[philwelch]

The idea that brutal, evil tactics don't actually work is something we may certainly like to believe or want to be true, but that doesn't make it true.

Part of human nature is the near-universal paradoxical behavior of digging one's own grave at gunpoint. It is breathtakingly easy to subjugate people through brute force. In 1860, there were large stretches of the American South where the majority of the population were enslaved. How do you think that order was maintained? How do you think the SS--an organization that at no point had as many as a million men--was able to murder tens of millions of people in the Holocaust (of which the well-known six million Jews were, at most, slightly more than half)?

Neither of these subjugations were stopped by the valiant resistance of oppressed people inspired by the unquenchable thirst for human freedom--they were stopped by some other group applying even more brute force to the oppressors for largely unrelated reasons.