> Has more progress been made through
      war/assassinations/violence/riots/protest, or   
      empathy/reasoned appeals?

That's a difficult question, and I'm not sure what the actual empirical answer is. And that's ignoring the obvious deficiency that we need to define progress -- progress to what?

    > it's a matter of wrong.

Most great evils that have been committed in history have been caused by groups thinking that their perceived moral superiority grants them license to act violently against opposition. Be it a witch-hunt, genocide of Native Americans, etc. there is always an element of moral superiority.

This sort of comment is displaying that same kind of attitude, an attitude which is actually dangerous to society. If your side is encouraging violence, and your opposition knows you are encouraging violence, then it is only rational for them to also consider violence and to adopt a first-strike policy. This leads to actual civil war. War is the opposite of progress -- it's the destruction of capital, families, and individual. That's regressive.

The people who oppose these things are not monsters. They have lives as rich and meaningful as your own. They attend church, they donate to charity, they tuck their children into bed at night. They are __not__ some radical fringe minority, hell-bent on imposing an ideology upon the world.

We are all basically decent people. Our democracy is destroyed when one group believes it has a moral license to incite violence to achieve its ends rather than work in the system. When that happens, we have stopped listening.

When we stop listening, we stop learning.