Politics

Carnation Revolution (Portugal, 1974): The coup only happened because the military had been bled dry fighting colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau for over a decade. Sustained armed resistance by independence movements inflicted casualties and destroyed morale to the point where the officer corps turned against the regime. The peaceful domestic transition was entirely downstream of violent armed struggle against Portuguese state power abroad. Without those liberation movements grinding the military down, the Estado Novo survives.

Oh, so that's why the military coup was performed with a view towards prosecuting the colonial wars of the fascist regime more efficiently?

... no? It was a democratic left-wing conspiracy by junior officers from the very beginning?

Huh.

Franco’s regime didn’t soften out of goodwill. ETA’s sustained campaign of political assassination, most consequentially the 1973 car bombing that killed Prime Minister Carrero Blanco, decapitated the hardline successor leadership and created the opening for reformists to negotiate a transition. The peaceful outcome was made possible by the credible and demonstrated willingness to kill regime figures.

Oh, so that's why Basque Country is independent now, right?

Hm.

Almost like the assassination campaign was far less important than the transfer of power to King Juan Carlos I, whose influence allowed for a peaceful transition to democracy.

Often framed as a ballot box victory but the regime only reached the referendum stage because armed resistance groups and mass protest movements made the cost of continued open repression internationally and domestically untenable. The MIR and other armed groups kept pressure on the regime throughout. Pinochet left on his own terms, but he left because holding power was becoming too costly.

"Pinochet left on his own terms"

Fucking what? Pinochet left office because the military brass outright refused to annul the results of the election.

The regime calculated that the scale of violence required to suppress the uprising would be too great. That calculation only exists because protesters demonstrated a willingness to absorb and return violence in the streets. The military’s refusal to massacre was not benevolence, it was a cold assessment that the uprising had enough force behind it to make suppression catastrophic for the regime itself.

"Sure it was peaceful, and done by a largely unarmed population, but it doesn't count because the regime using violence would have been counterproductive!"

Yeah, fucking welcome to nonviolent protests? That's... that's kind of the point of them...? To do so in such numbers as to display that violence is counterproductive?

Jesus fucking Christ.

Years of strikes, sabotage, and underground resistance made Poland ungovernable. The regime tried martial law, imprisonment, and killing activists and it wasn’t enough. The transition came because the state exhausted its capacity for violence against a movement that refused to be broken. The negotiating table was only reached because force failed to work.

"Sure it was peaceful, and done by a largely unarmed population, but it doesn't count because the regime using violence would have been counterproductive!"

See above.

The regime’s decision not to escalate after beating the student protesters came directly from watching Ceausescu get shot in Romania weeks later for choosing the violent path. The credible fate of leaders who massacred their populations was a direct deterrent. Violence against a neighboring regime created the conditions for a peaceful outcome in Czechoslovakia.

That's really impressive that the Communist oligarchy of Czechoslovakia managed to see two months into the future. /s

The state attempted to eliminate the opposition through assassination, poisoning Yushchenko with dioxin in a near fatal attack. That act of state violence backfired catastrophically, galvanizing opposition and international condemnation. The regime’s own use of violence against the people created the conditions that toppled it.

"Sure it was peaceful, and done by a largely unarmed population, but it doesn't count because the regime using violence would have been counterproductive!"

See above.

Preceded by years of political killings and armed conflicts in South Ossetia and Abkhazia that weakened and delegitimized Shevardnadze’s government. The regime’s use of state violence in those conflicts eroded its own foundations and made the eventual peaceful transfer possible only because the state had already been significantly weakened by armed conflict.

"Sure it was peaceful, and done by a largely unarmed population, but it doesn't count because the regime using violence would have been counterproductive!"

See above.

Also, fucking lmao at the idea that the South Ossetian conflict, which had its last 'hot' phase twelve years before, having materially weakened the Georgian military to the point where, after over a fucking decade later, it was judged non-viable against student protesters.

Born directly from the assassination of Hariri. Without that act of violence by the Syrian-backed state, there is no mass uprising, no international pressure, no Syrian withdrawal. The entire revolution was a direct response to and consequence of state violence, and the threat of further resistance made Syrian presence untenable.

"Sure it was peaceful, and done by a largely unarmed population, but it doesn't count because the regime using violence would have been counterproductive!"

See above.

The military and police defection that made the transfer peaceful was itself a calculated move by institutions that had witnessed what happened when security forces stayed loyal to collapsing regimes elsewhere. The historical record of what armed populations and military defections do to entrenched leaders shaped every decision made during that crisis.

"Sure it was peaceful, and done by a largely unarmed population, but it doesn't count because the regime using violence would have been counterproductive!"

See above.

Milosevic only faced a domestic uprising after his military apparatus had been degraded by NATO bombing in 1999. The air campaign broke the regime’s sense of invulnerability and its capacity for external aggression. The domestic political collapse followed directly from that military defeat. Without the bombs, Milosevic likely survives.

"Sure it was peaceful, and done by a largely unarmed population, but it doesn't count because the regime using violence would have been counterproductive!"

See above. Unless you think that the Serbian military in 2000 was rendered materially incapable of taking on unarmed civilians concentrated in a single city.

Armed Maoist insurgency had been fighting the monarchy for a decade before the urban protests erupted. The insurgency tied down the military, drained resources, and created the conditions where the regime couldn’t simultaneously fight a rural insurgency and urban mass protests. The peaceful resolution in the cities was only possible because an armed movement had already broken the regime’s capacity to project force everywhere at once.

Fair enough.

The military’s refusal to keep killing protesters was the decisive moment, and that refusal came because the scale of violence required to hold power had become undeniable. Over 300 people were already dead. The state had already crossed into open massacre and it still wasn’t working. The regime fell because violence against the population reached a threshold where even the security apparatus concluded it was futile.

"Sure it was peaceful, and done by a largely unarmed population, but it doesn't count because the regime using violence would have been counterproductive!"

See above.

The most direct example on the list. The regime killed over 100 people and it wasn’t enough. Armed resistance on the Maidan, particularly from the Right Sector and self-defense units who fought back against the Berkut riot police, is what broke the security forces’ willingness to continue. Yanukovych fled not because of peaceful protest but because armed resistance made holding Kyiv a losing proposition.

"but because armed resistance made holding Kyiv a losing proposition."

Was that because protesters armed with clubs and fireworks were a credible threat to the regime's security forces?

"It it doesn't count because the regime using violence would have been counterproductive!"

See above.

“Peaceful” outcomes were either the result of violence having already done its work upstream, the credible threat of violence making suppression too costly, or armed resistance directly breaking the regime’s capacity and will. Your rebuttal listed outcomes. The outcomes don’t tell you anything without the mechanisms that produced them, which was violence. States never willingly give up power. It must be wrested from its hands through bloodshed, every time.

I love the part where you acknowledge that these peaceful revolutions legitimately wrest power from the hands of the state without using violence as their tactic, but then immediately reverse here at the end, insisting on bloodshed.