Peaceful protests were meant to be a compromise to warn that something worse was coming. Black Panthers. Weather Underground. IRA and Sinn Fein.

Effective peaceful movements had potentially violent components. The more radical elements disappeared and peaceful protests became useless.

Unions were a compromise. Before unions, you’d drag the factory owner into his front lawn and exact justice.

The people saying "Violence isn't the answer" are the people who don't want to see anything change

"Violence is not the answer" says country that won its place in the world through violence.

There are entire Game Theory textbooks dedicated to grappling with the question of when and how one engages in violence. Because broadly speaking, violence is bad. The destructive social forces inhibit socio-economic development, degrade global quality of life, propagate disease, and cause catastrophic shortfalls of critical goods and services.

Whether you're working at the micro-scale of domestic abuse or the macro-scale of the bombing of Hiroshima, you're talking about a gross net negative for everyone involved.

But if a detente is one-sided, or a violent actor is free to act uninhibited, there are huge immediate rewards for looting and pillaging your neighbors, pressing ganging people into forced labor, and seizing neighboring property at gunpoint. It works great for perpetrators who engage in violence unchecked. Its only a problem when the perpetrator runs into a countervailing force.

But then over the long term, the violence takes an increasing toll. People don't build in neighborhoods that they think will be bombed. They don't invest in communities that are fracturing and falling apart. They don't befriend people they feel they can't trust or work alongside people they're terrified of.

Go look at Yugoslavia before and after the wars of the 1990s. Huge unified economy capable of operating on par with France or Italy, only to be splintered by violence and reduced to a near-pre-industrial state for over a decade. Who won the Yugoslav Wars? Who benefited from Bosnians and Serbians and Albanians and Croats pounding their plowshares into swords and slaughtering one another?

People talk about a "Peace Dividend" and you can see it in any country that's avoided a protracted military conflict for a generation or more. You can't be a successful country if you're always trying to hold one another at gunpoint.

To quote the onion, violence is never the answer, if you ignore all of human history.

A notable uptick in web queries for "guillotine for sale" is not a DDoS.

There's a lot of evidence that says that non-violent resistance is more often effective, and when it is effective it's more effective, than violent-based resistance.

Can't grab the source info link at the moment, but this video talks about it.

https://youtu.be/5Dk3hUNOMVk

Edit:

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/why-civil-resistance-works/9780231156820

https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/about/civil-resistance/

Pacifism is only good for aggressors and cowards

Violence is not the answer.

Violence is more of a question.

1. Whenever violence is involved, either both sides are violent, or violence wins.

2. When neither side is violent, violence is not the answer.

3. Now both sides look at #1 and ponder if the other side is ready to be violent.

The answer is violence, but to advocate for peace in principle.

The answer is obviously codifying the position of power that violence granted you in a set of laws, hoping they won't be challenged by further violence

It’s a double edged sword, because people who you don’t agree with will resort to violence as well. Like the Taliban.

Everyone knows violence isn't the answer....its the question. And the answer is yes!

Further reading: How Nonviolence Protects the State

I haven't read it yet but I read another book by that author

I thought we were supposed to learn from history and NOT repeat it.

Violence is not the answer. It is the question, and the answer is YES

History nerd here, can confirm.

Predictably, people are arguing if violence can be an answer. But the best rule of thumb is "speak softly, but carry a big stick". If peaceful demonstration and diplomacy ran its course, then violence is the only path forward. I mean, the abolition of slavery in the United States could never be done by peaceful means (unlike what UK had done) so war was the only way.