When I was younger—much younger—I used to believe in the power of peaceful protest. I believed that if enough people held hands and sang songs and marched with signs, the powerful would see the error of their ways and voluntarily give up their privilege... Okay, that’s a bit of an unfair caricature of myself. But I believed this method of enacting change was possible because that’s the story I was told about how change happens.

It’s a comforting belief. But when I started reading human history without the sugar coating, I started realising it’s also mostly bullshit. Naturally, my mind tried to protect its belief by looking for cases where, surely, merely asking won the day. But even then...

For example, what they teach us about Gandhi is he led peaceful protests against British rule in India, and through the power of nonviolent resistance, he helped secure Indian independence. The British, moved by the moral force of his message, simply decided to leave.

What they didn’t teach us was that Gandhi’s peaceful protests worked because behind him stood a nation of people willing to engage in violent resistance if peaceful means failed. The British weren’t dealing with just one man fasting and spinning cotton—they were dealing with a population on the verge of armed rebellion.

The Indian independence movement included groups like the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, who were bombing British installations and assassinating officials. When the British looked at Gandhi, they were seeing the moderate alternative to complete violent overthrow. They chose Gandhi to represent the story, over the alternative, not because they were moved by his moral example, but because they could see which way the wind was blowing.

But we don’t talk about that. We sanitise the story until it becomes a fairy tale about the power of peaceful resistance, ignoring the context that made peaceful resistance effective.

The same whitewashing happens with Martin Luther King Jr. We’re taught that he had a dream, that he gave beautiful speeches about nonviolence, and that America was so moved by his moral clarity that it decided to end segregation.

What we’re not taught is that King existed within an ecosystem of resistance that included armed self-defence groups like the Deacons for Defence and Justice (founded in 1964), who protected civil rights workers from white supremacist violence. When white supremacists looked at the civil rights movement, they saw Malcolm X talking about “by any means necessary,” armed Black veterans standing guard at voter registration drives, and young Black activists who had no patience for gradualism. The Black Panthers would emerge in 1966, building on this tradition of armed self-defence.

King wasn’t the whole movement. He was the face that white America could accept, the voice they could hear without feeling too threatened. But his effectiveness came from existing alongside more militant voices. The civil rights victories weren’t won through speeches alone—they were won through a combination of moral pressure, legal challenges, economic boycotts, and the implicit threat that if peaceful change didn’t come, violent change might.

And then there’s Nelson Mandela, celebrated globally as a peaceful icon. What we don’t mention is that he co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC’s armed wing, after concluding that “50 years of non-violence had brought the African people nothing but more repressive legislation.” He spent 27 years in prison not for peaceful protest, but for sabotage. The apartheid government only negotiated when faced with escalating armed resistance and international economic pressure—not moral persuasion.

This selective amnesia extends to how we understand our current economic and political systems. We’re taught that capitalism and democracy are inherently peaceful systems that naturally emerged from human progress and rational thought.

This is historically absurd. Capitalism was established through centuries of violent dispossession—enclosure movements that drove peasants off their land at gunpoint, colonial expansion that enslaved entire continents, and industrial development that required the systematic destruction of alternative ways of life. The primitive accumulation that Marx talks about was sophisticated violence deployed to create the conditions necessary for capitalist relations.

Consider the Haitian Revolution—the only slave revolt that permanently overthrew both slavery and colonial rule in history, virtually erased from popular consciousness. The enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue didn’t petition for freedom—they burned plantations, executed slaveholders, and defeated Napoleon’s armies. Haiti’s revolution terrified colonial powers so thoroughly that they collectively punished the nation with centuries of economic isolation. We don’t teach this because it demonstrates that the oppressed can win through force.

The Irish didn’t win partial independence by asking nicely. The Easter Rising, the War of Independence, the campaign of assassinations and guerrilla warfare—these forced Britain to the negotiating table. Even the “peaceful” hunger strikes only worked because they occurred against a backdrop of decades of armed resistance and the implicit threat of its resumption.

Political rights, too, were won through violence. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, the English Civil War—every expansion of political participation has come through armed struggle or the credible threat of it. Even the supposedly peaceful expansions of suffrage in the 20th century happened in the context of world wars, revolutions, and the constant threat of social upheaval.

The 8-hour workday? We’re told it was won through unions and negotiation. We’re not told about the Haymarket Affair, where workers were executed for allegedly throwing bombs at police. Or take the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, where private planes hired by coal companies dropped bombs on striking miners while federal troops were deployed against them. The coal bosses and the government worked hand-in-hand, using military surveillance planes and thousands of armed troops to crush workers fighting for basic rights. May Day—celebrated worldwide as International Workers’ Day—commemorates workers who were hanged for demanding an 8-hour day. Every labour protection we have was paid for in blood.

But we don’t frame it that way. We pretend these systems emerged naturally, peacefully, inevitably. We act as though the violence that created them was somehow different from the violence that opposes them.

This selective memory becomes particularly obscene when we start counting bodies. We’re endlessly reminded that “socialism killed 100 million people”—a number that includes everyone who died of famine, disease, or accident in socialist countries, often including projections of people who might have been born but weren’t.

But we don’t count the deaths from capitalism the same way. We don’t count the millions who die annually from preventable diseases because pharmaceutical companies won’t research treatments for poor people’s illnesses. We don’t count the people who die from hunger while food rots in warehouses because it’s not profitable to distribute it. We don’t count the homeless who freeze to death while buildings sit empty because housing is treated as an investment commodity rather than a human right.

We don’t count the over 200 environmental activists murdered annually—mostly Indigenous people protecting their lands from extraction. Companies hire paramilitaries to eliminate opposition. Meanwhile, we’re told to solve climate change by recycling and voting, never mentioning that those defending the Earth most effectively are being systematically killed for it.

We don’t count the deaths from colonial extraction, from slavery, from the violence necessary to maintain property relations. We don’t count the deaths from preventable workplace accidents, from environmental degradation, from the stress-related diseases that come from economic insecurity. We don’t count the suicides from economic desperation, the overdoses from pharmaceutical capitalism, the premature deaths from lack of healthcare access.

Why? Because those deaths are built into the system. They’re not bugs—they’re features. They’re the price we pay for “freedom” and “efficiency.” They’re natural, inevitable, nobody’s fault in particular.

Rosa Luxemburg understood this. She understood that the ruling class would never voluntarily give up power, that they would use whatever violence necessary to maintain their position. She advocated for revolutionary change but believed it could come through mass action and democratic participation rather than conspiratorial violence.

She was murdered for it. Beaten to death by paramilitary forces and thrown into a canal, her body not found for months. Her murder was organised by the same Social Democratic Party that claimed to represent working-class interests but chose order over justice when the moment came.

Luxemburg’s assassination demonstrates a crucial point: the powerful will use violence to maintain their position even against those who explicitly advocate for peaceful change. The question isn’t whether violence will be used—it’s who will use it and for what purposes.

What would history education look like if we told the full story? If we stopped pretending that power simply yields to righteous arguments?

We might see that civil rights weren’t won through speeches alone but through the complex interaction of different tactics and the threat of urban rebellion. The Watts uprising of 1965 left 34 dead and $40 million in property damage. Newark burned in 1967. Detroit erupted the same year—43 dead, 2,000 buildings destroyed, tanks rolling through American streets. After King’s assassination in 1968, over 100 cities exploded in rebellion. The Civil Rights Act of 1968, which included fair housing provisions that had been stalled for years, was passed just one week later—not from moral enlightenment, but from the urgent need to restore order. Politicians who had opposed civil rights legislation suddenly discovered the virtue of reform when the alternative was watching American cities burn.

The Birmingham campaign succeeded not just through peaceful protest, but because Bull Connor’s violent response created such chaos that the business community demanded change to restore economic stability. The Montgomery Bus Boycott worked because it created economic crisis for the transit system. Every major civil rights victory came when the cost of maintaining the status quo—whether through urban rebellion, economic disruption, or international embarrassment during the Cold War—became higher than the cost of change.

We might recognise that women’s suffrage wasn’t granted because men suddenly realised women deserved political rights—it was conceded because the suffragette movement was becoming increasingly militant and disruptive. In Britain, the suffragettes escalated from peaceful petitions to arson attacks on churches, railway stations, and politicians’ homes. They bombed Lloyd George’s country house, slashed paintings in the National Gallery, and physically attacked politicians including Asquith. Emily Davison died throwing herself in front of the King’s horse at the Derby. When imprisoned, they went on hunger strikes so severe that the government passed the “Cat and Mouse Act” to temporarily release dying women to avoid creating martyrs.

In America, the Silent Sentinels picketed the White House for two years, and when arrested, they endured forced feeding and beatings at Occoquan Workhouse during the “Night of Terror” in 1917. Alice Paul was force-fed through tubes shoved down her throat and confined to the psychiatric ward. The movement synchronised with World War I—women were building munitions and keeping the economy running while simultaneously conducting campaigns of property destruction and civil disobedience. Governments faced a choice: continue fighting an escalating domestic war against half their population while trying to fight an actual world war, or grant suffrage. They chose suffrage not from enlightenment, but from practical calculation that concession was less dangerous than continued resistance.

We might remember that the Vietnam War didn’t end because of peaceful protests alone. It ended because soldiers were fragging their officers, because the entire country was becoming ungovernable. Military casualties mounted while domestic resistance escalated—draft card burnings turned into campus uprisings, and by the early 1970s, groups like the Weather Underground were bombing government buildings. This combination of military failure abroad and militant resistance at home made continuing the war politically impossible.

We might acknowledge that Pride started as a riot. It was a violent uprising against police brutality—bottles flying, parking meters used as rams, tactical street fighting. The exact details may be disputed by different witnesses, but the essential truth remains: it wasn’t peaceful protest that launched the modern LGBTQ+ movement, it was people fighting back against state violence. The modern LGBTQ+ rights movement was born when marginalised people fought back against police violence. We’ve sanitised it into rainbow capitalism, but it started with people who had nothing left to lose fighting cops in the streets.

We might understand that every right we take for granted was won by people who were willing to risk everything for change, not by people who asked politely and waited patiently for justice to arrive on its own schedule.

But we prefer the sanitised version of history because it lets us feel good about gradual progress and peaceful change. It lets us believe that we live in a fundamentally just system that occasionally needs minor adjustments rather than a system built on exploitation that requires constant pressure to prevent it from reverting to its natural state.

The mythology of peaceful protest serves power by making resistance seem safe, predictable, and ultimately toothless. It channels dissent into approved forms that don’t threaten existing arrangements. It teaches people to protest in ways that can be safely ignored.

History suggests it takes more than moral arguments and peaceful demonstrations. It takes economic disruption, political organisation, and the credible possibility that if reform is refused, something more dramatic might follow.

The full picture of history isn’t comfortable. It doesn’t support our myths about inevitable progress or the power of moral example. But it’s truthful. And if we want to create real change rather than just feel good about ourselves, we need to start with truth.