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Examples Of Civil Disobedience In Antigone

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Obedience or Decadence: The civil struggle Civil Disobedience is an organized way to protest the laws of society that people don’t approve of. Starting with Henry David Thoreau civil disobedience has spread to major movements like those of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The ancient Greek tragedy, Antigone by Sophocles, has a large basis in Civil disobedience and splits people into groups throughout the play on the sides of obeying or protesting the law. Disobeying the law, when you disagree, with it for good reasons, makes civil disobedience obligatory for citizens of a country to defend their rights, beliefs, and actions in the face of the law. Civil disobedience, if used in a proper situation, should bring a great number of people to …show more content…

In Antigone Creon has an argument with Haimon, his son, about following the law or following what’s believed to be right arguing, “How about you in a public brawl with justice? With justice, when all that I do is within my rights? You have no right to trample on God’s right. (Sophocles 602-605)”.Haimon’s will and bravery shines through within this quote. Defending his rights and the rights of everyone else, by bringing something that everyone respects into an argument against the law, Haimon combats the forcefulness that Creon shows through the laws he created to persecute someone for following their beliefs with his own beliefs in the gods and his fiancé Antigone. In a similar manner using real world experiences Henry David Thoreau speaks on how he feels the law is wrong when it forces him to do as it says or face the consequences. Making no compromises as Henry David Thoreau states, “If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out… but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.” ― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays. Thoreau’s words inspire us to find a way to deny the system its momentum stopping the misuse of power for the betterment of

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