General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Why American and Britain are Self-Destructing [View all]ancianita
(36,055 posts)"we" is possibly different than you imagine.
"WE" never "stood by watching." Honesty has never had anything to do with any collective "us." But the freedom of free wills has.
"WE" who you claimed stood by watching, were busy living, working, and rightfully assuming truth and good faith of our leaders doing their work, too, but who lied -- LIED -- to us. Those leaders never dared say what they thought outright, but they thought it "best" to structurally make it "self evident" that people of color, women, children had fundamental constitutional rights. And no fundamental rights of education and health care, though those fall into "life, liberty and the pursuit of property..."
Your linked article uses countries only 1/10th our size as examples of what protests have done. The dynamics of unity toward change work much more quickly in small countries, and so, because so-called 'studiers' of nonviolent resistance in Sudan, Algeria, Philippines, Estonia, Georgia have successes, maybe, not countries like Russia, China and the U.S.
This has been too big a ship to scale up the dynamics of other countries' success. There is no "if little countries could do it, so can we." One might as well imply that grownups are at fault for not having the physical and moral dexterity of children.
As has been shown by most big countries, the U.S.'s greatest protest successes, no matter how non-violent at the start, came with a lot of death and destruction. It was not the nonviolent resisters' fault. Wars for resource wealth and land base and human control are waged within and across countries by those who do or don't don't live there, yet already own the most lawyers, guns and money.
We could collectively win a civil war using those same forces for, but the cost, as we've seen historically, is hard to pay, the trauma and wounds hard to heal from. The interference, as Venezuela is seeing, hard to fight off.
If we're honest with ourselves.