>Effective
The problem with political violence is that the other side will do the same thing, and you end up with an IRA situation where the country descends into sectarian violence.
The problem with political violence is that the other side will do the same thing, and you end up with an IRA situation where the country descends into sectarian violence.
Preemptive first strike logic[1] aside. This logic doesn't work because political violence never gets out of hand so fast that an entire political movement can be wiped out. On the other hand by starting/advocating for political violence you're almost certainly going to get the descent into sectarian violence before you can wipe out all the "fascists".
[1] Iran, anyone?
Tell that to the German left during the rise of Nazism.
The US has a problem with right-wing political violence; it's a long way off having a Baader-Meinhof.
(Still quite a bit of murder of informers, soldiers, lawyers, and a teenager who happened to be in the wrong car. As well as government snipers firing into a crowd, planting a bomb on a band, and so on)
How many people died under the totalitarian regimes that preceded them? These oppressive regimes did not start in a vacuum.
You're proving my point. Political violence just leads to a cycle of more political violence and/or totalitarianism. The Chinese Communists, if you recall, were violently put down by the Nationalists in the civil war. Starting political violence to stop the "fascists", just condemns your society to that fate. Not to mention that people who engage in political violence aren't exactly the most sane people. What makes you think they'll stop at "fascists"? The Bolsheviks eventually turned against the Kulaks, once their allies, and Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to consolidate power and push out rivals.
What? No, it isn't inevitable that the US descends into sectarian violence. What a silly notion. There remains more that unites us than divides us.
If the US does descend into violence, the blame can be squarely assigned to the propagandists (typically but not uniformly supporting the right wing) for twisting reality and making people feel their lives are under constant attack. How many Baby Boomer and older Gen X relations in your life are afraid to go to the mall or fear an apartment building being built in their local neighborhood for perceived increases to crime rates (versus standard NIMBYism of higher traffic issues)? Anecdotally, the FOX and ONAN and NEWSMAX views in my world declare every summer will lead to a race war. None of the "mainstream" media views think twice about that before being threatened by the federal government.
Strange.
Yes, the communist regimes were absolutely awful - both from nuts-and-bolts logistics failures as well as what was described in an earlier thread here as "prerogative" application of the law.