> This may be my optimism talking but I don't think violence solves any problems. We will continue to have enemies as long as we kill innocent people. Now that may be the objective; which refers back to my point that war is money. But you can not tell me that in the history of civilization that line of thinking has ever worked. People will always rebel when they consider the force governing or dictating their fate to be unconcerned with their true value or to be evil.

Rebellion didn't happen for the Jews, it didn't really happen for the majority of slaves throughout history, it didn't happen for the African Americans, it didn't happen for those sent to the gulags, it didn't happen for those under Mao, it didn't happen for the thousands that Saddam killed, it hasn't happened for women in the Middle East.

If violence didn't get people what they wanted at all, then even bad people would never use it. Rebellion against powerful and abusive forces is the exception, historically speaking. It has to be so almost by definition, they'd never have got to be large powerful forces if abuse hadn't been working for them.

For better or worse, you can break and abuse people. And if they grow up without any thought of something better, or can be convinced that they still have something left to lose, then you have to push them very hard for them to risk it all against you. It's often after the fact, looking back, that it seems people abused by even absurdly brutal regimes talk about rebellion -

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"What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, polkers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur – what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

If… if… We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure!

We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."

- Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

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I'd be the first to agree with you that violence is rarely a good answer.

But then... what about World War 2? The war itself may not have solved the underlying economic inequalities that caused the war, that came later, but do you think that World War 2 could have been resolved favourably without the use of force on the part of the allies?

Or a father (I use the term loosely) who abuses his children? Do you think that can always be resolved without the use of the police to stop him? Certainly it won't solve his mental problems but it solves the problem of the children being beaten and/or raped.

I think the use of violence is like trying to use the accelerator to gain traction in a car. You can use it to get around small, immediate problems, long enough - if you're lucky - to look at the underlying cause of that problem and correct it. However, if the group using violence is going somewhere very bad; if the society, for instance, has an abusive criminal justice system; then that group using more violence seems likely just going to take them somewhere they don't want to go with a great deal less control.

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If it's a cohesive group. That's the kicker in all this I think - what makes pacifism not make sense as an absolute:

You don't pay the above cost - unless someone imposes it on you from outside - if you don't share a destiny with the group you're thinking of attacking.

When you can meaningfully call it Us against Them, then violence seems like it would be far easier to justify as a tool to solve your immediate problem because you've relatively little invested in the long-term relationships.