Good luck against the trained soldiers then, I guess.
The thing you're missing here: an Authoritarian government is going to respond to any challenge to its rule with said trained soldiers. That's literally Max's entire point, that non-violent resistance only has a CHANCE of working in countries that actually give a shit about what their people think.
Your point that the odds of violent resistance has a low chance of succeeding is reasonable, but you have to understand that what Max is saying here is that in countries like this, the violent option is the one more likely to do anything.
Imagine if you will a government that will deploy soldiers to gun down any protest against its regime. Now imagine how that's likely to go if the protestors being shot have nothing but signs to hold up vs. if they came expecting a fight from the beginning. If the government is going to just murder you in cold blood for speaking up either way, what do you think are your chances if you just stand there and take a bullet to the face instead of shooting back? The odds may be low, but zero is a pretty low bar to clear here.
We already have a near-example of this difference here in the US despite being a country that is obstinately a democracy, where armed protests have generally gotten a much less hostile response from police. This example IS muddled by the fact that the armed protests tend to be right-wing and the cops themselves are right-wing, but if we didn't have our pesky partisan clusterfuck fucking things up and the police attitude was consistent, I would still expect armed protests to either be given more leeway if that consistency was in the "please don't shoot us like you don't shoot them" direction, or be harder for police to quell if things went the "please shoot them like you shoot us" direction instead.
And my point is that violent uprisings don’t work that well either, and even if they do manage their short-term objective of listing someone from power, you now have leaders that have used violence to achieve their position and are thus going to use violence to maintain that power, you have a precedent set that all it takes to win power is to be be more violent than the last person, and various groups of people who are now being oppressed because they were fighting against the winners, whose only option now is to use violence in return.
It is self-defeating at best.
Take Syria. Armed uprising in 2011, still fighting a civil war 11 years hence, the groups that are fighting the government are also fighting amongst themselves because while they may share the goal of ousting the incumbent, they all have different ideas of what should happen afterward. That sounds really constructive and conducive to a healthy situation at the war’s (eventual?) conclusion.
Take Libya. Armed uprising in 2011 against Gaddafi succeeded after almost a year of fighting. Some groups refused to disarm, causing tensions, elections were held in 2014 and various groups supported by various foreign influences got upset with each other over the results and the aftermath, and a further 6 years of fighting ensued. Elections due later this year.
Take Tunisia. A country considered among the most repressive in the world in 2011, 4 weeks of protest resulted in the authoritarian leader fleeing to Saudi Arabia. 11 years hence there is still work to be done, but there’s a bit less outright violence than Syria and Libya.
Tunisia may be an ideal in terms of how it non-violent protest turns out, but it does seem to have more pleasant outcomes than violence when it does work.
But whatever, kill away. If the Russians are fighting each other they’ll be too busy to fight anyone else.
