And ridiculously, naively optimistic. It's like saying that there would be no war if it weren't for other wars, going back infinitely to a chicken and the egg thing. Not to mention, fuck anyone who is in need of freedom until then, like the three million black people in the Confederacy, whom the underground railroad could never have hoped to save more than a tiny fraction of. Look at attitudes in the south today toward blacks, and tell me that there REALLY would have been some kind of clean and easy abolition of slavery if we'd just said "Okay, go ahead and keep owning human beings as property, torturing them, and murdering them. It's cool."
You also don't know the history of what you're saying: Mandela was the co-founder and leader of the armed insurrection wing of the ANC, and he actively directed sabotage and bombing campaigns as well as preparation for guerrilla warfare. He was also on the record as saying that his own years of effort and increasing repression had convinced him that non-violent protest had not and could not achieve progress against apartheid.
Also, Ghandi openly said this in 1946: "Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs... It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany... As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions."
So Ghandi's strategy of "pacifism at all costs" basically said that if someone wanted to come into your home, take your possessions, rape your children, and then torture you to death, you should let them do it. And I'm not exaggerating--he said that too, in 1940 about the Nazis. "I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions... If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them."
So pardon me if I find it wrongheaded to say that we should simply surrender the world to the worst human beings we can find.
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