Violence is not based on belief!
Walter Wink (May 21, 1935 - May 10, 2012).
Methodist minister. Pacifist. Bible scholar. Graduate of Southern Methodist University (1956). Master of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary (1959). PhD from Union Theological Seminary (1961). Longtime professor at Auburn Theological Seminary.
Author of "Naming The Powers" (1984), "Unmasking The Powers" (1986), "Engaging The Powers" (1992), and "Jesus And Nonviolence" (2003), among many other works.
---
Honestly, I find his statement utterly absurd. Violence has absolutely NOTHING to do with "faith".
People don't exercise violence as a form of ideology or religion. Violence works - either to rob, oppress and murder people or to defend oneself against aggressors!
It doesn't matter if I "believe" that a knife or bullet will kill me. If I don't have any means to defend myself against violent aggressors, I will end up dead.
Modern societies delegate much of that violence to professionals - police & the military - but that doesn't mean that the violence is gone.
As people try to reduce violence by those professionals, the violence from criminals instantly increases.
Following the BLM riots against the entirely fake narrative about "racist police violence", the number of homicides increased by more than 1100 within a year - 95% of the victims were black, murdered by other blacks. That was about 4-5x more than ALL the blacks killed by police in a year (just about 10-20 unarmed blacks are shot every year).
Even traffic deaths increased substantially...
So the BELIEF in non-violence actually caused massively more violence.
---
Violence is conter-productive to society. Crime and war will impoverish most, but it is super profitable for those who make successful use of it.
The only way to prevent such parasites from causing harm is by having superior force available, ideally as deterrent, so that those who would be tempted to use force will refrain from it.
e.g. the Swiss managed to beat the Habsburg Empire twice and then every major European power from 1273 to around 1500, at which point no one attacked them anymore, but instead tried to hire the Swiss as mercenaries.
What inspired so much fear in those who attacked the Swiss is that they never tried to capture aristocrats as prisoners of war to get ransom payments, but instead just slaughtered them like any other soldiers on the battlefield. Indiscriminate violence allowed the Swiss to gain their independence on which they then built their direct democracy and very peaceful society.
Don't forget that the greatest incentive to use force has always been the desire to acquire women for reproduction, a biological imperative.
Lots of men at the lowest social ranks often see war as a way to gain access to women even at a great risk of dying in the war. The alternative is to die childless.
Islam specifically exploits this desire by ensuring that a large proportion of Muslims will have no access to women (cf. the rules on polygamy), but promises them that they can have sex with slave women, i.e. any women they can capture from the enemy and even "sex in the after-life".
The Roman Empire got started when the Romans stole women from their neighbors, the Sabines - the famous Rapt of the Sabines - which allowed them to rapidly grow their population.
---
About the claim that "Gandhi proved that non-violence works":
The ONLY reason Gandhi won was because WWII forced the UK to withdraw from India!
What most people don't understand is that colonies operate at a net loss - they never brought any profits to the colonizers, except of course to a small number of beneficiaries, but to the citizens of the colonizing country, they represented a huge cost.
If they had represented a net source of income, then the UK would have needed them all the more, during and after the war. The fact that they left India is absolute proof that it cost them more than they could afford.
That's why Hitler is actually still very popular, in India! Most Indians see him as the reason they gained their independence.
Except that the independence was not really all that good for them. Economically, it was a disaster, given that they lost what amounted to massive subsidies. The Indian government under Gandhi and his successors was corrupt to the bone and impoverished the country far more than the colonial government ever did.
I met a former Indian ambassador to Switzerland in New Delhi. He had participated in the fight for independence and he told me that he regretted it. That India had been better before independence.
And let's not forget the 2 million victims caused by the separation of Pakistan and India...
----
To answer the question: "Did the nazis survive or did we?"
This was meant to imply that the less violent countries won against the Nazis.
Let's see: How did the Allies win against the Axis?
By having a far superior war machine, throwing unbelievable amounts of ships, tanks and airplanes at Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan!
They cut short the expected prolonged war against Japan - which would probably have caused millions of deaths - by demonstrating their new toy, nuclear bombs, which got Japan to surrender immediately.
It was clearly the guys able to bring more brute force to the table who won the war and imposed their views.
---
"Violence is wrong"
Sneaking in a moralistic argument doesn't help the debate.
Of course violence is wrong - from the perspective of the victim
That's why potential victims have to ARM themselves, so they do not become victims!
"it's useless"
Go tell that to the victims and victors of war... If it was "useless", maybe the US should not have bothered to free Europe from the Nazis and just let them mass-murder a few more million targets of their genocide...
"no matter how desperately you try to justify it"
Again: projection. There's nothing "desperate" about pointing out the obvious, but there is a LOT of desperation in your posts.
"Violence is 'always' the last resort of the incompetent. ~ Asimov"
That's a very disappointing Asimov quote. If the Germans had been incompetent, then they would have posed much less of a threat. It's precisely their extremely high competence at building weapons and at fighting that made them so dangerous.