Comment by saynsedit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saynsedit | Hacker News Reader

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I sense shades of implication that the effectiveness of MLK's non-violent resistance movement is a convenient docile mythology for the ruling class that ignores the other simultaneous aggressive challenges to the power structure, e.g. BPP, Malcolm X.

That may be so... history is written by the victors.

I do know this: the path to success for any minority movement is the path to becoming accepted by the majority.

A growing violent movement gives a virtually infinitely powerful state legal and moral justification for wiping you out.

A peaceful movement gives the state no justification for stamping it out with force. It must be challenged at an intellectual level.

Sure the current media environment is manipulative... but it's nowhere near as bad as it was in the past. Watch national news from the 60s, you'll see what I'm talking about. Also we have the internet now, every falsehood the media spreads is immediate debunked and it seems they know that.

The truth can't be suppressed forever. As MLK said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."

This is why I think non-violent resistance as a tactic is the best chance any movement has for success when normal legislative channels have failed.

I will politely disagree with your conclusion about modern versus historical media, because I think we could reasonably make an argument that the mechanisms are merely different in their manipulation and not in their scope.

Otherwise, though, I agree that for progress to be made a non-violent movement must be present. Being a violent movement doesn't really work unless you've got outside support against your state.

That said, and to speak to the implications you mention, it is my firm belief that while a violent movement is doomed to fail it still must exist for the non-violent movement to make progress.

If the choice is between listening to the vocal but peaceful minorities and ignoring them, the choice historically is to ignore them. Once the minority's voice is seen as a less-costly alternative to dealing with violence, the state tends to listen.

MLK had Malcolm X. The LGBTQ folks had the Stonewall Riots.

It's a bloody and inefficient way of making policy, but it seems to be the course of things.

I think there is an assumption underlying your belief that non-violent movements need complementary violent ones for state recognition: that non-violent movements can't gain majority acceptance by the population (without needing a complement).

I believe they can, furthermore I believe that the state is unable to ignore a majority non-violent movement. One example is the gay rights movement. Once critical mass is reached and culture is changed, politicians change their tune, and laws practically unwrite themselves.

In the case where a minority non-violent movement necessarily stays just that, then yes I think there is a valid tactical argument to be made in having a complementary movement.

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