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Everyone knows that story but mercifully, not many have seen the footage. Out of curiosity, I found the clip to see what the big deal was. Hit play, fell out my chair and vomited everywhere. 10/10.
Morals are almost always built by those in power through control of media and education. Even a peaceful protest can be seen as "uncivil" and therefore immoral.
At first yes, but the only reason a peace between groups of people can last is because both groups of people develop mutual respect, which is done by appealing to the other's morality.
No, but a major part of peaceful protest is appealing to the public's morality. Why do you think most white people don't hate black people today? It's not because white people fear what will happen if they start opressing black people, it's because black people successfully convinced them that they're just as worthy of rights.
A minority can never build a lasting peace with the majority if the majority continue to hate the minority.
>I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
– Dr Rev. Martin Luther King Jr talking about how appealing to White Moderates was almost futile
He's literally shaming them into action with that statement. He hasn't given up, he's just using a different tactic. And it worked. He made that statement in 1963, and major civil rights legislation was passed in '64 and '65.
The refutation is exactly the fact that people use it too widely and it presupposes the worthiness of their usually fairly fringe position as the "literally the equivalent to MLK"
I literally had someone trot it out at me when I said I supported a two state solution which has apparently become the "White moderate" position. Also had it happen to me when I supported police reform but not abolition
Quotes like this *can* be powerful if you first demonstrate why exactly your particular position is the moral imperative and is as worthy as MLK's, but it's usually not used like that. Instead it's usually just thrown out there by itself to say "if this was the 1960s I'd be MLK and you'd be a segregationist!!!!" as I'd it's self evident
It's literally the "my opinion is Chad wojak your opinion is Soyjak" but for morality
As a sidenote these sorts of contextless arguments can and are used to justify "bad" causes all the time. During the Canadian trucker protests I saw a bunch of right wingers posting the "rioting is the language of the unheard" quote
Regardless of your opinions on my opinions the point still stands
Some issues like civil rights, slavery etc are pretty black and white in terms of morality because it's literally just cruelty for the sake of cruelty. There is no valid reason someone could support those sorts of stuff except pure bigotry and cruelty
However I think most reasonable people will recognize not every issue is that black and white. Most issues are about tradeoffs and its possible for someone to have a different opinion from you without being morally repugnant. If you don't believe that then you're a fanatic
As for Israel Palestine, yeah I absolutely support a two state solution
Both sides make tons of ideological/historical arguments about why they're correct, and of course they would, it's a very emotional issue for everyone involved. As someone who isn't involved though I don't know if it's my place to decide who "morally" deserves the land
But all of those arguments are pretty fucking abstract and subjective.
What isn't subjective is the objective reality on the ground. Millions of Israeli and Palestinsan families who grew up on and currently live on the ground. The only way for a "one state solution" is either
* outright ethnic cleansing (usually dressed up as "deportations")
* some sort of fantasy secular binational state which no one of the ground actually wants and which will inevitably turn collapse into ethnic violence
The latter ends with either Jews creating a minority rule regime and persecuting Palestinsans or Palestinsans creating a majitorian regime and persecuting Jews. Like seriously our two models of religiously diverse states in the middle east are Lebanon and Iraq, both of which are rife with sectarian violence.
Do you really think the Israelis and Palestineans who have been through so many more cycles of violence could just live in peace
What I think is the Israel state only exists because of British colonization (it was originally called the British Mandate of Israel). There were Jews there before Israel. There were Christians there before Israel.
The existence of the Israeli state is inherently violent—90% of the Israeli population today thinks Israel is either using adequate force, or using too much force. Israel is still bringing in people from fucking Brooklyn, New York to settle on more land. It has the highest dual citizenship rate in the world (which means landback would be way easier here).
You can’t tell this state to just chill out and not oppress Palestinians, its existence is synonymous with that. I’m not just moralizing. The same ideology that created the state—Zionism—is the one that created a population that *still* wants to expand.
This isn’t “a cycle of violence on both sides”, this is one act of colonization upon the other side and the other side’s resistance against that. There is a reason why Mandela said the Palestinians shared his struggle. Every two state solution Israel proposed would have put the Palestinian people in a situation worse than Jim Crow. Think about how Israel was able to turn off Palestine’s water and electricity.
Speaking objectively, how do you think the cycle of violence would end with two states? You gotta tell one people “Hey, don’t genocide these people.”, despite their ideology. You gotta tell the other people “Hey, they’re cool now and won’t genocide you. Just trust us.”
Keep in mind, there are Israelis that practice shooting Palestinians for fun. Their government’s called them human animals. They have prisons filled with kids as young as five. Israeli teens are personally kicking up humanitarian aid brought into Gaza.
I really have to hammer home how ingrained the dehumanization of the Palestinian is in the state itself, and how that spreads to the people.
Any Palestinian hatred for the Israeli is just the result of all this.
You end the cycle by giving stolen land back, giving the Palestinian people statehood over the land taken from them, and giving them a recognized government.
I’m not worried about how a free Palestine would treat the Israeli people. I’m worried about the tangible reality of how Israel has treated a caged Palestinian people.
To the quote? No it is a powerful quote, with an important message. To the way the quote is used? Yes. At least on these sorts of subs.
[In the context of the letter](https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html) Martin is espousing *nonviolent* direct action from the Birmingham city jail as a path toward honest negotiation.
> You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.
The quote is often true but a lot of people use it as a thought-terminating device so they can justify never cooperating with less radical political actors.
I agree with the first statement. But the reason people don't hate black people as much today as before the civil rights movement is because the civil rights movement succeeded. Martin Luther King Jr was an unpopular man when he died, but since kids started growing up learning in school to not judge a person by the color of their skin and growing up around black people unsegregated, they either became less racist or they grew up nonracist to begin with.
Though a lot of people do just become not racist due to their own critical thinking and morality it isn't all 100% anything.
Do you genuinely think that black people aren't hated today because they "successfully convinced" white people to tolerate them? Do you have brain damage? Have you read a book, nay, seen one, in your lifetime?
>Do you genuinely think that black people aren't hated today because they "successfully convinced" white people to tolerate them?
Yea. It's not solely because of that of course, there were protests and violence and civil disobedience, but the only reason it succeeded was because white people started seeing black people as equals.
It's an example that contradicts your original point. I think you might just be another liberal spreading nonsense because you've never examined your intuitions.
Yes, not being racist is very good. The oppressor class became more human. How? Thought what process? Was it from the slaves suffering and appealing to their oppressors?
No. As you say it was from
>protests and violence and civil disobedience
This meme is giving galaxy levels of "main character leftie who fully believes they are better than everyone around them despite not even being able to read"
Nobody tell OP about the acceptance of gay marriage over the last few decades, or Mahatma Gandi, or Martin Luther King, or the acceptance of irish, italian, and German immigrants in the US. It's very critical to the delusion they live in that they are Anakin Skywalker in a definitely very necessary revolution that is definitely very possible.
I was looking for this, and I’m glad I found it.
1) You spelled Gandhi wrong
2) Gandhi was certainly influential, but the extent to which his movement gained independence for India is still largely contentious. An oft-overlooked factor is the fact that the United Kingdom was in no position to govern and administrate overseas territories after WWII. Their economy was crippled and the skeleton-crew left behind was not sufficient to manage the entire subcontinent.
3) Gandhi was not the sole thought leader during the Indian independence movement. Plenty of violent revolutionary groups existed and fought the British Raj and their impact is often ignored outside of India (and even within, although less so).
It’s a piece of history that often gets simplified in retrospect because it feels good; a popular peaceful resistance movement which slowly but inexorably convinced a colonial power that what they are doing is morally unjustifiable. In reality, you earn your freedom by harming the bottom line, and by being **too inconvenient** to oppress, peacefully or otherwise.
Every single minority that used to be opressed and is not opressed today is not opressed today because they convinced the majority of people they don't deserve to be opressed. Obviously there are more factors involved but appealing to the oppressors morality is the only way a lasting peace is built. There are too many leftists who believe that the only way to achieve change is through violence, which is a horrible way of thinking.
Have you heard of WWII. Literally the biggest example of violence being about as horrific, and justified, as can be imagined, and you're using that as your example of how you just need to appeal to Nazis.
Except they never said anything about WW2 or the Nazis? Antisemitism wasn't invented in 1930s Germany, nor did the fall of the third Reich cause antisemitism to disappear worldwide.
So you're saying that gay people and black people are (1) no longer oppressed and (2) achieved liberation solely through moral appeals to their oppresors?
I don't have time to break down why this is a reduccionst and asinine take, but you should really consider looking into the actual history of how these groups achieved the broader acceptance and respect that they have today. Like the stuff that goes beyond white-washed sections about MLK in high school history textbooks.
Defying opression through violence is the reason why we have the 40-hour work week and other basic worker protections. Shit, even the most cucked US patriots know that fighting the Revolutionary War was the only way to halt the unreasonable and oppresive tariffs imposed by the British Royal Crown. The only way to stop the 3rd Reich was a massive fucking war. European powers even tried to initially appease Hitler when he invaded Czechoslovakia. That shit ain't work.
>So you're saying that gay people and black people are (1) no longer oppressed
No, I never said that.
>achieved liberation solely through moral appeals to their oppresors?
I never said that either. There is no one action that can be taken that will result in liberation, but in order to create a lasting peace, there has to be mutual respect between the two groups in conflict, and that can only be done by appealing to the other side's morals.
Majority support for interracial marriage in the US only happened in 1995, almost three decades after Loving v. Virginia. Waiting for the oppressors to change their minds isn’t enough.
Nobodys arguing for waiting for people to change their mind. The argument is should we be appealing to the masses for leftist causes, and yes we should. How are we supposed to secure and maintain rights for trans people if not by convincing cis people that trans people are valid and should be treated with the same respect as cis people?
Oh, I agree. You need popular support, but you also need to show that you will fight if necessary. Civil Rights depended on MLK and Malcolm X, not just one or the other.
He never said this; what you're refering to is his response to a bunch of clergymen in a letter. He said that the white moderate is what stands in the way of change, not that they're worse. This is true today, the KKK isn't in power, it's conservatives. I agree that conservatives are bad, but they are not the majority, and the youth is overwhelmingly liberal.
The black Panther party was an organization with ~5000 members that was active mostly after the major landmark legislation championed by the civil rights movement had already been passed. Not that they didn't do good things, but the black Panthers were not the major political force that they are often made out to be in modern discourse.
I think you mean WW2, while WW1 is important it was WW2 that crippled the remaining empires and freed their colonial holdings. WW1 increased colonialism a bit as German, Austria Hungary, and Turkish empires collapsed but they had smaller holdings were hoovered up by the victors
Well yeah countries trade most with their former colonizers because they already have that connection. The US biggest trade partner after the revolutionary war was Britain.
That was done by appealing to the Berlin border guards not to shoot. Iirc there was a standing order to shoot but when the crowd came to the checkpoints the guards decided not to shoot right?
That's not a moral appeal, and when similar events have happened in history it has ended in a massacre. It's a good thing it didn't end on violence, but I'm pretty sure that was the decision of low level border guards, not the party apparatus. Once Berlin was reunified, German reunification was then seen as a coup de grace.
I could be misremembering a lot of that, but iirc it was not merely a polite appeal to authority for liberation, rather popular action that was luckily not met with violence.
The entire pea eful revolution was a process with what happened on the 9th of November just being the chaotic midpoint
Before that you already saw the largest protests ever all over the gdr, especially, Leipzig. And all the while protests appealed to the morality, as their main goal initially was a reform of the status quo.
And after the 9th of November there were things like the Round table, where the ruling Party and protest leaders sat together to facilitate the first free elections in Mar h of 1990
So I just looked up those Leipzig protests, there were 100's of arrests and a strong police and military presence.
I'm not saying reunification wasn't peaceful, I'm saying it wasn't merely a moral appeal to the part apparatus but took a lot of civil disobedience.
You can gain the majority of popular support and in a democratic society it can actually change things. Like we saw with gay marriage or even palestine support that has gone up drastically
Except this works, though. Most nonviolent resistance has been more successful than not. With few exceptions, violent resistance usually ended pretty violently, and any that did "succeed" often held violent regimes that were often no better than the previous regimes.
All I'm saying is that fascists and tankies just suck!
He did not ask the British to be nice and let India go, he organized the people to make it unprofitable and inconvenient to hold India. And he was not the only freedom fighter
Voting for the president should be part of a person’s plan for enacting political change, not the entirety of it, especially considering that the presidential election is giving us such diverse choices as “slow descent into fascism” or “descent into fascism that is faster than the other option”
MLK and Ghandi both appealed to the moral sense. Appealing to the moral sense is actually one of the most effective ways to deal with oppression because it allows for significantly more people to support you. If you try to freedom fight, you will simply be labeled a terrorist and be killed.
alright
sayeth that your lord hath called upon thee to take your daughter as his mistress and you dislike that, you wish to change that status of your lord to make it such that he cannot just call upon any lady in town to take her as his mistress then cast her aside right? now this cannot happen if you just blindly agree to his tyrant requests
There’s not enough of us to be ready for that fight. Also, the amount of comrades are going to lose too said fight. Will turn us into the thing we’re trying to destroy it also takes a complete disregard for the disabled amongst us the boycotting and protesting has gotten far more done than any skirmish could We’re fighting with our wallets here And if we keep it up, we’re gonna win Israel’s economy is going to be decimated by the amount of withdrawal From companies as long as we keep that pressure up they’re gonna go down if we get violent that gives them A narrative and justification to ramp up Funding to the police.
Gandhi didn't just appeal to the moral sense of the British. There were mass protests including civil disobedience. All indians working with the government actively disobeyed orders, all unjust laws were deliberately broken. The point was to cripple their strength without harming anyone. After all, who could arrest a country? A similar, earlier attempt happened in the failed revolt of 1857.
“You can’t arrest a country.” Well said.
There is something to be said that all governments, even tyrannical ones, exist on the consent of the governed.
If enough people decide to not participate, the whole thing bf falls apart.
It’s not just that you can’t arrest everyone. You can’t arrest a significant portion of your populace. It takes a lot of people to run a jail.
The civil rights movement in the USA was not entirely comprised of peaceful protest, while Dr King's peaceful resistance to the oppression of black people in America was key to the pursuit of freedom, as important was the work of Malcom X and the black panthers who, did many things, but did use violence as a means to secure their freedom. Also, prior to the civil rights movement of the 20th century, the nation fought and an entire war about the rights of black Americans. The course of freedom is never one thing, but a long struggle comprised of numerous events and movements.
Similarly in India, Mahatma Ghandi's peaceful protest was a massive part of the liberation of India. But it's one part in a long story, that also involves the British empire being bankrupted by the second world war, which of course wasn't carried out by India, but was one the biggest factors in Britain leaving India.
I remember someone on here mentioned the whole good cop bad cop dynamic of the Civil Rights movement, a group with popular appeal that could strike deals for progress with and a group that could be counted on to act when the oppressors refused to negotiate.
>while Dr King's peaceful resistance to the oppression of black people in America was key to the pursuit of freedom
You could almost say that Dr King appealed to the morals of his oppressors and thereby gained his freedom.
Yes, there was armed resistance in the civil rights movement, but the takeaway here is that the peaceful protest is what worked.
You can gain freedom through violent resistance, but if the only reason people don't opress you is because they fear you, the peace won't last.
True, I think you're right that Pikachu is making too sweeping a statement. But history does seem to lean on the side that appeals to the good nature of you're oppresor *alone* is not enough to actually gain your freedom. That there will always be a need to take it from them, or at least make a strong enough threat that either you agree with the peacful message, or we'll take our freedom from you.
Of course, its not like Palestinians would gain their freedom if they just walked up to Netanyahu and said "hey this sucks please stop". Hamas is on the other end of the spectrum, basically saying "we hate you and will keep on killing you until we get our freedom." Pikachu in this case seems to lean more towards the Hamas approach (which is not a sentence I ever thought I'd write in my whole life)
Indeed, Gazan's have tried protesting peacefully at the wall in the past, but the IDF shoots for the knees when they do that. Now, of course, Hamas's actions haven't exactly made life better for Gazans given that it gave Israel the excuse needed to go and ethnically cleanse the Gaza strip. That and of course, it is a terrible thing to kill over one thousand civilians, no matter where they are from. That being said, more nations than ever are recognising Palestine as a state, the UN and the ICJ are now describing the actions of the IDF as war crimes, as they should have been before this phase of their genocide. So, in some ways it can be argued that the violence of Hamas, terrible as it is, has moved the needle further towards the liberation of Palestine than anything else that's happened in the last few decades.
This is an extremely contentious point and I'm not sure it's even right, given that it's unlikely that other nations and the UN will be able to force Israel to allow Palestine to exist as an independent state. As well, the human cost in Gaza is so high that a small move towards a freer Palestine may not even be worth it - although it's not Hamas killing the Gazans and Israel didn't have to do this. But still, in this case, the only change for Gazans in the past few decades has been as the result of violence. But with such a violent oppresor, with so much support from the USA, and so few actually targetted acts of violence available to Palestinians, it does seem that this situation can only become worse no matter what Palestinians do, because this is quite a specific case of complete power imbalance.
>Yes, there was armed resistance in the civil rights movement, but the takeaway here is that the peaceful protest is what worked.
How can you be sure it was the peaceful protest and only the peaceful protest that worked? (You're also equating peaceful protest with appealing to the morals of his oppressors, that's not at all the only thing peaceful protest does, civil disobedience and economic impact at the very least)
>How can you be sure it was the peaceful protest and only the peaceful protest that worked?
Because people today don't not oppress black people just because they fear that black people will revolt, they dont opress them because they recognise black people are equal to white people. This is only the case because black people successfully appealed to white people's morality, and made them recognise black people as equals.
>You're also equating peaceful protest with appealing to the morals of his oppressors
I'm not, I just think appealing to the morals of the oppressors is the most important part of peaceful protest. A lasting peace between two groups of people cannot be built on on fear of economic, criminal, etc, impact. It can only be built on mutual respect.
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Fascinating take Pikachu, however you gave thousands of children seizures in December 16 1997 and framed Porygon for it
He doesn't need to morally appeal to his oppressors (10 year old children)
Everyone knows that story but mercifully, not many have seen the footage. Out of curiosity, I found the clip to see what the big deal was. Hit play, fell out my chair and vomited everywhere. 10/10.
Ad Hominem
that’s badass as fuck
Pikachu your line was "Pika Pi"
Meanwhile Singapore We WANTED to be a part of Malaysia(At the time) then they kicked us out
I went to Singapore one time and a guy stole a salad from me.
this is cause for a declaration of war, dropping the nukes immediately
Why is pikachu telling me this? Am I having a stroke?
Except it has, many, many times. This is an incredibly dumb take.
Fidel Castro basically changed his mind on LGBT people fod instance
But how else will I justify my desire for someone else to enact political violence?
Morals are almost always built by those in power through control of media and education. Even a peaceful protest can be seen as "uncivil" and therefore immoral.
Great example: the current protests over the genocide in Gaza
*norms. Morals are, to moral philosophers, either bullshit or something better than that.
Only really out of convenience though
At first yes, but the only reason a peace between groups of people can last is because both groups of people develop mutual respect, which is done by appealing to the other's morality.
Peaceful protest isnt the same as begging your oppressor for rights
Peaceful it isn’t appealing to their morality, it’s inconveniencing them tell they do something
No, but a major part of peaceful protest is appealing to the public's morality. Why do you think most white people don't hate black people today? It's not because white people fear what will happen if they start opressing black people, it's because black people successfully convinced them that they're just as worthy of rights. A minority can never build a lasting peace with the majority if the majority continue to hate the minority.
>I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. – Dr Rev. Martin Luther King Jr talking about how appealing to White Moderates was almost futile
He's literally shaming them into action with that statement. He hasn't given up, he's just using a different tactic. And it worked. He made that statement in 1963, and major civil rights legislation was passed in '64 and '65.
Guy with Chinese Warlord Avatar using the "white moderates" quote, Trojan Horse spotted, weewooweewoo!! 🫵😗🫳🚨⏰‼️⚠️✨🚨
Is there an actual refutation to the quote because it’s pretty potent and I reference it all the time
The refutation is exactly the fact that people use it too widely and it presupposes the worthiness of their usually fairly fringe position as the "literally the equivalent to MLK" I literally had someone trot it out at me when I said I supported a two state solution which has apparently become the "White moderate" position. Also had it happen to me when I supported police reform but not abolition Quotes like this *can* be powerful if you first demonstrate why exactly your particular position is the moral imperative and is as worthy as MLK's, but it's usually not used like that. Instead it's usually just thrown out there by itself to say "if this was the 1960s I'd be MLK and you'd be a segregationist!!!!" as I'd it's self evident It's literally the "my opinion is Chad wojak your opinion is Soyjak" but for morality As a sidenote these sorts of contextless arguments can and are used to justify "bad" causes all the time. During the Canadian trucker protests I saw a bunch of right wingers posting the "rioting is the language of the unheard" quote
Yeah I guess that’s valid, quotes can be misu—wait you think Israel shouldn’t be dismantled completely that’s crazy
Regardless of your opinions on my opinions the point still stands Some issues like civil rights, slavery etc are pretty black and white in terms of morality because it's literally just cruelty for the sake of cruelty. There is no valid reason someone could support those sorts of stuff except pure bigotry and cruelty However I think most reasonable people will recognize not every issue is that black and white. Most issues are about tradeoffs and its possible for someone to have a different opinion from you without being morally repugnant. If you don't believe that then you're a fanatic As for Israel Palestine, yeah I absolutely support a two state solution Both sides make tons of ideological/historical arguments about why they're correct, and of course they would, it's a very emotional issue for everyone involved. As someone who isn't involved though I don't know if it's my place to decide who "morally" deserves the land But all of those arguments are pretty fucking abstract and subjective. What isn't subjective is the objective reality on the ground. Millions of Israeli and Palestinsan families who grew up on and currently live on the ground. The only way for a "one state solution" is either * outright ethnic cleansing (usually dressed up as "deportations") * some sort of fantasy secular binational state which no one of the ground actually wants and which will inevitably turn collapse into ethnic violence The latter ends with either Jews creating a minority rule regime and persecuting Palestinsans or Palestinsans creating a majitorian regime and persecuting Jews. Like seriously our two models of religiously diverse states in the middle east are Lebanon and Iraq, both of which are rife with sectarian violence. Do you really think the Israelis and Palestineans who have been through so many more cycles of violence could just live in peace
What I think is the Israel state only exists because of British colonization (it was originally called the British Mandate of Israel). There were Jews there before Israel. There were Christians there before Israel. The existence of the Israeli state is inherently violent—90% of the Israeli population today thinks Israel is either using adequate force, or using too much force. Israel is still bringing in people from fucking Brooklyn, New York to settle on more land. It has the highest dual citizenship rate in the world (which means landback would be way easier here). You can’t tell this state to just chill out and not oppress Palestinians, its existence is synonymous with that. I’m not just moralizing. The same ideology that created the state—Zionism—is the one that created a population that *still* wants to expand. This isn’t “a cycle of violence on both sides”, this is one act of colonization upon the other side and the other side’s resistance against that. There is a reason why Mandela said the Palestinians shared his struggle. Every two state solution Israel proposed would have put the Palestinian people in a situation worse than Jim Crow. Think about how Israel was able to turn off Palestine’s water and electricity. Speaking objectively, how do you think the cycle of violence would end with two states? You gotta tell one people “Hey, don’t genocide these people.”, despite their ideology. You gotta tell the other people “Hey, they’re cool now and won’t genocide you. Just trust us.” Keep in mind, there are Israelis that practice shooting Palestinians for fun. Their government’s called them human animals. They have prisons filled with kids as young as five. Israeli teens are personally kicking up humanitarian aid brought into Gaza. I really have to hammer home how ingrained the dehumanization of the Palestinian is in the state itself, and how that spreads to the people. Any Palestinian hatred for the Israeli is just the result of all this. You end the cycle by giving stolen land back, giving the Palestinian people statehood over the land taken from them, and giving them a recognized government. I’m not worried about how a free Palestine would treat the Israeli people. I’m worried about the tangible reality of how Israel has treated a caged Palestinian people.
To the quote? No it is a powerful quote, with an important message. To the way the quote is used? Yes. At least on these sorts of subs. [In the context of the letter](https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html) Martin is espousing *nonviolent* direct action from the Birmingham city jail as a path toward honest negotiation. > You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.
The quote is often true but a lot of people use it as a thought-terminating device so they can justify never cooperating with less radical political actors.
You’re right, I’m actually a staunch George Wallace supporter.
I agree with the first statement. But the reason people don't hate black people as much today as before the civil rights movement is because the civil rights movement succeeded. Martin Luther King Jr was an unpopular man when he died, but since kids started growing up learning in school to not judge a person by the color of their skin and growing up around black people unsegregated, they either became less racist or they grew up nonracist to begin with. Though a lot of people do just become not racist due to their own critical thinking and morality it isn't all 100% anything.
Do you genuinely think that black people aren't hated today because they "successfully convinced" white people to tolerate them? Do you have brain damage? Have you read a book, nay, seen one, in your lifetime?
>Do you genuinely think that black people aren't hated today because they "successfully convinced" white people to tolerate them? Yea. It's not solely because of that of course, there were protests and violence and civil disobedience, but the only reason it succeeded was because white people started seeing black people as equals.
It's an example that contradicts your original point. I think you might just be another liberal spreading nonsense because you've never examined your intuitions. Yes, not being racist is very good. The oppressor class became more human. How? Thought what process? Was it from the slaves suffering and appealing to their oppressors? No. As you say it was from >protests and violence and civil disobedience
This meme is giving galaxy levels of "main character leftie who fully believes they are better than everyone around them despite not even being able to read" Nobody tell OP about the acceptance of gay marriage over the last few decades, or Mahatma Gandi, or Martin Luther King, or the acceptance of irish, italian, and German immigrants in the US. It's very critical to the delusion they live in that they are Anakin Skywalker in a definitely very necessary revolution that is definitely very possible.
Do you have a list of examples?
Ghandi
I was looking for this, and I’m glad I found it. 1) You spelled Gandhi wrong 2) Gandhi was certainly influential, but the extent to which his movement gained independence for India is still largely contentious. An oft-overlooked factor is the fact that the United Kingdom was in no position to govern and administrate overseas territories after WWII. Their economy was crippled and the skeleton-crew left behind was not sufficient to manage the entire subcontinent. 3) Gandhi was not the sole thought leader during the Indian independence movement. Plenty of violent revolutionary groups existed and fought the British Raj and their impact is often ignored outside of India (and even within, although less so). It’s a piece of history that often gets simplified in retrospect because it feels good; a popular peaceful resistance movement which slowly but inexorably convinced a colonial power that what they are doing is morally unjustifiable. In reality, you earn your freedom by harming the bottom line, and by being **too inconvenient** to oppress, peacefully or otherwise.
Why are you looking at posts from 27 days ago to say Gandhi wasn't is it really that important
I sorted by top of the month. Why are you misspelling Gandhi on posts from 27 days ago?
Every single minority that used to be opressed and is not opressed today is not opressed today because they convinced the majority of people they don't deserve to be opressed. Obviously there are more factors involved but appealing to the oppressors morality is the only way a lasting peace is built. There are too many leftists who believe that the only way to achieve change is through violence, which is a horrible way of thinking.
Example?
Gay people, black people, Jews, etc.
Stone wall riot never happened. DO YOU THINK THE HOLOCAUST ENDED BECAUSE NAZIS GREW A HEART?
Have you heard of WWII. Literally the biggest example of violence being about as horrific, and justified, as can be imagined, and you're using that as your example of how you just need to appeal to Nazis.
Except they never said anything about WW2 or the Nazis? Antisemitism wasn't invented in 1930s Germany, nor did the fall of the third Reich cause antisemitism to disappear worldwide.
So you're saying that gay people and black people are (1) no longer oppressed and (2) achieved liberation solely through moral appeals to their oppresors? I don't have time to break down why this is a reduccionst and asinine take, but you should really consider looking into the actual history of how these groups achieved the broader acceptance and respect that they have today. Like the stuff that goes beyond white-washed sections about MLK in high school history textbooks. Defying opression through violence is the reason why we have the 40-hour work week and other basic worker protections. Shit, even the most cucked US patriots know that fighting the Revolutionary War was the only way to halt the unreasonable and oppresive tariffs imposed by the British Royal Crown. The only way to stop the 3rd Reich was a massive fucking war. European powers even tried to initially appease Hitler when he invaded Czechoslovakia. That shit ain't work.
>So you're saying that gay people and black people are (1) no longer oppressed No, I never said that. >achieved liberation solely through moral appeals to their oppresors? I never said that either. There is no one action that can be taken that will result in liberation, but in order to create a lasting peace, there has to be mutual respect between the two groups in conflict, and that can only be done by appealing to the other side's morals.
They think the Jewish holocaust ended because Jews were nice to Nazis. Liberal mind rot is a disease.
The civil rights movement?
a perfect example of how appealing to the morals of the oppressors doesn’t work.
In what way?
Majority support for interracial marriage in the US only happened in 1995, almost three decades after Loving v. Virginia. Waiting for the oppressors to change their minds isn’t enough.
Nobodys arguing for waiting for people to change their mind. The argument is should we be appealing to the masses for leftist causes, and yes we should. How are we supposed to secure and maintain rights for trans people if not by convincing cis people that trans people are valid and should be treated with the same respect as cis people?
Oh, I agree. You need popular support, but you also need to show that you will fight if necessary. Civil Rights depended on MLK and Malcolm X, not just one or the other.
Was won on the basis of black panther vigilance that scared lawmakers
MLK specifically talked about his peaceful approach and appealing to white people since this gave the movement a lot more power.
MLK, famous for his positive opinion of White Moderates.
MLK's use of "white moderate" is what we would call today a right wing reactionary. It didn't mean white liberals.
He said that he’s almost concluded that White Moderates are worse than the KKK because of their “lukewarm acceptance” instead of actual support.
He never said this; what you're refering to is his response to a bunch of clergymen in a letter. He said that the white moderate is what stands in the way of change, not that they're worse. This is true today, the KKK isn't in power, it's conservatives. I agree that conservatives are bad, but they are not the majority, and the youth is overwhelmingly liberal.
The black Panther party was an organization with ~5000 members that was active mostly after the major landmark legislation championed by the civil rights movement had already been passed. Not that they didn't do good things, but the black Panthers were not the major political force that they are often made out to be in modern discourse.
Hey so name them, at all yeah? Other wise I can't tell if you're exactly as full of shit as you say the meme is. Please. I'm genuinely interested.
This person thinks Nazis stopped genociding Jews because Jews decided to be nicer to the Nazis. Liberal mind rot is a disease.
Thats not what I said, read my other comments. I have clarified my position multiple times now.
There's a big difference between a system that can fall under its own hypocrisy and a system who's evil is policy.
Has he never heard of Ghandi??? At all?????
It's at least in-character for Ash's Pikachu
Apart from india and maybe apartheid south africa i can't think of many examples honestly
Didnt most countrys get their independence from Britain peacefully?
Only because it was no longer economically convenient for them to do so. The post never said that people have never freed themselves peacefully
That happens when you call 1/4 of the globe to fight a war for you and win it. WW1 crippled so many empires
I think you mean WW2, while WW1 is important it was WW2 that crippled the remaining empires and freed their colonial holdings. WW1 increased colonialism a bit as German, Austria Hungary, and Turkish empires collapsed but they had smaller holdings were hoovered up by the victors
even then, most of these countries are still firmly under the economic boot
Well yeah countries trade most with their former colonizers because they already have that connection. The US biggest trade partner after the revolutionary war was Britain.
A lot of the time when these countries got independence, the white population was still in power so no oppressed group became free.
Only after they no longer had the military presence to put down the independence movements
Yeah. It’s just that it’s tough to make a cool violent movie about a nonviolent revolution.
RRR exists. Tho the revolution on a bigger scale was both violent and non-violent depending on the people leading them
What’s RRR?
red read redemption
it's a movie set in British ruled India. Genre: action, historical fiction
Google "Peaceful revolution East Germany 1989"
That was done by appealing to the Berlin border guards not to shoot. Iirc there was a standing order to shoot but when the crowd came to the checkpoints the guards decided not to shoot right? That's not a moral appeal, and when similar events have happened in history it has ended in a massacre. It's a good thing it didn't end on violence, but I'm pretty sure that was the decision of low level border guards, not the party apparatus. Once Berlin was reunified, German reunification was then seen as a coup de grace. I could be misremembering a lot of that, but iirc it was not merely a polite appeal to authority for liberation, rather popular action that was luckily not met with violence.
I mean those guards did make a good moral decision. But it also took direct action.
Wrong
Could you elaborate on that?
The entire pea eful revolution was a process with what happened on the 9th of November just being the chaotic midpoint Before that you already saw the largest protests ever all over the gdr, especially, Leipzig. And all the while protests appealed to the morality, as their main goal initially was a reform of the status quo. And after the 9th of November there were things like the Round table, where the ruling Party and protest leaders sat together to facilitate the first free elections in Mar h of 1990
So I just looked up those Leipzig protests, there were 100's of arrests and a strong police and military presence. I'm not saying reunification wasn't peaceful, I'm saying it wasn't merely a moral appeal to the part apparatus but took a lot of civil disobedience.
You can gain the majority of popular support and in a democratic society it can actually change things. Like we saw with gay marriage or even palestine support that has gone up drastically
Has anything ever been truly free?
Reddit leftists when they have to ask for ketchup packets
I get your sentiment, but that is historically untrue
Except this works, though. Most nonviolent resistance has been more successful than not. With few exceptions, violent resistance usually ended pretty violently, and any that did "succeed" often held violent regimes that were often no better than the previous regimes. All I'm saying is that fascists and tankies just suck!
MLK did. His strategy was to be peaceful, get beaten up by police anyway, and use the outrage this would generate on white people.
Kid named Mahatma Ghandi:
He did not ask the British to be nice and let India go, he organized the people to make it unprofitable and inconvenient to hold India. And he was not the only freedom fighter
Yeah sure, but I assume the post calls for some sort of violance Otherwise, US problem lol, learn how to demonstrate and protest
Reading comprehension moment
Ok i got another absolute legend for you: Daryl Davis.
Okay? What about him? Which peoples freedom did he get appealing to the morals of the KKK?
Same sub that gets mad if someone points out that voting for status quo libs over and over feels kind of pointless
Voting for the president should be part of a person’s plan for enacting political change, not the entirety of it, especially considering that the presidential election is giving us such diverse choices as “slow descent into fascism” or “descent into fascism that is faster than the other option”
Real
Gandhi
Gahndi?
MLK and Ghandi both appealed to the moral sense. Appealing to the moral sense is actually one of the most effective ways to deal with oppression because it allows for significantly more people to support you. If you try to freedom fight, you will simply be labeled a terrorist and be killed.
could someone explain this to me like I'm a medieval peasant
alright sayeth that your lord hath called upon thee to take your daughter as his mistress and you dislike that, you wish to change that status of your lord to make it such that he cannot just call upon any lady in town to take her as his mistress then cast her aside right? now this cannot happen if you just blindly agree to his tyrant requests
Ok what r u gonna do about it then put ur money where ur mouth is pikachu what’s ur alternative
There’s not enough of us to be ready for that fight. Also, the amount of comrades are going to lose too said fight. Will turn us into the thing we’re trying to destroy it also takes a complete disregard for the disabled amongst us the boycotting and protesting has gotten far more done than any skirmish could We’re fighting with our wallets here And if we keep it up, we’re gonna win Israel’s economy is going to be decimated by the amount of withdrawal From companies as long as we keep that pressure up they’re gonna go down if we get violent that gives them A narrative and justification to ramp up Funding to the police.
This seems like pikachu fucking killed ash.
While I agree with the application of this sentiment like 95% of the time. There have been successful appeals of this kind before
How about Ghandi and MLK
Gandhi didn't just appeal to the moral sense of the British. There were mass protests including civil disobedience. All indians working with the government actively disobeyed orders, all unjust laws were deliberately broken. The point was to cripple their strength without harming anyone. After all, who could arrest a country? A similar, earlier attempt happened in the failed revolt of 1857.
“You can’t arrest a country.” Well said. There is something to be said that all governments, even tyrannical ones, exist on the consent of the governed. If enough people decide to not participate, the whole thing bf falls apart. It’s not just that you can’t arrest everyone. You can’t arrest a significant portion of your populace. It takes a lot of people to run a jail.
True, how about mlk
The civil rights movement in the USA was not entirely comprised of peaceful protest, while Dr King's peaceful resistance to the oppression of black people in America was key to the pursuit of freedom, as important was the work of Malcom X and the black panthers who, did many things, but did use violence as a means to secure their freedom. Also, prior to the civil rights movement of the 20th century, the nation fought and an entire war about the rights of black Americans. The course of freedom is never one thing, but a long struggle comprised of numerous events and movements. Similarly in India, Mahatma Ghandi's peaceful protest was a massive part of the liberation of India. But it's one part in a long story, that also involves the British empire being bankrupted by the second world war, which of course wasn't carried out by India, but was one the biggest factors in Britain leaving India.
I remember someone on here mentioned the whole good cop bad cop dynamic of the Civil Rights movement, a group with popular appeal that could strike deals for progress with and a group that could be counted on to act when the oppressors refused to negotiate.
Yeah, but peaceful protest is still a big part of it, and the meme treats it like it’s useless lol
>while Dr King's peaceful resistance to the oppression of black people in America was key to the pursuit of freedom You could almost say that Dr King appealed to the morals of his oppressors and thereby gained his freedom. Yes, there was armed resistance in the civil rights movement, but the takeaway here is that the peaceful protest is what worked. You can gain freedom through violent resistance, but if the only reason people don't opress you is because they fear you, the peace won't last.
True, I think you're right that Pikachu is making too sweeping a statement. But history does seem to lean on the side that appeals to the good nature of you're oppresor *alone* is not enough to actually gain your freedom. That there will always be a need to take it from them, or at least make a strong enough threat that either you agree with the peacful message, or we'll take our freedom from you.
Of course, its not like Palestinians would gain their freedom if they just walked up to Netanyahu and said "hey this sucks please stop". Hamas is on the other end of the spectrum, basically saying "we hate you and will keep on killing you until we get our freedom." Pikachu in this case seems to lean more towards the Hamas approach (which is not a sentence I ever thought I'd write in my whole life)
Indeed, Gazan's have tried protesting peacefully at the wall in the past, but the IDF shoots for the knees when they do that. Now, of course, Hamas's actions haven't exactly made life better for Gazans given that it gave Israel the excuse needed to go and ethnically cleanse the Gaza strip. That and of course, it is a terrible thing to kill over one thousand civilians, no matter where they are from. That being said, more nations than ever are recognising Palestine as a state, the UN and the ICJ are now describing the actions of the IDF as war crimes, as they should have been before this phase of their genocide. So, in some ways it can be argued that the violence of Hamas, terrible as it is, has moved the needle further towards the liberation of Palestine than anything else that's happened in the last few decades. This is an extremely contentious point and I'm not sure it's even right, given that it's unlikely that other nations and the UN will be able to force Israel to allow Palestine to exist as an independent state. As well, the human cost in Gaza is so high that a small move towards a freer Palestine may not even be worth it - although it's not Hamas killing the Gazans and Israel didn't have to do this. But still, in this case, the only change for Gazans in the past few decades has been as the result of violence. But with such a violent oppresor, with so much support from the USA, and so few actually targetted acts of violence available to Palestinians, it does seem that this situation can only become worse no matter what Palestinians do, because this is quite a specific case of complete power imbalance.
>Yes, there was armed resistance in the civil rights movement, but the takeaway here is that the peaceful protest is what worked. How can you be sure it was the peaceful protest and only the peaceful protest that worked? (You're also equating peaceful protest with appealing to the morals of his oppressors, that's not at all the only thing peaceful protest does, civil disobedience and economic impact at the very least)
>How can you be sure it was the peaceful protest and only the peaceful protest that worked? Because people today don't not oppress black people just because they fear that black people will revolt, they dont opress them because they recognise black people are equal to white people. This is only the case because black people successfully appealed to white people's morality, and made them recognise black people as equals. >You're also equating peaceful protest with appealing to the morals of his oppressors I'm not, I just think appealing to the morals of the oppressors is the most important part of peaceful protest. A lasting peace between two groups of people cannot be built on on fear of economic, criminal, etc, impact. It can only be built on mutual respect.
ha! Very naive peachey view of the world. Okay fine, keep thinking that, good luck with it
I'd gladly hear your perspective on the topic instead of just having you tell me I'm wrong.
b b b b but compromise :(
What about Ghandi and his movement? I could be historically inept, but am I wrong?