The purpose of protesting is to demonstrate the need for violence to the fence-sitters. If protesting results in change non-violently, so much the better. But the purpose is to demonstrate that violence is absolutely necessary.
You believe that MLK and Gandhi were really in it for the violence?
Furthermore, in other cases, people don't have to realize the purpose of the strategy that they're applying in order to apply it. Intention isn't function.
If he was in the USSR or Nazi Germany he would have been quietly murdered one night.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-35-milli...
Granted even that is deeply evil, but it doesn't mean that they would wipe out any given people group that they conquered.
On top of Generalplan Ost the holocaust had 12 million victims, 5 million of whom were Slavs. The only reason why they aren't counted as genocide victims in the West is because it was not convenient to admit that during the cold war.
As a percentage of the population of the time it would have been similar to the British gassing 17 million Indians after starving another 45 million. And that would have been in three years of occupation, not a century and a half.
So yes, India was incredibly lucky to have the UK as their colonial overlord.
Or if their opponents weren't willing to ramp violence up enough. The thing about Gandhi in particular is that he is famous precisely because he won. How many like him were there that didn't win, and we have no idea that they even existed, because their body was dumped into a ditch behind a prison tucked away in the middle of nowhere?
And sometimes we do know about them, because they did survive to tell the story - but it's not a very inspiring story when they lose, and so it gets eclipsed. This guy was a Gandhi to his people before Gandhi was even born: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunta-haji - how many have heard of him?
As an aside, if you haven't read it I highly recommend it. I think it's an excellent example of arguing that a position is consistent with people's existing worldview instead of trying to force them to adopt a different worldview.
Protests are a basic right in every democracy. The vast majority of protests (as in: >99%) is peaceful.
Protests are among the basic set of methods and institutions that form the public sphere where democracy actually happens. They are no better or worse than newspapers, public libraries, TED talks, Trump rallies, call-your-senator-campaigns, Twitter, Sunday sermons, bumper stickers, the NAACP, triple-A, or, yes, even the Star Wars franchise.
Each of these forums has different strengths and weaknesses, and protests are somewhat unique in being basically free and accessible to everyone (as active participants, not just consumers). Not a single protest since the Civil Rights Movement got anywhere close to being large enough to threaten the sort of overthrow-the-system violence that would be required in an outright confrontation challenging the US government.
(I include Vietnam War protests as meeting the threshold).
Outside the US? The Arab Spring was nothing but protests, and it did topple something like a dozen governments. Yes, the new ones mostly failed, but that's a different matter.
In Ukraine the protests succeeded. In Hong Kong, they certainly seem to be a major pain for the local government as well as China.
Environmental protests have succeeded almost spectacularly over the last decade or so. Germany's anti-nuclear movement relied on protests as their main method-the Green party was actually founded by a group of people who first met at a protest. Today, Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future and similar keep climate change in the news week by week. That's the sort of pressure without which the Paris accord would have never been attempted.
Compare any agenda from a G7/G8/G20 meeting a decade or two ago, and you'll notice that issues such as the environment, labor protection, or fair trade have gone from zero to dominating these meetings.
The US-EU trade agreement basically died on the day that half a million people in Berlin protested against it.
Obviously, it is often impossible to unambiguously assign causality. It's a complex system where everything affects everything.
But purely subjectively, I am actually surprised by how effective protests are. Consider Ukraine, where a single protest at a central square toppled the government. In practical terms. a Tiannanmen-style massacre was entirely possible. But the protesters won. Why? How?
I think a more correct way to put it/think about it is: protesting is a threat, not a statement that "violence is absolutely necessary". If violence were absolutely necessary, then they'd all just skip the protesting and do the violence.
Seems like they often exist to expose systemic violence that is underappreciated, undocumented, forgotten, etc. That is, show what the violent are really willing to do to get them to alienate themselves.
It’s the threat of reprisal from the entire population that does that.
While some regimes get overthrown by mass uprisings, many more lose power because they either lose support from the security state or create an insurrection inside of it. Of course the lines here are often fuzzy.