zlacker

>>david9+(OP)
Prayers for Charlie and his family, violence against people you disagree with is never the answer

>>petaby+62
I agree that we should not try to resolve America's current problems with violence. (And to be clear, I am an ardent pacifist and urge change in the ways of King, Gandhi, etc.)

Still, violence has been the answer in many (most?) political revolutions, including the American revolution and separation from Britain.

>>treeta+V6
And the American civil war.

>>jeffbe+o7
Depending on how you turn the lens, the Civil War is an excellent example of violence not being the answer.

The Confederacy tried to replace their Constitutional government and the policies instituted by the leaders elected by the people with a violence-enforced new state inside the territory of their existing one and got (justifiably) multi-generationally brutalized for their trouble. The town I grew up in and moved away from was still raising funds to rebuild some of the places that were burned to the ground in the war. That was fundraising in the 1980s.

Every time someone points to the 1776 war as a success story I feel compelled to point out that half the descendants of that war's victors tried a very similar thing in 1861 to absolutely ruinous result.

(On this topic: Fort Sumter is an interesting story. While it was never taken during the war, it basically became a target-practice and weapons field-test location for the Union navy: every time they had a new technique or a new cannon they wanted to try out, they'd try it on the fort. By the end of the war, the fort was "standing" only in the sense that the bulk of its above-ground works had been blasted flat and were shoved together into an earthworks bunker; the Confederates were basically sheltering in a hole that a lobbed shell could fall into at any time.

And while the fort and its northways sister kept Union ships out of the harbor, it didn't stop them from firing past the fort into Charleston itself, since "war crimes" and "civilian populations" weren't really a concept yet.

People very much went into that war thinking there wouldn't be consequences for ordinary folk. They were very much wrong.)

>>shadow+bh
And it was even a failure for the North - sure, in theory they won, and in practice they just let the South stay as they were but poorer and with a few Black people able to leave.

>>lazyas+Om
The confederates should have been punished, publicly.

>>mapont+Xq
> The confederates should have been punished, publicly.

No, it would have led to decades or centuries of resentment between the north and the south and eventually another civil war among those lines. It would have destroyed the union for good. The only purpose of the civil war for the North was to save the union, humiliating the south would have ensured that it would never really happen.

>>throw_+oT
The North 'saved' the union by allowing the South to continue its brutal practices against the freedmen leading to almost a hundred years of violence, lynching and the Black Codes designed to keep control over the 'freed' slaves.

Thaddeus Stevens was proven correct in his opinion that the south should've been treated like a conquered state and the land forcibly given to the freedmen.

>>fzeror+LU
Yet here we are, and the civil right act passed. On the other hand, The allies humiliating the Germans with the Versailles Treaty led to World War II.

The people who want retribution are never the ones to listen after an armistice.

>>throw_+IW
“Here we are”, indeed. Lynchings, massacres, expulsion, mass criminalization, a slave workforce for the plantations…and I’m only talking about the immediate aftermath for black southerners, not the centuries of continued violence.