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Comment by gruseom | Hacker News Reader

Gandhi's techniques aren't really generalizable to anything else

People frequently say this (right down to the cliché about how lucky he was to be facing the British), but it's obviously untrue. Gandhi's great insight was that nonviolent resistance is more effective than violent resistance. He is increasingly being proven correct. (Popular movements pretty much instantly lose their legitimacy when they turn violent.) That some authorities massacre people doesn't refute it.

Let's not forget that Gandhi's techniques were considered ridiculous and guaranteed to lose by most people at the time. It was only once he won that the "obvious" position had to be revised to "well of course it worked in that situation, but..."

Gandhi didn't invent these ideas but he demonstrated their practicality in a shockingly counterintuitive way. If his techniques truly weren't generalizable to anything else, they wouldn't have worked for him either.

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It requires an opponent who is capable of being shamed.

Hitler wasn't shameable, nor Stalin. America wasn't in fighting the native tribes in the 19th century, or the Philippines at the turn of the 20th. The Japanese at Nanking and elsewhere. The Ottoman Empire in Armenia (a matter Turkey to this day will not acknowledge or discuss), in Greece, in Assyria, and Kurdistan following WWI. China in Tibet. Britain/Australia and the aboriginal populations.

Guatamala (1968-96). Pakistan (1971). Burundi (1972 & 1993). North Korea. Equatorial Guinea. Indonesian in East Timor. Agentina (1976-1983). Rwanda. Cambodia.

Nonviolence is a tool. It's not the only tool. It is frequently, but not always, disproportionately successful.

Nonviolence is a simple idea. It works when majority of people stop working, enough to cause loss to a company or the ruling party. It requires that the ruling party gains it power from the working class, which was the case in British ruled India and similarly in Iran.

It will fail if one nation is attacking another. It would have worked against Hitler if the German people had revolted (I guess they did not because they believed in Hitler's ideas, few minority that did not could be got rid off). Nonviolence would not have worked if British people used it against Hitler.

Being shameable is not necessary (but is helpful). For example, the occupy movement in America, even though nonviolent is not successful because the companies (or the top 1%) are not losing anything. There is not enough critical mass to the movement to affect the profits (enough that they take notice).

This is wrong. Nonviolence on its own doesn't work at all. Gandhi would have been forgotten by now if people like Bhagat Singh hadn't been making enough trouble to cause the venture to not be worth the cost. Martin Luther King would have failed had the black panthers not been effective with their violence (e.g. "the bomb blast heard 'round the world" mentioned in a King speech). Peaceful resistance probably was tried in Germany, but the Nazis had a habit of disappearing people who didn't toe the party line. You honestly believe the majority of people in Germany thought Hitler was wrong? It was dangerous to disagree.

I don't think Nonvioence and Game Theory play nice together. Nonviolence as a complete solution strikes me as an idea that we really want to believe but isn't actually true. There are many things in this world that are bad and I would like to see changed. I'd love to be able to just be nonviolent and cause it to change but I don't think history is very kind to this fantasy.

>Gandhi's great insight was that nonviolent resistance is more effective than violent resistance. He is increasingly being proven correct.

Citations? He wasn't even proven correct in India! It was people like Bhagat Singh who finally convinced Britian that it just wasn't worth the trouble. Do you honestly think Gandhi's peaceful protests did anything? If you had some land that you were exploiting for great profit and the only thing between you and more riches was Ghandi would you stop? Of course not, he's no threat to anything. His "great insight" guarantees he never will be. The only thing that could be problematic would be if a majority of the people you need to exploit started doing the same thing, but game theory tells us this probably won't be the case. Just shoot a Ghandi or two and most people will go back to the factories/fields.

I know of no country gaining independence or changing their government without violence or the threat of violence. Of course Britain wants to claim that Ghandi had something to do with it. Hopefully next time people will be stupid enough to believe it, only resist peacefully and we can just ignore them.

> Let's not forget that Gandhi's techniques were considered ridiculous and guaranteed to lose by most people at the time. It was only once he won that the "obvious" position had to be revised to "well of course it worked in that situation, but..."

  1. First they ignore you.
  2. Then they laugh at you.
  3. Then you free India from them.

Hmm. You never claim that Gandhi said that, so now my pointing out that the quote actually comes from a garment union worker in 1914 and has no connection to Gandhi (other than how apropos it is) sounds even more pedantic than usual. Cunning bastard :)

I think you're confusing what you'd like to be true with what actually is true.

>Gandhi's great insight was that nonviolent resistance is more effective than violent resistance.

Except: that isn't true. Or rather, it's true only in certain circumstances.

>Popular movements pretty much instantly lose their legitimacy when they turn violent

Perhaps, but "legitimacy" and three bucks will get you a cup of coffee. Power accumulates in the hands of whoever controls large numbers of men with guns.

>That some authorities massacre people doesn't refute it.

Actually it pretty much does. In the contest between a nonviolent movement with "legitimacy" and a violent authority without it, the violent authority wins every time.

The few times that nonviolent movements have succeeded, they have done so against a tired power that was pretty much in the process of withdrawing anyway -- the Soviet Union circa 1990 and Great Britain circa 1950.

Of course I don't mean that nonviolence beats violence every time (edit: though in fairness I do see what sounded like that). That would be magic fairy dust. The point about Gandhi is that what he did worked at all.

Power accumulates in the hands of whoever controls large numbers of men with guns.

If you're right, why would the military take Sharp seriously, as the article says they do? Don't they have all the guns?

The few times that nonviolent movements have succeeded, they have done so against a tired power

That smells like hindsight bias to me: if it works, the regime must have been "tired".

Well I personally contend that it's never worked at all. Do you have any specific examples?

Given that you credit Martin Luther King's success not to nonviolence but to the Black Panthers, who didn't even exist until 1966, I believe no example will convince you.

This is one of the low points of a thread with a lot of low points. I regret posting the article. It was borderline to begin with (political, but intellectually interesting), but the toxicity of the discussion it immediately gave rise to shows that I made the wrong call. It's not just that it's toxic, it's atypically toxic – significantly more malignant than usual. HN has enough local species of weeds to tend to; this is like an ecological invasion (or would be if it got out of hand).

Edit: a more positive spin is that this is a good limit case showing that the guidelines are about right.

I was quoting from memory. So it wasn't the Black Panthers but there was targeted violence going on. Of course if you're going to give in you want to give credit to someone like Martin Luther King so hopefully in future people will imagine that non-violence works and you can be safe to ignore them.

It was certainly wrong of you to try and forward the propaganda machine of claiming the nonviolence on its own is an effective mechanism against dictatorships. None of us want violence, but many of us don't want lies either.

I'm very glad you posted it, as I don't know if I would have heard of Gene Sharp any other way.

The fractiousness of the discussion is unfortunate, but nobody has to read it.

Thanks for saying so. I'm glad I peeked back in here and saw it. Yes, Sharp is genuinely interesting.

Power accumulates first in the hands of the people who make the guns and the bullets, who package them, ship them, write the accounting software, process the orders, pack the trucks, etc.

The only real violence we should worry about is the every day violence that is used against these people ( mainly the threat of starvation, unemployment, poverty ) if they don't do their jobs. And that violence is surprisingly effective considering that violence changes the world by making it every day, and remaking it, over, and over, and over. Making people choose to get out of bed before 8am instead of sleeping in and making love and eating pancakes. Over and over and over.

Any one who talks about revolution without talking about first about every day life has a corpse in their mouth. Debates about violence and non-violence represent a decision that represents maybe 0.0005% of the experience of human beings.

There are so many more interesting, probably 100x more revolutionary decisions one could make, where this debate isn't even relevant.

Should one work on optimizing life for the sustainability of multiple concurrent romantic relationships instead of for the stability and predictability of a mortgage payment? If so, how? What effects would this have on the economic and military stability of a country?

Want to topple a regime? Make its subjects fall in love and want to bone more than they want to go to work.

Start by writing an app for that.

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