Quoting System of a Down: "Why don't you ask the kids at Tiananmen Square..."
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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Okay but who's the one defining a protest as violent? You get enough people together and you're going to have some aseholes that damage property but are the minority. If chocolate can have 5% bugs, then protests should be able to have 5% violence and still be called peaceful.
Or heck, if people react when police instigate, should that be called a violent protest?
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Is this why the opposition always tries to escalate the peaceful movement into a violent one?
That, and so they have an excuse to incarcerate or kill the leadership, see: Haymarket 7, Joe Hill, &c
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I honestly cant recall seeing any peaceful protest accomplishing anything of significance in my lifetime. Most successful protests I hear about are the French lighting up Paris when they try to raise the retirement age. They just try again 2 years later though.
The cries for violence here are quite disgusting. I understand our American friends are frustrated, but violence is only going to get you killed. The police in the US have been receiving military gear for decades now. If you want violence, you will get it.
Then there are some major misconceptions about the 3.5% rule. That is for persistent non-violent protests. Week in, week out, for months at a time, before this yields results. Violent protests drive away many of the people you need on board to achieve genuine change and make it exponentially harder to get to your 3.5%. Try getting a grandma or a family with kids to join when molotov cocktails are being thrown around.
So for everyone here calling for violence, you are idiots and you won't achieve a damn thing.
One thing I love about the protests is seeing the little children and grandmothers marching side by side with my extraordinarily angry ass. Yeah I have to moderate my language a little, but I feel much less alone seeing a multi-generational sea of people standing with me.
you're the bigger idiot if you think non-violence works against fascists, and you'll achieve even less (unless you count the deaths of innocents that are on your hands, coward)
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600k Australians protested against the Iraq war in 2003.
The population was about 20m so 3.5% of that is 700k. So if another 100k had joined then the protest would have succeeded?
No, if another 100k Australians had come out and then kept protesting day in day out for weeks/months they would have got the aus government to back down and not support the war.
STOP SPREADING THIS FUCKING LIE.
KING JUNIOR WAS DISLIKED DURING HIS NONVIOLENCE PROTEST.
IT IS PRECISELY VIOLENCE THAT THE STATE ENACTS THAT LEAD TO TRUMP’S REELECTION.
IF YOU WANT CHANGE, BE MORE UNGOVERNABLE THAN MAGA.
Keep Goodhart's law in mind:
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
I have never known a North American protest to succeed at anything in my lifetime.
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It's also important to remember that non-violence serves the interest of entrenched power. The state is at its core a violence-control structure. When people excersize the power of violence in their own interests, the state must reassert it's dominion or risk collapse.
Non-violent requests can be accommodated without elites feeling like their ill-gotten power is threatened. But it's often the violent demands that scare them into doing so.
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