Quote:
Originally Posted by Saya
That's a really cartoonish way of thinking of nonviolent protest. What I don't get from people who say that nonviolence doesn't do anything is what they plan to do to overthrow a heavily armed police force and possibly the army.
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Considering the source, I'd consider the relative sanity of that statement unimpeachable. Then again, that's Burroughs for you. Gotta love the mad bastard.
As for your question though, I don't think there's really a clear-cut answer to that - the truth is, unless the vast majority of people were prepared to risk injury for their beliefs, we wouldn't have a hope in hell.
Then again, the alternative is to stop trying and bend over. In practice, it's often just stuff like this: the police tell you to move. You don't consider them to have a salient reason to do so, so you stand your ground. Or people get kettled, and instead of standing around meekly for however many hours the police choose to keep them there, they kick off.
Now if it's an organised London protest with a large police presence, chances are they've allowed enough officers to squash such incidents - I mean, that's sort of the point of their presence. But now and then people are just all "OH HELL NO". I saw some SWP members break a kettle in Luton once, protesting against the English Defence League and their harrassment of non-white locals. That was pretty badass, especially considering the kettle was born of blatant harrassment in the first place (the police didn't seem too keen on either group) and also caught quite a few passers-by just trying to get home.