Civil disobedience
Civil disobedience is commonly recognized as the active and professed refusal to obey certain laws, demands or commands of a government or occupying international power. Civil disobedience is often, but not always, nonviolent.
Civil disobedience has been employed by many resistance movements, including the 20th century Egyptian and Indian movements against British occupation and colonialism. The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the Singing Revolution in the Baltic countries, the South African fight against apartheid, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the East German efforts to oust the communist government are other examples of historical occurrences where civil disobedience has played a major role.
In Sophocles play Antigone, the heroine of the story wants to give her brother Polynices a proper burial but is hindered by the current king of Thebes since Antigone and her brother are the offspring of the former king of Thebes. Antigone gives a stirring speech where she tells the new king how she cannot obey him since she must obey her conscience (i.e. give her brother a proper burial) rather than man-made laws. She prefers death to living with a guilty conscience. In the end, she is killed by the new king. This is one of the oldest texts where civil disobedience is mentioned.
In the early 1800s, British poet Percy Shelley reacted to the Peterloo massacre by writing a poem named “Masque of Anarchy” where he first describes what he considers to be the unjust forms of authority of his time and then proceeds to conjure up images of a new form of non-violent social action.
In 1949, Henry David Thoreau published an essay named “Resistance to Civil Government” (today known under the title “Civil Disobedience”) where he argues that individuals should not allow government to overrule their consciences. Thoreau was motivated in part by his aversion to slavery and the Mexican-American War, and he refused to pay taxes as an act of protest against slavery and the war.
“If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders,” Thoreau writes in his essay. “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.”
Another prominent figure in the history of civil disobedience is Mohandas Gandhi who included civil disobedience in his doctrine of Satyagraha. Shelley was one of his many sources of inspiration and Gandhi was known to frequently quote “Masque of Anarchy” during his campaign against British colonialism.