Strategies for fighting Social Injustice
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There are a wide array of strategies for fighting societal injustice. The simplest, of course, is to respond in kind: to fight injustice with injustice. Taken to an extreme, this would lead to revolution: if the government is unjust, then the citizens should rise up and overthrow it. This can be counterproductive, however, because violence begets more violence. In our political culture, the notion of civil disobedience has emerged as a leading alternative to revolution, because "Civil disobedience is a tactic, a tactic of resistance" (RIIA, 13). Civil disobedience itself operates on a spectrum, from liberal civil disobedience preached by 20th Century philosopher John Rawls to the more strident radical civil disobedience preached by anarchists. It is my belief that the only form of civil disobedience that can succeed in a democratic nation is the liberal form. The government must be shamed into submission through the mobilization of public opinion against the particular injustice in question. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ghandi were the most inspirational civil disobedience practitioners in history, and their movements succeeded precisely because they refused to resort to violence in the face of violence. Their non-violent approach to civil disobedience remains the most effective method available to shame society into becoming more just. Liberal civil disobedience has its roots in the work of Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau believed that the law in and of itself di
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olitical appeals that were available to them within the society, and these appeals would have to have been rejected. Second, the disobedience would have to be limited to substantial and clear violations of justice, not merely any unjust law or practice that the individual disapproved of. An example of a manifest violation of justice would be inequality before the law. Third, the right to civil disobedience operates for all people that are affected similarly, and it is in some sense socially proportional to the threat that the injustice poses to individual rights. Lastly, individuals resorting to civil disobedience must understand the practical limitations involved with civil disobedienceùnamely, that this type of tactic is only useful if it is likely to be effective (RIIA, 14). This last point is a key one. The students who were practicing civil disobedience in Tian an Men square in China learned that lying down in front of a tank is not an effective form of civil disobedience if the government has no compunctions about running you over.
In the end, Rawls believed that civil disobedience was "a form of political action within the limits of fidelity to the rule of law" (Cohen, 569). It was meant to be used primarily "as
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Approximate Word count = 1212
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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