Violence
\r\nGuns are cool. You can be the most peace-loving person in the world. You can be a vegan who meditates eight times a day and wears nothing but recycled hemp clothing. You can be opposed to violence in all of its forms. And yet when you pick up a gun, it’s impossible not to feel, in some dark place deep within your soul, as if there’s no challenge you can’t confront and no problem you can’t solve. Something about being armed changes people. They feel powerful.
\r\nLike motorcycles or shots of bourbon, guns seem to be instant agents of empowerment, which is why so many Hollywood movies, video games, and other forms of popular entertainment are rife with them. There’s a reason statues of great men show them with weapons in their hands or on their belts, and it’s because most people think that a person with a weapon is a person who gets things done. And yet, when it comes to social change, it’s often the person with a gun who fails the most miserably.
\r\nIn a stellar book titled Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, two brilliant young American academics, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, looked at every conflict they could find between 1900 and 2006, 323 in total, and analyzed them carefully to see which succeeded, which failed, and why. Their findings were astonishing. “Nonviolent resistance campaigns,” they discovered, “were nearly twice as likely to achieve full or partial success as their violent counterparts.” Not surprisingly, if you look at the same statistics in the last two decades alone— with no more Cold War to spur the financing of armed conflicts across the globe— the ratio spikes even more dramatically in favour of nonviolence.
\r\nCountries that experienced nonviolent resistance, Chenoweth and Stephan found, had more than a 40 percent chance of remaining as democracies five years after the conflict ended. Countries that took the violent path, on the other hand, had less than a 5 percent chance of becoming functioning democracies. Choose nonviolence, and you’re looking at a 28 percent chance of experiencing a relapse into civil war within the decade; choose violence, and the number is 43 percent. The numbers are uniform, and what they tell us is irrefutable: if you want stable, durable, and inclusive democratic change, nonviolence works and violence doesn’t.
\r\nCompiled From:
\r\n \"Blueprint For Revolution\" - Srdja Popovic, pp. 197-201