Reddit reviews Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Modern Library Chronicles)

Nonviolence doesn't strictly mean pacifism. It can also mean civil disobedience without violence. Hence, nonviolence has worked by itself, per your own example. I found this book to have some excellent discussion on the subject, if you're interested.

Yes. We had so much social and political change in the last 50 years for the better (more or less) and it was because strong people of character and courage stood up and resisted without having to resort to violence. Unfortunately, I believe that idea of nonviolence has eroded into pacifism. This is why I hate hippies. They appropriated the legitimate message of nonviolent resistance and turned it into granola eating, flower wearing, BS. Nonviolent resistance has absolutely nothing to do with "dropping out." It's the exact opposite.

You may like a good by Mark Kurlansky (author of Cod and Salt) called Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea. He defines "nonviolence" and makes a cogent argument that it has been, historically, the most effective form of resistance.

I really like history books that don't at first seem to be history books, but are explorations of societies sometimes seen through the lens of a single important concept or product. For instance, Mark Kurlansky has several books such as Salt; A World History, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, The Basque History of the World, Nonviolence: 25 Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea that teach more history, and more important history than is usually taught in US public schools.

History need not be rote memorization of dates and figures. It can, and should be a fun exploration of ideas and how those ideas shaped civilizations. It can also be an exploration of what did not make it into the history books as Bart Ehrman's Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament or his Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why and Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels attest.

I don't wish to come across as too glib about this, but I feel like the average person might well retain more useful knowledge reading a book like A History of the World in 6 Glasses than if they sat through a semester of freshman history as taught by most boring, lame generic high schools. I feel like often the best way to understand history is to come at it tangentially. Want to understand the US Constitution? Study the Iroquois confederacy. Want to understand the French? Study cuisine and wine. Want to understand China? Study international trade. And so it goes. Sometimes the best history lessons come about from just following another interest such as astronomy or math or cooking. Follow the path until curiosity is sated. Knowledge will accumulate that way. ;-)

Well I think you ought to redact your edit again, because if you think anyone who believes the US is not a functioning democracy is a wanker, then you're talking to a wanker.

I think the issue is that people are not cross-reading or fully understanding the concept of intersectionality. As I have read "Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea", have Piketty on queue, and have read the PDFs in the sidebar, I doubt anyone here has read Che Guevara's Guerrilla Warfare or have listened to Ward Churchill's "Pacifism and Pathology in the American Left" or read his "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens".

The aggression is not a "speed bump", unless this speed bump takes you out of the commonly accepted limit of the atmosphere--after all, literally millions of dead bodies would create a rather large speed bump. If you got yourself a scale and measured our good versus our evil, there wouldn't be a chance of good landing on the bottom, not even if you sat on it.

If you picked up some literature that wasn't what you might deem a "circlejerk", i.e. if you read something you didn't necessarily agree with to begin with, you would realize that nonviolence in this case becomes a liability, not the hailed powerful weapon it has previously been used as. If you don't want to bother reading, just watch this episode of the Boondocks.