demanding absolute purity and claiming anything else isnt socialist doesn’t result in socialism.
Pretending that socialism is "when the gubment does stuff" hasn't resulted in socialism, either.
Quite frankly the entire world would become fascist before a single nation
Yes, that's what political elites do when the power and privilege of the class they serve is threatened - and that includes the ones pretending to be "socialist."
We've known this since forever - and your solution to this is to render an enduring political concept so impotent and hollow that it ceases to have any meaning to the very people it is supposed to liberate?
Mangione's grievance with Big Healthcare was seen as personal - ie, he didn't make any attempt to justify it with an overtly political narrative that could only be seen as abstract by the general public.
Leftists forget that the general public does not conflate the personal with the political. That is why the general public lionised Luigi Mangione and completely ignored Aaron Bushnell.
yet history has shown dramatic political progress after assassinations.
History shows that poorly-thought out assassination attempts backfire far more than they succeed at achieving anything good. I can point at assassinations like Dmitri Tsafendas (an anarchist) stabbing Hendrik Verwoerd as an attempt that achieved absolutely nothing, and at Alexander Berkman (another anarchist) shooting Henry Clay Frick as an attempt that backfired disasterously on anarchists at the time.
Brian Thompson's assassination should be an important case study for radicals when it comes to the use of targeted lethal force. For one, Thompson was an unknown - not a well-known personality like (for instance) Charlie Kirk. Second, Mangione's motives was not overtly political - a very important factor in his subsequent lionisation. This is why Thompson's demise could not be used as political theatre by liberals and fascists in the way that they used Kirk's.
(I am aware that Kirk wasn't assassinated by a leftist, but that's neither here nor there when it comes to this question)
I will always maintain that assassinating well-known or infamous figureheads is a worthless strategem. At best, it's merely symbolic, at worst it's likely to backfire spectacularly - and it achieves very little in reality because you're not actually doing any structural damage to the hierarchy involved.
Their right-hand henchmen, the people these figureheads rely on to get anything done and usually remain hidden in the shadows, on the other hand...
Sure, but places like Australia with mandatory voting shows that forcing increased participation doesn’t solve or really improve things.
Sooo... blaming the population for not participating in a fundamentally anti-democratic system didn't magically turn the fundamentally anti-democratic system into something democratic?
Apparently, they aren't Maoists but "Althusserian" - influenced by Louis Althusser, some French Marxist brainiac who murdered his own wife.
Being a Marxist-Lenninist or Maoist is one thing - but basing your politics on that of these almost universally creepy French academics from the 60s is downright cartoonish IMO.
not civilians grabbing weapons for a spontaneous revolt.
Again... is that how I characterised them?
This is an unserious comparison.
Where did I compare them, Clyde? I merely used them to demonstrate that suffering military reversal does not necessarily mean the end of an insurgency.
There are literally no examples of successful modern insurgencies starting as civilian uprisings.
There is no such thing as an insurgency ("modern" or otherwise) that doesn't start with civilian uprisings. No extant insurgency has "modern" roots - if that is what you demand an example off I'll simply write your demand off as ridiculous and not worth bothering with.
They did not wage an armed campaign against the Syrian state.
Somehow, I don't think Assad would have seen it that way if he had won the civil war.
It’s political optics that constrained the state.
Merely optics to you, actual political threats to them.
Besides, Mexico did crush them militarily. It took 12 days.
Again... not the first insurgency to survive military reversal.
Modern states can annihilate insurgents when they stop caring about optics.
Caring about "optics" is not the reason Russia suffered defeat during the 1st Chechen War.
Most insurgencies don’t start as peasant uprisings that get crushed and then re-emerge lmao
Complete mischaracterisation of what I actually said. Most insurgencies do experience military reversal at some point in their existence or other. And no...
you’re just using some romantic examples
...I never claimed there was anything "romantic" (whatever that means) about it.
All insurgencies start as civilian uprisings - with or without guns.
They’re fighting ISIS, not overthrowing the Syrian state through street protests.
No... they took advantage of Syrian state power fragmenting to launch their insurgency - which they could not have done without armaments. This was before tenuous US support arrived.
Zapatistas are actually proving my point…
No, it doesn't. All insurgencies experience defeat initially. The Viet Minh was, at first, roundly crushed by French colonial forces. Before WW2, Mao's rebels tasted nothing but defeat at the hands of Kuomintang forces. This is merely the historical pattern almost all insurgencies must pass through. Logistical reality dictates the fortunes of insurgencies - not their levels of commitment to either "peaceful" or "violent" means.
it would be terrible PR for the mexican government to launch a campaign on them
If you are going to take armchair revolutionaries to task for simplifying and essentialising the nature of insurgency (justified as it may be), you should be careful not to do the same yourself. If PR was the only thing standing between the Mexican state and crushing militant autonomy within it's own borders, it would have happily already done so already.
Militaries are shit for fighting anything but other militaries.
That's not true at all. Almost every time an insurgency is cut off from outside logistical support (or doesn't have it in the first place) it's chances of being defeated by conventional militaries is pretty high.
There are lots of examples - the LTTE in Sri Lanka (defeated in the 2000s), the MNLA in Malaya (defeated in the 1960s) - they are simply just not as well-known as the insurgencies that succeeded.
The whole reason the Palestinian resistance had to accede to this (so-called) "ceasefire" is because they simply do not have the logistics to carry on the fight for that much longer - if the Palestinians had a Ho Chi Minh Trail, Israel would be history by now.
Somehow, I don't think tankies will be crediting the PRC for stopping this silly system before it got out of hand any time soon.