Once there's violence targeting you, the solution is to bring real weapons and resolve it using ordinary military tactics, that is, you kill the operator.
That sounds bold and exciting, but it's clearly false and terrible advice.
Violence, like warfare, is politics by other means. Every expert knows that law of warfare - the first law of warfare, in a sense - that it ends when and only when there is political agreement. Even in warfare, violence just buys time and changes your political position.
In countries with rule-of-law, you can use the political / legal system to stop the violence and hold accountable the perpetrators. In countries without, the only solution is political.
It's also well-established that non-violence and other tactics can be quite effective. While if you attack back and injure others, your credibility and legality is gone - nobody will listen to you or pay much attention to 'they started it' (which the other side will dispute anyway).
Once there's violence targeting you, the politics is over and a different kind of problem solving begins.
If someone has attacked you and there has been no apology or attempt to solve the situation, he must be eliminated. Once he's done it, he may well try again, in which case you might die. Better then to get rid of him.
I don't really agree that it's necessarily a continuation of politics. It's an interpretation of things from Clausewitz. It's to some degree a great interpretation, explaining certain aspects of warfare, but you choose the role that your violence plays. You can make it an extension of politics, you can make it simple self-defence, purely a matter of destroying your enemies.
>Really? If someone assaaults you, you must "eliminate" them? That is bizarre, extreme, dangerous behavior.
If the government or other powerful entities target you specifically, yes, you have to get rid of them.
> You can make it an extension of politics, you can make it simple self-defence, purely a matter of destroying your enemies.
You still don't understand.
> If the government or other powerful entities target you specifically, yes, you have to get rid of them.
Changing the government is politics; you are just accomplishing it through other means - violence.
You are going to "get rid" of the government through violence? When has that happened? And what are the results? Politics enables people to change governments regularly, and with much better results.
My perception is that it's an ideology of violence. People just want to advocate violence - like anyone else who wants to feel like a rebel against the status quo. Maybe find something bad to upend, rather than peace. If you can choose violence, so can other people, so can the next people who don't like you - it's not a good outcome for society or for you or your descendents.
You choose to interpret it as politics. But you can make decisions from many points of view, even a view of pure self-defence.
If somebody is engaging in pure self-defence it is a misframing to think of as political.
If you believed that it were political, then you could imagine compromises, coalitions etc. that could end it, but if it's pure self-defence then it will end when the threat is gone, and agreements etc. will be irrelevant.
Even in warfare, what dictate the end of it is politics, most war stop because of that, killing yourself just because "gun go brrr" in a democratic country is stupid, and probably is going to back fire, no one normal like people shooting each other for nothing and putting innocents in risk
>And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrest, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood that they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. What about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur – what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs [Soviet state institutions] would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
If…if… We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! … We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have....
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose."
— Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
This an idealized version of revolution and assumes elections are available and respected... There's rarely no violence during the fall of authoritarian regimes, even the most famous version of non-violent protest succeeding in India included a lot of fighting by Indian nationalists that pushed Britain to withdraw.
I'm not talking about revolution, but about all violent conflict. It's an actual, universal principle of violent conflict, and of warfare in particular. I didn't say there was no violence, I said violence is politics using a different means, and is only settled by politics.
He still right, nonviolent means are effective, go ahead start shooting each other in front of a school because "violence is the only mean" and see how many support you
Who are you to say? What if someone else disagrees, as they likely do? Should any one person have the authority to kill another? Maybe that's why someone is attacking you (in the hypothetical scenario).
Every reasonable person agrees with me. It’s obvious. Would you ever write a unit test to assert true is true? Sometimes you can just look at the problem and the right answer is so clear that everyone knows it
It's exactly the opposite - you're spending too much time in the violent-ideology bubble.
Most of the world is law-abiding, avoids violence, and calls the police. Until recently in the US it was almost universal, afaik, that self-defense was the limit of legal violence, and you had a 'duty to retreat' if violence could be avoided. Only recently has the right wing passed 'castle doctrine' laws there. In other countries, people don't buy guns with the idea of meeting violence with violence; in the US, at least until recently, most people didn't have guns.
"Attack is the best form of defence" is a well-grounded doctrine, but it's not mutually exclusive with protecting yourself. Armies use armoured vehicles even though armour-piercing shells exist, for example.
It's also not always necessary; actively using force against the authorities would essentially be the start of a civil war, and personally I don't think starting a civil war is more likely to result in change than peaceful protest. For instance, Serbia is to some extent reliant on the EU, and has expressed an interest in joining. That should force the current government to reconsider and crack down on corruption much better than an attempted coup would.
Full disclosure: I have never been to Serbia and this is just my personal feeling. But for expressly peaceful protests to seamlessly turn into a full-blown revolution, and a successful one at that, seems incredibly unlikely to me.
I fully support targeted use of violence against oppressors and aggressors but it needs to be said that materialized (as opposed to threatened/implied) violence only works if you are able to deliver sufficient amounts of it.
Up until that point you need to paint yourself as the victim (the just/right/good side) to get more support to deliver more violence later what the time comes to materialize it.
Premature materialization leads to the oppressor/aggressor painting _himself_ as the victim and you as the aggressor. And because most people are uninformed, not terribly intelligent and conditioned to prefer peace over justice, they are more likely to take his side.
Yes, but you probably only need something like a 1000 men to get something like Mariupol. That of course does require all of them to be ridiculously resilient, but I think you can learn that.x
You're really up and down these comments advocating the start of another war in the Balkans, aren't you? How did that work out last time, and the time before that?
Think of it like this instead: if those who run countries or otherwise have power over people know that they if they attack people risk a proper response, then all such people who are sensible will refrain from violence.
If things get too out of hand there's always the possibility of calling an election.
Yes, but presumably dealing with just a couple of systems like this has to be a quick matter. These things are probably off right now, so it's just a matter of finding them, shooting the people guarding them and either destroying or taking them.
Violence, like warfare, is politics by other means. Every expert knows that law of warfare - the first law of warfare, in a sense - that it ends when and only when there is political agreement. Even in warfare, violence just buys time and changes your political position.
In countries with rule-of-law, you can use the political / legal system to stop the violence and hold accountable the perpetrators. In countries without, the only solution is political.
It's also well-established that non-violence and other tactics can be quite effective. While if you attack back and injure others, your credibility and legality is gone - nobody will listen to you or pay much attention to 'they started it' (which the other side will dispute anyway).