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The Use Of Nonviolent Resistance By Martin Luther King Jr.

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Same War, Different Tactics If someone were to slap you across your face what would you do? Would you turn your other cheek or would you return the slap back to them? The vast majority of people would not hesitate and quickly as possible slap the person back right before the person leaves. The point here is that there is more than one way we can react towards many situations. Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Greenwalt and readings about the Trump protest talk about the two possible ways people can act towards a political cause, violence or nonviolence. We, with the help of these readings, would look into both perspectives of each technique, their drawbacks & benefits, and the circumstances in which they may or may not be justified. The …show more content…

Furthermore, what makes it more effective and powerful than violence is the people’s ambition. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his article “Nonviolence and Racial Justice” that “this method is passive physically but strongly active spiritually; it is nonaggressive physically, but dynamically aggressive spiritually.” By this he means that the reason why nonviolent resister is stronger than a violent resister, is because their hearts and minds are strongly involved. By doing so, they build a strong character and determination in them. Not only that but their mindset is not in winning or humiliating their rival, but to get them to understand their perspective. You know like that saying, “put yourself in other people’s shoes”. Overall, nonviolence is a strategy that one can use and have the same effectiveness or better than violence.
The second technique is violence resistance. Now violence is of course an option yet it has it’s downfalls. It’s first downfall, is that it only creates more violence. King said, “ Violence solves no social problems it merely creates new and more complicated ones” (pg. 45). It’s like a fire. The more you feed it the more it grows and grows. So violence brings forth chaos and by doing so, it is a high probability that the people would lose their focal point. It may cause their own people to end up fighting one another. For instance in the trump

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