02-05-2021, 06:29 PM
(02-04-2021, 06:25 PM)Einzige Wrote: Why is nonviolence to be preferred to violence?
Non-violent confrontation isn't lawless. Most people have some recognition of the validity of law and order. Actions that look criminal usually are seen as such. Law and order means that people caught in overt crimes face legal retribution. Command-and-control, which is genuine repression that one associates with exploitation, corruption, and rigid rule, is a different matter. Law and order is essential to civil liberty; command-and-control is its enemy. Where the police go after brawlers, muggers, robbers, and rapists one has law and order. Where the police pursue political dissidents and those who resist corporate power one has command-and-control. In the First World, Japan is arguably the worst country in which to be a criminal because law enforcement is strict and efficient, criminal sentences are severe, and criminals typically endure mind control of the sort that the People's Republic of China exerts upon political dissidents. On the other side, Japanese law enforcement treats political dissidence and personal eccentricity with kid gloves. Japan is one of the safest countries in the world because it has relatively few repeat offenders. Organized criminals ordinarily gravitate to richer countries; the Yakuza (the Japanese equivalent of Chinese triads or the Sicilian Mafia) emigrates even to poorer countries in which it can get away with more. South Africa under Apartheid, at least in its treatment of blacks, was the opposite. Criminals got away with every imaginable crime so long as they did so to fellow black people, but if they challenged the Apartheid system and demanded rights like those that we Americans (or the Japanese) take for granted, they faced brutal attacks.
Law and order is the first civil right, and where it does not exist enumerated civil rights are void. Non-violent resistance is respect for the fundamental decencies that inform the behavior of law enforcement and other aspects of civil life. It is far safer to address police brutality if one is not brutal to the police. People of political maturity see gross inequity doing them no good and any privilege that they get from it suspect. Civil disobedience is not disorder; it is respect for the formality of the legal system. It is blatant and overt, the antithesis of criminality that is secretive, violent, and selfish. Civil disobedience implies that one loses dignity to stand for something higher. If I can mock someone who breaks into a house through a dog door and gets a lesson on how dangerous any large carnivore or pack of small carnivores can be, I don't want law enforcement going after non-violent protesters of Occupy Wall Street or gay-rights protesters in the past or Black Lives Matters protesters today.
This is not law enforcement; it is command-and-control resorting to lawlessness to enforce degrading customs of ethnic subordination.
(2) The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States establishes freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of the press, and the right to peaceful assembly for the redress of grievances against the federal government. The Fourteenth Amendment establishes the same against State governments, and paradoxically the state governments (see above) have often been more likely to violate human rights. Images of this type made the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a political necessity if America was to make any claim to be anything other than an Apartheid society.
Most countries have Constitutions modeled after the US Constitution. Even Stalin's 1936 Constitution was in many places a plagiarism of ours. Germany in 1938 had a Constitution much like ours, and until 1933 it was in effect. In 1933, you-know-who set Constitutional protections aside in favor of an agenda that required dictatorship and a savage brutality to enforce the command-and-control system of the Third Reich.
Decent societies suppress this sort of rioting. Nazi leaders encouraged this (Kristallnacht). On the whole, German Jews had done nothing wrong. They typically thought that they were Germans. Goebbels did not condemn it; he called it off when international reporting looked like this:
Law and order is necessary for safety and prosperity. Command-and-control is good only for enriching elites and salving illegitimate resentments.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.