But Gandhian theory isn’t the only–or the best-evidenced–explanation of the success of nonviolent resistance. It’s a popular story in the Anglosphere, in part because it pays the British Raj the (in my view entirely erroneous) compliment of implying that it fell due to its warmhearted conscientiousness, rather than the stark practical limitations of trying to wield ruthlessness when you’re a 0.05% foreign ruling class trying to keep the world’s single biggest colonial population under your thumb.
I’ve no doubt that Gandhi’s appeal to the British conscience was sincere, but it was also flattery–giving them an ego-saving excuse to take a path toward which all practical realities were pointing them anyway. As I said in one of those long posts on the topic above, I’m convinced that while it plays a minor-to-middling role,
The tactical nonviolence of a Popovic, which I discuss with lots of links to cases above, is much more relevant to the case of XoR. It’s not motivated by any convictions about the humanity or conscience of the oppressor – an XoR MC can have those, but they won’t play a strong role in the success or failure of their nonviolent tactics. Rather, the Popovician approach takes seriously the risk tolerance of the people whose participation you need for a mass resistance movement, and the corresponding likelihood that your rebellion reaches a genuinely threatening scale:
Brutal dictatorships are generally on pretty comfortable ground facing armed resistance movements; even where terrain makes a thoroughgoing victory impossible, as in e.g. Myanmar, the army can often keep the violent resistance small and marginal enough that it’s an irritant rather than a serious threat. Repressive regimes are often much more threatened by nonviolent movements that get hundreds of thousands of people disobeying them and gumming up the workings of the regime than they are by a few thousand armed freedom fighters. Myanmar’s dictatorship took an incomparably more serious hit from the NLD’s nonviolent activism than it did from decades of armed revolt in the hinterland.
It’s true that the Hegemony fuels itself on repression in a far more literal way than any real-world regime. That makes any rebel strategy more likely to end at a Harrower…whether you’re mustering people for discreet nonviolent resistance or to take up arms.
Yet like any horrific regime, the Hegemony relies on the labor of countless skilled and non-skilled civilians to keep running. It believes, like Hitler in the quote you shared, that the threat of death is enough to keep its civilians compliant, and as a result it’s built up a huge coercive apparatus. But that huge Alastor/domestically garrisoned Phalangite force is in various ways becoming more a destabilizing than a stabilizing factor; and it still isn’t close to enough to coerce everybody. If you can convince enough subjects to discreetly end or reduce their compliance…well, I was going to write that you’d be putting the Ennearchs in a situation they couldn’t just Harrow and magick their way out of. But they’re already in that situation; they’re just some distance from realizing it. Nonviolent resistance can bring the system to a crisis point just as readily, if not more so, than violence.
Sometimes, yep. And sometimes violent flank movements only “succeed” because other people did the mass mobilization and civil resistance for them:
On the far side of the rebellion, nonviolent movements also tend to be more successful at creating a stable governance regime. That’s perhaps where Gandhi’s insistence on respecting the humanity and conscience of your adversaries had the biggest real effect – less on levering the Brits out of India, and more in setting India up to be an unlikely democratic success story. (“Unlikely” in its poverty and literacy levels for the first several decades of independence, which were at levels more often correlated with authoritarianism.)
So much for the areas where we disagree, Comrade. We agree that it’s possible to have a violent revolt without atrocities; and the discipline that entails is also positively correlated with better post-revolution stability. A rebel movement that maintains clear rules of engagement (i.e. treating many tactics as out-of-bounds “atrocities”) and disciplines violators is also broadly more likely to succeed than one which sets loose a decentralized swarm of fighters to do as much damage as they can, any way they can.
In a story like this which tries to take seriously the effectiveness of many wildly different approaches to rebellion – Robespierre, Cromwell, Bolivar, the Taliban, Prachanda, Gandhi, Popovic, Gusmao – you’re probably going to come across choice blocks that include views you think are obvious nonsense. I can well imagine that it would never cross your (or your MC’s) mind in the de Merre standoff to think: “I’m keen to see true justice done, and it cannot be done by a mob in the night.”
But that’s not the only reason the game gives to not execute the de Merre. The reader sees three possible reasons to spare them – the “ethical pacifism” one, the pragmatist ally-seeking one, and the “we shouldn’t execute people without trial” one. Maybe the last one looms largest in your mind because the first two are utterly beneath your consideration? 
And there are two reasons to execute them: because in the absence of a just system, it’s the most just response to their crimes; or because you want to make an example of them to strike fear into the hearts of the regime and win more of the oppressed to your side.
I can’t keep readers from seeing #options they’d personally never consider picking without fundamentally betraying the whole point of this project – the theme that there is a choice of rebels, that there’s a wide variety of ways to take on and topple an intolerable social order. But if you pick the execution options, do you think the actual text you see outside the choice block suggests that your character wonders if they’re doing the wrong thing?
I certainly didn’t try to write it that way. I generally try to write the ruthlessness paths in ways that quietly recognize the humanity of the people you’re killing (so it doesn’t turn entirely into an unrealistic Manichaean revenge fantasy) without acting as if those touches of humanity mean it’s unjust to kill them. Similarly, I try to write the pacifism/compassion paths in ways that recognize that you’re making choices that cost lives, forgo benefits, and will be seen by many of your followers as a betrayal – without forcing the MC to conclude that those choices are therefore wrong.
Down one de Merre path you react to the accidental, especially-ugly features of Iokasta’s death with nausea, but that gets you recognized as a non-sadist who’s doing the right thing. I don’t think anything in the text suggests you regret or ought to regret ordering their execution?
At the end of the day, readers who believe successful rebellion must entail a certain degree of violence or atrociies will have the option to play through a successful rebellion in which they wield violence and/or atrocities effectively to weaken the Hegemony. I’ll aim to write that in a way that makes the human cost clear but still leaves the reader to decide if it was all justified. Ditto for pacifist rebellion and its human cost.
If it bothers the reader that the way they think best and most realistic isn’t the only available path…well, I’ll happily debate the historical analogues. At the end of the day we might need to agree to disagree, but there’s much to be said before we get there.