Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal to obey certain laws, demands, or commands of a government, or of an occupying international power. Civil disobedience is sometimes, though not always,[1][2] defined as being nonviolent resistance.Civil disobedience is one of the many ways people have rebelled against what they deem to be unfair laws. It has been used in many nonviolent resistance movements in India (Gandhis campaigns for independence from the British Empire), in Czechoslovakias Velvet Revolution and in East Germany to oust their communist governments,[4][5] in South Africa in the fight against apartheid, in the American Civil Rights Movement, in the Singing Revolution to bring independence to the Baltic countries from the Soviet Union, recently with the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia and the 2004 Orange Revolution[6] in Ukraine, among other various movements worldwide. One of the oldest depictions of civil disobedience is in Sophocles play Antigone, in which Antigone, one of the daughters of former King of Thebes, Oedipus, defies Creon, the current King of Thebes, who is trying to stop her from giving her brother Polynices a proper burial. She gives a stirring speech in which she tells him that she must obey her conscience rather than human law. She is not at all afraid of the death he threatens her with (and eventually carries out), but she is afraid of how her conscience will smite her if she does not do this.[7] Following the Peterloo massacre of 1819, poet Percy Shelley wrote the political poem The Mask of Anarchy later that year, that begins with the images of what he thought to be the unjust forms of authority of his time—and then imagines the stirrings of a new form of social action. It is perhaps the first modern[vague] statement of the principle of nonviolent protest.[8] A version was taken up by the author Henry David Thoreau in his essay Civil Disobedience, and later by Gandhi in his doctrine of Satyagraha.[8] Gandhis Satyagraha was partially influenced and inspired by Shelleys nonviolence in protest and political action.[9] In particular, it is known that Gandhi would often quote Shelleys Masque of Anarchy to vast audiences during the campaign for a free India.[8][10] Thoreaus 1848 essay Civil Disobedience, originally titled Resistance to Civil Government, has had a wide influence on many later practitioners of civil disobedience. The driving idea behind the essay is that citizens are morally responsible for their support of aggressors, even when such support is required by law. In the essay, Thoreau explained his reasons for having refused to pay taxes as an act of protest against slavery and against the Mexican-American War. He writes, If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another mans shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too. See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say, I should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico; — see if I would go; and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute. By the 1850s, a range of minority groups in the United States--blacks, Jews, Seventh Day Baptists, Catholics, antiprohibitionists, racial egalitarians, and others--employed civil disobedience to combat a range of legal measures and public practices that to them promoted ethnic, religious, and racial discrimination. Public and typically peaceful resistance to public power would remain an integral tactic in modern American minority-rights politics.[11] In December 2008, Rafael Correa, President of the Republic of Ecuador, declared Ecuadors national debt illegitimate odious debt, based on the argument that it was contracted by corrupt and despotic prior regimes. He succeeded in reducing the price of the debt letters before continuing paying the debt.[5] After the overthrow of Jean-Claude Duvalier from Haiti, there were calls for cancellation of Haitis debt to multilateral institutions, based on the argument that it was unjust odious debt, and that Haiti could better use the funds going towards debt service for education, health care, and basic infrastructure.[6] As of February 2008, the Haiti Debt Cancellation Resolution had 66 co-sponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives.[7] Several organizations in the U.S. issued action alerts around the Haiti Debt Cancellation Resolution, and a Congressional letter to the U.S. Treasury,[8] including Jubilee USA, the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti and Pax Christi USA. (copied from wikipedia) This is for those people who didnt even know the meaning of #Civil Disobedience...!!! Syed Ali Ishaq Ammar Mahmood Khan Taha Ali Sheraz Ahmed Khan S Hamza Ali Yasir Khan and Fahim Patel..!!
Posted on: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 10:36:31 +0000
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