Actually engaging in violence is always a losing proposition.
Sometimes the alternative is even worse, the cost of allowing somebody to continue what theyâre doing outweighs the consequences of going to war. Like, say, destroying the actual nazis. But those situations are few and far between, and in those cases itâs absolutely crucial that you eliminate whatever it is that cannot be allowed to continue, because otherwise youâve gained nothing and lost a lot.
Letâs take punching ânazisâ as an example. When youâre the one who makes a nonviolent situation violent, in the eyes of any neutral party you become the aggressor. You add weight to their arguments, because if you could not answer their words with words of your own then their points must be irrefutable. You add credibility to their figureheads, because those people appear willing to suffer for what they believe in, while your side appears to be cruel and cowardly.
None of those costs can be avoided (a skilled manipulation campaign could mitigate them, but you donât have that). So under what circumstances would they be worth paying? If thereâs specific people who are indispensable to the enemyâs movement, who are doing real and material harm to innocent lives which cannot be prevented any other way, and if your violence can make them stop that completely and forever. In short, a straight up assassination is a valid plan in the right circumstances.
Is that what youâve done? No. Every person attacked has either doubled down on what they were doing, or been proven to be innocent all along because you didnât even know who your targets were. Youâve gained absolutely nothing from this campaign, but your enemies have gone from powerless laughingstocks to major political players. It would have been a masterful false flag operation if the white supremacists had organized the whole âpunch nazisâ meme in the first place, but they didnât, they were too dumb and powerless for that. Fortunately for them, you proved yourselves even stupider.
Wrapping back around to nuclear weapons, the cost of actually using one is more than any nation could afford to pay, so the only circumstances where it would be worth doing are when the alternative is, at a minimum, the downfall of your entire government. But the threat of a nuclear weapon is almost as powerful as the blast itself. By announcing that you have this weapon and youâre willing to use it under specific circumstances, you force the rest of the world to work for you to prevent those circumstances from coming to pass. A nuclear-armed country cannot be seriously invaded, because if it looks like you might actually lose then you could bring the rest of the world down with you. Nobody can make a serious attempt to conquer the world by force the way Hitler (or Napoleon, or Ghengis, or AlexanderâŠ) did anymore, unless they develop a reliable way to make themselves immune to nukes.
Thatâs why the past seven decades have been so peaceful: none of the âgreat nationsâ has been able to look at another and think âyeah I could take themâ they way theyâve been doing all but continually for the rest of human history, because if you push somebody far enough youâll abruptly stop existing. War has continued, but only on the very small scale, in countries without nuclear armament, killing by the thousands instead of by the millions.
Bringing things down to a scale thatâs more comprehensible, what can you as an ordinary individual do to get the same passive protection that Russia and North Korea enjoy? Carry a gun. Itâs a nuclear option that fits in a jacket pocket. Sure it wonât do anything against an army, or even a gang, but against any individual, no matter how much more powerful they are than you physically, it provides an option that they cannot afford to push you to take. When a rapist or abuser or simple mugger attempts to pit their strength and skill against yours, just letting them know that you have a firearm tells them that if they push you any further, they will most likely cease to exist.
But remember, just like the great nations of the world, if you pull the trigger you lose. The prisons are full of people whose only crime was to execute a child molester or to refuse to retreat when their home was invaded. Be absolutely certain that the alternative is worse before you go past threats.
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