Some clarification on where the ANC were coming from, courtesy of Nelson Mandela in The Sacred Warrior (2000):

> Gandhi remained committed to nonviolence; I followed the Gandhian strategy for as long as I could, but then there came a point in our struggle when the brute force of the oppressor could no longer be countered through passive resistance alone. We founded Umkhonto we Sizwe and added a military dimension to our struggle. Even then, we chose sabotage because it did not involve the loss of life, and it offered the best hope for future race relations. Militant action became part of the African agenda officially supported by the Organization of African Unity (O.A.U.) following my address to the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA) in 1962, in which I stated, "Force is the only language the imperialists can hear, and no country became free without some sort of violence."

> I'd submit that it was the violence of their respective systems upon their non-violent protests that is responsible for anything Gandhi and MLK achieved.

You say that like it's an argument in favor of violence and against pacifism. In those two cases, the violent side lost specifically because they were violent.

I'm not convinced that violence is never called for, but pacifism clearly can work in at least some circumstances.

>You say that like it's an argument in favor of violence and against pacifism.

I don't mean it to be. I mean to say that the strength of pacifism comes from the violent reaction to it.

There's a place for that but it should be a last resort. The Nixon administration was more afraid of the collective size of the protest movement - not the violence by the radical fringe.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/white_house/july-dec11/nixont...

I think that's because the violence that the Nixon administration would have to visit on a protest movement that couldn't be worked around would cause support for the administration to crumble.