Violence and Political Revolutions
Violence cannot be used to achieve political goals. It can only be used to fight temporal threats, to stave off an attacker.
When the enemy is at your shores, in your homes, threatening to murder your family, that is when you pick up arms to fight. The third amendment may seem odd to us today, but it was very specific, because at the onset of the American revolution, soldiers being quartered in American homes was increasingly common, as they stole your food, threatened you, and could get away with doing practically anything to you. When your enemy is at your footsteps, threatening your nation and individual liberty, you fight.
But what happens if the British never invade? What purpose does violence serve if it's directed towards nothing? When Gandhi proclaimed India a free nation, did he need to shed blood for his revolution? When Canada became it's own country, did they engage in a romanticized, glorious revolution?
No. Their countries achieved independence by unifying as a single state, and simply ignoring their rulers. Because the British decided not to fight, the Indian and the Canadians got their freedom without ever having to fire a single shot. It was not violence that solidified the country, it was their ideals, their viewpoints, their central identity as a country, separate from their oppressors. If no aggressor shows up to fight, than simply aiming pointlessly at the ground and firing bullets in random directions would have no effect; it would not forge a country's resolve.
If the British had never showed up to our shores, we could have still easily became our own independent country. If America had simply crowned a second king, like France with Napoleon, we could have entered a never darker age, or at least one just as worse. What made America was the foundation, at it's core, of a government built by the people, for the people, of the people, predicated on justice, freedom, and democracy. That the forefront to our democracy was freedom and the pursuit of happiness, rather than a democracy which could control everything, or one that was completely powerless.
Violence, will not cause political change. To succeed in any political change, you must first have the will of the people. Whether by a gentle, guiding hand, or an iron fist, one must have the people by their side, whether due to propaganda and manipulation (like Stalin or Hitler), or by truly winning over their spirits. Countries only exist in the people's mind, and you are only unified if you believe yourself to be. Arbitrary lines of a map do not a country make.
Martin Luther king, contrary to many people's beliefs, was not against violence. He himself petitioned many time to get a firearm for self defense, but to not avail. He had armed guards at each of his shows, to deter the threats of assassination. Martin Luther King believed violence could solve temporary issues, the immediate threat to your life, but it would not cause political change. That we had to change the hearts and minds of the people to ever have true political change. Rights won at the end of a barrel would be Pyrrhic, as the people would grow to resent you, and see you as another dictator. They would never truly learn why it necessary to treat you that way, they would never truly act like you were equal, and wouldn't enforce it or would eventually overthrow a minority.
In order to have change, real change, positive change, instead of just providing a patch, you must fundamentally change how people think, in order to change the system. An educated populace is the most important thing to a democracy. Therefore, political change cannot be won at the end of a barrel, it can only stave off temporal threats.
What would justify a revolution? The immediate threat to your life or freedoms. That it was worth taking someone's life to achieve your objective, that it was justified, and that this person deserved it. "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."- Declaration of Independence.
"Anger can revert to happiness, sadness can revert to joy, but the past cannot be rewritten, and the dead cannot be brought back to life."- Sun Tzu, the Art of War.
When we have laid supine, prostrated, working ceaselessly to change the world around us, when we have worked within the system, when we have done everything in our power to avoid violence, down to the last point we can, to avoid the ensuing Anarchy and chaos, to avoid the countless outsiders who would take any opportunity available to them to invade America, our numerous enemies, from Russia, to North Korea, to Iran, when we have carefully weighed the lives of those we are about to take and those we are about to lose in the revolution, that we have no other choice but to fight, than it will be justified. But until that time, we must carefully ponder and analyze our position, and try to change the people's hearts and work to change the system peacefully. Those who don't do anything now to fix the system in peaceful times, are likely to do a whole lot less when the problems truly arise.
"War is the greatest affair of the state. The way to life or death, survival or extinction. It must be thoroughly pondered and analyzed."
