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Nonviolence Dbq Analysis

Decent Essays

“Who says life is fair, where is that written?” William Goldman. Life is never fair, but the solution never stems from bringing the ones more powerful down as well. This is what violence reaps. Whenever life is unfair violence tears everything down and those who fought so hard to be equal are left with nothing but brooding hatred on both sides. On the contrary, if the disenfranchised ones solve their issues through nonviolence, the ruling party has no one else to blame for what they’ve done but themselves. Reform through nonviolence, although it is an arduous method, provides the best and most effective results in the aftermath. This nonviolent tactic is effective because of the large number of followers, accepting the consequences without …show more content…

The sheer number of people shows how much the cause means to the people. Nelson Mandela and the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign is a fantastic example of this aspect. At one point, Mandela was talking to several hundred volunteers to this campaign who were all dedicated to the cause (Doc 6). This group and the power in numbers they had, caused change before a ballot was cast. In 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. along with two hundred eighty students were arrested at a diner sit in (Doc 2). All of theses people were crammed into one diner, and they did nothing but sit and be ridiculed by the white people opposing them and they took the ridicule without fighting back to enhance their …show more content…

The strategy is to get everyone else to see that the oppressors have been wrong the entire time. Gandhi, in a letter he wrote to the English governor of India, Lord Irwin, stated his goal was to get the British people to notice what they’d done wrong to India (Doc 1). By doing so, the British lost whatever moral ground they had and were forced to either continue their rule of India and be perceived as evil or give India its independence. During the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr., by knowing they were right, expressed the moral high ground upon the U.S, which, according to Dr. King, was their “most formidable weapon of all” (Doc 5). This is powerful because although the U.S. didn’t realize it at the time, the fact that they had no doubt that their movement was wrong was the U.S.’s downfall. Finally, Nelson Mandela, when discussing with other leaders of the Defiance of Unjust Laws campaign, saw that nonviolence was morally superior for them and was strictly a necessity (Doc 3). Although the state under Apartheid was much more powerful, the moral high ground gave Mandela an effective tool that was impossible to account

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