Hacker News Reader

Comment by planetguy | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com