I've been to three wars and I've observed the aftermath of it first-hand. How many wars have you been to, and how much "colonial violence" have you observed first-hand? Or is your take on these things all theory?
As part of my academic work I have been directly exposed to warlike violence. It's what I'm trained to do. That's what my professors do. I study how warlike violence affects people and what action they undertake to build peace. I have no idea why you think academics never leave their offices. I talk to everyone I can. People who kill. People who build peace. People who have done both. People who hate war, people who embrace it. People whose job it is to care for vets. Widows who've lost spouses, kids who lost their parents, etc.
I was a kid delivering newspapers when WW II began. I was exposed daily to the truth about how likely it was that France would escape Nazi rule without violence. Do you actually believe the Nazis wouldn't have taken over all of Europe plus Britain had they not been met with more violence than they, themselves could produce?
You are all convinced that nonviolence is total crap because of the Nazis and how brutal they were. You associate it with passivity, hopelessness, and weakness. Yet, know this:
The fact is, some Europeans did undertake successful nonviolent direct action against the Nazis. Ask a Dane about Arne Sejr, who as a 17 year old developed the "Danskerens 10 bud" (Ten Commandments for Danes). Do you know about him, what he did? Do you know what nonviolent actions the Danes took against the Nazis to fight back against the invasion of their country, and to save their Jews? Do you agree that the Danes were successful? In Germany itself, do you know about the Rosenstrasse women? Ruth Gross and her father? Do you know the reactions of Himmler, Goebbels and Hitler to these actions?
Do you know about Franz Jagerstatter? Maybe some of you do, as it's not a secret. But did you know the connection between him, Randy Kehler, and Daniel Ellsberg? Jagerstatter died an awful death. Pointless even. Yet his life and death had a direct impact on the American side of the Vietnam war, because he inspired Ellsberg, who learned about Jagerstatter from Kehler's scholarship. So in the end, Jagerstatter's life and death was far from pointless. Who could have possibly known at that time that his life would have that effect on an American war planner decades later.
In WWII, European understanding of nonviolent direct action was minimal. Europeans knew far more about waging war then they did about nonviolent resistance. Much has changed since then. We know much more now. There were no handbooks then, like Gene Sharp's "From dictatorship to democracy".
So to your question, would it have worked on a continent wide scale for people at that time, had they tried, with the limited knowledge that they had? And the answer is, we don't know, because it wasn't tried on a continent wide scale. No one knows. Maybe they simply didn't know enough to have a good shot at getting the job done. All we know for sure is that in relatively recent times (1990 onward), nonviolence is twice as effective as violence in achieving the strategic objectives of those doing it.
And we also know that in the same time period, many millions of people have been killed by combatants who are convinced that violence is the only way to achieve their ends. Five million in Congo. Almost a million in Rwanda. Who knows how many will die in Syria, in Yemen. The people waging those wars are convinced they are doing it for the best.
