Examples Of Peaceful Resistance

Peaceful resistance is exhibited in many world leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. ,Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela and many others. Peaceful resistance positively impacts a free society because it allows violent resistors to see another way to protest, it saves lives, and finally it keeps an unjust government in check.
Peaceful resistance allows for violent protestors to mend their ways and protest peacefully. Protesting violently accomplishes nothing and only leads to death.Peacefully protesting opens up new ideas and actually shows the world how much can be accomplished without shooting a bullet. An example of this would be Gandhi's salt march. Instead of violently protesting against the salt tax like other revolutionaries he decided to make a 240 mile march from Ahmedabad to the coastal town of Dandi.
This march was joined by thousands of volunteers and even the revolutionaries who acted violently to stop the British government stopped in their tracks to praise Gandhi and join his march because they saw its followers growing by the numbers. This march led to national attention and allowed him to become a powerful politician .Eventually this lead to a high spirit of confidence in the Indians and helped them to achieve independence from Great Britain. The Salt March is a great example of how civil disobedience can help achieve a common goal with violent protestors.
Peaceful resistance can save lives or even eliminate single death while violent resistance leads to ever growing death toll.
A great Current example would be the Isis idea of wanting an independent Islamic country over areas like Iraq and Syria. This so called protest of wanting an Islamic state has led to a death toll of more than 33,000 people and thousands of others displaced in places like Aleppo. It can be noted that this movement is slowly being diminished by the work of many countries because this has lead to many people dying and a massive headache for countries like the U.S..It can be seen that a peaceful protest saves the lives the population of Estonia. This country literally "sang its way out" of the Soviet Union. At this event tens of thousands of people grouped together and sang for five nights and eventually won their independence. If they would have protested violently it sure would have been crushed by the considerably larger armed forces of Russia but this only led to national attention and Russia recognized their independence. All in all, violent protests only cause more and more death while peaceful protesting eliminates the expense of
lives.
Lastly, peaceful resistance keeps the government in check . This can be seen in an example like the Rosa parks boycott. On December 1,1955 Rosa Parks changed the face of the nation. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat for a white person to sit down and through this simple peaceful protest she saw the change and the effects of the civil rights movement and legalized segregation came to an end and the African American community finally started to get better education which led to an increase in black upper class families .Also Martin Luther King Jr's protests led to an equal opportunity to pursue their dreams without being restricted by the federal government.These two examples show that peaceful protests show the government that people are starting to bring up an issue that has been mischosen by the federal government and that the idea should be checked over and or abolished like segregation in this case.
In conclusion, violent resistance only leads to failure and more deaths while peaceful resistance brings a change in the governments policies, allows for violent protestors to be redirected into a more effective movement, and finally peaceful resistance is effective without the cost of lives..