Hong Kong leader to announce formal withdrawal of extradition bill

I am using "democracy" as a synonym for "liberal democracy."

If you tell me about a country that:

- Has a beautiful founding document that ensures what we'd recognize as basic rights of all citizens

- Has a well-designed federal system that empowers individuals and lower-level governments at the expense of the federal,

- Has hundreds of thousands of enslaved people who form the foundation of their economy and are indeed bred into captivity,

I would never, ever call that a democracy. The first two don't matter when the third is true, to me. If you would, that's fine; you wouldn't be objectively wrong.

First sentence: "The Velvet Revolution or Gentle Revolution was a non-violent transition of power in what was then Czechoslovakia, occurring from 17 November to 29 December 1989.

When I say that "Revolutions don't produce democracies", I'm talking about violent revolutions. A "non violent revolution" is a contradiction on terms to me.

> Non-violent protest often wins because the powers that be want to avoid antagonising the violent arm of the movement.

Not really a non-violent protest wins because majority move away from a violent group to a non-violent group.

So it makes a violent person who already has fear, more scared of being left alone. Non-violent protests need to be planned and require strategy in such a way, it helps those non-violent protestors to self-defend with the use of non-violent means, i.e. using deterrents which create fear in aggressors mind on use of violence.

I'm not disagreeing that in this case non-violent approach isn't the best. But depending on the setting, the parameters if you will, that approach might be inefficient. Another example would be the people living under the Stalin's rule in Soviet Union. Even if you resisted peacefully, I'm sure you would have been taken to the gulag either way.

The circumstance where non-violent behavior works is very specific and is best when there's:

A) much stronger opponent (British Empire, Chinese government)

B) level of civilization where both parties do not want to engage in violence (the majority of modern civilizations)

C) good chance for massive unrest if violence were to happen (no ruler wants to deal with domestic terrorism and internal squabbles, unless of course your regime is breaking up already and that's the only way to keep control)

The more primal the opponent, the worse are your chances. Aztecs would have welcomed non-violent behavior with open hands, they would have cheerfully enslaved people who didn't put up a fight. The reason why they stopped was basically the destruction of their civilization by the Spaniards. But maybe I'm mixing here war with protesting, which is a more of problem after you have lost and are under the oppressive regime. Then your options are limited: it's either violent insurgency or non-violent protesting. In modern world luckily we have electronic mass-media that helps immensely with the non-violence.

The American Revolution was won by leveraging Iroquois-style confederacy [1] as effective propaganda [2], and by employing guerilla warfare tactics learned fighting the Algonquin. This enabled securing enough victory (i.e. Saratoga) to get the French involved as the focus shifted to the Southern theater.

It was the first successful war of independence [3], lead to establishing the modern elected head of state, outlawed explicit nobility, and inspired fanatical devotion to an earthly cause.

For the previous hundred years, Jacobite rebellions in Europe had been crushed, seemingly due mainly to tactical failure (e.g. Culloden, the last pitched battle in Britain).

But then, a few years after the American Revolution, the French: guerilla warfare, beheaded head of state, banished nobility, fanatical devotion to an earthly cause.

(Interestingly, the French Revolution occurred right around the time they hit 50% literacy [4], increasing the viability of written propaganda.)

Then Haiti launched the second successful independence war in 1791, kicking off centuries of decolonization.

The American Revolution was a break from history.

We haven't cycled back to pitched battles, if anything guerilla warfare is still under active development and experiencing significant growth. Propaganda, as an instrument of war, is only becoming more important. And colonial aggressors continue to lose when on someone else's home field.

1. https://archive.org/details/indiantreatiespr00vand/page/78

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join,_or_Die

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_of_independence

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#/media/File:Illiterac...