All i know is what happened in Germany
Yeah. 3.5% would be about 2.8m people. This number has been exceeded easily last year when the AfD scandal happened. Absolutely fucking nothing happened.
Liberal three-percenter lore?
I mean, I do think non-violent disobedience can be effective, but the state usually makes it violent. State sanctioned protests where most obey most of the rules isn’t disobedience. Is a good start though, and I hope things progress (in a good way).
Didn’t BLM 2020 protests have over 3.5%? I don’t think they accomplished much except put pressure to prosecute Chauvin. Like literally just that one guy.
I wanted to make an ironic, exaggerated comment here, but irony doesn’t really work when it is 100% in line with what these people would actually say.
Change is so slow because this country has managed to form and propogate such a thoroughly oppressive system, that to call it out is to only reinforce what the people have been taught since day one.
These “freedom people” want their privilege so bad that they are willing to keep a monarch/oligarch in office who will perpetuate an oppressive system under the guise of ignorance.
Weren’t those violent though? Or maybe I’m thinking of something else. The COVID era memories kinda blur together in my brain. I definitely remember a lot of destruction around that time though
Mostly peaceful, really, same as these. But obviously when you have literally millions of people protesting, there’s bound to be some not-quite-ok stuff happening in all the chaos. Property damage, stealing, that sort of thing.
There’s really no way to have zero violence at this scale, although I’d say there’s a distinction between property damage and violence (one is done to objects and the other to people).
Don’t forget we remember MLK protests as mostly peaceful too, but the media did not portray them that way back then either. The copaganda is ever present. But look up the 2020 protests and you’ll get a lot of headlines reporting that they were in fact like 99% peaceful.
Not really. The overwhelming majority of those protests were peaceful. However the media latched on to the few cases where riots broke out which is pretty much what they always do.
Still waiting on you “violence is the only way” crowd to do some violence.
I don’t think we’re there yet.
How many of those were backed by much more powerful foreign powers?
Considering the UK’s biggest export is independence days, it’s kind of hard to think that all of those were solved through non violent means.
there has to be a big ass asterisk on his post. generally things like the civil rights movement got partially undone and then success can be nebulous since even in a movement there are subset of goals that might not have been achieved
Let me know what all the peaceful protests on climate change did leading up to and since the Paris Agreement.
Civil disobedience, including violent action, absolutely has a place in changing the policy of the state.
Sure, a poor uneducated place.
Lmao I love that people still reply to you when your name is trollception.
Well done.
Ah, so you agree there IS a place though.
Anyone who makes peaceful revolution impossible makes violent revolution inevitable.
List all the regimes that weren’t brought down by peaceful protests and singing kumbaya. No worries we will wait.
Um, you sure you don’t mean all the regimes that “were” brought down by peaceful protests and singing kumbaya? Either way I really don’t have the desire or time to look any of that up for you.
Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution was one instance, assuming you squint and ignore all the NATO soft power involved.
The 2018 and 2024 Armenian Revolutions also technically qualify. Although, the fact that they had two in six years raises questions of their effectiveness.
2024 Armenian Revolutions
A “Revolution” lol that didn’t do anything and was hardly even noticed by the locals in Yerevan.
Name one non-violent protest that changed the material conditions of those protesting, I’ll wait.
George Floyd protests had more than that (closer to 8%) and they didn’t really change anything.
A lot of violent protests have succeeded too. Such as the suffragettes gaining the right to vote for women or unions gaining the right to exist, and the 8 hour work day.
This refers to Chenoweth’s research, and I’m somewhat familiar with their work. I think it’s good to clarify what non-violent means to them, as it’s non-obvious. For example, are economic boycotts violence? They harm businesses and keep food of the tables of workers. I don’t think that’s violence, but some people do, and what really matters here is what Chenoweth thinks violence is, and what they mean when they say “nonviolent tactics are more effective”.
At the end of “civil resistance: what everyone needs to know”, Chenoweth lists a number of campaigns which they’ve marked as violent/nonviolent and successful/unsuccessful. Let’s look at them and the tactics employed tonfigure out what exactly Chenoweth is advocating for. Please do not read this as a condemnation of their work, or of the protests that follow. This is just an investigation into what “nonviolence” means to Chenoweth.
Euromaidan: successful, nonviolent. In these protests, protestors threw molotov cocktails and bricks and at the police. I remember seeing a video of an apc getting absolutely melted by 10 or so molotovs cocktails.
The anti-Pinochet campaign: successful, nonviolent. This involved at least one attempt on Pinochet’s life.
Gwangju uprising in South Korea: unsuccessful, nonviolent. Car plowed into police officers, 4 dead.
Anti-Duvalier campaign in Haiti: successful, nonviolent. Destruction of government offices.
To summarize, here’s some means that are included in Chenoweth’s research:
- throwing bricks at the police
- throwing molotov cocktails at the police
- assassination attempts
- driving a car into police officers
- destroying government offices
The point here is not that these protests were wrong, they weren’t. The point is that they employed violent tactics in the face of state violence. Self-defense is not violence, and this article completely ignores this context, and heavily and knowingly implies that sitting in a circle and singing kumbaya is the way to beat oppression. It isn’t.
The problem when it comes to the current situation in the US, is that these protests already came baked in to the Project 2025 plan from the start.
They’re not going to change their minds on anything as a result of the protests because they already knew there’d be mass protests before Trump signed a single order.
Well that’s total bs, in Greece there’s been dozens of non-violent protests far exceeding 3.5% that have failed spectacularly.
Clue: peaceful protests in the entire western world achieved nothing for the past half a century. You had the massive Greece protests, the Gilets Jeunes in France, the 15-M in Spain, the Occupy Movement in the US, the BLM protests in the US too, the anti Iraq war protests all over Europe… None of them achieved anything meaningful. The EU and US are NOT democratic.
Why Civil Resistance Works the book that 2x figure comes from has some major controversy about cherry picking data as well as playing with the definition of peaceful protest.
If peaceful protests worked (as good as this article suggestions) the BBC wouldn’t be writing about them.
Peaceful protest works great under two conditions:
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Just a metric fuckton of participants
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The implicit threat of violent protest (e.g. Malcom X behind MLK)
- Your opposition has empathy
Meaning they aren’t somehow making money off whatever you’re protesting…
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The article pointedly says that non violent protests were more successful because a lot more people were involved than in the violent protests.
Claims without any supporting evidence aren’t that interesting.
Edit: OP changed his post after I called him out for not referencing any sources
How to blow up a pipeline has a chapter on the topic.
You can also read the original book and check the examples.
P.C. this is article about the fourth mentioned protest in the article, and literally the second paragraph is about clashes. There are 11 casualties during this series of protests.
But you knew that with your high standards of verifying information right?
P.C. this is article about the four mentioned protest in the article, and literally the second paragraph is about clashes.
Which states
Clashes break out as police try to disperse the crowds and eight demonstrators are killed.
Police killing protesters makes a violent movement?
They’re not exactly an armed group of combatants coordinating attacks.
Working with Maria Stephan, a researcher at the ICNC, Chenoweth performed an extensive review of the literature on civil resistance and social movements from 1900 to 2006 – a data set then corroborated with other experts in the field.
Research.
How to blow up a pipeline has a chapter on the topic.
Research?
But you knew that with your high standards of verifying information right?
Do your standards measure up to that?
I’m not the one making claims. If you want to make a claim cite a source.
The article also made claims. Did you check them?
Yeah, look at the Iraq war protests, they didn’t amount to anything because they were peaceful and easily ignored by the media.
I personally feel like a lot came out of it, though. The USA left Iraq for example.
The USA actually still had troops in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, etc. And the protests were to prevent an invasion from happening in the first place, not to go in, kill a million people and then 2 decades down the line throw up your hands and say ‘that was a mistake’ with no consequences for anyone that pushed for it.
In 2007 there were 170,000 troops in Iraq
In 2010 there were 88,000
In 2024 there were 2,500
And the number there should be is 0, I’m really not sure what point you’re trying to make here. People didn’t want a war in Iraq in 2003, there were mass peaceful protests, and yet it still happened.
The number absolutely should not be 0. It’s a nation which actively funds and mobilizes religious extremists who imprison or execute homosexuals and treat women as cattle.
EDIT: in this context Iraq/nation meant the local populace, not the government
Which wasn’t the case before the invasion, when there were 0 US troops. Why the fuck do you bring up current day when I’m talking about protests that happened over 20 years ago (by people who knew the current outcome was likely)?
post hoc ergo propter hoc. the invention of Facebook was just as much a cause of leaving Iraq. or flat screen TVs. or Blu-ray disks.
which is to say the protests didn’t change anything.
Politicians making decisions based on public opinion has a lot of cause and effect relation. By all accounts it would have been easier to maintain a 40k to 100k presence in Iraq than it was to pack everything up and leave.
please prove a casual link between protests and the ending of the war
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People opposed the pointless war whose only winners were Exxo n Mobil.
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People voted the party who started the war out of power.
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The opposition party withdrew from the region.
doesn’t sound like the protest had any impact. sounds like the votes were the only thing that mattered.
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This was going to be my counterexample too. Millions protested in the US, UK, Australia, and elsewhere before any troops were committed and it still didn’t help. I dont have solid numbers but I’d be shocked if less than 3.5% of people were involved. They were the biggest protests ever at the time.
