Great polling news

[dixiegrrrrl]

Real Clear Politics poll average has Biden 10.2, trump 41.6

Even Rasmussen has Biden ahead by 12 points!

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_biden-6247.html

[DonaldsRump]

1. Sounds great, but one question about your tag line/signature

What about Mahatma Gandhi/India against the British? It wasn't, of course, passive resistance, but rather non-violent resistance. That worked, didn't it?

I appreciate most dictators aren't like the British in India in the first part of the 20th century, but non-violent resistance can work. It's actually worked very well against Trump, too. I think there are many instances where it has worked, which is why giants like Gandhi, MLK Jr., and Nelson Mandela employed it.

[msongs]

2. don't see any tagline/signature on any posts nt

[DonaldsRump]

4. "No dictator on earth has ever been defeated by passive resistance."

Not dissing the OP or the post or the sentiment, but just was curious about this, given the context of resistance by many great folks just in the last 100 years.

Non-violent resistance clearly wouldn't work against monsters like Hitler etc, but it is a brilliant strategy in the right conditions.

[msongs]

5. ok, thx nt

[thucythucy]

7. Not to mention the Velvet Revolution in the former Czechoslovakia.

I could be wrong, but I seem to agree that was mostly non-violent.

[dixiegrrrrl]

21. the key word is dictator and how you define that.

Usually one thinks of dictators as a person in your own country becoming powerful enough to forcibly take over that country, turning on its own citizens.

[DonaldsRump]

22. Agreed, but I don't think it has to be a person from the same country.

My agreement is that there are many definitions of dictatorship.

[Drunken Irishman]

6. I think your second paragraph answers the concern of your first.

Britain was an empire but not what one would consider even remotely close to a dictatorship - not in the full totalitarian sense of the word. That makes a difference, I think.

[DonaldsRump]

8. Tell that to anybody who lived in India until 1947, and to the Irish

I guess we have differing views of what being a "dictator" is...Monsters like Hitler needed warfare, and even Gandhi agreed to that. Not all dictators are Hitler, though.

As I said, in the right circumstances it works. In other circumstances, it doesn't.

[Drunken Irishman]

9. Yes I assume we do have a differing view of what a dictatorship is.

The British Empire was a lot of things but I would never consider a dictatorship, especially in the modern sense of the word.

[DonaldsRump]

11. Again, consider what freedom exactly a person born in India had until Independence?

and I am specifically limiting my comments about the British to India prior to Indian independence.

The fact of the matter was that the British were more civilized than other tyrants, but they were tyrants, and Gandhi himself referred to them as tyrants, which, AFAIK, is a synonym for dictator.

[Drunken Irishman]

13. Plenty of unfree people in America's past and I would never call us a dictatorship, either.

[DonaldsRump]

14. I guess you and Gandhi and me disagree!

Good night!

[thucythucy]

12. What about the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia?

I seem to recall that being pretty much non-violent.

And the Berlin Wall coming down and the end of the German "Democratic" Republic--the border guards and mid-level police went over to the revolution. The Stasi was hardly known as a bunch of cream puffs, yet they succumbed to an uprising that was almost entirely unarmed and so incapable of violent resistance. (There had been violent uprisings in the DDR--1951 and 52--and these were complete failures).

Come to think of it, the collapse of the Soviet Union itself came as a result of a massive--and mostly non-violent--response of the Russian people to the attempted military coup against Gorbachev. I seem to recall most of the violence during that upheaval came from the losing side--and the orders delivered from on high to shoot the protesters led to the army units defecting en masse to the revolution.

Even earlier than that, the overthrow of the Czar in the February revolution was also rather "passive"--in that by and large the people---conscripts and workers--went out into the streets and refused to follow any more orders. Units sent by the Czar to enforce "order" also defected to the revolution. The tipping point came on "International Woman's Day" when women in Petrograd got sick of standing in breadlines and started breaking into food stores to help themselves. (I don't consider that to be violence). It was the police and soldiers sent to quell those protests that escalated those spontaneous demonstrations into a full scale revolution. I forget who said it, but the account of one observer was along the lines of "It was as if the whole of the Russian people simply shrugged, and the whole rotten system collapsed of its own weight."

This of course wasn't the case when Lenin orchestrated his coup, which indeed was violent, and which resulted in a civil war that killed millions and left Russia in the hands of Stalin.

I should add, British rule in India was hardly without some horrific violence. The British withdrawal I think had less to do with any great moral scruples on the part of the British ruling class--Tory or Labor--and more to do with Britain being bankrupt and exhausted at the close of World War II, and simply unable to maintain the level of force needed to continue its subjugation of India. (In fact, by this point the Brits couldn't even maintain their presence in Greece, let alone the entire Indian subcontinent. Hence: the Truman Doctrine).

Sorry to be so long winded and pedantic. Once I get started I find it difficult to stop, especially with all this cold medicine I'm on right now.

[DonaldsRump]

16. I tend to agree with you

There have been MANY instance where dictatorships have been quelled by non-violent resistance. That being said, there was probably far more going on behind the scenes than common folk like me are made aware of.

Dictatorship can take many forms. I think, as you say, there are many examples where non-violent resistance has defeated them. There are also horrible cases like Hitler et al where only war or something more than non-violent resistance can stop them.

[thucythucy]

17. Yes, each case is different

and what might work in one context might be impossible in another.

I'm not saying violence never brought down a tyranny--the French Revolution, and as you point out, in Germany's case the overwhelming military force of the Allies being two rather obvious cases in point. But at the same time I don't think it's accurate to say that violence is the ONLY method that has ever worked to bring down a tyranny, which is what some of the people posting here seemed to be saying or at least implying.

I'm trying now to remember what led to the fall of the Pinochet regime in Chile, which was an extremely violent tyranny that used vile methods of torture, including taking a leaf from Nazi Germany's "Nacht und Nebel ("Night and Fog&quot program of "disappearing"--that is murdering--those whom it considered to be opponents and leaving families in anxious ignorance of the fate of their loved ones.

Sometimes both violence and non-violence bring about the desired result. I'm thinking of the generals' regime in Argentina. It was the junta's defeat in the Falkland's War which accelerated the mostly non-violent strikes and demonstrations that toppled that hideous collection of reactionary thugs.

It seems to me anyway that nothing is ever very simple when it comes to history or politics. Nuance is everything.

Best wishes--

Edited to add: I have no idea why a smiley face smiley got inserted into this post. How odd is that?!

[DonaldsRump]

19. On the smiley face

It's happened to me a ton of times! It's when you put the "close parentheses" next to a quotation mark, you get the winking smiley face. Just put an extra space between the two punctuation marks, and you will be fine.

(Seriously, this has happened to me so many times. That smiley face can greatly alter the tone/meaning of a post!)

[thucythucy]

20. Ah, thank you for this information.

Best wishes.

[MFM008]

3. the Hill

poll dragging down Bidens numbers or he would be higher...

[BainsBane]

10. Rasmussen gets more legitimate closer to the election

So they can claim their polls are accurate. Earlier in the season they are nothing but a propaganda service.

[Drunken Irishman]

15. There's still a cycle left for Rasmussen. They'll tighten again.

He's already at almost even in approval despite being 10-points under water a week ago. They're rearing to have him within the MOE in their next head-to-head match-up. Then they'll swing back and end with a more consensus number the final week or so of the campaign.

[regnaD kciN]

18. That Rassmussen poll was from last week...

They have a habit of issuing Republican-skewing polls most of an election cycle and then, in the last month, "shifting" them to be more in line with what everyone else is predicting, so that they can lay claim to being just as accurate as the others. Looks like they're falling right into the usual pattern.

[BlueWavePsych]

23. Super! Now GOTV!