I agree with whoever said that one should not look to anyone in the IT department for political guidance. But if one is going to talk about violence one should at least consider, if only toargue specifically against, Barrington Moore's historical thesis that only those nations that went through a violent struggle for democracy were able to build stable bourgeois democracies. Those that evolved without a civil war (e.g., Germany) had a tendency to totalitarianism.
I'm neither defending nor attacking this argument (especially since it's
been nearly 35 years since I read it), but it's interesting.
Carrol