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“If you kill a killer the number of killers in the world is unchanged”
“So I should kill multiple killers”
“Hol’ up”
This is silly. Everyone knows, historically, you stop opressors by asking nicely. Maybe go into the street in a funny costume or something, organize a singalong. Violence is what the baddies do.
Nonviolent resistance exists, been explained before, & has been done before. It also takes more courage.
Okay here’s an opinion that’ll get me down voted to oblivion but here goes:
Violence is like symptom management. If you’re hurting, seriously injured etc. get that morphine. But keep using it and it becomes dependency. It’s a short term solution to one specific problem and rarely solves the underlying causes. Unless you can do that, you’ll be back to using violence as symptom management. Only the next time you’ll need more of it, just like heroin.
Historically, almost all social progress has come from stopping before you kill your oppressor and making him reorganize the system in a way that works better. Just killing the oppressor usually only gives you another one a short while later.
Also historically, a small minority of oppressors ever accepted a truce where they reorganize the system. And killing the ones that didn’t let people run the dice again with a new one.
That’s about the least Iroh thing to say. Congrats for the quality shitpost I guess.
He wouldn’t word it that way, and he wouldn’t suggest that killing is universally the best way to go about it, but this is not the least likely thing that could come out of his mouth, as another commenter pointed out “Azula is crazy, and needs to go down”. Even as he turned down the team’s request to defeat Ozai, he made it clear that it could only end in death, “brother killing brother”. He was under no illusion that capturing Ozai was ever an option.
Do you think that the white lotus took back Ba Sing Se without killing anyone with those 100-foot-tall walls of fire? No, you don’t expel an occupying force by just cutting the tips off of some spears. Avatar shows us the least-bloody parts of the recapture, but do not mistake Iroh’s depiction in a kids’ series for pacifism. Iroh is very clear, vocally, that violence is necessary in some cases. He teaches zuko to redirect lightning to send it back at the person who launched it, as he says “to use your opponent’s energy against them”. He prefers nonlethal methods, but that doesn’t mean he refuses to employ deadly force. He and his friends use heavy fire against enemy metal tanks, which would boil alive the soldiers inside. They use rocks to stop up the holes through which benders were actively shooting fire, which would rebound and fill the tank with that same conflagration. Those tanks get shot up hundreds of feet in the air and have hard landings on top of one another, which would not only concuss anyone inside to death, but would crush all of the tanks on the bottom. Iroh literally starts the liberation of Ba Sing Se with a fire blast large enough to completely obliterate the titanic wall, as well as everyone previously depicted positioned directly behind it, in an instant. He doesn’t know how many soldiers lie behind that wall. He just destroys it, sight-unseen.
Iroh is not a pacifist, he is just very selective in his use of deadly force.
sips tea Ah … come, sit with me for a moment. The tea is hot, and such questions are best answered slowly, with a warm belly.
It is natural to feel anger when one has been wronged. Even the gentlest river becomes violent when dammed for too long. But we must be careful, my friend, not to mistake the force of our feelings for the wisdom of our actions.
You ask why one should not kill their oppressors. The answer is not because they are strong, nor because they deserve mercy, nor because the world would punish you. It is because when you choose to do evil in the name of justice, you quietly invite that evil to live inside you. And once it is settled there, it does not leave easily.
You may believe you are striking only your enemy, but violence has a poor sense of direction. It spills into the soul, changing the person who wields it. The moment you decide that a “good reason” excuses a cruel act, you teach your heart that cruelty can be justified. Soon, it will begin to justify itself.
Oppression is a heavy chain, but hatred forges a second one, but this time around your own spirit. If you destroy another to feel free, you may discover that freedom never arrived, and only the destruction remained. True victory is not standing over your enemy’s body. True victory is refusing to become what hurt you. It is choosing a path that allows you to look at yourself in the mirror without turning away. The right reasons lose their meaning when they are carried by wrong actions. Like tea made with poisoned water, no matter how fine the leaves, the cup will only bring sickness.
So no - do not kill your oppressors. Not for their sake, but for yours. Because the most important battle is not against them, but against the part of yourself that believes goodness can be built from blood.
Iroh is not a pacifist. He is just very selective about the use of deadly force.
Iroh tries to teach zuko how to kill his enemies unflinchingly with “cold-blooded” lightning, and when that fails, teaches zuko to redirect lightning, which he knows is — and makes clear to be —explicitly deadly force, “to turn your enemy’s energy against them”. He acknowledges that, if he were to defeat Ozai, it would be “brother killing a brother”, because there was no realistic world in which Ozai could be contained without leading to his death. He accepts that his granddaughter “is crazy and needs to go down”.
When he chooses to take back Ba Sing Se, does he go in covertly and retake the puppet state from the occupying troops by forcing a surrender or a diplomatic solution? No, his opening move is to generate the largest ball of fire possible, then hurl it at the titanic wall, which not only does the camera show us has many people behind it, but which Iroh is ready to obliterate, soldiers and all, sight unseen. He does what must be done. Violence is his last resort, but he clearly has no moral compunction against using violence against the violent. Deadly force is met with a redirecting blow, carrying that same energy or more. In the first season, when he believes the fate of the world hangs in the balance, he threatens and uses deadly force “tenfold” that which is exacted upon the moon spirit. There is nowhere in the show that Iroh says that death is never the solution. The only reason we don’t see the deaths of the many soldiers occupying Ba Sing Se at Iroh’s hands (as well as all of the other times he has caused soldiers to be buried under their own boulders, breathed fire into their faces, or otherwise used violent infernos to defeat enemies) is that it was depicted in a kids’ show. The only person in the series who maintains that deadly force is never the answer is Aang. Aang only manages it in the finale by Deus Ex Machina because he’s the chosen one (and the protagonist of a kids’ show).
This is a fantasy land take that has no basis in reality or human history. At some point, it becomes a matter of physical well being for yourself and those around you. Telling people to just suck it up and take a beating/killing for the benefit of their “soul”…my god. Rejoin the real world buddy. It can be a scary place, but at least it’s real, not whatever bizarro world you are speaking from.
You let bullies walk on you, and they will keep doing it. The only thing that will stop them is letting them know that they will pay a real price if they keep at it. Trying to spin this “peace at all costs” worldview is intellectually dishonest and counterproductive.
Like we never tried this shit before… So who is the one deciding who gets taged as oppressor? Designate a “benevolent” dictator, or you vote on it, or just give everybody guns and make it a free for all?
Do you murder the oppressor’s children as well because they benifited from their perents behavior?
Where do you draw the line, who is an oppressor? Your boss, the cop doing her job, the train ticket expecting dude, someone stoping desperet people from shoplifting from her store?
What is wrong with you people? This is how some of the worst atrocities start.
This is how some of the worst atrocities start
Start? Really? People are being murdered in plain sight without consequences. The governments of the west are collaborating In genocide against Gaza. One in four black men go through jail in the US over their lifetimes. Homelessness is rampant, people are left to die without healthcare, drug abuse skyrockets, people are left unemployed and depressed.
You don’t care about “the worst atrocities”, the worst atrocities are happening TODAY and you simply don’t care because YOU have not been affected so far.
So who is the one deciding who gets taged as oppressor?
The people, democratically, organized in worker councils. Nowadays it’s usually old men with wigs deciding who’s a criminal, and that’s clearly working like shit, we can do better easily.
Do you murder the oppressor’s children as well because they benifited from their perents behavior?
No, literally no revolution ever has done this except in politically dangerous situations where keeping royal family members alive means danger of reestablishment of monarchy (e.g. Romanov). You’re just doing fake atrocity propaganda for something that literally doesn’t happen, and ignoring the millions murdered every single year.
Cycles of violence.
if you have oppressors, chances are that cycle is already alive and well without your input anyway.
Yeah. The question is whether to work to continue the cycle or work to break it.
How does one overthrow the shackles of oppression without violence?
That’s a hard question and I don’t know. I don’t know that a strictly nonviolent movement can work if there’s a critical mass of oppressors who believe that those they oppress deserve to be oppressed. I think the theory of nonviolent resistance is built on an assumption that, deep down, we all know that what oppressors do is wrong and that there is a contrivance of convenience that allows oppressors to except themselves, or simply ignore that knowledge. I don’t know if that deep down knowledge is universal. But I know from personal experience it’s quite easy to ignore it, especially when one’s own life is hard, or when the oppression is mostly hidden from view, or simply when the problem of oppression seems overwhelming and unassailable. I believe that most people who don’t try to resist oppression either disapprove but feel helpless in the face of it, or they benefit from it and therefore try to justify it, or usually a combination of the two. If that belief is correct, then the answer I think is one of education. Give people the tools they need to fight nonviolently: Educate about local elections, form citizen watchdog groups, show how propaganda uses common tropes to reinforce ideas about the “inherent criminality” of the oppressed, teach the history of how oligarchs use flunkies like trump to implement favorable policies while deflecting blame onto minorities, and the million other things that people need to know to have a well functioning society. Use shame to dislodge the privileged from their comfortable niches and force them to answer for the consequences of their actions or lack thereof.
I think, especially now in America, this seems so far away that even to seriously consider it seems fanciful. Maybe it is. Maybe we’re at the point where violence is necessary to jerk us back from the cliff of autocracy. It certainly seems like trump and his goons want a fight, and it seems likely that sooner or later they’ll get one. But I don’t think violence can be solved with violence, and even if America goes through some violent convulsions I don’t think they’ll end us in a place where we aren’t doing violence to each other. Nonviolence requires nonviolence.
So you hope the oppressors gain a conscience. Good fuckin luck with that. Violence to enforce is rarely justified, violence to defend usually is. Pacifism has never gained rights or prevented the loss of them.
I think oppressors have a conscience already, they’ve just been taught to ignore it or accept exceptions to it. Or rather, I think it’s more that oppressive leaders are in on the game, but the vast majority of their coalition has to be hoodwinked into following along. Look at the modern American news media machine: we kind of forget how expensive it is because it’s also profitable, but that’s a huge amount of concerted effort directed at making white americans afraid of and angry at non-white people. If people were just naturally OK with oppression none of that would be necessary, they would just do it and not bother trying to justify it with scare tactics. It’s also fragile to argument, which is why books get banned and civil rights leaders get assassinated.
True, the guy who killed Hitler was basically Hitler himself.
There’s a reason it’s pushed so hard, and it’s because people in power don’t want to lose the golden goose that is American apathy. They can oppress us as much as they want, and we think having the moral superiority of taking it on the chin makes us strong. It doesn’t.
