Kitty Marion: The actress who became a 'terrorist' - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-44210012 When a student researching in the archives of a London museum read the unpublished memoirs of a suffragette bomber, she began to wonder if the history of the movement had been sanitized. The suffragettes may have won the vote for women, but some of them, she argues, were terrorists.

Any radicalized movement is going to have A assholes and B people that push shit to the nth degree so then can have the perpetual smuggest of high ground, that hasn't changed since two people argued over a mammoth carcass.

I thought it was pretty common knowledge that some of the suffragettes were, by our modern definition, terrorists. Some of them absolutely did use violence for political ends, specifically bombings and arson. I can't comment either way on whether they were right to resort to those means but they did exist in a society that was seeking to deny them equality and felt that they had no other recourse, whether correctly or incorrectly.

The suffragettes are a really good counterexample to people saying "b-but violence doesn't get social movements anywhere!!" Most successful social movements have used some degree of violence to achieve their ends.

yeah contrary to: iirc there's evidence that the suffragettes actually hurt the movement for women's suffrage, while the suffragists were already actually affecting meaningful change

Clearly you've not actually read about the suffragette movement. They directly hurt the suffragette cause in England. They are one of the main reasons it took so long for women to get the vote, as Parliament realised that they couldn't be seen to be making concessions to what they saw as terrorists. People always do this. They always lump the credit to the suffragettes when it was almost entirely the suffragist movements that got women the vote. Women like Millicent Fawcett, through her own esteem and connections to Parliament through her husband Henry Fawcett, managed to put women's suffrage on the agenda. When the suffragettes were using their tactics of destroying property, burning stuff, breaking windows, and causing commotion, women's suffrage was ALREADY on the parliamentary agenda and they were simply figuring out the details of how such a policy would be executed. But this had to be delayed because of the suffragettes. Even when the suffragettes had public support, women didn't join the suffragette union (Women's Social and Political Union), they joined the suffragist union (National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies) run by Fawcett. In reality, the suffragettes were classist (two of the Pankhurst family were kicked out of the WSPU for suggesting that all women, not just middle-class women, should get the vote and for campaigning for women to get higher wages) and Christabel Pankhurst (essentially 2nd in command) literally hated men (not in the "feminists hate men" type of way but a sincere sexist hatred), to the extent that she spread around pamphlets stating that all men had venereal disease. This whole idea that the suffragettes were this amazing force that got women the vote is honestly so close to being a myth and is a complete misrepresentation of the events that unfolded.

I'd rather have no social movements if it meant that people wouldn't unnecessarily die

that's a very easy thing to say from the comfortable positions we live in now.

yeah when you're a bomber like most terrorist are people tend to die

It's also an easy claim to make because the example you literally cited proves it

You're so far off topic here, I'm not really even sure how to respond. I'm not advocating terrorism, I'm acknowledging that violence can and has been used as a tool to successfully create social change. Violence doesn't necessarily require innocent blood to be spilled, much less force than that can be effective. Also your "most terrorists are bombers" statement is so incredibly confusing I'm not even going to touch it, honestly.

Can you actually cite an example where violence has been used to create positive social change because you've yet to give one.

Without social movements, we'd still be living under feudal systems, 50% of the population wouldn't have a political voice, and democracy wouldn't be implemented at all. All of those problems were fixed through some degree of violence, sometimes loss of life and even war. I don't understand the point you're making.

There's a difference between a social movement and a literal revolution. One tries to affect change within aspects on an existing system or structure, the other literally seeks to completely overturn and destroy the entirety of the existing systems and structures to replace with new, different ones.

See, what you've done there is conflate all nonviolent and violent social movements into one big bulk and poised it as being "look, political violence can do something". Social movements are necessary, but you seem to be under the impression that the voice of the people can only manifest itself violently. My core point is that you're uninformed on the suffragette movement and you claimed it was a good example of violent movements being successful when the reality was that the suffraggetes directly hindered the progress of women's rights in England explicitly because of their violent methods.

This is not my viewpoint.

The only situation where violence creates positive social change is when you aren't living in a democracy (even a flawed democracy) to begin with. In a democracy, making people fear your movement is only going to hurt it.

You're not saying much. and what you've said has been wrong, so now might be a good time to fix that up.

Your initial point was about violent social movements and then you started speaking about social movements in general. You were actively conflating the two.

I mostly agree with you, with the exception that if the democracy directly excludes a group from having a political voice, which has happened consistently through United States history, they may have to resort to violence.

Except that if their violence is against a group that does have a political voice, what do you think that's going to accomplish?

It brings up the issue in the public and political consciousness. When that happens, the issue is then up for public debate and that opens the door to real change happening.

Yeah it brings up the issue of "what do we do about these terrorists"

"We should probably get some guns and shoot them all. No more terrorists."

Yes, and that's a good thing, because some people are going to try to understand why the "terrorists" are doing what they're doing, and some people are going to become sympathetic. If the cause is righteous, sympathy will grow, and if that's successful, violence will no longer be necessary. Violence is an excellent way to say to the world "HEY, WE ARE HAVING A BIG-ASS PROBLEM." Of course violence doesn't fix anything by itself, the world is too complicated for "kill the problem until it's fixed" to work, but it catapults the people and their issues right to the front of the public consciousness.

That's not really how that works actually. Everyone just goes, "They're violent and killing people. They need to be stopped." It doesn't building sympathy, it builds more terrorists who also get killed, but it mostly just builds opposition to them.

Except historically this is not the way it works. Historically the fact that people are committing violence in the name of a cause is used, effectively, as an argument against that entire movement.

It's not a quick process, it's not like peoples' hearts and minds will be turned in a month. If 100% of the people who are made aware of the violence have their opinions turned against the people committing the violence, that won't still necessarily be true in 5 or 10 years. But if they made a big enough impression, in 5 or 10 years, people will still be discussing the violence and the issues that caused it.

Except you will literally never get 100% support from that, you might be lucky to get 1% or 2%. But a much greater portion will just be turned against you.

This operates under the assumption that the violence will have stopped which pretty much never happens