Pacifism Pacifies and Peaceful Protest Doesn't Work., Why Gandhi and MLK Jr. Are Nationally Accepted Heroes. Options

[NoSex]

Caution to the wind: Here is a short speech I wrote after I attended a convocation for Black History month. I was specifically inspired by the aggressive religiosity presented and the representation of Malcom X as a detestable fool. As this is a speech, it is, in part, quite rhetorical. However, I do indeed believe in its main tenants. I have a lot more to say on the topic (including the development of virtuosity, the extended failures of peaceful protest, the ramifications of violent upheaval, and my own formerly strict pacifism), but I would like to see how this moves from my speech. Consider how unpopular these views are. Review them critically yourself. Do research. I would love for you prove me wrong, honestly.

Peaceful Protest Invented by and Designed to Protect the State: Or, Why We Celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Martin Luther King Jr., the non-violent southern Baptist leader of the pacifist Civil Rights Movement, is one of four individuals in all of the history of the United States that has a national day in his specific commemoration. The day has been rewarded in the hindsight of the one of the most lauded victories of peaceful protest and civil disobedience – the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But, beyond the mythologies of self-prescribed “leftist progressives,” and into the forceful breast of reality… violence, suffocating social stirring – out of the sphere of just mere unrest – was the vehicle at which these supposed equalities arrived. Peaceful protest is a failed strategy and a pacifying doctrine. An oppressive institution, with the means to squash most violent uprisings, hears not the silent scuffling of coffee shop revolutions marching along picketed streets. Instead, those institutions revel in the non-property damaging realities of peace, and the inefficacy of your stupid political pins.

Pacifism is a virtue in the suburbs and in the churches – and, it’s glorified as a means towards social revolution and government reform. Rotting idiotic flesh married to the delusion of having ended the Vietnam war, and young morons pontificating on the success of their straw man hero Mohandas Gandhi. Vietnam was choked by the inevitability of defeat, and the constant violent uprisings (ignored by the egotism and zeal of the pacifistic dogma) of both combatant and non-combatant Americans - bombings, riots, and the pooled bounty money among soldiers for the head of those least-popular commanding officers. The British Empire was never daunted by cells full of starved protesters, or by the sore feet of salt stinking scuffles. Britain granted independence in the financial and militaristic exhaustion that was World War II, and the continued conflict in the state of Israel. Britain handed power only over to those parties that instilled the Empire’s self-interest. There was no victory for Gandhi or the liberation movement in India. What sort of victory permits the slaughtered losers to dictate the precise time in manner in which the victor’s ascendancy occurs? The mythologies of reformation and revolution permeate throughout our society, and the proliferation of these ideas is a conscious effort to tap into a religious urge in order to stagnant and destroy revolutionary effort. In modern protest, the Iraq war might have seen the largest and most peaceful display of dissent, but no one heard you. The confusion the young people must have – if one starving Indian and a few thousand conscientious objectors in America can make a difference, why can’t we? It’s because those people were only an accepted image in the face of defeat by oppressive powers. They are the sedated scapegoats of the rioting realities of the natural history of violent upheaval and revolution.

Right before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was finally past, after nine months of peaceful protest in Birmingham, thousands of angry blacks, fueled by the fires of the Black Panther Party and Malcom X, rioted for several days. The pressure of the property damage and the threat to human life so great – the fear of an exponentially growing unrest – rushed the Civil Rights Act into motion. Dr. King himself would later say, “The sound of the explosion in Birmingham reached all the way to Washington.” You know what sound didn’t reach Washington? The nine-month parade of Kumbai Ya sing-a-long forever behind the rhythm of pig-ass-cop billy club. The reclamation of our liberties and freedoms is not seating in the silence of pacifism. Instead, the power to move these institutions, to any sort of revolution, rests in the fear that the people may, indeed, abandon the virtues the systems we choose to fight have imposed on us, and actually rise to violence, actually take and not politely ask.

[Simba]

Wow, well said and written. I don't exactly feel like refuting, but I'm interested in how the discussion in this thread will go down.