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These people who support “Civil Disobedience” as an alternative to violence don’t get the fact that it is a tactic that can only be viewed in context, and used in certain well-suited situations.

When Martin Luther King, Jr. used it here, America was already deep into the process of shedding old racial prejudices and divisions. He just came along and delivered some badly needed shoves to a few stubborn areas. Eventually we would have gotten to the point of racial equality, because most people believed that racism was backward and counterproductive.

When Gandhi used it in India, Britain was already an tired, spent empire that was about to begin letting go of it’s colonial holdings. Again, Gandhi came along and developed a few well-timed shoves to an already weakened institution.

If we had tried the same tactic with the British in 1776, at the height of their economic and military power, they would have squashed us like a bug.

Exactly. As another Freeper put it, Gandhi and MLK were successful in what they did only because they appealed to the conscience of a state which had a conscience.

Had they tried the same thing in the old Soviet Union, they would be nothing but forgotten names in a Gulag roster somewhere in Siberia.

Civil disobedience works against moral folks. It fails utterly against immoral aggressors.

White people in America weren’t about to accept seeing black people arrested daily over the inability to sit at a lunch counter. The argument was correct and the action highlighted the need to change.

Pope Francis came in with a lot of expectations. He’s been a disappointment with how he seemingly wants to deliver Catholicism over to modernism at the expense of theological support.

In 1938 Gandhi proclaimed that non-violent resistance by Jews in Germany (his method of "satyagraha") would "in the twinkling of an eye" turn the situation around. NAIVE does not begin to describe the preposterous fatuous Panglossism of Gandhi in the face of Hitler's evil. Yes, non-violent resistance can accomplish great things when the opponents have robust conscience to be appealed to. But against the most ruthless evil-doers such as Hitler, non-violence is no panacea.

[Gandhi in 1938] "But the Jews of Germany can offer satyagraha under infinitely better auspices than the Indians of South Africa. The Jews are a compact, homogeneous community in Germany. They are far more gifted than the Indians of South Africa. And they have organised world opinion behind them. I am convinced that if someone with courage and vision can arise among them to lead them in non-violent action, the winter of their despair can in the twinkling of an eye be turned into the summer of hope. And what has today become a degrading man-hunt can be turned into a calm and determined stand offered by unarmed men and women possessing the strength of suffering given to them by Jehovah. It will be then a truly religious resistance offered against the godless fury of dehumanised man. The German Jews will score a lasting victory over the German gentiles in the sense that they will have converted the latter to an appreciation of human dignity. They will have rendered service to fellow-Germans and proved their title to be the real Germans as against those who are today dragging, however unknowingly, the German name into the mire."