50501

I'm not. Don't put words in my mouth.

Fighting without a plan for success is the same as fighting for nothing. In Hong Kong, there was no plan for success that could involve violence, strategically. It's easy enough to say people somewhere else should kill and die for a cause you believe in, it's another thing entirely to commit millions of people to doing so. They would have been treated as an invading army and far more than the active protesters would have been targeted and killed as "collateral damage".

My actual perspective on it is that if I thought killing and terrorizing the CCP, or any authoritarian government like that would work, I would be here screaming from the rooftops to pile the bodies high. I have no qualms about dragging fascists out of their homes and butchering them like animals in front of their families, because that is the world they want to build for others, but you cannot commit to violence like that without a rock solid plan, a plan that would involve being able to count on non-combatants seeing violent action and sticking around or joining in. And even if that was the right course of action, this is not Ukraine being invaded by Russia, people getting their homes and cities bombed to pieces, you'd have to convince people that level of retaliation was necessary when the danger was in the form of powerful people signing documents making agreements out of sight. You have to CONVINCE people to do it. And then those people have to actually see it through.

And I'm NOT saying they're even the main movement we should be taking lessons from, but to ignore the usefulness of the tactics they used that DID work, and not looking at what SPECIFICALLY DIDN'T work, at what caused them to fail would be FOOLISH. Take from the Civil Rights movement. Take from the Suffragate movement. Take from the Indian independence movement. There's even lessons to take from revolutions that turned violent. The Boston Tea Party was a non-violent act of economic terrorism that cost the British government the equivalent of almost 2 million dollars. That's the sort of thing we can do TODAY. But we are in the early stages of this thing, and the organizational infrastructure IS NOT THERE. That's WHY we do the marches. To build momentum. To make each next step easier and easier to commit to, and to build communities and networks around protesting like this, making it routine and just another part of people's lives so it can be done sustainably. We want them to be fighting us all day every day on every front without rest, and it takes a LOT of time to set something like that up, especially across an entire nation and ESPECIALLY one as big as the US.

I am unwilling to disparage and dismiss the intelligence, effectiveness, and effort of the Hong Kong protesters, or any protest movement that tries but collapses under the weight of their opposition. Unions used to be a stronger force in the US, until they were systematically destroyed by the forces we're currently fighting. Would you say that of them because they failed and didn't then choose to die fighting an enemy they couldn't beat? I wouldn't. I'd say survive until you can create an opportunity to fight again, better next time.