[an orange character is driving a bulldozer, facing a house]
I am going to bulldoze your house
[a yellow character is shocked]
[yellow asks politely, hands clasped]
Could you please not do that?
[orange, pushing the bulldozer’s controls, answers]
NO!
[yellow walks away from their house, looking dismayed]
Well, I guess I tried to do everything I could
Too bad
[orange smiles smugly as they bulldoze yellow’s house]
https://thebad.website/comic/respectable_resistance
Tired strawman against nonviolent resistance which has proven effective in many many situations. There is no universally right or wrong tactic to resist. It depends completely on the circumstances.
Do we think the comic is implying that one should employ violence all the time, for everything?
Laying down in front of the tractor is nonviolent resistance but is treated by centrists and liberals as out of line anyways (i.e. blocking highways, throwing soup at paintings behind glass)
It’s not strictly against nonviolent resistance though IMO. It’s against protests that don’t do anything. You can nonviolently do a blockade or sabotage something, or do a strike, etc.
Yah, this person commenting is avoiding the fact that their are ways to escalate without becoming violent with other people. They’re Kind of proving the comic right.
I suppose it could be taken either way. I agree with you that successful nonviolent resistance often involves more confrontational tactics.
I’m just tired of leftists acting as if the only reason we don’t have a better society is because people refuse to just start shooting. Reality is much more complex than this. But maybe the author was not making this exact argument.
Preaching non-violence is how conservatives have tricked millions to their deaths throughout history. They know non-violence is the hope of every normal person and they prey upon that hope. It is a deadly trick used to peacefully walk millions into gas chambers.
We have concentration camps now. Hegseth has fired 20% of the command staff to replace them with military leaders willing to kill civilians on U.S. soil. We are at the endgame for normal people right now. Stop trying to walk us into the camps peacefully.
We either finish Sherman’s work or we die at the hands of conservatives. There truly is no middle ground. Allowing pure evil to continue living at the “end” of the civil war has resulted in this situation. As long as they continue to live, conservatives will do absolutely everything in their power to exterminate the normal people. It’s not an illusion. Believe your eyes and ears and believe conservatives when they call us their enemy. They have loudly proclaimed their hate for us for over 100 years and we have turned the other cheek. They now have us at death’s door and are raising their rifle. Pretending peace will save us is a deadly mistake and is what they are hoping we will do.
Calls for peaceful solutions are deceptions designed to walk us to our deaths. Do not listen to the message of the enemy. Stand up and fucking fight.
Not really though. If anything the fascists have tried to push people into violence so they can arrest them. This is exactly how the FBI disassembled radical eco-anarchist groups in the 90s.
Your summary of the current situation is also pretty exaggerated. ICE is committing crimes against humanity but not mass murder. We have free press and those people have lawyers, family, etc. We would know if they were being exterminated, if that’s what you’re implying.
The reality is a coordinated general strike would much more easily bring a fascist government to its knees than even an army of Benjamin Songs. You are not going to defeat the US military and if you give them the political legitimacy to escalate to that kind of conflict we’re pretty much cooked, if we aren’t already.
That’s not to say if they do bring the war to us we shouldn’t fight back but it hasn’t happened yet. And we don’t want it to. We want to fight on ground that works to our strengths, not theirs. And a civil war where they control the entire military and policing systems is not to our advantage.
I respectfully disagree. Conservatives do not need reasons to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely. Conservatives (such as those working for DHS or the FBI) are currently able to detain anyone without hearing and without any access to any “due process” via executive memorandum (such as NSPM-7) under the Patriot Act. The leader of the conservatives is actively directing this to happen and is openly and publicly promising to dramatically increase such detentions after midterms.
Detention without adequate nutrition, sleep or medical care is their current standard treatment for all detainees, even those who are eventually released. Some detainees that are NOT held indefinitely are held in these conditions for over a year and suffer permanent injury as a result. Many die under these conditions because they lose access to their needed medications or treatments or simply because the conditions breed deadly disease. Conservatives celebrate all of this. They will absolutely not stop without physically and forcibly being stopped.
Our lack of evidence of gas chambers or executions does not absolve conservatives of beginning the first stages of genocide against their enemies. They are doing absolutely everything they can to kill us and are quietly escalating the scale and pace with which they do it. There are no exaggerations here. Pretending it’s not happening is the standard play of conservative fascists. It always has been. We saw that exact same deception in WWII.
Yes conservatives arrest violent protestors, but they also arrest peaceful protesters in even greater numbers. Violence is immaterial to their arrest decisions. However, I am not suggesting violence in the streets is the only way to kill our enemy. Especially not when they control our military.
To erase an enemy on an industrial scale (which is needed when there are over 100 million of them), we can use perfectly legal methods. For example, conservatives despise regulations that protect their water and air. So, they have abolished those laws in countless conservative areas. This is a major opportunity to make sure millions of them develop multiple myeloma or pancreatic cancer without ever breaking a single law. Sure these diseases can take years to be effective, but for those of us in concentration camps years from now, that investment will be critical. In fact, we can even use the proceeds from such endeavors to fund further erasure projects before we are detained or executed. Combined with other industrial acts of resistance, we can make a massive difference without firing a single shot.
Conservatives have made it clear for over 100 years that we are their enemy. They have told us time and time again they want us dead. We need to listen to them. They are not pretending.
As we enter the endgame of their plans to oppress and kill their undesirables, any promise that peace is the solution is a lie that only serves the enemy. It is a lie that has killed millions in the past and is a lie that could kill millions in the present.
I think you know how dangerous it is to tell people to wait to resist. Please stop. There is no effective resistance from a detention camp. Conservatives will never stop trying to oppress and kill us as long as they continue to live. We must act now, while we still can.