A lot of glowy handshake accounts are posting comments like non-violent civil disobedience doesn't work. Likely FBI agents.
Remember when tens of thousands of businesses in every state defiantly reopened? Remember when we choked off DC highways with hundreds of trucks parked in the road? Remember when millions of us walked around in the supermarket without masks? Remember when we held sit-ins at Twitter and Facebook HQ for weeks?
No, of course not. We never actually did that. I live in a so-called red area and all of the businesses are still closed and everyone wears masks. The trucker strike never happened. Most of us are still compliant.
Civil disobedience worked for the civil Rights movement. Czechoslovakia's Velvet revolution was non-violent and it overthrew a communist regime far more totalitarian than what we have. They didn't even have fucking guns.
No, we skipped all of that. A handful of idiots decided to go full retard and fight with cops and try and storm Congress when both houses were in session. Some were likely plants, but most of them including the woman who was shot were Trump supporters who did not need to be there in the building. they could have stayed on the steps and made their point just as well.
I'm sick and tired of hearing about the four boxes. Yes, the voting box has been taken away from us, but that doesn't mean going straight to the ammo box. There are so many options for civil disobedience that we haven't even tried yet. FBI glowy shill handshake accounts get the f*** off this site.
Many non violent protests throughout the years worked because their opponents used violence on them, and the pictures and videos of that violence perpetrated on pacifists rallied enough public opinion to their side to evoke real legal change.
So the three main differences between past successful non-violent protests and now is:
we've been working non violently for decades, it got us to where we are now. It DID get us Trump, but we caught them by surprise in 2016, they won't make that mistake again
our opponents don't even have to do anything physical to us to win, just continue to slowly erode our laws. Boil us 3% per year - enough to keep the people asleep and complacent, never enough to wake them up to the power games and theft
even if they did get physical with us the media would never allow a true narrative to get out to the normies who need to wake the fuck up
I don't know. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm saying this isn't apples-to-apples either. We need our own unique solutions to this unique situation.
Absolutely, we definitely need a different plan and no two countries or situations are the same. I'm definitely not saying that civil disobedience is 100% guaranteed to solve our problems.
What I am saying, is that our actions need to be well planned for maximum impact. Storming the capitol was a fit of blind rage provoked by Mike Pence's actions. It wasn't a planned event.
You're right, the media would never cover it, that's why our actions need to be totally massive. Blocking off DC with a bunch of trucks would be non-violent. Just park them in the middle of the highway. Yes it's illegal, yes you'll get a ticket, and you probably should get a ticket, but people will know about it regardless of whether or not the media covers it.
Same thing with the masks. If every single Trump supporter quit wearing a mask, the mandates would be totally unenforceable. Or reopen the businesses. That would be way way way more effective than what happened on Wednesday.
What really doesn't work is having no organization and leadership. Let's say we wanted to go shut down a freeway or block assembly members from entering a building. Where am I going to get the info of that happening?
We are in desperate need of structure.
Black lives matter doesn't really have a centralized leadership either. They have figureheads, but no real top leadership. I live in a small town, and a bunch of high school kids organized a bridge overpass rally. Totally spontaneous, wasn't even on social media. I don't like using BLM as an example, but you have to admit that their methods were effective. At least their peaceful methods were, after all the riots, public opinion of them went way down.
Get involved with your local council. Get involved with your workplace and people you work with. Get involved at your school. Yeah, most physical gathering places are shut down for now, but not in every state, and the covid problem will probably magically disappear once Biden is in office.
Are you forgetting people get fired if they have supported trump and shamed at the school, their kids bullied. I live in a very liberal place. I understand there are things I can do, but anything you would suggest is still a whole lot easier if we had leadership and organization.
If just half of the 74 million started to get active, then nothing would happen to most of us. You can't fire 37 million producers. You can't bully 50 million kids.
But yes, leadership is important. Who's our MLK? Who's our Gandhi? Donald Trump was the president, but he was constrained by being the president, too. We probably don't need any single one leader, though, but many of them.
Hong Kong.
Yes, Hong Kong had a lot of the same civil disobedience that I'm talking about. It didn't work in their case, at least not yet, but the fight is certainly not over for them. I can't 100% guarantee that non-violent civil disobedience will solve all of our problems, but it's an option that we haven't even tried. It's an option that is oftentimes effective, that we've ignored. Beating up cops and breaking into the Capitol building is not non-violent civil disobedience. Even Trump condemned it and begged people to stop while it was happening. They would have made their point just fine by standing on the stairs or on the lawn. And then they could have occupied it for longer, all the way up until the 20th. We need to try some of the things that I mentioned in my op.
Police were beaten up, hospitalized, and one of them has died. I guess you could call it "mostly peaceful" if you want to use media standards. In reality, most of the protesters were peaceful, but a lot of them did get violent.