What’s the difference between a German in the 1930s who said “I don’t support Hitler’s stance on Jewish people but he promised to make the economy great again so I’m voting for the Nazis” and a German who said “I fully support Hitler and I’m voting for the Nazis”?
What’s the difference between a German who said “I don’t support the regime’s actions but this job at the weapons factory pays the bills” and a German who said “I’m fulling my patriotic duty building weapons for the Nazis who I fully support”?
What’s the difference between a German solider who said “I don’t agree with the regime but I’m just following orders” and a German solider who said “I’m doing this because I support the regime”?
The answer is not very much. Their actions accomplish the same end result and they’re judged by history to be almost no different. The Nazis were in part comprised of millions of people who unintentionally or intentionally supported the regime with their small daily actions.
This time around things must be different. Make ensuring your actions don’t support the Trump regime your mission. Be bold and speak out whenever you can. Teach others that silence is tacit consent in the regime’s actions. Don’t worry about imperfection, your actions no matter how small will make a difference. You could be grain of rice that tips the scale.
How? We can see time after time how direct peaceful protest fails and violent protest either is policed down or fails successfully like in Syria, Libia, Egypt.
Approaching the politics from the moral ground perspective and making martyrs is childish
The answers to protest failing seems to be more protests.
The key word is “democracy.” WWII Germany wasn’t a functional democracy. It is debatable whether America still has a functional democracy, or if it’s just in pre-failure.
Belarus had more than a million people on the streets for months. It’s a lot more than 10% of the whole population. Also your source seems to be BBC
I would ask what’s wrong with BBC, but I don’t want to get into that. This study is the source study: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240678278_Why_Civil_Resistance_Works_The_Strategic_Logic_of_Nonviolent_Conflict
I think it was based on over 320 cases from 1900-2006.
Belarus is a hard case, since the meeting the goal depending on the estimates, and this varies a lot. But you could be right. The Bahraini uprising is more clear-cut exception to that rule. So fair enough.
But still the opinion that large sustained protest are ineffective is less evidence based that stance that they are effective.