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Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal to obey certain laws, demands, and commands of a government, or of an occupying international power. Civil disobedience is a symbolic or ritualistic violation of the law, rather than a rejection of the system as a whole. Civil disobedience is sometimes, though not always, defined as being nonviolent resistance. ==Overview== One of its earliest massive implementations was brought about by Egyptians against the British occupation in the 1919 Revolution. 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 (Gandhi's campaigns for independence from the British Empire), in Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution and in East Germany to oust their communist governments, 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 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.〔(Sophocle's Antigone ), Project Gutenberg, F. Storr translation, 1912, Harvard University Press〕 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 statement of the principle of nonviolent protest.〔() 〕 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''.〔 Gandhi's Satyagraha was partially influenced and inspired by Shelley's nonviolence in protest and political action.〔Thomas Weber, "Gandhi as Disciple and Mentor," Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 28–29.〕 In particular, it is known that Gandhi would often quote Shelley's ''Masque of Anarchy'' to vast audiences during the campaign for a free India.〔〔Thomas Weber, "Gandhi as Disciple and Mentor," Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 28.〕 Thoreau's 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 man's 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, anti-prohibitionists, 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.〔Volk, Kyle G. (2014). ''Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy''. New York: Oxford University Press.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「civil disobedience」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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