And of course it was Hitler who started WWII. It was a failure.
India’s independence was not simply about Gandhi weaving his trousers with homepsun.
There was violence, and if war is failure, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have not been particularly peaceful.
MLK works because blacks had shown they weren’t going to take it. So the threat of vioence was present.
Besides reasons already mentioned, there’s the question of emotional satisfaction. People want to smash their enemies; we are wired that way. Even in situations where Gandhi/MLK Jr style tactics are actually a good idea, or even plain old negotiations, many people won’t want to deal with their problems that way. Even if the violent methods are doomed to failure, and the non-violent methods are more likely to work.
As for the claims that such tactics depend on your enemies being nice, I don’t think that’s quite true. They depend more on your enemies wanting to think of themselves as nice, or wanting to look nice. Regardless of whether or not they are; the British certainly were not, nor were the pro-segregationists in America. Push someone like that into striking the first blow, and you make them feel bad or look bad as the case may be. Gandhi/MLK Jr style tactics worked where and when they did because they struck at the self image and public image of people who cared about those things.
It won’t work on people like the Nazis for the simply reason that they were not only ruthless and bloodthirsty, but liked other people to look at them as being ruthless and bloodthirsty. Using such tactics against people like the Nazis is like trying to drive away a salesman by buying things.
A peaceful demonstration will get you stompped by the authorities nowadays. They will hurt you and jail you. They have invented gadgets to inflict pain on demonstrators. Wooden bullets,tasers etal.
I wonder why cops so gleefully protect the interests of the wealthy when they should identify with many of the people in demonstrations. But they do go after demonstrators with malice.
Hmmm… his principles are not precisely the same as Gandhi’s and King’s, but I can think of one living (albeit quite old) man who was a major contributor to a change from social injustice to social justice in his home country, whose pre-reform ideology was founded on unjust principles. Specifically,the Most Rev. Desmond Tutu, retired Archbishop of Cape Town.
And what this proves to me (along with the opposition to Hitler brought up earlier) is that whether your home country is restrained or not is not the primary issue; it’s whether the [o]world* is prepared to support your quest for justice.
Temporary? Tell it to the Carthaginians.
To begin with, you ignore the basic fact of life that every solution to every problem creates new problems.
The independance of British India which Gandhi fought for led to it’s partition into two, later three, religiously-segregated states. This caused great bloodshed at the time, and led directly to the situation we have now, which is two nuclear-armed states with border disputes. Indeed, muslim Pakistan, which was an integrated part of British India, is now increasingly headed toward becoming a fundamentalist Muslim state, one at real risk of intentionally-or-not slipping nuclear arms to terrorist groups. By the logic you have displayed in this thread, then, it is Ghandi’s fault for unleashing a “dark night of chaos and revenge for later generations.”
More basically, however, you ignore the fact that Ghandi and King themselves said their tactics would not be effective against all oppressors.
To be fair, “effectiveness” was not really the goal for Gandhi. This was, after all, the guy who said that the best way to resist an invasion by fascist Japan was to make them feel unwelcome, and that the Jews should have happily accepted their fate under Hitler.
If that’s the kind of world you wanna live in … well, you go first.
I think I’m going to demand a cite on the idea that that “the authorities” will start a violent reaction to a peaceful demonstration. They happen by the hundreds every year, in every city and town, and rarely is there any trouble. Sure, it’s happened in the past, but the tasers and RUBBER bullets aren’t really any more effective than billy clubs.
Tom Clancy of all people pointed out a group that missed a trick by not choosing peaceful demonstrations: the Palestinians. Israel is a democratic country which is dependant on foreign support and the Palestinians have at least a semblance of a valid cause - it’s a tailor-made situation for Gandhian tactics. But the Palestinians choose to fight with rocks and suicide bombs which gives the Israeli government justification to use force to suppress them. If instead the Palestinians just started holding sitdown strikes and praying, Israel would be faced with the dilemma of either letting them demonstrate or using force against non-violent people.
What would be your point? The fact that some poeple sometimes do stupid things does not mean that this is routine or usual. In fact, it’s highly unusual, and the protesters are probably more likely to initiate violence than anyone else. Likewise, the police here didn’t just grab their gear and start huring people, although your total lack of information-sharing said zip.
But as I guessed you would, you don’t have an argument. You have an anecdote. And not a very good one.
Wood bullets. They can cause very serious damage.
I am an old peace marcher and have been been at demonstrations where the police were going crazy beating the long hair hippies.
http://www.nowpublic.com/los_angeles_police_savage_demonstrators I could do this all day. It is a fact that the cops go way overboard with violence. Then they say "someone threw a bottle’. We all knew better than to do that and we made sure noone would give them an excuse.
Worked for Vietnam.
As for this whole turn the other cheek thing, let’s think of another example. The World Trade Towers have fallen into dust and scattered steel bars. Unknown thousands are dead. Bush comes on TV and says he will work very hard with the Afghanistan government to extradite Osama bin Laden and his supporters to the International Criminal Court for their crimes. No military action will be undertaken since, as Bush puts it, “it is not our right to compound one tragedy with another.”
Sounds good to me. But I think the American people would have something else to say. Raytheon too.
Worked for Vietnam.
As for this whole turn the other cheek thing, let’s think of another example. The World Trade Towers have fallen into dust and scattered steel bars. Unknown thousands are dead. Bush comes on TV and says he will work very hard with the Afghanistan government to extradite Osama bin Laden and his supporters to the International Criminal Court for their crimes. No military action will be undertaken since, as our hypothetical pacifist Bush puts it, “it is not our right to compound one tragedy with another.”
Sounds good to me. But I think the American people would have something else to say. Raytheon too.
Personally, I think that Martin Luther King’s peaceful approach was, to some extent, the wrong one for this country. “You can sit in the same seats on the bus, so long as you’re peaceful.” “We’ll make colleges accept you even if you’re not the best, but only if you play nice.” But if you really want to be taken as an equal in the real world you have to get out and kick butt, try to succeed, and make people take notice of you. White America doesn’t value peacefulness once you’re talking about upper mobility, which is what Black America has had a hard time getting.
I think that Malcolm X’s more in-your-face, I’m-gonna-make-my-own-way sort of outlook on life, had it not been shut down and slammed by the popular media, would have been a better role-model for youth after the end of segregation. We-have-to-be-nice-and-sociable, instead, seems to me to have led to a lack of leadership and individual determination to out-perform your peers.
Just to be conflated by Affirmative Action…
I disagree. Martin Luther King’s message was that all people should be equal. And this was combined with a recognition that black people were not being given equal opportunities. When everyone has an equal chance to compete, they can do so as individuals.
Malcolm X’s message was “it’s us vs them” which I always said is a losing plan for black people in America. There are more white people than black people in this country. If it becomes a competition between white and black, black will lose.
Karl Marx’s message was that all people should be equal as well. Jesus’ message was that everyone should be happy tilling the soil and that caring about money would end us all up in hell. While as in real life, the instant that people decided that it was alright to charge interest on loans, inventors popped up left and right, invented the cotton wheel, slavery ended, and a hundred and fifty years later I can order pizza online and have never once felt the need to kill an infidel.
If you look at game theory (specifically, the Prisoner’s Dilemma), being a bully is a bad thing, but so is laying down when someone is being a bully to you. Overall, kind and forgiving in the long-run but punishing wrongs when they happen is what gets you to the best outcome.
Malcolm X might have been deliberately taunting White America, which is admittedly bullyish, but he was at least closer to this model. So long as people were fair with him, he was fair back. If they were a jerk, he’d raise a ruckus and make sure everyone knew the person was a jerk. Now I’ll admit that I’m basing this view on Spike Lee’s movie–the real Malcolm X might have had guys out with bats, smashing heads, for all I know–but the movie X looked like he was trying to be a reasonable guy but one who couldn’t be pushed over, and nothing more. That to me seems like a much better rolemodel for success.
So let me guess, you base your impression of Gandhi on the movie by the same name? Well that settles it you are an expert…
Indeed, one should never consider the possible pros and cons of a strategy in life if the source is fiction or speculative. There’s nothing to be learned by the musings of intelligent people, just double-checked and factual historical accounts. throws away Sun Tzu’s The Art of War :dubious: