20 Facts About Civil disobedience

Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws, demands, orders or commands of a government.

Hence, civil disobedience is sometimes equated with peaceful protests or nonviolent resistance.

Henry David Thoreau's essay Resistance to Civil Government, published posthumously as Civil Disobedience, popularized the term in the US, although the concept itself has been practiced longer before.

An early depiction 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.

Civil disobedience gives a stirring speech in which she tells him that she must obey her conscience rather than human law.

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Civil disobedience is not at all afraid of the death he threatens her with, but she is afraid of how her conscience will smite her if she does not do this.

Civil disobedience is one of the many ways people have revolted against what they deem to be unfair laws.

Henry David Thoreau's 1849 essay "Resistance to Civil Government" was eventually renamed "Essay on Civil Disobedience".

In reviewing the voluminous literature on the subject, the student of civil disobedience rapidly finds himself surrounded by a maze of semantical problems and grammatical niceties.

Civil disobedience is usually defined as pertaining to a citizen's relation to the state and its laws, as distinguished from a constitutional impasse, in which two public agencies, especially two equally sovereign branches of government, conflict.

Some theories of civil disobedience hold that civil disobedience is only justified against governmental entities.

Christian Bay's encyclopedia article states that civil disobedience requires "carefully chosen and legitimate means", but holds that they do not have to be non-violent.

Non-revolutionary civil disobedience is a simple disobedience of laws on the grounds that they are judged "wrong" by a person's conscience, or as part of an effort to render certain laws ineffective, to cause their repeal, or to exert pressure to get one's political wishes on some other issue.

Revolutionary civil disobedience is more of an active attempt to overthrow a government.

Civil disobedience disobedients have chosen a variety of different illegal acts.

In cases where the criminalized behaviour is pure speech, civil disobedience can consist simply of engaging in the forbidden speech.

Electronic civil disobedience can include web site defacements, redirects, denial-of-service attacks, information theft and data leaks, illegal web site parodies, virtual sit-ins, and virtual sabotage.

Some disciplines of civil disobedience hold that the protester must submit to arrest and cooperate with the authorities.

Some civil disobedience defendants choose to make a defiant speech, or a speech explaining their actions, in allocution.

Governments have generally not recognized the legitimacy of civil disobedience or viewed political objectives as an excuse for breaking the law.