You’re right that successful movements often have both violent and nonviolent wings - but the nonviolent components don’t succeed because of the violent ones. They succeed despite them. The research is pretty clear on this: nonviolent campaigns are actually more likely to achieve their goals than violent ones, and they’re more likely to lead to stable democratic outcomes.
Your claim that “without violent resistance, nonviolent resistance becomes branded as terrorists” is historically backwards. Nonviolent movements get labeled as extremist precisely when they’re associated with violence, not when they’re separate from it. The Civil Rights Movement’s greatest victories came when they maintained strict nonviolent discipline - Birmingham, Selma, the March on Washington. Every time violence entered the picture, it gave opponents ammunition to dismiss the entire movement.
And about Gandhi needing violent militants to succeed - this ignores how the independence movement actually worked. The violent revolutionary groups you’re thinking of (like the Hindustan Republican Association) were largely marginalized by the time of Gandhi’s major campaigns. His mass mobilization strategies worked because they were genuinely nonviolent and drew broad participation precisely because people knew they wouldn’t be asked to commit violence.
The “good cop/bad cop” theory sounds intuitive but doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. What actually makes nonviolent resistance effective is mass participation, strategic planning, and moral leverage - not the threat of violence lurking in the background.
You have the causality backwards.
You’re right that successful movements often have both violent and nonviolent wings - but the nonviolent components don’t succeed because of the violent ones. They succeed despite them. The research is pretty clear on this: nonviolent campaigns are actually more likely to achieve their goals than violent ones, and they’re more likely to lead to stable democratic outcomes.
Your claim that “without violent resistance, nonviolent resistance becomes branded as terrorists” is historically backwards. Nonviolent movements get labeled as extremist precisely when they’re associated with violence, not when they’re separate from it. The Civil Rights Movement’s greatest victories came when they maintained strict nonviolent discipline - Birmingham, Selma, the March on Washington. Every time violence entered the picture, it gave opponents ammunition to dismiss the entire movement.
And about Gandhi needing violent militants to succeed - this ignores how the independence movement actually worked. The violent revolutionary groups you’re thinking of (like the Hindustan Republican Association) were largely marginalized by the time of Gandhi’s major campaigns. His mass mobilization strategies worked because they were genuinely nonviolent and drew broad participation precisely because people knew they wouldn’t be asked to commit violence.
The “good cop/bad cop” theory sounds intuitive but doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. What actually makes nonviolent resistance effective is mass participation, strategic planning, and moral leverage - not the threat of violence lurking in the background.