I feel like you may have misunderstood what I was trying to say with shorthand. A previous comment I made (which you may have already seen) might help elaborate:
Violence works, otherwise there wouldn’t be any. We’ve put up a whole system of laws and police and investigators and courts and prisons in order to provide an alternative to violence. And even then, that system is itself backed up with a real threat of violence as well as its occasional localized deployment.
Yesterday’s “pep rally” where none of the military leaders dragged in had anything good to say about it suggests that there is not the overwhelming military support that Trump wants there to be. There are plenty of examples of far less powerful local forces successfully standing up to superpowers. Afghanistan is one. Wallachia is another.
When the entire federal government and many state governments have wholly abandoned the systems put together to avoid violence, and are in fact using the husks of those systems to apply violence to their opponents, we’ve already crossed the Rubicon.
Go walk up to a cop and explain to them that if they don’t start serving the people then you and the people are armed and going to stand up. … I can’t think of a funny way to explain that you won’t have any teeth and won’t ever be able to come back to explain how poorly that went. But THAT is “violence” in action. They just have a lot more than you do.
As for your comment about how people should stand up: Sure, there are examples of that working. There are also plenty of examples of that being met with mass executions.
It says a lot that nobody could be quite sure if the “we aren’t going to prosecute rape anymore” rally was actually going to be another 1979 Ba’ath Party Purge where all the people who had previously stood up to saddam (or might have done so in the future) were literally rounded up to be executed.
Again, resistance and violence are tools. People need to understand the consequences of that and the odds of it ending in anything other than mass executions.
In order to succeed, you must have the capability and the will. A necessary part of capability is sufficient strength. That strength can come from numbers.
Once enough people are desperate enough, and realize that they have the numbers, and by extension the capability, the will is not far behind.
Of course there are consequences to standing up to fascism. The consequences of not standing up to fascism are worse. Unfortunately, we’re all going to have to suffer those worse consequences in order for the population to choose the lesser consequences of revolution.
In the meantime, the fascists grow stronger, largely because of their forced abandonment of facts. Full circle then: Until there is no alternative to armed conflict (and maybe even then), feeding the post-truth paradigm only strengthens fascism. This will ultimately forestall revolution, and make it harder for revolution to succeed. It’s already going to get worse before it gets better; being loosey-goosey on facts will only make it that much worse for that much longer.
I feel like you may have misunderstood what I was trying to say with shorthand. A previous comment I made (which you may have already seen) might help elaborate:
Yes, violence works.
Go walk up to a cop and explain to them that if they don’t start serving the people then you and the people are armed and going to stand up. … I can’t think of a funny way to explain that you won’t have any teeth and won’t ever be able to come back to explain how poorly that went. But THAT is “violence” in action. They just have a lot more than you do.
As for your comment about how people should stand up: Sure, there are examples of that working. There are also plenty of examples of that being met with mass executions.
It says a lot that nobody could be quite sure if the “we aren’t going to prosecute rape anymore” rally was actually going to be another 1979 Ba’ath Party Purge where all the people who had previously stood up to saddam (or might have done so in the future) were literally rounded up to be executed.
Again, resistance and violence are tools. People need to understand the consequences of that and the odds of it ending in anything other than mass executions.
In order to succeed, you must have the capability and the will. A necessary part of capability is sufficient strength. That strength can come from numbers.
Once enough people are desperate enough, and realize that they have the numbers, and by extension the capability, the will is not far behind.
Of course there are consequences to standing up to fascism. The consequences of not standing up to fascism are worse. Unfortunately, we’re all going to have to suffer those worse consequences in order for the population to choose the lesser consequences of revolution.
In the meantime, the fascists grow stronger, largely because of their forced abandonment of facts. Full circle then: Until there is no alternative to armed conflict (and maybe even then), feeding the post-truth paradigm only strengthens fascism. This will ultimately forestall revolution, and make it harder for revolution to succeed. It’s already going to get worse before it gets better; being loosey-goosey on facts will only make it that much worse for that much longer.