As soon as you choose to fight with violence you're choosing to fight against your opponents best weapons and you have to be smarter than that.

Some foreign states will act against a dictatorship only to gain their own economic, political, or military control over the country.

Violence by the defenders will be used by the putschists to justify overwhelming repression which they want to use anyhow. It will be used to CLAIM that the putschists are saving the country from ‪‎terrorism or ‪#civil war‬, and are preserving "‪law‬ and ‪‎order‬

Further, democratic negotiators, or foreign negotiation specialists accepted to assist in the negotiations, may in a single stroke provide the dictators with the domestic and international legitimacy that they had been previously denied because of their seizure of the state, human rights violations, and brutalities. Without that desperately needed legitimacy, the dictators cannot continue to rule indefinitely.

The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is, it follows, in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them.

That is straight out of Gandhi. If people are not afraid of the dictatorship, that dictatorship is in big trouble. … If you fight with violence, you are fighting with your enemy’s best weapon, and you may be a brave but dead hero.

As soon as you choose to fight with violence you're choosing to fight against your opponents best weapons and you have to be smarter than that.