as it became clear that conditions were declining and the wealth gap was growing, there has been a new wave of radicalization, on both the right and the left, which started to really manifest in 2016. But it is very much in its infancy, without a lot of experience or strength. It’s been over 40 years since we had strong unions (and even those ones were defanged). Now, we’re fighting against entrenched anti-union and anti-worker policies, practices, and beliefs. And progress is being made, but it’s a long, uphill battle, and a lot of it is young people figuring things out from scratch.

Hey, I agree with you, a two state solution isn’t viable (albeit for the opposite reason, that Isreal is a beligerant, expansionist, genocidal state that should not exist). Now, as a “leftist,” I’m sure that you’d agree that, if everyone’s going to be part of the same state, then of course everyone should have equal rights, including voting rights, correct? You want every Palestinian to have the same voice in government that Israeli citizens do, right?

Or is it that when you call for a one state solution, what you mean is that you want to continue denying them rights within your own state while also preventing them from having their own state? To seize their territory and then have them remain as second class citizens who are denied fundamental human rights? For your race to reign dominant over others?

You don’t need to answer, I think we all know the answer to that question, fascist.

And I’m not a fan of Zionazis trying to pass themselves off as “leftists” while supporting genocide and apartheid, but here we are.

Yeah, I see where you’re coming from. I mean, I’m also 100% a leftist, I’m extremely left on most issues, but I also just don’t get why so many people are opposed to this one particular state.

I mean, people always talk about the whole conflict with Germany starting in 1939, but you really have to consider that those wars happened because they were reclaiming territory like the Danzig Corridor that belonged to them historically. They even tried giving territory back to France by setting up the Vichy Republic. And it was the communists and partisans going around trying to stir up a class war who really started things, we had to put them in camps for the sake of security. And I feel bad for any innocent people caught up in it, but it just feels like nobody extends the same concerns to the German civilians the government is trying to protect. At the end of the day, if the Reichstag Fire hadn’t happened, none of this would be happening.

Oh! My mistake, it seems I mixed up the names of some countries and events there. You’re totally right though, if those people didn’t want to get massacred and starved, they shouldn’t have tried to resist your political project and/or had homes in places you wanted to forcibly seize. You know, this is just like what I’m always saying, “It’s your own fault you got slapped, because you shouldn’t have resisted.” I mean, that’s what leftism is all about, amirite?