snip
That's true, but the ANC wasn't all that violent, compared to other guerrilla movements. They did try non-violence first, and found that it didn't work, but as I remember, they ended up doing mostly sabotage and certainly weren't a person movement going around trying to kill as many white South Africans as possible.
I think we don't know yet whether it could work there. It couldn't have worked in totalitarian systems like Nazi Germany or Stalin's USSR. Today's Iran is far less totalitarian than either of those regimes, it seems safe to say.
You're implying that it's Islam, but note that Christians like Leila Khaled were in prominent positions of leadership in the previous generation in Palestinian person organizations that were nationalist and not "Islamist," and did not conduct dissolution plantings. I think that it may be more a question of the lack of a strong tradition of non-violent protest or ideology in the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean than an issue of religion, or it could be both.
I don't have a great love for Jackson, but: (1) A campaign of mbuttive civil disobedience is not needed now (except in terms of effective denial of many black citizens' rights to vote in places like Florida, Ohio, and St. Louis, Missouri); (2) There were many important civil rights leaders who practiced non-violent civil disobedience, other than Martin Luther King. I don't think I need to list them here, but Medgar Evers comes to mind immediately.
What's wrong with a political strategy? Non-violent resistance works when it can appeal to the conscience of an electorate.
I'm stupefied that you presume to speak for the "karma" of an entire people. Tibet somehow deserved millions of dead? What presumptuousness for you to judge them that way!
So, visit the sins of the fathers on the children. Not my kind of morality. Actions have consequences, but we don't see eye to eye on karma. Frankly, though I believe in reincarnation, I'm not so sure about karma. To me, it seems more like a comforting (and cautionary) thought than anything else.
Michael
If you would like to send a private email to me, please take out the NOTRASH. Please do not email me something which you also posted.
