Asklemmy

Well, yes, killing a noncombatant is bad, no question about it.

I think there are plenty of "noncombatants" that can be killed without it being bad. How about concentration camp guards? Or the wardens? How about a President guilty of war crimes and genocide? What about the person that shuts off the water supply to a vulnerable population, killing thousands? I will shed no tears for those people if those they oppressed rise up against them with decisive violence.

Or for one more controversial: what level of violence is acceptable against settlers? Their comfort and security on stolen land is the material basis for the settler project. Making them unsafe undermines this more thoroughly than most other violence. Several groups of native Americans recognized this while their people were genocided and it did have the intended impact right up until the genocidal US government deployed overwhelming forces. When the oppressor seeks genocide, what should really be off-limits? Why the tut-tutting of the oppressed when they face such inhumanity and existential threats?

There are other ways to accomplish the goal, from peaceful ways to simply killing actual combatants instead.

If there is a peaceful way, the Palestinians have already tried it. They tried it in a very obvious way just a few years ago with the Great March of Return. Did it work? What did Israel do in response? What impact did this have on the freedom fighters in the resistance?

Why are you trying to dictate the terms of others' freedom when they face genocide and occupation? Does your country materially support the occupation? Focus on disrupting that instead.

I know you're more of a revolutionary, so that kinda undermines your whole thing, but oh well.

Generally speaking it is a bad idea for liberals to guess what socialists want or think. I have yet to meet one that has guessed correctly with any consistency.

Sure, but things like the riots, particularly around race, contributed to a great deal of backlash, and were not exactly the cause of things like the Civil Rights Act.

First, peaceful marches got very similar backlash. Dr. King was criticized with the exact same milquetoast, "we agree with his ideas but not his methods" treatment by liberals and he was majority unpopular among white people for his entire life.

Second, violent actions, as defined by critics, formed the basis for much of the civil rights fight and forwarded it. The seizure and destruction of property, the vigilante justice against lynchers, the hounding of segregationist bosses, and riots were all highly influential. Thr best-organized groups carried rifles. Dr. King has been appropriated by liberals, particularly white liberals, in order to tell an ahistorical story about the importance of nonviooent resistance, that liberty can have its cake and eat it too, to be free of the blrmish of violence while securing its goals. Of course, they tend to stop telling the story when King began to focus on capitalism and its use of structural marginalization to induce poverty on black people and was killed shortly after. Nobody can seriously argue that the civil rights movement simply succeeded, no one can go to the black ghettos and say this with a straight face. It was mollified with partial legalization reforms while the major engine of oppression chugged right along, ensuring continued racialized poverty, policing, and society at large.

In fact, I'd challenge you to provide historical cases of a leader caving to that sort of violence while they still had their military and police forces to protect them.

Every revolution and, most closely ties to the topic of this post, the victory of the ANC guerillas over the apartheid South African government.

Yes, martyrdom is common, assassination is unquestionably a thing that happens in history. If you're saying his assassination was some conspiracy to preserve capitalism I'd like to see some actual evidence of that, though, from a respected historian.

It is well-known that black civil rights leaders were frequently assassinated and that the FBI led the charge in harassing and threatening them and certainly did not stop at Dr. King. Fred Hampton is a well-known example. Though government employees were hardly the only ones killing and they often worked with civilian assets or simply sat back and let white supremacists do the job. The interest of the state in doing so was to undermine the civil rights movement itself and to wrap it up in its red scare tactics, both in the service of capitalism, namely racialized capitalism. Though it is not only the state with such interests - businesses, particularly those owned by racist whites, have every incentive to support these violences, and had often been the sponsors of lynchings.

Re: Dr. King specifically, his family has always maintained that he was killed in a conspiratorial manner. There is doubt about this narrative, but it is useful to follow the logic and constellation of government infiltrators of King's organization and connections to organized crime. But even withiut that, the original confession of the officially accused and convicted was by someone looking to get paid a racist bounty that had been placed on King's head.

Almost always fails, though? It's relatively rarely attempted in any seriousness, but let's see... Vietnam War

Was ended primarily by the Vietnamese, namely by North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. The US domestic side, which was not entirely nonviolent, just limited the capacity to wage war and was dramatically secondary.

Women's Suffrage

Notoriously involved violence.

Civil Rights Act

Already discussed. Incomplete and not separable from violent struggle.

Prohibition

Which part of it? Teatotalers were often violent leading up to it and the period of prohibition was characterized by violent organized crime. Prohibition was itself ended mostly because capitalists wanted to make money legally again and to crowd out the mob. The primary sponsors of repealing prohibition were the Rockefelllers and du Pont brothers, including various "grassroots" organizations. The whole thingis hardly a peaceful people's campaign against an oppressor.