You are talking about different things.
There are parts of the world that hold elections-in-fingerquotes and the winners of those elections-in-fingerquotes are Saturday night poker buddies with the military leadership and if you so much as whisper about how that seems not okay you will die. This has nothing to do with nonviolence or violence; the fact is these governments have no legitimacy, do not pretend to have any legitimacy, and cling to power solely through asymmetry in the access to military-grade force. These countries don't have MLK's or Gandhi's, because they fucking murder them. These countries do sometimes develop significant enough armed resistances to destabilize them. Sometimes that's because the rebels have their own military-grade force, and sometimes that's because the rebels just burn things down and then go back to being indistinguishable from ordinary citizens.
The United States is not one of those countries. We have a government that is (despite the best efforts of many elected officials) at least in part accountable to a voting public, and it actually does feel the need to pretend that it is legitimate and democratic. I think the instant a Ferguson police officer opened fire into a crowd of protesters with an assault rifle -
even if those protesters were in the middle of burning down the Ferguson Police Department - that that would spark a level of national outrage and rioting so intense it could not be ignored and we'd actually be able to start a frank discussion about police militarization and America's favorite pastime of blue-on-black violence, a discussion that only ever really manages to get lipservice in today's world. And I think if police departments across the country had to worry about millions of dollars of property damage for murdering civilians, there'd be genuine pressure on them to listen when people say "murder less civilians."
Some specific notes:
hyzmarca wrote: Humans have empathy. There comes a point where we see someone suffering and just can't take that shit anymore, even if we're in charge and they're out enemies.
You fucking wish. Empathy is taught, and for a very long time our society taught that black people didn't deserve it. And we have to have problems shoved in our fucking face before we notice, and boy is it easy to ignore communities we don't live in and that the media doesn't care about. Ask yourself how many
generations it's been since the fifteenth amendment, and ask yourself how you feel about where we are today, then give me some more of this empathy bullshit.
hyzmarca wrote:If you want to effect change in any situation where the other side is vastly more powerful than you, then you need to have public support, and you need for the rules to be on your side rather than theirs.
That is exactly the point. The Ferguson protesters have played by the rules as much as humanly possible, and they were rewarded with a smoking gun
that hasn't changed a fucking thing! There have been
zero proposed solutions for any of Ferguson's structural problems, among them (and I am paraphrasing an actual conclusion from the god damn report) "the Ferguson Police Department believes its responsibility is to generate revenue for the city by fining African Americans."
The social contract behind nonviolent protest is that in exchange for not hurling molotov cocktails into buildings the powers that be will genuinely allow you to work towards your goals within the system. If they won't allow you to do that, then there is no fucking point. Contract broken.