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En 209 Civil Disobedience Critical Essay

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Submitted By lgwyse
Words 1563
Pages 7
Lloyd Wyse
Melissa Hull
EN 209-014
April 18, 2012
Critical Essay: Civil Disobedience Civil disobedience is the active refusal to comply with certain laws or demands of a government, such as paying fines or taxes. Although it is not necessarily on-violent, it has classically been attributed to nonviolent resistance. The etymological origin of the term is from Henry David Thoreau’s essay Resistance to Government, written in 1849, which was eventually renamed to Essay on Civil Disobedience. Since its republication in 1866, Thoreau’s essay has inspired many important activists over the course of history. Its messages have resonated within countless people unsatisfied or disgusted with the law of the land; one of the most prominent lessons it teaches is that an unjust government can only be corrected by the defiance of its people. As long as there is an imperfect government, there will be a need for civil disobedience. Citizens of nations from all over the globe still read and learn from Civil Disobedience because even in modern times a perfect government does not exist.
In Civil Disobedience, Thoreau prompts the reader to take direct action against injustice. He argues that the government is a representative of corruption and injustice that, like a machine, fuels the enabling of its wrongdoings through enforcement of law. He states that an individual’s silent compliance with the law is essentially the same as cooperation with injustices that the lawmaker commits. In particular, he points out that paying taxes directly funds the actions and capabilities of the State; Thoreau himself is imprisoned for a period of time for his refusal to pay a poll tax, knowing a percentage of the taxes would endow purposes he disagreed with. In his time, the government’s chief crimes were slavery and the war in Mexico. He links the funding from seemingly unrelated taxes the law

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