Noam Chomsky Civil Disobedience

During a cold night in December 1773, a group of citizens snuck onto three British East Indian Trade Company ships, and in an act of civil disobedience, threw twenty-three thousand pounds of tea into the Boston Harbor. (Gunderson, 4) This endeavor helped spark the revolutionary war between the heavily taxing English and the soon to be United States of America. Without these defying acts of civil disobedience, governments would continue to implement unjust and immoral laws on their citizens. Civil disobedience doesn’t just play a part in laws, it also is a main factor in the human rights movements and environmental movements. Noam Chomsky believes that with civil disobedience comes a negative and a positive outcome. Sticking to non-violent acts

Often, governments will make decisions on behalf of their country that they believe is in the countries best interest. This is not always the case, as laws that are discriminatory or immoral may have less of an appeal to some citizens. It is up to the citizen to keep the government controlled, not the government keeping control of itself. By using civil disobedience as a justifiable measure, we are able to tell the government what we will and will not stand for. This can be seen today, with NODAPL, where indigenous and people from all different races, are camping out in protest of a pipeline that will run through sacred land and the Missouri River. This form of civil disobedience shows the government that they can’t just sign off on things they want without proper consultation from all people involved. As Henry David Thoreau said, “The government is best which governs least.” Thoreau believed that the best way for a country to be governed was by the government intervening as little as possible. Next, civil disobedience is also a non-violent way to show the government what you want changed, and why you want it changed. In a study done by Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth in Why Civil Resistance: Works of Nonviolent Conflict, it was discovered “that major nonviolent campaigns have achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with 26

Henry David Thoreau believed that civil disobedience did not lead to anarchy, but instead to betterment of the