Have you looked into what that “coup” actually looked like? It wouldn’t have started at all without the nonviolent movement (which had been going for weeks before the coup plotters decided they’d try to capitalize on it). The leaders of the coup initially tried to get the support of the protest movement, but when Cardinal Sin and Aquino wouldn’t endorse violence, they went ahead anyway…and failed, and had to hole up in a camp in metro Manila. The only reason the coup leaders survived at all was their appeal for help to the mass nonviolent movement, whose leaders quickly mobilized crowds (notably including lots of priests and nuns) to surround the camp.
Marcos’s troops repeatedly refused to fire on the camp’s nonviolent protectors. Once it became clear that the camp wasn’t going to be overrun, more units started to defect. But even then, the coup was never a “big violent component.” The mutineers did eventually carry out a couple of attacks to e.g. degrade Marcos’s air force, but the air force was by then already powerless to turn the tide.
The coup plotters’ capacity for violence was never necessary in bringing about the fall of the Marcos regime. The same can’t be said for the nonviolent movement, without which the coup would have been snuffed out within a day or two. (It’s worth noing that after Aquino became president, some of the coup plotters tried to depose her – and failed again, repeatedly.)
Violent resistance had already failed repeatedly in the Philippines; the Communist and MILF (no, these ones) attempts in the 1960s and '70s only led to martial law and the consolidation of Marcos’s power. Overall, if you want arguments for the necessity of violence in regime change, you should definitely be looking elsewhere.
The comparative evidence suggests that it’s a pretty huge advantage in practice. And I don’t think these should be our canonical examples, @Ramidel:
Malcolm X talked a lot about violence, but was not in actual practice a violent revolutionary (and was moving even further from that when he was murdered, as @comradelenin notes). And when it comes to Bose, I think that even if he’d survived the war, his influence would have been eclipsed by Gandhi and Nehru because he was so much less effective, not just because he used violence (or because he collaborated with the Axis).
This does indeed beg the question, in the strict sense of the idiom. 
Strong pacifism is never (as far as I know) a consequentialist ethical stance i.e. one that justifies itself in terms of RESULTS. If you’re already convinced of consequentialism, you’re pretty much guaranteed to be unconvinced by ethical pacifism (though as discussed above you’d often still be well advised to adopt nonviolent resistance on a tactical basis). But hard pacifism can be entirely consistent with other ethical stances, e.g. one primarily oriented toward duties, or virtues, or divine commands.
(NB: Having finally re-read Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue for the first time in many years, I’m more attracted than ever to virtue ethics myself. As I’ve written elsewhere, “we’re still miles from an adequate rules- or principles-based account of ethics.” Consequences are one factor in moral judgment, but our grasp of them is much too unreliable for them to be the cornerstone.)
Like I said upthread, I join you in being dubious that a social order entirely free of violence is achievable. But even if that’s right, and at some point the nonviolent revolutionaries have to either take up the police power or defer to someone who will, that point can be well after an oppressive regime has collapsed through entirely or primarily nonviolent tactics.
And if you’re not an ethical pacifist, then there’s a simple answer to:
“Because it was the most effective tactic for rebelling, and isn’t the most effective tactic for maintaining social order now that we’re in charge.”
It’s a great point. I don’t know how many of these nice callback ideas I’m going to be able to make canonical and still finish the game…I’m already finding the end of Game 2 to be a lot more work than I’d thought it would be. But I’ll look at that when I revise G1.
And finally, ADAT we were talking about how to pronounce Xthonos.
