One way or another, violence is the ultimate guarantor of the elites' power. Mao: "political power comes from the barrel of the gun." Paul Krugman: "the dollar is backed by men with guns."
I agree completely. No popular elite has ever risen to power without leaving a trail of bodies in the background in my opinion. Non-violence rarely helps the powerful people achieve their goals(Mahatma Gandhi's Non-Cooperation movement etc).
It is true that the West uses a significantly lesser degree of violence in support of the elites power. Gandhi was a rare case of success because his movement was so overwhelmingly popular that it would have required openly draconian measures to put down.
What I try to show in the OP, though, is not the
degree of oppression, which is less in the West, but the
fundamental nature of oppressive society, which is the same all over the world. In the West, the public is educated and smart enough, that it's impossible for the elites to be openly oppressive. But since money and finance are at the center of everything, and money and finance are oppressive, there is no fundamental difference.
