ruleslawyer said:
South Africa is an example of a historical situation that contradicts your point. The apartheid government routinely shot or disappeared activists, and yet in the end, it was peaceful protest and not armed revolution that won the day.
The reason that the Jews couldn't have used passive resistance is because they were such a small minority, AND because the rest of the world was unwilling to come to their end in censuring Germany. (Also, Hitler wouldn't have cared.)
And why can't anyone ever spell Gandhi correctly?
This is perhaps the only other significant example out there of pacifism amounting to much of anything, IF pacifism could be said to be what happened here. I tihnk it is a stretch.
Blacks in South Africa used violence as well as non-violence, and made up the overwhelming majority of the country. The fall of apartheid may very well never have happened were it not backed by the explicit or implicit threat of violence from that minority against that majority. Additionally, it is not historically certain that the sanctions actually much good, and a big chunk of them were arms-related. Arms embargoes are not used to support non-violent resistance. They are useful primarily to support VIOLENT resistance. Depriving a country of arms (to the extent possible) is not that useful unless they are in an armed conflict with someone, and one does dnot need massive arms importation to oppress people who are not fighting back.
The South African government, while oppressive, did not use maximum force at all times, and there still were, though in a weaker sense, some universalist European liberal norms floating around internally. Pacifism can never defeat sufficient, committed force. It is only because the South African govenrment was a borderline case of meeting the requirements that a mixed strategy of violence and non-violence succeeded.
Saying that non-violence only works if you have a very large group comes very close to saying that non-violence requires the implicit use of force.
Furthermore, you concede that "Hitler would not have cared." Thus, your South Africa example is only a challenge to borders of the still-narrow parameters of where pacifism might work, not an attack on the claim that pacifism is unsuitable for dealing with true evil of sufficient power and committment.
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More ot the main point, though, I said before that fighting evil is better than pure benevolence because in general, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It is better to vaccinate when possible than wait for people to get a disease and cure it. it is better to filter a factory's runoff than trying to fish all that junk out of the bay. It is better to neutralize something that it constanty producing more evil than to just mitigate its effects for wahtever time you are acting.
Sometimes the resources required to neutralize that evil could actually be more efficiently used on mitigation, but like in most other areas, you usually have the potential for far more evil reduction for your buck/time/whatever through eliminating sources of evil.
