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Comment by pling | Hacker News Reader

I think a non-violent approach is unrealistic. History tells us that tables only turn when soldiers refuse to shoot citizens on order of the government and turn the guns back against them.

The best interim approach is to destroy all means of facilitating the dictatorship. In this case that means destroying the tools by which we work, destroying the banks, the commerce regimes and the communication and logistic platforms muck like the Russians did when they pulled out of the Eastern Bloc. No one has to be hurt to do that but people will go hungry, jobless and penniless. This will however open their eyes to the situation.

I'm not advocating this as a solution nor would act upon it but I'm without a better option in my mind.

Edit: to the down voters. This is not reddit. Don't down vote because you disagree, down vote because it's not relevant. This is relevant discussion.

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It has been shown (for example in Altemeyer's research on authoritarianism) that violence increases authoritarian tendencies among population, while violent attacks against nonviolence decrease those tendencies.

This is where American Founding Fathers got it wrong, with the 2nd amendment. The reason why soldiers refuse to shoot against citizens is because they are unarmed and have moral upper hand. Once that happens, the powerful people have to give up, because they themselves can only rely on other people to stay in power.

>This is where American Founding Fathers got it wrong

They got it right in 1776-1783 when they put their lives on the line, and fought for their independence. Britain never would have "given up" their North American colonies peacefully.

Except for the part where they did. In the Statute of Westminster, 1931. And we do not know how a non-violence independence movement would have gone.

What made the American Revolution succeed through violence were the facts that (1) it was a war of attrition against a foreign, remote power, and (2) it was bolstered by another foreign, rival remote power. Due to its far-flung nature, it cost British Empire a LOT of money to keep the war effort going, and moreover at a time when they were hurting for cash (since this was just after the Seven Year's War with France). The Americans and French were able to make it too costly for Britain to continue to hold on to the colonies.

Britain also tried to take America back in the War of 1812, but was again thwarted by the costs of maintaining a war abroad (and the war had come to a stalemate by 1814).

Unlike most revolutions we see today (which are revolutions at home, and become civil wars if they turn violent), the American Revolution succeeded through violence because it was against a foreign adversary and because the Americans were able to make it too costly for Britain to maintain their war effort. These preconditions do not apply to local revolutions, where no side has an economic incentive to stop fighting until the other sides are crushed. Each factions' lives are on the line, largely eliminating the cost consideration. It's not like King George III or the members of Parliament were in danger of losing their lives, families, and lands if the Americans won.

> "This is where American Founding Fathers got it wrong, with the 2nd amendment. The reason why soldiers refuse to shoot against citizens is because they are unarmed and have moral upper hand."

This is a cute theory, but history provides countless examples of soldiers not refusing orders and shooting unarmed citizens. It's been happening in the Middle East for the past few years. It happened prior to the American Revolution (events such as the Boston Massacre likely contributed to the 2nd Amendment). And it will happen again over and over again.

Soldiers have several things to weigh when contemplating orders to fire on fellow citizens. The "moral upper hand" is one of them, but history has shown it's often not the strongest motivator. The 2nd Amendment is an amendment firmly grounded in reality and written by people who had seen government at its worst. Americans have lived in a relatively peaceful country for a long time and have largely learned to love Big Brother by now, so they are more worried about the 1/1e12 chance of a terrorist attack than the chance of their own government oppressing and spying on them. The 2nd Amendment establishes a firm deterrent that, in the limit, discourages how far and how fast the government can exercise its various forms of abuse.

I think (and I implied) that non-violence is a necessary, not sufficient condition for non-shooting.

And I haven't frankly seen much evidence that 2nd amendment is effective deterrent. First, it's a bit of a fantasy - in the U.S., you hardly see gun owners among the revolutionaries. For a good reason - it's a bit naive to expect people go with handguns against tanks or drones. And U.S. government seems pretty oppressive compared to many countries which don't have equivalent of 2nd amendment.

Second, most people consider violent revolutionaries to be terrorists (e.g. compare how we view Unabomber and Martin Luther King), which actually supports the theory. The same is actually true in islamic countries - for example here: http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/07/01/concerns-about-islamic-e...

The United States was certain the Muslim world would "open its eyes" to Western style democracy if only we overthrew their governments and destroyed their infrastructure and just kept killing whoever disagreed with us until we were welcomed as liberators with flowers in the streets. It didn't work, though maybe we just need to keep killing until it does?

I think it's irrational, albeit probably a common bias in revolutionary thinkers, to assume that the likely result of such violence will be the people viewing you as their liberator rather than their oppressor. Which is of course why such revolutions typically require purges and secret police, and spawn violent counter-revolutions of their own. I don't see how one form of oppression is better than the other.

> Don't down vote because you disagree, down vote because it's not relevant. This is relevant discussion.

Upvoted to compensate even though I don't agree with your opinion as being the best interim approach. As you said, downvotes are for irrelevance, not for disagreement.

Surely, if you push people to the point of starvation they'll grab arms and force change. But I'm not so sure that in the end this will bring a liberal democracy, rather than another dictator taking over and fixing things short-term.

downvotes are for irrelevance, not for disagreement

The site founder has said otherwise on more than one occasion. About 2341 days ago he wrote,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

"It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that."

Downvotes are, of course, especially appropriate when a comment is BOTH uninformative in the context of the discussion and uncivil besides. I'm happy to upvote comments I disagree with (as a factual matter) if those comments prompt me to think about an issue I haven't thought about before, or if the comment contributes to the discussion being more nuanced in other ways. But there appears STILL to be no general rule in the Hacker News Guidelines[1] prohibiting downvoting to express disagreement. Submissions of course cannot be downvoted by anyone (they can be flagged) and no submitter or commenter can downvote child comments to what they have just posted. It's the overall sense of onlookers that determines net karma of a comment.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Whatever they're for, I think downvoting for a comment should only become available after replying to the offending comment.

Downvoted you before replying.

I might even agree with you, but in the context of the thread, I'm afraid if I don't exercise my downvote, I might lose it.

> people will go hungry, jobless and penniless.

This is why you are being downvoted. It seems unlikely you have kids, but you must have parents and grandparents. Are you willing to see them suffer for your anarchist pipe dreams? If you are then how are you any better than the privacy violators?

I have three children so your assertion is incorrect.

If it means that the world is a better place afterwards for them, some hardship for us all is not a bad thing. That includes me and my family. It's not an anarchist pipe dream. It happens when the government sends your country to war as well don't forget.

I talk to a lot of people from the rather war-torn bits of Eastern Europe and they'd do it again to be free from opression.

You write,

I talk to a lot of people from the rather war-torn bits of Eastern Europe

but it seems to me that if you had a comprehensive sample of people from eastern Europe of my generation you would come to the conclusion that what I said is the way to go. The countries in eastern Europe that have the brightest prospects now are those whose transition from dictatorship was via a nonviolent people power protest movement, while those that really just traded dictators in palace coups are still very lousy places to live. But don't take my word for it--look up some examples and some principles of how to win freedom with people power, nonviolently.

http://www.aeinstein.org/downloads/

>Are you willing to see them suffer for your anarchist pipe dreams? If you are then how are you any better than the privacy violators?

What complete and utter nonsense. Someone willing to pay a price now for a better future tomorrow is the same as corrupted governments prying into the private lives of their citizens. What a brilliant comparison you've drawn.

It's this fear of change and desire to protect the status quo that has our societies in the rotting state that they're in, by the way, so while you may take comfort in knowing your parents and grandparents are ok now, and that your pockets are moderately protected, that it's your choices in protecting this status quo that is making the future look very bleak for our children.

The future does not look bleak. For fuck sake progress is accelerating. That may not jive with your doomsday bullshit but that hardly matters because foolish ideas like yours are going fucking nowhere with honest decent people who will tell you to take a flying fuck. If you want to induce suffering on some questionable moral stance you will be crushed under a stampede of reason.

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