Quote of the day from my friend DJ:
The only reason we know the names Ghandi and Martin Luther King are because the people of the US and UK weren't willing to use violence to enforce what they knew to be unjust policies. The Chinese Communist Party has no such qualms, which is why non-violence has not and will not work in China. The Dalai Lama has been quite successful at making people like him, and making people aware of China's conquest of Tibet, but Tibet is still conquered, it's culture destroyed, and it's history and language dying. And all the protests in the world will not save it. Non-violence protest is a useful tool against relatively civilized governments only. You have to be pretty delusional to think that a single tool will solve all problems.
I like that. It fits with a couple aphorisms I have on the matter.
The first is specific to MLK. Martin Luther King Jr's mistake was to consider non-violence as a strategy rather than a tactic. And to expand on that, MLK was never the leader that Nelson Mandela was. Mandela knew his tactics from his strategies. After all, he spent a much longer time in jail.
The second is specific to Americans in support of Tibet. Every American who has a 'Free Tibet' bumpersticker would rip it off their cars if they knew actually freeing Tibet meant sending troops. But that's why Tibet isn't free.
There's a broad gulf between nationbuilding and peacekeeping. But we don't seem to have a good vocabulary across that space that has working political currency in American foreign affairs. Clearly Obama hasn't advanced that understanding, except to the extent it allows him to use drone strikes. But drone strikes are a tactic and not a strategy. So Boko Haram, like the Janjaweed Militia and IS is yet another force acting with impunity against the interests of civil rights in their nations.
What to do? What to do?
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