I am not a pacifist. I think that nonviolent protests and demonstrations, as exemplified by Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement and by Martin Luther King's Freedom Marches, are generally a very good idea, but I certainly do not believe that nonviolent protests are the only valid response to tyranny and injustice. The effectiveness of nonviolent protest has its limits, and history has shown that there are always tyrants who are not at all influenced or swayed by nonviolent protests. For example, it is highly doubtful that the sight of thousands of Jews assembling or marching in peaceful protest would have brought a positive reaction from the Nazis in Germany during the 1930s and 40s.
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In 1905, thousands of people assembled in peaceful protest before the Russian Czar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to present a very reasonable request for the Czar’s mercy for the suffering of the poor. Without any warning, the Czar’s troops suddenly opened fire on the demonstrators, and then the Czar’s Cossack cavalry rode in with their sabers drawn, mercilessly cutting down many of those who had survived the bullets. Hundreds of the peaceful demonstrators were killed, and their bodies littered the bloodstained snow.
One tragic outcome of the Russian Revolution was the execution of Czar Nicholas and his family in 1918. Czar Nicholas could have avoided this grisly result by listening to the Russian People and respecting their natural rights as human beings. But it is well documented that Czar Nicholas firmly believed in his own ‘Divine Right’ to rule as he was putatively ‘ordained by God’, and that he paternalistically regarded himself as ‘the Father of the Russian People’. It is my opinion that the egotistical Czar Nicholas, overconfident in his own ill-considered beliefs and judgment, was ultimately more responsible for the violent Russian Revolution and for the unfortunate fate of his own Royal Family than were the Revolutionaries who overthrew him.
In India, Mahatma Gandhi and the Satyagraha movement were protesting against their nation’s British occupiers, who were spread quite thinly, not only in India, but also in dozens of other British colonies throughout the world. The British Empire was overextended, and while the British military was trying desperately to stop the German Blitzkrieg in Poland and France, the Japanese quickly conquered most of the British colonies in East Asia. British nationals captured by the Japanese were interned and terribly abused in squalid and disease- ridden ‘death camps’ for the next four years, until the War ended in 1945.
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