I think it's a good thing to prefer a peaceful approach. Not just because I personally dislike violence, but also because *defaulting to* violence makes it untenable to keep a society functioning in a more general sense.

However.

The problem I have is with the particular brand of 'pacifism' that *structurally* rejects violence from an individual perspective. You know the type: "we are above that sort of behaviour, just because they do it doesn't mean we have to."

The reality is that peaceful approaches only work as long as all parties involved have (genuinely) committed to peace, in every way. And sometimes, you will be dealing with situations where that is not the case - such as bigotry, for example, which is a form of deliberate violence.

In those situations, "being peaceful" is not a strength; it means that you are actively refusing to defend yourself - or more importantly, others - from an external act of violence, letting harm come to them, and handing the reins to the violent party.

This makes you complicit. It is a position of harm, not one of superior ethics. You have directly allowed harm to come to another person through inaction.

Pacifists of this brand will frequently tell you how such-and-such problem has been solved in a peaceful manner, so clearly violence isn't necessary. What they *won't* consider, however, is exactly *why* that worked.

What reason does someone committing deliberate violence have to stop, just because you're politely asking them to? They don't, and they won't.

What *actually* did the job here is the knowledge that this peaceful situation *could* escalate into violence if the polite request isn't honored.

This line of thought is not specific to any one ideology either; even problematic concepts like the "social contract" and "violence monopoly" are directly built on this principle; the threat of state violence as a deliberate underlying enforcement mechanism.

It works the same way for things that *aren't* state legislation; like protests, for example. Peaceful protests only work because the "recipients" know that if the demands are ignored, it will escalate into violent protests.

And indeed, in countries where this escalation has become socially unacceptable (eg. the Netherlands), protests have lost virtually all their power. They can be safely ignored, because of the belief that they're not going to escalate anyway. It's just a bit of temporary noise.

Ultimately, the only way to deal with violent malicious actors of any sort is violence - either applied or, preferably, just the threat of it at first. Your politeness will not make them stand down; if that actually worked, things wouldn't have gotten so bad to begin with.

That's the harsh reality of it. None of your 'polite' and 'peaceful' mechanisms actually have any teeth whatsoever without some kind of threat of violence to back them up.