You can't fight fire with fire

airrunner

airrunner

airrunner

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Hello All :)

Just wanted to bounce off you all with this concept. I'd be interested to read your perspectives.

With the recent tragedy of the Russian & Ukraine war manifesting. Some friends and I were talking about the latest details. We then got onto the idea of "you can't fight fire with fire". Fundamentally we were saying that the root problem of something cannot be solved by mirroring or replicating the same behavior. Implementing this into the idea of war, being either the aggressor or defender puts you in the same boat. Neither one is better than the other.

This led to the idea that Peaceful protest is a potential way forward. Now on one level, this may look like you're just lying down and letting the opponent take your country or land. On the flip side, you're not agreeing or condoning what the aggressor is doing, but you're not communicating with violence to gain traction in the event.

Fundamentally there needs to be a mindset shift that violence doesn't solve anything and only creates more pain and suffering. When we have examples of people on our planet like Gandhi who strongly believed and practiced the idea of Nonviolence. Is this a potential way out of the vicious loop of wars on our planet?
 

Terminal_Boy

Terminal_Boy

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You do know that woodland firefighters actually do fight fire with fire?

They fell trees and conduct a controlled fire to create a firebreak of ground with no flammable material left for the approaching fire to use as fuel.
 

BowdonUK

BowdonUK

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Peaceful protests have never changed anything.

The only time something changes is when people in influencial positions change things from the inside.
 

Lysander

Lysander

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Jean Rasczak: Force my friends is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.

Dizzy: My mother always told me that violence doesn't solve anything.

Jean Rasczak: Really? I wonder what the city founders of Hiroshima would have to say about that.

[to Carmen]

Jean Rasczak: You.

Carmen: They wouldn't say anything. Hiroshima was destroyed.

Jean Rasczak: Correct. Naked force has resolved more conflicts throughout history than any other factor. The contrary opinion, that violence doesn't solve anything, is wishful thinking at its worst. People who forget that always die.
 

Johno please?

Johno please?

Johno please?

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Lysander said:
Jean Rasczak: Force my friends is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.

Dizzy: My mother always told me that violence doesn't solve anything.

Jean Rasczak: Really? I wonder what the city founders of Hiroshima would have to say about that.

[to Carmen]

Jean Rasczak: You.

Carmen: They wouldn't say anything. Hiroshima was destroyed.

Jean Rasczak: Correct. Naked force has resolved more conflicts throughout history than any other factor. The contrary opinion, that violence doesn't solve anything, is wishful thinking at its worst. People who forget that always die.
Click to expand...

hahah I was just looking for a gif of that....

Seriously this is beyond naive, what we should finally realise is that coexistence with dictatorship is not possible, imagine if Saddam had got his nuke before invading Kuwait.
 

robgmun

robgmun

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There is a concept that runs like this

Hard men > Easy times > soft men > Hard times > Hard men

We had the soft men in the last few years with the SJW's and wokeness, we're now into the Hard times part of the loop. The upside that we should be rid of all this wokeness in a couple of years as people see it as relatively unimportant in the world we now live in.
 

sanaxe1

sanaxe1

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airrunner said:
Hello All :)

Just wanted to bounce off you all with this concept. I'd be interested to read your perspectives.

With the recent tragedy of the Russian & Ukraine war manifesting. Some friends and I were talking about the latest details. We then got onto the idea of "you can't fight fire with fire". Fundamentally we were saying that the root problem of something cannot be solved by mirroring or replicating the same behavior. Implementing this into the idea of war, being either the aggressor or defender puts you in the same boat. Neither one is better than the other.

This led to the idea that Peaceful protest is a potential way forward. Now on one level, this may look like you're just lying down and letting the opponent take your country or land. On the flip side, you're not agreeing or condoning what the aggressor is doing, but you're not communicating with violence to gain traction in the event.

Fundamentally there needs to be a mindset shift that violence doesn't solve anything and only creates more pain and suffering. When we have examples of people on our planet like Gandhi who strongly believed and practiced the idea of Nonviolence. Is this a potential way out of the vicious loop of wars on our planet?
Click to expand...

Hey Can you trust me your address? I'm going to come round to your house and take all of your stuff. However I'll be happy to leave the sofa for you to do a peacefull sit-in protest.
 

GreatAuk

GreatAuk

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Reminds me of WW2 when we famously held protests against Nazi Germany's invasions and treatment of 'undesirables'. They rolled over within a week.

Same thing in Korea - if the US hadn't thought to deploy the hippies with placards around the Pusan Perimeter then South Korea wouldn't exist today!
:p

Obviously I'm being a bit facetious - there are definitely times when peaceful protest can make a difference. It can support movements for social change, and demonstrate popular support and strength of feeling on a particular issue, as well as just making life difficult for their opposition (although when you start making things physically difficult for them, I think that starts to move down the spectrum towards violence, so you could argue for example that supergluing yourself to a tube train isn't entirely peaceful, even if it's not really violence either). However, there are also times when peaceful protest just doesn't cut it, and without violence there's no way of achieving your aims.

Edit: Ukraine has been interesting in this front, because there seems to be a place for both violent and more peaceful forms of protest.

There are lots of videos of civilians standing in front of Russian armoured vehicles to prevent them moving forward without mowing them down. This seems to have been quite effective in some cases. However, this clearly doesn't work so well against artillery etc, there are lots of places where it clearly hasn't been possible to stop them in this way, and it would reach the limit of its effectiveness if the Russians did just start gunning them down.

I don't doubt that the Russians would have already replaced the Ukrainian government if the only opposition had been peaceful.

Edit2: see also Tiananmen Square for a great example of peaceful protest meeting its limits.
 
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