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See, and there it is. Zero to a hundred. It's either popcorn or civil war, no gradient.
I mean, for one thing Nazi Germany also wasn't defeated by military cosplayers flashing their gun collection at them, and clearly neither was MAGA America. The first one was defeated by a borderline apocalyptic global war, so... in the grand scheme both the military cosplay and the sternly worded letters are pretty much about just as effective there. We're still waiting and seeing on the MAGA America part.
But for another, plenty of nonviolent and/or unarmed protest has achieved its goals, historically. From Europe to India to South Africa to the actual United States. The "sternly worded letter" derision is pure action movie fantasy. This month alone the governments of Madagascar and Nepal came down after mass protests. Not a single set of camo pants in sight, just... you know, students organizing on social media and One Piece flags for some reason because this is a weird timeline.
They weren't even fully nonviolent, either. There were clashes, there was enforcement violence and dozens of people, mostly protestors, were killed in both countries. And still two governments came down and the situations continue to evolve and push for full regime change.
Meanwhile the example I'm being given is some American fascists standing on a street while cops that agree with them wait for them to get sleepy at their military cosplay convention and go home.
I don't get Americans. I don't think the way they see the world as a culture makes sense, and I am terrified at how much they export it successfully through places like this. Nepal just held a full-on election over Discord and I still understand how that went down better than middle class America's political views.
I'm not the one who brought up not being able to fight against the military cause they have planes and tanks. No where in my replies have I suggested a civil war.
Please go through my post history. I've been telling the left to arm themselves for decades now. This has nothing to do with maga, get that out of your head. The gravy seals would be the ones siding with the fascist.
Which was fought and won with mostly small arms.
Not really. You seem to not live here, ICE is mostly made up from those magats...
No one said to start a civil war. Still your missing the part that being armed can be peaceful. That's why I posted the link to 20k+ armed gun owners peacefully protesting gov overreach and cops left them the fuck alone.
And burning gov buildings and killing their leaders... totally peaceful... way to contradict your point.
Again, it was peaceful because those same cops don't want to start shit and die for a paycheck. This example isn't there to show you that bringing guns to a protest magically makes things get done. I brought it up because left protesters are usually unarmed and are pushed around and arrested on bullshit.
The right is not being exported by just Americans, it's a growing movement in the world because of poorly educated people and social media.
Most of that is entirely absurd and not worth getting into. I'm sure a pedantic historian can nitpick it if that's the way everybody wants to go.
However, let me revisit your accusation of "contradicting my point". At no stage here have I conflated unarmed protest with peaceful protest. All along I've been frustrated by the US mindrot tendency of accepting no nuance between some My Little Pony version of political action and outright armed confrontation. The worldwide protests that show how bonkers the US perception of the issue is were not peaceful, but neither were they an armed confrontation where protestors attempted to use their armed might to deter police forces. They were... you know, political action. Civil unrest. "Civil" being the key word.
The way you and US leftists in general tend to parse stuff like this is nonsense. The fact that mass protests can escalate to the point they went in Nepal, Madagascar or any of the countries in the general "Gen Z spring" movement and prior protest waves disproves the US perspective because a) it has nothing to do with the level of access to weapons, and b) it shows sufficiently commited public action doesn't have to be either fully nonviolent or an armed insurrection.
Americans look at this as some form ot guarantee their success by either intimidating the other into submission or hoping that the other side will fold immediately. That's not how this goes. "The cops may charge at us, we should bring guns" is some weird overlap of thinking protestors are entitled to painless victory and that there is no possible pressure beyond violent pressure. It makes no sense to me. And yet, here we are, a bunch of posts down the line.