If you start with violence, the opposition will always label you as violent extremists and respond the same way. You start with pacificism and escalate accordingly.
A lot of people I've seen think it's a binary choice. Either you do and say nothing or you resort to extreme violence immediately. It's not, that's not how that works.
Pacifism with loud voices, lots of visibility, practiced by a LARGE number of people can be very effective.
The art is in making those voices heard without being perceived as overly aggressive / violent. The more people who join, the longer and more often they participate, the less aggressive they need to be to be heard.
Nobody's saying violence is the only thing that has any effect on power? Power compounds on power and snowballs. The rich and the elites are going to do things that progressively favour themselves unless prevented, that's just the default. And in terms of generations, guess who has virtually all of the political and financial power: old people. They don't need violence to convince themselves to favour themselves, obviously.
The current state of affairs where one very small demographic did well for themselves 60 years ago and have been riding off that income much to the detriment of literally everyone else?
The later boomers were the hippie generation. The economy was generally better, yes, because of the New Deal. But that means they had different things to protest - the Vietnam War, for instance. It was them who ended that.
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u/Yiazmad Jul 28 '26
Violence should never be the first resort, but if someone is unwilling to use it at all, then they're not a pacifist, they're just harmless.
And harmless people are never regarded.