alt Hacker News> it is white washed non-violence 'protest and vote harder' nonsense that the history books like to push
My family is largely [EDIT: South Asian] Indian. It’s really not nonsense.
> there was a very real looming rod waiting
The rod was thinly-veiled racial violence and domestic terrorism. It would have been a route towards exterminationist rhetoric and potentially action on both sides. Not civil rights.
Keep in mind, while King was in jail America was in its own telling losing the Cold War. We were behind in space. We drew a stalemate in Korea and were getting routed in Vietnam. A year earlier the Cuban missile crisis had been narrowly averted through diplomacy. King vs. Malcolm is a textbook illustration of the downsides of escalating to violence as a political tool. (And the upsides of refraining from it even if your adversary embraces it.)
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Let’s not whitewash Ghandi and the Indian independence movement either, by implying there also were violent sticks in the background vs Ghandi’s carrot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_movement_for_Ind...
If the Indians would have gone the King route alone rather than being on reservations they'd have been annihilated and you wouldn't even have been born. The token offering of the reservation was what they got in exchange for not fighting a losing battle to the last man, but the exchange wouldn't have happened had that not been on the table.
> King vs. Malcolm
Popular history idolizes Dr. King, but without the stick of Malcolm X, King would have been cast aside. Only with both did the movement succeed. An ahistorical false dichotomy. Nonviolence wasn't simply some magic bullet that was magically better than force, it was a political tool that seemed nicer compared to the alternative of force.
> [R]iots are socially destructive and self-defeating. I'm still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. [...] But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities [...]. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. [...] [A] riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation's summers of riots are caused by our nation's winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.
- Dr. MLK.
> India in relation to nonviolence
The Indian case is arguably one of the best cases for violence against a colonizing force. Ghandi brought eyes of the common people towards India and created internal pressures, and additionally functioned as a unifying figure, but without indian revolutionaries nothing would have happened.