Wednesday, 4 March 2026

Post No. 3,400 - Resistance, violence/nonviolence, and change

I now have a YouTube video (by the excellent Tad Stoermer) which ties together Gene Sharp (his mentioned data base is here)Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Dr Martin Luther King Kr, the COMBINATION of methodologies in the fields of resistance, violence/nonviolence, and change, and updates it from past context to current context

“Is the "Civil Resistance" Crowd Misleading You About Resistance? | A Resistance History Dispatch - YouTube”   https://youtu.be/K22OouNvVvM   “You don’t have to be for violence to want to understand how resistance actually worked. That’s the dishonesty at the center of this. The current framework treats any attempt to examine the full ecology of resistance — including direct action, confrontation, economic disruption, armed self-defense, and the credible threat of loss for the people in power — as though it were an endorsement of violence. It isn’t. It’s an insistence on honesty about a subject that the people most affected by authoritarianism cannot afford to have distorted.   The Civil Rights Movement was not a nonviolent movement. It was an ecology in which nonviolent mass action, armed self-defense, legal strategy, radical economic demands, and direct confrontation all operated simultaneously. The Deacons for Defense made nonviolent organizing survivable in places where unarmed workers would have been killed. CORE and SNCC knew this. King knew this — his home was an arsenal before he was talked out of keeping guns. The threat of confrontation and the reality of armed self-defense changed the calculus for the Klan, for local law enforcement, and for the federal government in ways that made the nonviolent campaigns possible. Stripping that out and calling what remains “the movement” isn’t just bad history. It’s a decision about what people today are allowed to consider when they’re deciding how to act.   The same thing is happening with the data.”   The video continues to discuss the updated data (including this) on Erica Chenoweth’s site. As I watched this, I also recalled Gandhi’s view that the task of a nonviolent noncooperator was to continue to provoke until there was a reaction.    

Watch this video as many times as is required to take it in - the view of resistance as an ecology is vital



Possible flaws 

Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider: 

  • there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking” 
  • I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.

 

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Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).

#PsychicABetterWorld   and  

Note that I am cutting back on aspects of my posts - see here, and Gnwmythr is pronounced new-MYTH-ear  

Copyright © Kayleen White 2007-2026     NO AI   I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise  replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typos may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product.     Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-ShareAlike basis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/