When does violence become ethical?

So when their chosen heroes — the freedom fighters in whom they invested so much moral cachet — showed up at a concert and started beheading raver kids and Asian workers and abducting grandmas and God knows what else, what were Western leftists supposed to do? In situations like that there are really only two things you can do, without switching... See more

In their book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan compare over 300 violent and non-violent struggles in the 20th century to conclude that non-violent civil disobedience is about twice as effective as armed revolution.

Where actual nonviolence says “violence would be justifiable in this situation, but here we are practicing nonviolence in order to highlight the cruelty of our enemies and challenge them on a moral level,” false nonviolence says “the violence of the status quo is more justified than the violence of those who fight it.”

Perhaps the easiest way to... See more

The time to call for nonviolence is when the violence is systemic: when it is slow, quiet, and legal. Waiting until people riot or take up arms to demand “peace” is a luxury of those who were never being harmed in the first place.

“Violence has no place in politics.”

It’s a comforting phrase, but it’s almost always delivered too late, after the glass is already broken. It’s never said when the budget cuts are passed that close hospitals. It’s never said when laws are written to force pregnancies, gut voting rights, or criminalize protest. It’s never said when corporations... See more

Sometimes you have to imagine in a radical way that makes you seem a little crazy, that puts you in an embarrassing light, in order to open up a possibility that others have already closed down with their knowing realism. I’m prepared to be mocked and dismissed for defending nonviolence in the way that I do. It might be understood as one of the

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when law and morality conflict?