Is Violence Part of Resistance?: No River, No Flood

An interesting historical analysis that examines what constitutes effective resistance and what doesn’t.

This is a discussion about violence in resistance, and the stupidest form of resistance violence: assassination.

Right now, people are screaming about political violence having no place in our democracy, as if this democracy wasn't built on calculated bloodshed. The Boston Massacre wasn't spontaneous - Samuel Adams orchestrated it after studying how British troops firing on protesters in London created martyrs that transformed public opinion. Dead colonials would turn British authority from irritating to tyrannical. That's strategic violence.

But assassination? That's different. When resistance movements try to kill leaders, they consistently make things worse. The socialists who killed Czar Alexander II in 1881 got worse oppression under Alexander III. The Black Hand thought killing Franz Ferdinand would unite Serbia - instead they triggered World War I and lost a quarter of their population. Even killing Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Holocaust, accelerated the genocide. The Nazis named Operation Reinhard after him and murdered 1.5 million Jews in his memory.

The resistance movements that actually worked during World War II learned to target the machinery, not the symbols. The Polish Home Army killed 945 prison guards and deportation clerks. The Danish resistance eliminated 400 informers. The French assassinated local collaborators who knew faces and names. No glory in shooting a clerk outside a café, but the trains ran late, the deportations slowed, the resistance networks survived. They understood that occupation runs on middle management - people who are irreplaceable in ways generals aren't.

This matters now because claims about "radical left violence" in America make no sense. That radical left doesn't exist here. The American left has been domesticated - they file permits for protests in designated free speech zones while begging to be heard. When someone screams about radical left violence while the actual left is filling out paperwork for candlelight vigils, they're not describing reality.

The historical lesson isn't that violence doesn't work - it's that symbolic violence is a waste. Assassination is what you do when you want to lose heroically. Real resistance understands how power actually works, not how it looks. Most people who reach for violence are committing elaborate suicide. The ones who succeed map the machine first.