thinking about pacifism: the goal's to have most everybody be sufficiently free from ignorance and want  because people like that don't go in for wars and oppression so much, at least not personally.

so imagine this agent of oppression in some police state. there's this guy with a big gun making you less free and life less good. he's got a gun because the state operates based on the assumption that the threat of violence is the only thing keeping the state together. it's LUNACY to attack this guy, ESPECIALLY with a gun or something like it, because it plays precisely into the expectations of the state, it's presumption that the state would violently fall apart without that guy. it legitimates, in the perverse logic of this lousy, hypothetical state, a violent response, because what other response could there possibly be.

And the agent of oppression with the big gun is a person too, with lots of people like him, and probably a significant, privileged minority of the population that's very invested in his monopoly on big guns. Using a gun against that person mobilizes all those people to get bigger guns, because it validates their fear. now they, absurdly, have gotta protect themselves!

also, economic sanctions are warfare. they're like a siege. they make people hungrier and more ignorant and so more liable to want to have a war and so become even hungrier and ignorant.