Does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding
Is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil
Is a willingness to accept suffering without retaliation, to accept blows from the opponent without striking back
Avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit
Is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice
I knew I didn't agree with nonviolence as an ethos but seeing it all laid out really shows how just... absurd it is.
You aren't going to win friendship and understanding with fascists; evil isn't some magical force in the universe, it's a thing done by people; your suffering is not noble; you are allowed to hate your enemies; the arc of the universe doesn't bend towards justice - it must. Be. Bent.
Worth reading and/or listening to MLK's anti-Vietnam speech given a year before his assassination which, some historians argue, led directly to his assassination and intensified smearing by the media.
some quotes
spoiler
There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?
Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call "VC" or "communists"? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.
In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.
Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred -- rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak of the -- for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
There's something wrong with your formatting: all the sentences after the first paragraph appear as long single lines of text that require scrolling sideways. You probably just need a > character at the start of each paragraph to mark it as a quote.
I am not too familiar with Taiwan but usually most countries have elections at multiple levels of government and potentially even e.g. presidential and parliamentary elections.
It's impossible to know who will win at this point, Biden is historically unpopular, but his opponent will be Trump. Who is very polarising. I still don't understand how they'll allow him to run again, but that's beside the point. Bush Jr stole a whole election and no one did anything to stop it and he also was allowed to run in and win the 2004 election, so anything goes.
It all depends on what happens this year. The election media frenzy hasn't even properly started. The Democrat voter base can be very easily emotionally manipulated into voting for Biden if liberal media plays it's cards right. The Republicans and conservatives are screwed, it's Trump and no one else with the MAGA cult he's formed around himself. It's the only chance they have. All their other primary candidates are generic manufacturerd politicians. But Trump guarantees them a passionate voter base, something none of the other candidates have.
I'm going to do the same thing I did when Trump won last time: laugh at Democrats for allowing this to happen by being uselessly arrogant, anti-Left idiots.
Libs will probably once again be in denial and cry about it for months.
Right-wingers, let's just hope the most they do is gloat.
Hope the US does not bring the rest of the world with them while crashing and burning.
They've been doing that since the end of the cold war... Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans/Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq (Again), Afghanistan (again), Libya, Syria, Yemen, Israel - Palestine, Ukraine. Haven't even mentioned AFRICOM.
How could it get any worse? Will the nukes start flying?
Yeah that's true I guess. I just hope as the world changes, no one does anything crazy with nuclear weapons. Or balkanisation of the major world powers. That could be disastrous.
Also, I think nihilism in some cases actually displays privilege. Apart from being socialist, I would probably not be the prime target of fascist reactionary and nationalistic behavior. Therefore I do not think I can morally allow myself to laugh about it at all, but rather channel despair into rage and willingness to fight back.
Honestly, fuck that. It has nothing to do with privilege or nihilism.
I am a prime target of fascism and Nazism, I'm far from a nihilist but I still laugh. Dark comedy exists as a coping mechanism for a reason and the West has done it to itself. It's not entirely comedic, I am horrified of certain developments that can happen, but I'll laugh along the way.
Then I was wrong to assume that privilege of you and you can disregard what I wrote. I tend to assume privilege of those I interact with because in the majority of cases it is true. Most people with privilege also are quite unaware of it. As I think it is our moral imperative to stand up for our comrades in need, I will continue to urge those with positions to act to do so and not get pacified on the expense of those that will seriously hurt from it.
I mean, the liberal denial has started already. Look at the number of downvotes this post has already, compared to the number of valid arguments in the comments. (12 up, 29 down; 23 comments)
It's not about making a convincing case or appealing to logic or reason, it's about liberal suppression of dissenting views to preserve a worldview that was already archaic when it was first mainstreamed in the US in order to deny ethnic, sexual, class, and religious minorities a seat at the table with the ever-present and looming cudgel of fascism as the failsafe.
It's not about making a convincing case or appealing to logic or reason, it's about liberal suppression of dissenting views to preserve a worldview that was already archaic when it was first mainstreamed in the US in order to deny ethnic, sexual, class, and religious minorities a seat at the table with the ever-present and looming cudgel of fascism as the failsafe.
Absolutely!
Although, we at Hexbear happily live under an authoritarian Communist dictatorship with a Great Firewall of our own and as such we do not see downvotes. Downvote me all you want, libs.
That could happen to both Biden and Trump lol. Both are old and unhealthy, and displaying signs of dementia. Trump almost died of COVID while president, and his blood is entirely made up of diet Coke at this point. Biden is just incoherent and constantly says things he shouldn't say, much to the dismay of his staff. Remember Blinken's reaction when Biden randomly went on an anti China rant, for no reason at all? Ruined a whole day's workblinken-pain
Is he less popular than Trump? Because while I don't think there's going to be the same voter turnout as last election, I think he can still beat Trump. And if Trump gets disqualified his chances are probably even better. I mean, I don't like Biden, and don't think he did a good enough job to vote for him again. I still will, because the GOP is a fucking disgrace.
at this point, it’s genuinely unclear whether Trump will even be allowed on the ballot in enough states to win— or possibly on any ballots at all. there’s a legitimate possibility that Trump may, if fact, be disqualified from running for president at all.
I don't confidently predict anything for the upcoming election. I couldn't possibly count the amount of random shit that could happen between now and then.
I'm kinda surprised, but also relieved that conservatives won't be able to point to my state and say we did what they expected. Looking forward to further disqualifications in states that aren't targets for "bias."
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