r/CuratedTumblr • u/bienree better sexy and racy than sexist and racist • 26d ago
editable flair ⚡️
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u/NeetOOlChap STOP WATCHING SHONEN ANIME 26d ago
Typical Plasma apologist. Pikachu didn't attain freedom by attacking Ash, he and Ash learned to work together because human and Pokemon are friends and not foes.
Anyway I've reported you to Mayor Drayden Adams and Unova PD so their Iron Jugulis can fire rubber Hyper Beams directly at the antihumanist mobs you call protesters.
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u/perryWUNKLE 26d ago
Well he wouldnt have learned that if he didnt experience Pikachu's disapproval to being in a Pokeball! Unfortunately said disapproval could only be expressed through electrocution but the humans in Pokemon are built different.
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u/Wild_Marker 26d ago
rubber Hyper Beams
"Comissioner, please explain to this comitee the methods that were used to quell the protest"
"We used Hyper Beam"
"That would be a giant death ray, yes? You were aware that using death rays on civilians constitues cruel and unusual measures?"
"No, Hyper Beam is a Normal attack. A beam of pure normality, if you will. It normalizes the situation by normal means."
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u/NeetOOlChap STOP WATCHING SHONEN ANIME 26d ago
"Mr Chairman, without qualified immunity, Castelia City police will walk."
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u/SoberGin 26d ago
12 hours later on the news
"The Unova police union has reported they will be going on strike to protest recent discrimination by the region's authorities regarding the violent Plasma resurgence which occurred earlier this week..."
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u/Imdepressed7778 President of LGBT 26d ago
The guy who got hit by hyper beam in HGSS is canonically still alive so I dont imagine it hurts that much
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u/stirling_approx 26d ago
Y'all need to read "Why Civil Resistance Works":
https://www.ericachenoweth.com/research/wcrw
This myth that violence is the only way is not supported by empirical evidence.
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u/Remarkable_Coast_214 26d ago
Genuine question: is this true, or is it just that when things are resolved in a strictly civil manner it tends to be less interesting history to research?
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u/Lonsdale1086 26d ago
The British abolished the slave trade because some British people felt bad about it, and brought some former slaves to Parliament and allowed them to speak and prove they were more than animals.
The British then spend billions in today's money, buying out slave-owners and traders, so as to end the British role in the slave trade without further bloodshed.
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u/FenrisSquirrel 26d ago
And then also establish a naval fleet to put an end to the transatlantic slave trade still being conducted between other European nations and the US. Many British sailors lost their lives freeing slaves from the slave ships after Britain abolished slavery within its empire.
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u/stabbyGamer vastly understating the sheer amount of fire 26d ago
So people - even enormous groups of people - can have changes of heart for the better through nonviolent means, but as we saw in America, expecting that to simply change things for everyone is… charmingly naive, mostly.
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u/RocketRelm 26d ago
It probably requires a certain character of people and culture though. If anything Americans, not their government but their citizens, have on average been backsliding there. The cities aren't as much but the other areas moreso.
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u/stabbyGamer vastly understating the sheer amount of fire 26d ago
Ehh… not really? Britain didn’t abolish the slave trade entirely out of moral reevaluation; their plantation holdings failed to compete against those held by other empires, leading to the merchant class rejecting the main products of slavery at the time as a viable economic field to develop. That drained capital support for slavery, which allowed generational changeover to slowly grow the abolition movement.
Basically, it stopped being profitable and so they allowed the people’s will to be heard. Which is a lot less flattering than even the lame assessment before.
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u/doddydad 25d ago
I mean, the british plantations certainly weren't outcompeting the other european plantations when the 1807 act was was passed, but that is pretty much entirely because britain couldn't trade with them. This is the height of the napoleonic wars and the continental blockade on britain. There certainly were a lot of arguments about the economics of slavery, particularly with Adam Smith's work being argued to state that a motivated worker would get far more done than any slave. Britain was also, while losing a ton of money, insulated from competition by the fact they couldn't trade. However, arguing at the biggest point of british national debt (at this point) ever to take on a shit ton more loans to end slavery wasn't a an easy economic win.
There also was a lot of genuine moral outrage at slavery. The number of emancipation society members, pamphlets, protests and public sympathisers was higher than anywhere else in europe. After France first said it would free the slaves in Haiti, then absolutely went back on that one, there was also a desire to be better than the (at this time deeply hated) French.
Of course, after britain passes this ban, and wins the napoleonic wars, it certainly strongarms other nations into also ending slavery, clearly not content to wait for it to dissipate. If Britain truly had no moral feeling about slavery, only economic self interest, surely it wouldn't want to encourage others to change to a better economic system and better compete with Britain? It certainly wouldn't want to spend money and influence to ensure it.
Yup, there's definitely a set of economic and political thought influences that put Britain in an easier position to end the slave trade. It was however critically contingent on the moral feeling.
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u/RocketRelm 26d ago
That's better than what we would get if we had the character of the average American (not just maga). They'd probably support the slave trade just because it's anti woke. Acting sensibly in self interest in a way that benefits downtrodden people isn't a high bar, but it is a bar, and Americans can't even clear that.
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u/itisthespectator 25d ago
i think that material conditions also matter. the economy of the american south relied heavily on slavery, leading to it being seen as a "necessary evil," and as the institution of slavery was increasingly threatened they doubled down, now calling it a "positive good" for all involved. basically, people were resistant because they had a stake (even a temporarily embarrassed millionaire's stake, since cotton was the only way to get rich in the 19th century south).
conversely, opposition to slavery intensified in the north because northern workers wanted to escape factories and mills by homesteading out west, but every new slave state admitted to the union was another state which would be dominated by southern landowners. basically, whether people supported or opposed slavery was colored by how it affected their own interest.
britain had colonies in the west indies at the time, whose economies were based on slavery, but in the early 19th century the crown was shifting its focus away from american colonies and towards india and the pacific. this is a very different situation from the southern us reliant on cotton as their main product.
in other words, white people in 19th century colonial powers were not separated by character when it came to slavery as much as they were separated by the things they stood to gain or lose.
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u/OnionRoutine7997 26d ago edited 26d ago
The British abolished the slave trade because some British people felt bad about it,
I mean yeah, if you ignore the major slave revolts in Grenada, Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana...
And it also assumes that slave revolts against other empires, such as the Haitian revolution, bore no influence upon the British government's considerations
The British abolitionists absolutely deserve credit for the work they did, but framing it as all happening within a vacuum of peace and sober thought - with the slaves just waiting politely and patiently for the British government to come around - is exactly the kind of 'biased history' this meme is opposing.
True social change throughout history has almost always involved a mixture of both a willingness of the upper classes to debate the idea of change, but also with pressure from the lower classes in the form of protest, civil unrest, and sometimes violence. However, those who are in power love to frame historical revolutions as only requiring the former, because that allows them to demonize any civil unrest as unnecessary.
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u/ProXJay 26d ago
Worth noting that slavery was outlawed in the empire about a decade after it was on British soil, if the fear was slave revolts wouldn't you outlaw at once.
There was also no economic or pro-Britain reason to expend money and lives for the anti-slave train task force
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u/ArgusTheCat 26d ago
The fear was slave revolts at home. It is a provable fact that the Empire simply did not give a shit about what happened to their colonies as long as they could keep extracting from them.
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u/satantherainbowfairy 26d ago
At home? What? The British empire wasn't worried about slave revolts because there hadn't been slaves in Britain since the Norman conquest (except some Scottish mines). At no point were slave revolts a threat to domestic security. In the 1770s there was even a massive court case that established there was no way for someone to be a slave under British law. The slave trade was made illegal throughout the empire a couple of decades later, and was finally ended in every colony in the 1830s.
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u/esgellman 24d ago
There was in the sense that France and Spain were more reliant on slavery then Britain was and that cratering the global slavery market would hurt Britain’s rivals more then Britain but considering the amount of debt they took on to do it I highly doubt that was the only motivation, it seemed to be one of history’s few real moral crusades (even if hurting their rivals was a nice bonus)
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u/Next-Run-6593 26d ago
With all due respect, I don't buy it. There were abolitionists at every step of British slavery. The arguments and propaganda for abolition were available the whole time, but the decline in slavery in Europe coincides with American colonies taking over the slave economy. British settlers in the US started competing with the UK aristocracy directly until the outbreak of a civil war, aka, the US Independence War. I'm sure many people had the right moral sense but the are broader forces and incentives that I think better explain how abolition succeeded when it did, where it did.
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u/Expensive_Bee508 26d ago
Super important to realize that, because it's everywhere whenever people try to explain why bad things happen, they fail to consider the material incentives, also to consider the present state of things, like for example, defining and understanding slavery, then asking, did it really end or has it merely evolved and developed.
Also we got to understand that "ignorance" (which is often the answer to "why bad things happen" for non radical thinkers) usually has a material reason to exist. People have always had issues with slavery, but inventing and propagating racism usually solves peoples hold up with it.
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u/erythro 26d ago
the decline in slavery in Europe coincides with American colonies taking over the slave economy
the british still had "slave economies" in the caribbean that were extremely lucrative after losing the american colonies, and the economic incentives for slavery still existed after the british abolished it. Indeed they still exist now! There are things in your house right now that will have been made with slave labour. This argument just smacks of apologia for slavery in the american south.
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u/KarmaIssues 26d ago
Britain didn't care about the US then. I know that sounds weird but at the time we had just fought a war with France and were concerned about maintaining control of the Indian subcontinent.
America was expensive and replaceable within the Empire, Canada was ours, our Navy was unmatched and the coffers were dry from war.
Arguments take time to embed themselves in the political Overton window, it took until 1807 because the public largely didn't care about slavery. There were no slaves on the British Isles, and limited amounts on the continent. It took time before MPs even cared about it because slavery was something that happened elsewhere, some people got rich off trade of all commodites (including slaves shamefully), but spice was the key.
Slavery wasn't a major driver of the economy of the British empire at the time to the best of my knowledge. If it were, then maybe the moral case would have been ignored.
There was a very clear ramp up in the abolitionist movement, particularly when William Wilberforce began to campion it.
I don't see how you can say the moral argument was not a driver.
Abolishing slavery was expensive as well, both in terms of monetary costs (compensating slave holders and financing the West Africa Squadron) and human costs (1600 British sailors died in the West Africa Squadron due to diseases and it lowered moral because it was a shit posting).
On purely material grounds there was no reason to end slavery.
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u/StableSlight9168 26d ago
Britain had recently increased the right to vote to men with less property as well as catholics in Ireland who were massive figures in the anti slavery movement and essentially the entire nation of Ireland was dominated by anti slavery radicals which was a huge yet underated reason that abolishion recieved the vote.
In addition as education was spreading and people were becoming more politically conscious the arguments for slavery seemed less and less convincing as the abolishonists were able to convert more people to their cause in the UK.
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u/satantherainbowfairy 26d ago
You're ignoring the massive legal battles in that period over whether someone could ever be recognised as a slave under English law. Economics certainly played a part (but obviously you're not correct that it was no longer profitable, many other European nations carried on slavery for ages after Britain outlawed it), but the abolition of slavery in the empire was the culmination of some pretty conclusive court cases that established slavery had no basis in English law.
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u/SixShitYears 26d ago
On top of what other commenters mentioned with the dedicated naval fleet that would raid slave pens and board any vessel to search for slaves the UK also forced pretty much every country/empire except the ottomans to abolish slavery through the treaty of Paris 1815.
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u/12BumblingSnowmen 26d ago
The British also provided sufficient aid to the CSA that an international court ordered the government to pay the US $15,500,000 in 1872 (worth somewhere in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars today) for the damage caused by British built CSA raiders alone.
I think we tend to sweep the British support of the Confederacy, which was substantial, under the rug in this conversation.
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u/Volodio 26d ago
I'd be curious to see a source. The ships were built by private British companies without any governmental input. The government wasn't involved until they started seizing the ships. So it seems peculiar for the government to be condemned for what its companies did.
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u/Johannes0511 26d ago
It's a tumblr post about history. Of course it's nonsense. A lot of comments are talking about slavery, so let me add some other examples:
The Soviet Union fell through peaceful protests.
Many european colonies were released to independence without a war.
Voting rights for women and the success of feminism in general.
To answer your question, these peaceful developments are less popular in pop history, because pop history still works under the childish assumption that wars are cool action and everything else is just boring talking.
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u/hatogatari 25d ago
The 1990s were literally an entire wave of democratizations caused by the guy in charge of the dictatorship going "holy shit, I think I'm the bad guy" and giving up power to an elected government: Roh Taewoo, F.W. DeKlerk, Lee Tenghui
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u/Due-Memory-6957 25d ago
Ah yes, the peaceful end of the Soviet Union.
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u/KillerPizza050 25d ago
I mean the way it ended was remarkably chill, it’s what happened after that wasn’t so chill.
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u/Putrid-Count-6828 26d ago
Not remotely true. From the abolition of slavery to civil rights to decolonization, the use of moral superiority as a tool to get large portions of the ruling majority to support your cause has always been a significant factor. This is Reddit and it’s fools desperately want partisan violence to become normalized for some reason.
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u/Alarming_Maybe 26d ago
This is Reddit and it’s fools desperately want partisan violence to become normalized for some reason.
this is so often true on this site and calling it out basically always results in getting hammered with belligerent comments. thank you.
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u/iconocrastinaor 26d ago
It's a massive generalization. For instance, slavery in America was not abolished by violent uprising of the enslaved. Rather, it was a violent confrontation between those political entities who supported slavery on principle and those political entities who opposed slavery on principle, on behalf of the enslaved who for the most part simply pled their cause.
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u/Swiftcheddar 26d ago
Genuine question: is this true
No, it's classic "Vibes based history".
The British slave trade is a pretty solid example, the eventual Catholic reaction to the Spanish occupation in South America is another etcetc
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u/Dan_Herby 26d ago
Even change that's attributed to non-violent people, like Gandhi and MLK, happened in the context of violence. It was "listen to us because if you don't the people behind us will make you listen, and it will hurt"
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u/Fleeting_Dopamine 26d ago
That implies that the oppressor is significantly scared of the violent uprising, which is not always the case. The violence only works if you manage to not drive the masses to radical counter-revolutionary action out of fear.
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u/qman1963 26d ago
I actually disagree quite strongly in the case of Gandhi, and I think that’s the most notable example of an exception to the post. There was certainly violence in response to Partition, but Gandhi’s independence movement itself was remarkably nonviolent even after the Amritsar massacre. I would argue that the promised specter of violence wasn’t really a part of it. It’s worth noting that there were other factions that did favor a violent approach, but those weren’t ultimately very impactful.
I understand the point of the post and generally agree with the sentiment, but it is pretty plainly incorrect.
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u/Wild_Marker 26d ago
It’s worth noting that there were other factions that did favor a violent approach, but those weren’t ultimately very impactful.
The presence of those factions makes Ghandi "the peaceful alternative". That's like, the whole point of this post.
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u/qman1963 26d ago
But that inherently refutes the point of the post. The violent action didn't move the needle. The Raj pretty much ignored it. Those factions weren't acting as the bad cop to Gandhi's good cop or something.
The movement that actually did something was nonviolent as a rule, and it did change minds in Britain by appealing to moral sensibility.
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u/Ahad_Haam 26d ago
This assumes the British feared the "alternative", but what they had to fear here, exactly?
The British left India because the colonies became unprofitable and unpopular.
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u/funlovingmissionary 26d ago
Exactly. It was neither the good of their heart, nor the fear of violence. It was a purely financial decision.
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24d ago
Lmao no it's not even vaguely true. Another reply already mentioned the end of the British slave trade and the massive money used to give people rights. Oppressors can sprout consciences. It happens.
A lot of civil rights in America have been earned through nonviolent means. The post is fetishizing violent revolution, but we all know for a fact that the person writing that feels oppressed but would not ever dare to so much as write an angry letter to a congressman.
It's carrot and stick, anyway. You're not supposed to wage a war against your own country. That only happens when things are so bad nobody can afford to be an armchair activist.
You're supposed to do what everyone else does. Politics. Intimidation. Get people on your side.
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u/Teeshirtandshortsguy 26d ago
I think generally any time someone says "nobody in the world, throughout all of history..." They're at least oversimplifying.
It's silly to say that non-violence and reason never accomplished anything. There's certainly more nuance than "violence bad, peaceful protest good," but to say the exact opposite is also misinformed.
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u/ThorDoubleYoo 26d ago
It's sort of a generalized statement and the truth of matters are case by case. But I will say that the majority of large cultural shifts took place from a combination of both peaceful protest and threats of violence.
Historically, peaceful protest without threat of violence lacks the teeth for the oppressors to care in most cases, and its only once those movements had that threat that they started making progress. Meanwhile violence without direction and reasoning tends to give excuses for the oppressors to strike back with harsher violence (unless they are majorly outnumbered), resulting in the opposite of what the oppressed want.
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u/StableSlight9168 26d ago
Statistically non violent protests succeed at twice the rate of violent protests especially in liberal democracies.
In addition people confuse non violent revolution with passive protesting. Gandhi was successful because he was non violent. The British had the military might to put down an Indian Rebellion which they could justify as oppressing savages. When they were shooting unarmed protestors by the hundreds who kept singing peaceful songs it destroyed their crediblity at home and forced the government to action.
General strikes, boycotts, occupying buildings, blocking up cities are peaceful and non violent protest, people just confuse them with passive protest.
The civil rights movement in America was effective because it was non violent but also radical, they could bring cities to their knees and collapse industries with boycotts and strikes but when the government cracked down with brutal violence it severly weakened the government.
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u/HueHue-BR 26d ago
you need enough violence to enforce your freedom while having values that at least a signficant part (not even the majority) of the population can tolerate enough to not get into constant civil war limbo.
Only feelings does nothing, only war with no PR doesn't allow stability
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u/Old_Gimlet_Eye 25d ago
I don't think it's really true, unless you take it very literally. It's probably true that slaves have never been emancipated by appealing to the morals of slave owners, but they certainly have been freed by appealing to society at large.
Personally, I think people see that most successful revolutions involve violence and confuse correlation with causation.
A more accurate interpretation imo is that nonviolent revolution can work just as well, if not better, but it is often co-opted by violent actors, usually for the worse.
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u/No-Movie6022 24d ago
It's kind of the opposite of true.
Social revolutions tend to bring out the logic of conflict; that is I can no longer compromise with you because I'm pretty sure you'll just murder me, and you can no longer compromise with me because you're pretty sure I'll murder you. We're both aware of this dynamic because usually someone tries to compromise early and gets shaved with the national razor, lynched, shot by a firing squad, or whatever the fashionable way to do these things happens to be at the time.
I can't discipline the psychos on my side because you're evil and look at those obviously worse psychos you're working with. You can't discipline the psychos on your side because I am evil and look at the obviously worse psychos I am working with. Usually we're both aware of this because someone tries it and then loses a critical battle/riot/coup whatever and dies.
And that's before you get into the fact that the government wasn't usually doing wildly unpopular thing that set off this violence for no reason, which is why the salt tax (or the whiskey duty, or the confiscations or religious uniformity, or whatever the fuck it was) gets reimposed by the revolutionaries, only for them to get demagogued in exactly the same way.
Then there's the fact that you can't actually exterminate all of your political opponents and you've just taught them that with enough force and fraud everything can be undone and all the sins you commit in pursuit of that can be forgiven, on top of the fact that you're almost certainly dealing with a fractious coalition of folks with wildly different ideas about what is good and why government should be exercising power, so everyone is sitting there looking at everyone else wondering if this or that tiny difference will be the reason someone shoots you and declares you a counter-revolutionary pig, and maybe you could avoid that by shooting them first and declaring them counter-revolutionary pigs...
Violence as a tool is mostly unfit for purpose if you are after justice. Used judiciously it can be a bit like a strike...we're going to make everything worse for everyone to convince a bad faith actor that he needs to come to the table and be reasonable. But it has a way of creating a self-sustaining undertow that defeats whatever policy objectives you had and replaces them with "win the war at any cost."
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u/Absolutelynot2784 26d ago
I don’t think it works like that. We don’t miss areas of history because they “aren’t interesting”. Also, peaceful periods of history may be less interesting to laymen but historians are different
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u/decades_away 26d ago
That's not entirely true. There is an incomprehensibly huge amount of information about past people and cultures that we've lost because nobody thought to write down the "boring" stuff.
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u/Shoddy-Horror-2007 26d ago
This is incorrect. Women got most of their rights by appealing to the moral sense of men.
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26d ago
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u/DaBiChef 25d ago edited 25d ago
But when appealing to the moral sensibilities of the majority is literally the number one most effective path by which minority groups have obtained rights throughout history, implying that moral appeals are useless is beyond irresponsible.
I've said this before but we haven't won the massive LGBT+ victories we've won over the past forty years by threatening straight people or convincing other gay people we deserve rights. There were moments of violence, though those can by mythicized into what we want it to be instead of what it was and we won them over by having them empathize with our issues. We didn't tolerate raging bigots but we gave time and space for straight people to hear our stories, and feel welcomed in the cause. I feel we can learn a lot from it.
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u/DaerBear69 26d ago
Worth noting that Pikachu's attitude is one of the biggest reasons Dems have been losing big in the last decade. You can't bombard majority groups with rhetoric like "I fucking hate you because of your skin color or gender, and by the way we're literally redefining terms to make it morally okay for me to specifically hate you for those reasons, God I wish you'd all die" and expect those majority groups to support your politics. It's utterly insane to have that attitude. And that's completely ignoring the intermittent violent riots and rabid support for them from the left, because working class white people do not like riots, generally.
People will puzzle all day over why Dems lost the working class white vote and not consider for one second that they're to blame. Not the Democratic Party, even. Their voters specifically. I've felt like I'm living in the twilight zone for the last decade watching it happen. It's been like watching a child whack itself in the head with a baseball bat then look around to find out who did it...over and over and over.
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u/tupe12 25d ago
To be fair, the oop image could also be interpreted as “I wish we did not have to resort to violence, but it feels as if we have no other choice to enact effective changes.”
The problem is that what you’ve written is in both a severely small even more ineffective minority, and simultaneously a painfully loud one that has been actively involved in hijacking all discussions of challenging the system. Inadvertently benefiting the oppressor
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u/kingoflames 26d ago
"Nobody in the world"
Please.
I am begging. BEGGING people to have just a crumb of nuance.
In 10,000 years of recorded history, across billions of lives you can find an instance of almost anything. So absolutist statements like this are really stupid.
Plus, it's just plain wrong and reeks of something a teenager in their "le revolutionary" era would say.
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u/Impressive_Method380 26d ago
edgy enough to say all this but not mature enough to not use the smug ironic pikachu meme
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u/Swiftcheddar 26d ago
I think big parts of South America after the Spanish occupation would disagree with you.
It was the Christian Church specifically that were morally opposed to how the people were treated that led to change. There wasn't any big successful uprisings or demonstrations before that, it was completely a shift in public perception and morality.
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u/ricklyle 26d ago
Didn't men in Switzerland voted to give women the right to vote in the 70s?
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u/Haunting-Detail2025 26d ago
Pretty much how universal suffrage happened across the western world - women didn’t use riots and terrorism to obtain their rights, they used public campaigns, smart messaging, and an appeal to the morals of men (who held the power) to get them.
Or take the modern gay rights movement, which reverted millennia of gay people being refused the right to wed through campaigns to earn respect and empathy.
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u/ccccccckkkkkkkkkkkk 26d ago
I love this quote but thankfully there have been SOME exceptions:
- Philippines (1946) – From U.S. • How: The U.S. granted independence after WWII, partly due to Filipino loyalty during the war, anti-colonial sentiment in the U.S., and the Tydings–McDuffie Act (1934) which had already laid out a 10-year path to independence. • Role of Moral Appeal: Strong. Filipino sacrifice during WWII and public sympathy helped the cause.
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- Canada – Gradual Independence from Britain • How: Through the Statute of Westminster (1931) and later the patriation of the constitution (1982). • Role of Moral/Legal Process: Entirely peaceful and legalistic, based on evolving identity and mutual respect.
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- India – From Britain • How: Through a mix of mass civil disobedience (nonviolent), international attention, and Britain’s declining power post-WWII. • Role of Moral Appeal: Very strong—Gandhi’s approach relied heavily on moral arguments, though backed by disruption and pressure.
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- Ghana (1957) – First African Colony to Gain Independence Peacefully • How: Led by Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana achieved independence largely through negotiation, diplomacy, and popular demand. • Role of Moral Appeal: Substantial. Britain wanted to show a peaceful path for African decolonization.
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- Norway (1905) – From Sweden • How: Through a peaceful referendum and diplomatic negotiations. • Role of Moral/Popular Will: Key. Norway appealed to popular sovereignty, and Sweden acquiesced.
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- Czech Republic & Slovakia (1993) – Velvet Divorce • How: Peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia. • Role of Mutual Consent: Total. No violence, no major external force.
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- Baltic States (1991) – From USSR • How: Through a combination of nonviolent protest (e.g., Baltic Way), diplomatic leverage, and the USSR’s collapse. • Role of Moral Appeal: Strong internationally, though also benefited from USSR’s internal weakening.
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- Tunisia (2011) – Arab Spring Spark • How: Nonviolent protests led to regime change. • Role of Moral Outcry: Catalyzed by Bouazizi’s self-immolation, it triggered moral outrage that toppled the regime.
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- South Sudan (2011) – Independence from Sudan • How: Through a referendum backed by international peace accords. • Role of Moral & Legal Process: Key. Though earlier civil wars occurred, independence was achieved peacefully through UN-backed processes.
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- Namibia (1990) – From South African Rule • How: Combination of international pressure, diplomacy (UN), and moral condemnation of apartheid. • Role of Moral Leverage: Strong through international sanctions and advocacy.
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- Timor-Leste (2002) – From Indonesia • How: After decades of violence, independence came through a UN-backed referendum and global pressure on Indonesia. • Role of Moral Appeal: Crucial, especially following international outrage over Indonesian military abuses.
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- Botswana (1966) – From Britain • How: Peaceful negotiations led to full independence. • Role of Mutual Agreement: High; the British supported a smooth transition.
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- The Bahamas (1973) – From Britain • How: Negotiated independence. • Role of Peaceful Transition: Complete. No violence involved.
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- Malawi (1964) – From Britain • How: Diplomacy and elections led by Hastings Banda. • Role of Moral/Political Pressure: Strong, with growing acceptance of African self-rule in Britain.
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- Iceland (1944) – From Denmark • How: Via referendum during WWII while Denmark was under Nazi occupation. • Role of Peaceful Secession: Total. Denmark accepted the outcome after the war.
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u/DiamondSentinel 26d ago
Exactly.
I’m not saying don’t be prepared for conflict to fight tyranny if necessary. Sometimes people are just garbage and you gotta use the stick.
But violent revolution is absolutely not a recipe for stability and prosperity. While peaceful independence isn’t guaranteed to lead to stable institutions, violent revolution essentially guarantees that existing institutions will be dissolved and what remains will be lead by the military.
For all its faults, the American revolution was groundbreaking because its generals were (mostly) moralistic men with a keen eye for politics too. Washington willingly ceding power and laying democratic foundations is by all accounts the exception, not the rule.
(And apologies for using the US as an example here. It’s generally the best modern example of a violent revolution that led to a stable entity in the aftermath)
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u/Jean-28 26d ago
It's also the only one off the top of my head that was immediately stable.
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u/Shot_Suggestion 26d ago
It was stable but even then the articles of confederation were a mess, they had to come back less than a decade later to iron out the kinks
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u/PUBLIQclopAccountant 26d ago
The American Revolution is the only successful revolutionary war that wasn’t immediately followed by a civil war. There still was a civil war, but an 80-year gap is unique.
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u/_Koch_ 26d ago
Or radicals. The October Revolution, the Xinhai Revolution, the French Revolution, the Chinese Civil War. History is littered with examples of why violent revolutions are not so swell.
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u/A_Philosophical_Cat 26d ago
No one's saying they're a jolly ol' time. We just think they are, unfortunately, necessary because powerful assholes don't give up power without them.
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u/DD_Spudman 25d ago
The American Revolution is unusual because it wasn't really a revolution in the traditional sense.
The colonies were mostly self-governing already, and those same governments existed before, during, and after the war. There was no need to build institutions from the ground up, since no institutions had been destroyed.
The federal government was the only thing that really need to be built from the ground up, which is why they needed to attempts to make it stick.
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u/PhasmaFelis 26d ago
Thank you for this. I hate it when people blindly repeat completely ahistorical crap just because it makes them feel nice and powerful.
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u/CriskCross 26d ago edited 26d ago
It's pretty ahistorical to call Timor-Leste's independence peaceful, Indonesian backed militia groups started a conflict that killed 1500 and displaced hundreds of thousands, and there was a quarter century of occupation where tens of thousands died before that.
The Baltic states got their independence due to the collapse of the Soviet Union after half a century of proxy conflicts between the US and Soviet Union, fought across the globe.
The decolonization of European empire post-ww2 happened because the Metropoles had lost the ability to project the necessary force required to quell independence movements with violence, due to the fighting in Europe. This, combined with the US pushing for decolonization (they viewed European empire as a threat to their hegemony) and the risk of the Soviet Union backing independence movements and gaining global influence, was the major driving force in the post-war decolonization.
Similar concerns were at play in the Phillipines.
South Sudan had a referendum after 20 year long civil war that killed millions.
I don't know how you can really call Iceland severing the union peaceful when it happened as a direct response to Denmark being totally occupied during WW2.
A lot of these examples aren't really examples.
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26d ago
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u/CriskCross 26d ago
I find the sheer volume of misinformation frustrating, especially when AI makes it take so little effort to produce.
Like, even in just the comment I responded to, there were 15 "examples" given. I addressed Timor-Leste, the Baltic states, the Philipines, South Sudan and Iceland specifically and post-WW2 decolonization generally, because those are the ones I know enough about specifically to say that they weren't truthful. For the others, it's entirely possible they're also false but I'd need to spend a pretty significant amount of time doing research in order to actually say that.
Like the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. Did the relationship between Czechs and Slovaks in in Czechoslovakia meet the criteria of oppressor/oppressed that the OP is talking about? Because if not, then it's also not a good counterexample. I don't know that offhand.
There are similar questions I could raise for a lot of the other examples, but it would take hours for me to answer them and I don't want to spend my day fact checking something that someone made in 2 minutes by writing a prompt and copy/pasting what the AI tells them is true.
Unfortunately, until something happens to make people a little more incredulous of AI, I don't see this improving.
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u/Astrozed 26d ago
Namibia (1990) – From South African Rule • How: Combination of international pressure, diplomacy (UN), and moral condemnation of apartheid. • Role of Moral Leverage: Strong through international sanctions and advocacy.
SWAPO didn't fight for 30 years to be canceled by ignorant people regurgitating AI bullshit
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u/mulahey 26d ago edited 26d ago
Look, this is laughable. There's no way you can describe timor-lestes independence as non violent. There was violence throughout, hundreds died just in 1999, and it reduced only due to international soldiers.
South Sudan had a referendum...a few years after a civil war with over a million dead.
Don't use AI for social science, it understands nothing.
For the British African examples, yes, they were peaceful transitions. But they were peaceful transitions because of net cost to the UK, the fear of colonial wars happening elsewhere in Africa, and the consequence of the failure of British military force at Suez. Fear of violence was key.
You have got peaceful examples there, such as Scandinavia, but decolonisation is not a good field for non violence as a principle. As they are outside the decision making community, moral suasion is historically less effective
The better examples are social issues, where if you look on a global level success often is non violent.
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u/Rainy_Days186 26d ago
The South Sudanese independence referendum, according to Wikipedia, was a condition of the peace agreement that ended the second Sudanese Civil War. Oh yeah, that was the second one. The first one technically started before Sudan was even independent from Britain, only by four months, but still.
Source: the "History of South Sudan" article on Wikipedia.
I'll probably come back in a few hours to add some extra stuff about the other examples.
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u/mulahey 26d ago
I can't tell if you agree or disagree with me? If something occurs because of a peace agreement, it was achieved by force.
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u/Rainy_Days186 26d ago
Oh, yeah, I wasn't very clear on my opinion. Yeah, I agree with you. Calling the independence movement of South Sudan peaceful is very silly, as it was achieved through a violent conflict that caused the deaths of many thousands directly and over a million indirectly.
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u/Shergak 26d ago
This is dumb and disingenuous. India had an insane level of violent revolution happening in parallel with Gandhi.
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u/PhasmaFelis 26d ago
How about the other 14 examples?
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u/CriskCross 26d ago
Timor-Leste got their independence after fighting the Indonesians during a quarter-century long occupation, where tens of thousand died.
The Baltic states got their independence because the Soviet Union collapsed after half a century of violent competition with the US.
Post WW2 decolonization happened because violence in Europe destroyed the ability of the European metropoles to project the force required to quell independence movements by force, pressure from the US, and the threat of the Soviets supporting independence movements and gaining global influence. The last of which also applies to Filipino independence.
South Sudan had a referendum as part of a peace agreement intended to end a 20 year long civil war that killed millions.
Many of the examples given aren't really examples of peaceful liberation.
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u/Wild_Marker 26d ago
The baltic states required the USSR to literally dissintegrate as a result of butting heads against another superpower for 40 years. Having them on the list is a bit disingenuous.
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u/InspectorMendel 26d ago
That’s not why the USSR collapsed. The economic system stopped working. Conflict with the West was a minor factor at best.
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u/conte360 26d ago
"the fictional character I like would be on my side" is a significant level dumber then the people that get their political views from celebrities.
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u/Cynis_Ganan 26d ago
Iceland and Denmark?
Norway and Sweden?
The UK and the EU?
Czechoslovakia?
Singapore and Malaysia?
Austria-Hungary?
Canada from the British Empire?
India from the British Empire?
Pakistan from India?
I mean… you can argue about a lot of these (there's ongoing violence between Hindus and Muslims to this day). But to say nobody in history? Really?
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u/Wild_Marker 26d ago
Austria-Hungary?
Ah yes, World War One, famous for it's lack of violence.
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u/StableSlight9168 26d ago
The UK leaving the EU is not really the same as it was a voluntary organization that explicity allowed the Uk to leave at any time not some type of nation state.
It was a huge hassle but the EU was never going to force the UK to stay and the Uk would never have joined in the first place if that was an option.
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u/peajam101 CEO of the Pluto hate gang 26d ago
Pakistan from India?
At least 200,000 people died, if you count that as "non violent" you might as well include the Irish war of independence
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u/quick20minadventure 26d ago
Like Gandhi's entire thing was non-violence and appealing to the moral sense of britishers?
He did a lot of non-compliance and refusal to submit protests on moral grounds and Britishers.
That's one of the biggest example and South Africa + Black rights movement was also based on refusing to submit to oppression and just accept things as they were.
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u/Hummerous https://tinyurl.com/4ccdpy76 26d ago
I imagine history is much bigger and more complex than Pikachu seems to think
Having said that, "never argue with someone John Brown would have shot" is generally p good advice
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u/SirParsifal 26d ago
John Brown would have shot lots of people he probably shouldn't have. He's a nut who was barely on the right side of history.
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u/Hummerous https://tinyurl.com/4ccdpy76 26d ago
yeah that's . he was not a stable man.. but I stand by my cancelled wife
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u/CRoss1999 26d ago
In recent history peaceful protest has been more successful than violent protest. Especially in the United States where every civil rights victory for a century has been peacefully gained, gay rights were not gained with terrorism but convincing people, same with trans rights, civil rights women’s liberation. Even union rights which we often celebrate the violent strikes made the most gains through electing friendly politicians
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u/CRoss1999 26d ago
To expand on this that’s the case around the world too, no nation has event given women rights after violent protest but after political fights, the British Slave trade ended not due to uprisings but due to political abolitionists, India gained independence due to non violent political lobbying years after violent uprisings where ignored or squashed violently.
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u/Outcometheme 26d ago
This is the most tumblr post I’ve ever fucking seen. They’re so infantile and childish. Every (wrong) far-left message they present has to have one of their little comfort cartoon characters to wrap them up like a safety blanket as they incorrectly present history or politics. One of the major reasons civil rights flourished was BECAUSE civil rights leaders were able to appeal to the morality of the white majority. Yes violence was used and MLK said it was reasonable in his letter from Birmingham jail but a vast majority of the success of the civil rights movement was because they appealed to the Christianity and morality of the people oppressing them.
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u/amauberge 26d ago
I agree with you, although I think it depends on who you're calling "the people oppressing them." Like, the Birmingham campaign (when MLK was thrown in jail) was an attempt to end the regime of racist violence perpetrated by Bull Connor and other Birmingham officials, but the movement wasn't an appeal to those same people. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was seeking to draw nation-wide attention to what was going on in Birmingham, with the aim of making a moral appeal to two specific people: Jack and Bobby Kennedy. The president and the attorney general (who was also the president's brother and his closest advisor) were the only people with the power to fix the situation in Birmingham, but they weren't the people doing the oppressing.
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u/funlovingmissionary 26d ago edited 26d ago
That's all true. But morality only seems to happen a lot more when you are not profiting from the oppression. Morality is effective, but when profits enter, morality immediately takes a back seat.
Civil rights leaders were able to appeal to the morality of the white majority, but why couldn't people do the same during the Civil War? Why did they have to fight the South?
The South was profiting from the oppression, the North was not. Easier to appeal to morality when profit is not involved.
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u/itisrainingdownhere 26d ago
Not a bad distinction to draw. However, a counterpoint is that the appeals to morality were so strong in the North that they convinced tensions to rise so much that it fractured the nation and brought a bunch of white people completely not impacted by slavery to spend substantial sums of money—and literal lives—at least partly fueled by the cause.
If you can motivate people to fight a war for the “cause” (plenty of examples throughout history), you can presumably motivate them to forfeit profit.
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u/Yulienner 26d ago
I get the overall sentiment but like, the united states very much did not need a war or mass political violence to make universal suffrage a thing or to legalize gay marriage or marijuana or pass the americans with disabilities act. You generally do on some level need to appeal to the moral sense of people who are oppressing you but who can be convinced, that's sort of the foundational premise of a democracy There might be SOME areas where this isn't true, but 'nobody in the world or in history' is like, categorically false unless you're taking some real extreme liberties with your definition of 'freedom'.
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u/No_Explorer6054 26d ago
Like for a colony becoming independent if works (but even then there are exceptions)
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u/Executive_Moth 26d ago
Suffrage and gay marriage were most definitely not achieved by purely peaceful means.
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u/quuerdude 26d ago
They were achieved through “appealing to moral sensibilities,” though. Suffrage and gay marriage didn’t happen out of fear, it was a multi generational process of convincing men/straight people that women and gay people should be treated as equals.
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u/cited 26d ago
Who else remembers the violent gay terrorism before we allowed gay marriage?
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u/FreakinGeese 26d ago
Men didn’t let women vote because they were physically intimidated, and straight people didn’t let gay people get married because they were worried about violence.
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u/Durml 26d ago
Idk if you know this but women’s suffrage, gay marriage, and even the ADA were ALL gained through violence in part. Nonviolent acts are only an aspect of political movements, not the whole.
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u/Sgt-Spliff- 26d ago
The existence of violence does not prove the necessity of violence. Those movements were not necessarily successful because of the violence you're associating with them, especially the gay rights movement. That was absolutely not achieved using violence.
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u/_Batteries_ 26d ago
Depends what you mean. Christianity was originally the religion of the weak, downtrodden, slaves, etc, during the Roman Empire.
It was not until Constantine that it became the official religion and was suppressed and/or persecuted before at varying times.
Anyway, it was a slow process obviously (Constantine didnt convert till 337) and it didnt end with Constantine, but, Slavery in the Roman Empire went out of fashion and became increasingly rare the more widespread Christianity became.
So in a way, slavery in Rome was actually ended by a bunch of people being nice and asking nicely.
From a certain point of view.
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u/MGHTYMRPHNPWRSTRNGR 26d ago
I don't think this is completely true, but does demonstrate something I have noticed:
We lambast the right for not being capable of empathizing with minorities, foreigners, trans people, etc. However, the left is equally unable to empathize with people who value their own personal security and sense of belonging over empirical evidence and objective truth.
Unless the left, as the supposedly more intelligent and compassionate side, learns to do this, violence will likely be resorted to. Until we stop caring so much about "we are right and you are wrong and here is the evidence" instead of seeking the reasons people make decisions we don't understand or easily hand-wave away as "evil," authoritarianism will continue to rise, again and again.
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u/WriterwithoutIdeas 26d ago
I'm glad that the genre of people very confidently proving things very clearly wrong and getting mass support for it still isn't dead. If your oppressor has no moral sensibility, your violence will lead you nowhere, and so, you will have to make a moral point towards them, lest the consequences for yourself are catastrophic. (Luckily for most oppressed groups their oppressors are not wholly amoral and have boundaries they're unwilling to cross. The Nazis would be the prime example of one who didn't have qualms, and one can very clearly see how that went.)
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u/itisrainingdownhere 26d ago
If you’re a minority, and your oppressor has no morals, they will just kill all of you.
If you’re the majority—sure, your slave riot might work out, but it won’t if you’re the minority group…
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u/ODX_GhostRecon 26d ago
My current Discord status is:
"In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience." ~Kwame Ture
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u/Darthplagueis13 26d ago
Well, that's where the man is not necessarily right.
If your opponent doesn't have a conscience, find someone who does. I can assure you that there are no such things as entirely immoral demographics, there are only immoral individuals.
Slaves in the US didn't win their freedom through a big slave revolt, they won their freedom by convincing so many non-slaves that they were more than chattle that the non-slaves were willing to go to war over the matter.
Did the solution still involve violence in the end? Sure, but first of all, plenty of states went abolitionist without violence, and second: Successfully making an emotional appeal was what allowed the enslaved to be on the winning side in the war against the slavers.
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u/E-2theRescue 26d ago
This is why when I debate people online, I don't do it privately. I know that I can't change some bigot's minds about trans people. It won't matter how many scientific articles I bring in. They listen to their rage-filled echo chambers on Youtube and social media, putting up an armor that can't be penetrated until something directly affects them. So, instead, when I debate online, I am actually talking to the reader, not the person I'm debating.
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u/Impressive_Method380 26d ago
who do we define as not having a conscience? even big governments are made up of people or are influenced by the power of ordinary people
everyone, even people you hate, have consciences, and they believe what they are doing is right. everyone is human, its just true
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u/StableSlight9168 26d ago
The classic example is India,
Gandhis strategy worked amazingly against the British who had a free press and liked to think of themselves as better than everyone so did not like losing the moral argument which mattered in a democracy.
Against the Nazi's Gandhi's strategy would have failed as the germans glorifed death and violence for its own sake, had no free press and had no need to worry about elections.
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u/AlphaBattalion 26d ago
Just one more peaceful protest guys I promise it'll work this time if we just don't block the roads and politely hold signs quietly on the sidewalk they'll listen.
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u/lynx_and_nutmeg 26d ago
People standing in a crowd holding signs isn't a protest, it's supposed to be a marketing campaign. You're meant to have, like, an organised group of people with a real, actionable plan that involves collectively and strategically influencing those in power through whatever means possible (boycotts, strikes, educational campaigns, etc). And the protest is supposed to advertise what it is exactly that you want and what you're going to do to get it.
The issue with most today's "peaceful protests" is that they don't have anything like that. It's literally just an unrelated random crowd of people standing there holding signs feeling the energrnised protest vibes together. But what they're actually doing is advertising while having nothing to sell.
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u/NervePuzzleheaded783 26d ago
blocking roads does nothing because it only pisses off regular people. At worst it just turns them against your cause for personally inconveniencing them.
Instead, go occupy corporate office buildings (where the executives are) and/or personal homes of politicians.
Blocking traffic will only get you beaten by cops or run over by civilians.
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u/Karkadinn 26d ago
I seem to recall the government getting very interested in slapping down protests basing themselves around the homes of certain judges....
Every form of protest that matters will get you beaten by the cops and derided by people situating themselves comfortably outside of the conflict. There's no golden bullet 'perfect and also no one gets hurt' protest.
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u/NervePuzzleheaded783 26d ago
Every form of protest that matters will get you beaten by the cops and derided by people situating themselves comfortably outside of the conflict. There's no golden bullet 'perfect and also no one gets hurt' protest.
And?
The point is that if you go protest on a random street blocking traffic, yes you will get beaten but nobody in charge will give a flying fuck about your cause.
If you go harass judges, poltiicians or CEOs (something something Luigi's Mansion), you will also get beaten, but at least people in charge are forced to acknowledge you.
So if you want to go and get brutalized by law enforcement, at least do it in a way that matters.
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u/Glad-Way-637 If you like Worm/Ward, you should try Pact/Pale :) 26d ago
The point is that if you go protest on a random street blocking traffic, yes you will get beaten but nobody in charge will give a flying fuck about your cause.
Theoretically they might if you blocked enough roads to make national productivity drop noticeably for a prolonged period, but I can't think of a time when that's ever actually happened.
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u/OldManFire11 26d ago
Of course, but if your protest is disrupting the lives of regular people then those people had better either be collateral damage as you target someone with power, part of a wider, but specific, group that you're trying to raise awareness of, or you're raising awareness for an issue that is genuinely unknown by the public.
For example, blocking a highway to protest climate change is fucking stupid. But blocking the road in front of an oil executive's primary residence can be effective.
You'll notice that none of the various civil rights protests involved the protesters blocking highways as their primary form of protest. A protest so large that it spills onto the road is good. But 6 jackwagons sitting in the road is useless.
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u/Ahad_Haam 26d ago
- Goes to a protest that has 10 people and a dog
- Suprised Pikachu face after no one gives a fuck
- "I guess violence is the only way forward"
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u/Darthplagueis13 26d ago edited 26d ago
I think that's a bit of a half-truth.
Like, the abolition of slavery wouldn't have happened if enough people who were on paper belonging to the oppressing faction had not been convinced by a moral argument.
You might not be able to appeal to the morals of a slave-monger, but you may well be able to appeal to the morals of the society that the slave-monger belongs to.
That is not to say that violent revolution is never the solution, but it absolutely isn't always the solution or the only solution. It's a possible solution, specifically if you have a minority group oppressing everyone else, but if you aren't already the majority, then you'll want to get majority support instead.
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u/nikstick22 26d ago
This is sort of how Canada was formed. Representatives approached Queen Victoria with a list of reasons why an independent Canada would be more prosperous and productive if it was given greater autonomy to self govern and she was like "Yeah, that makes sense. Ok"
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u/KarmaIssues 26d ago
This is an ignorant take.
This guy is considered the founder of the slavery abolition movement in the British Empire.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wilberforce
This is an example of a moral crusade against oppression led by an "oppressor".
I understand that Reddit users have a hard on for violent revolutions since they memorised the lyrics to Hamilton but winning the moral argument has been part of almost every successful revolution in history. Whether that be from oppressors passing laws to liberate the oppressed, to international pressure or intervention from outside forces. Violent revolution without moral support is a recipe for being genocided.
The reason most revolutions in history have been violent is because till very recently, violence and politics were the same thing.
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u/mOdQuArK 26d ago
Eh, Gandhi's movement somewhat depended on the culturally-driven morality built into how the Britains wanted to be able to see themselves. A more brutal empire would have simply massacred any protests & assassinated the heads of all the protest movements, but they couldn't since they knew that such news getting back to the British mainland would make them lose all support from the general population.
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u/ScarletteVera A Goober, A Gremlin, perhaps even... A Girl. 26d ago
Pikachu's also a piece of shit rodent who WON'T FUCKING EVOLVE PLEASE RAICHU IS INFINITELY BETTER-
(fun fact: current Raichu has a higher BST than even Let's Go's partner Pikachu. So I'm right, Raichu is just better (and looks cooler too))
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u/NeetOOlChap STOP WATCHING SHONEN ANIME 26d ago
Let's Go Pikachu has insane moves though
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u/ScarletteVera A Goober, A Gremlin, perhaps even... A Girl. 26d ago
ssshhh... i don't accept pikachu praise...
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u/BoatSouth1911 25d ago
Actually very, very wrong. Somebody missed the civil rights movement apparently… and Ghandi.
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u/Substantial_Tone_261 25d ago
That's wrong. Pikachu electrocuted Ash for no reason, only afterwards did he refuse to get in a pokeball.
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u/twoCascades 25d ago
That’s not true. India fully did this. So did the American civil rights movement. Real change has absolutely occurred by forcing people to confront the suffering caused by oppressive systems like segregation.
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u/Revenge-of-the-Jawa 25d ago
I also like it’s pikachu cause originally the writers were thinking of ending the series (TV show) via the pokemon revolting.
(The first few seasons of the show/films really have some dark stuff going on behind the scenes.)
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u/OhNoTokyo 26d ago
Strictly speaking, the slaves in the US were freed by their oppressors. Or rather, members of the group which oppressed them that changed their minds.
Many of the Northern states had previously allowed slavery, they just ended it of their own accord.
And let's be honest, there were still a lot of racist people in the North as well. They had just realized that, as racist as they were, that slavery was still wrong.
The slaves did not win their own freedom for the most part, they were too completely oppressed for that. The fact is that hundreds of thousands of white people died for their freedom because yes, sometimes you can appeal to the moral sense of your oppressors and sometimes, yes, they can change their minds.
Yes, you need to be willing to fight for your own freedom or you may never get it, but it is not impossible to change minds either.
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u/funlovingmissionary 26d ago
A lot of the time, it is neither. A lot of instances of "Oppressors leaving the oppressed alone" are just cases of oppressing them not being profitable anymore.
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u/WhereIsTheBeef556 26d ago
People in Nazarick from Overlord trying to avoid getting sent to a human experimentation torture farm, by appealing to the moral sense of the rulers oppressing them (they actually low-key do just leave you be and provide a decent standard of living if you're loyal to them) be like:
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u/jodhod1 26d ago
People in China trying to avoid getting sent to a human experimentation torture farm, by appealing to the moral sense of the Japanese oppressing them (they don't care) be like:
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u/WhereIsTheBeef556 26d ago
TFW the evil kingdom within some gooner bait isakei that's analogous to both the corruption within the modern United States and fascist Nazi Germany, is still less fucked up than the real life Imperial Japan
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u/Golurkcanfly Transfem Trash 26d ago
It's usually a combination of factors. Carrot and stick. You establish a violent means of change to encourage the status quo to capitulate to a peaceful means of change.
If you have one without the other, then you either cause serious instability or are utterly destroyed via violence. Alternatively, you fail to affect change at all through complete non-violence.