can you win a blockade fight using gandhian tactics?

well, let's understand what gandhi did. 

there's a lot of ignorance around this, mostly coming from dumb hippies. but, what gandhi did was say "dear british, look at the size of my army! they are not currently armed - for both your sake and mine. but, suppose i were to arm them. would you stand a chance against a force this size?".

and the british, who were rational, which is the key part of the whole thing, said "no. we cannot win.", and moved out.

could a native blockade conceivably make an argument of the sort? it would have to have immense popular support that is willing to mobilize with a credible threat, which is the opposite of the status quo. you would essentially have to have an argument like this: "dear canada, look at the amount of support we have. it is not currently mobilized, but we might mobilize it. and, would you survive if we did?".

if the threat was credible, and our government was rational, which is not an obvious assumption, then a blockade might work on that level.

but, with the reality as it is, what the state is juggling is perception. nobody thinks critical mass is likely, unless you're talking about the potential of counter-demonstrators.

i want to support tactics that can win.

this one might feel good. you might think it's moral, and that might matter to you. but they can't win....

a blockade is in theory an effective action, if you can actually defend it when challenged. what's the logic, though?

the ultimate in effective actions is, of course, the sit-down strike. with a sit-down strike, the company is crippled - it can't even hire scabs. it has to negotiate, or fail. but, what is the key factor in ensuring that a sit down strike is effective? it is that the strikers can actually prevent the police from entering the building. even with a sit-down strike, they're still fucked if the cops can just move in and arrest everybody for trespassing.

a blockade could potentially work for the same reason as a sit-down strike - it can cripple production. it hits them where it hurts. that's what you want, so it's smart in a way.

but, the next question is "can we protect the blockade?", and the answer is that you never can. they can snipe you from the trees if they have to. they can water cannon you from the sky. once you get to the inevitable stage of actual conflict, there is no way to hold a blockade against a military or even a police force. it is a losing tactic, without question.

the protesters would need to build substantive fortifications over the tracks, somehow. they'd need to treat it like trench warfare and have some serious background in how to do it. 

google is just so hopelessly fucking useless nowadays without a good search filter to block out the capitalists and religionists and i can't install anything from this guest account.

so, i can't do anything at all on this chromebook. i keep saying that. but, i'm operating on distractions anyways - i should be focusing on inri023, not looking up proper histories of the christian recolonization of britain, that undo the mythologized official church narrative (which is complete and utter bullshit).

essentially everything at the top of the google results for essentially every topic is just nonsense. and, it's making me understand these arguments that technology is making people ignorant...

if i was forced to rely on the results at the top of the google results, then, yeah, that would be about right. i know better, at least. but, i need the right tools to undo the ignorance of market stupidity, and i don't have them in front of me.

the (re)christianization of britain was a horribly brutal, bloody mess that undid an indigenous revolution, brought on by the tribal invasions that overturned the roman occupation. it should really be thought of as a clash of civilizations. it was a thousand year long civil war with multiple phases, the last of which was the viking phase, when the nobility realized the value of christianity as a tool over their conquered peasants. the vikings initially moved south as a response to charlemagne's genocide of the saxons.

britain itself is actually a little bit frustrating, because it kept getting reconquered by pagan forces, and the fact that this happened so frequently should be indicative of what side the people were really on. when your cities fall to pagan forces over and over and over again....

but, you don't get as brutal of a history there as you do elsewhere, for that reason - the christians really had a hard time holding the island at all. the mythology suggests that the reconversion happened in the 7th century. the reality is that the purpose of this mythology is to gloss over the centuries of civil war that followed, and the fact that the clergy was still struggling with very widespread pagan "reversions" (what a bullshit term.) past the invasion of william the conqueror, into the period of peasant revolts that followed the plague and all the way to the renaissance. we can condemn the inquisition for killing witches, but doing so means recognizing the continued, lingering importance of indigenous european belief systems.

in britain, specifically, it was a slow process of gradual assimilation and passive resistance. like the indigenous people of canada, the indigenous people of britain seemed to give the church a questionable amount of actual authority. they seemed to prefer to avoid and ignore them than fight them. and, in the long run, that was probably a successful strategy - religion is not very prevalent in britain, these days. the pagans have, largely, won the fight.

it's hard to google this, though. i'm just going to get the official line of absolute bullshit from the depository of bullshit that is the anglican church, as backed up by mainstream "scholarship". i need to be able to get around that in order to get to substantive research, and it's very time consuming without these filters i've built up over the years that remove religious sites from the search results. i'm not going to waste my time with it.

i was hoping that the link i posted would be helpful, but it's not.

yeah.

that text is a good example of the kind of whitewashed, colonial, christian-mythologized history that you want to avoid.

i apologize for posting the link.

don't read it. it's a lot of nonsense, and a waste of time.

that link i posted starts off scholarly, but picks up a disappointingly pro-christian tone halfway through and ultimately isn't what i expected it to be, which was an exploration of the violent methods used to spread christianity in britain. rather, it simply repeats the standard christian mythology of terrorizing german tribes, and then attempts to whitewash the violence of the church by blaming it on the germans, themselves - the spread of christianity wasn't violent because of the colonizers, but because of the colonized. this is a kind of victim-blaming and should be properly denounced.

i did not endorse the text, i pointed out what i had searched for and explained that i was going to spend some time sorting through it. i appear to have made a poor assumption about it's contents.

the basic analogy between the indigenous peoples of europe and america is apparent if you read between the lines, though, even if i strongly disagree with the pro-christian, anti-german slant of the text.

there are jungle people, there are desert people, there are mountain people, there are arctic people....

we are the people of the forests.

we should recognize our shared responsibility to protect it. and, we should stick together.

as i've said many times now,

decolonization means dechristianization, deislamification, etc.

and, if we all do this together, we we will see how similar we are, together, up here, in our northern arboreal lands - because we are products of such similar climates.

and, yes, other people are welcome in my proposed indigenous-european coalition, asians would be a rational third partner, and anybody else, but there are obvious historical reasons why pointing to cultural overlap between these specific groups is a particularly fertile proposition for a lasting synthesis.

i'm not saying anything outside of history, either.

in canada, we actually have an entire category of people called metis that intend to be a synthesis of european and amerindian indigenous groups. in america, there is this constant theme through your history of defecting to the indians - because it happened. all of the time. and, the dna that's left is kind of startling, with some indigenous groups being majority r1*, at this point.

but, i'm not the first person to propose an alliance of indigenous and european commoners against the power of the church and the state.

people like me have existed since contact....

i'm not suggesting that we all ought to go back to the dark ages...

....but, i've said this before: the similarities between indigenous europe and indigenous america are actually pretty startling, and there's actually kind of a powerful potential for a hybrid culture if our own tendency towards this kind of post-reductionist scientific atheism hybridizes with their own emancipation of the superstitious into the ecological.

the truth is that we used to be just like them, actually, and that they can teach us how to get back to what we were, as much as we can teach them to evolve out of their shells.

we got off to a bad start. but, a few centuries is a short period, in the broader scheme of things.

i'm going to flip through this tonight while i wait for my neck to heal. it doesn't seem to be bruised, just very stiff.

https://thekeep.eiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1292&context=theses