The Onion

bro, you're on lemmy.world, careful now

I don't think it is possible to go draw conclusions to individual countries and peoples situations from that statistic.

Also the historic lense cannot analyse the advancements in oppression since then. If you go to prison for sitting on a street, like climate activists in the UK and Germany do, you might as well go to prison for smashing something. If you are painted as terrorists by a complicit media, for throwing soup onto the plexiglass in front of an old painting, what is the point in not using means that actually achieve something?

If your adversary is willing to murder you at the earliest convenience like Assad slaughtered his people in Syria or Israelis are slaughtering Palestinians, or well the US healthcare system is letting its people die en masse, nonviolence can only do so much.

Final thought: No campaign is completely violent or nonviolent. You always have both aspects. At the minimum a threat of escalating to violence is necessary for nonviolent campaigns to be successful. Many campaigns fail, because they make it clear from the beginning, that they will not escalate, and so the government just ignores them.

Wow, what an interesting graphic. Maybe the government should start using nonviolent tactics to deal with rapists and murderers. Why lock a child molester in prison when you can do a sit-in or a letter writing campaign?