This commitment to moral law overrides the duty to obey an institutional one. Encouraging non-compliance challenges the convention that good citizen is a law-abiding one. Thoreau asserts that a good citizen is someone who follows his conscience, even if it means not abiding by the law. Another component of civil disobedience is that when people break the law on moral grounds, they do so peacefully.
Indian social reformer Mahatma Gandhi exemplified non-violent civil disobedience. Then they will have my dead body, but not my obedience. In a contemporaneous example, University of Utah student Tim DeChristopher bid on drilling rights to public lands being auctioned to private gas and oil companies.
DeChristopher used his trial and the surrounding media coverage to explain that he was stopping an illegal auction of publicly owned land rights. Yengich was referring to the new administration under President Obama, which in the spring of , canceled 77 of the auctioned drilling leases. This act of civil disobedience resulted in DeChristopher serving 21 months in prison.
I think those impacts turned out to be much more important than just keeping that oil in the ground. Among western democracies, the United States stands alone in upholding free speech to the point of not censoring hate speech. Hate speech is malicious oral or written language used against a person or people on the basis of race, religion, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and other groups.
This reluctance to regulate the things people say, for better or worse, has a historical context. The American concept of freedom of speech is virtually inseparable from freedom of religion. Both of these freedoms arose as a dissent to the restricti ve Puritanical and Anglican culture of British society.
Only clergymen and governors could engage in free expression without fear of reprisal, and they were reluctant to extend this power to the public at large. The idea of giving all citizens the right to speak their mind with impunity, regardless of social status, made its way into the First Amendment :.
This background may explain why the United States insists on protecting all speech, as opposed to preventing or prohibiting some speech. Jews will not replace us. Government censorship of hate speech and actions is more commonly seen in other democratic countries, such as Germany, Canada, Britain, Denmark, and New Zealand.
Two weeks before the Charlottesville incident, two Chinese tourists were arrested in Berlin for openly using the Nazi salute. They took photos of each other standing and saluting in front of the Reichstag building.
The Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, is a small, independent church that teaches its followers that God hates homosexuals. In , artist Andre Serrano exhibited series of photographs showing religious objects submerged in fluids, including one of a crucifix immersed in urine.
In the United States, the public outcry that followed turned into a political debate over whether to withdraw government funding for public art. Bearing witness is a civic action that involves observing events without intervening and changing their outcome.
On-the-scene news stories and documentary films are examples of bearing witness. As mentioned previously, paintings, poetry, music, and other art forms can also bear witness. What all of these have in common is that they use storytelling to effect reform and change indirectly. Storytelling can be a powerful motivator for interventionist actions such as civil disobedience, live demonstrations, and armed uprisings. James Orbinski is a physician, former director of the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders, and winner of the N oble Peace prize.
Orbinski sees his role in eliciting change as being a witness to people who are suffering, refusing to remain silent, and sharing their stories. Observing without getting involved can present particularly difficult ethical challenges. American news photographer Malcolm Browne captured the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk during the Vietnam War on film. Browne was the only photographer present and shot ten rolls of film. Because that was the whole point ole point — to produce theater of the horrible so striking that the reasons for the demonstrations would become apparent to everyone.
And, of course, they did. The following day, President Kennedy had the photograph on his desk, and he called in Henry Cabot Lodge, who was about to leave for Saigon as U. Modern technology—such as television, broadband internet, social media platforms, and cell phones—makes it possible for virtually anyone, to bear witness to any event, happening anywhere in the world. Whereas previously, we may have only had access to verbal or written accounts; now, we can see events unfold in real-time.
Skip to content Credit: CSalem. Free for commercial use. No attribution required. Key Concepts This chapter will prepare you to: Define reform and revolution, including the critical differences between them. Describe a reform or revolution event from the 20 th century, including relevant historical, social, or political context. List various artistic reactions associated with war. Provide examples of artistic movements that led to social reform and assess their effectiveness.
Provide an example of civil disobedience and the change that resulted from it. Explain the importance of free speech to reform movements. Describe an example of bearing witness or storytelling that initiates change. Or is revolution necessary to enact change? When Reform Becomes Revolution When changes are not being implemented or have not gone far enough, reform may become the catalyst for revolution.
The definition of revolution includes two aspects: A forced replacement of a government or social institution to establish a new system Multiple events orbiting around and driven by the perceived need to initiate progress Keep both of these in mind as we explore the reasons why people feel compelled to take up arms, as opposed to using reform to enact change within the existing system.
Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution. Non-commercial use of copyrighted material is free and open. Revolution Is Not War While armed conflict is frequently involved, war may not be necessary to achieve revolutionary change. Why We Fight: Examining Historical Events The following examples present several 20 th -century reform and revolution events. Or is war an inevitable aspect of life?
Digging deeper, what reasons would be compelling enough for people to protest or to take up arms rebel against the status quo?
Do you believe the primary motivation for going to war is the fear of kill or be killed? Or is the reason more complex? What compels countries to spend vast sums of money on troops, weapons, and warfare?
As we have considered why we fight and how we process those experiences as human beings, have your views on war changed? Do you think it is always justified? Whose Story Is It? Credit: Eric Durr.
New York National Guard. Public Domain. How does the contradiction of slavery affect this definition? Do you think the declaration justifies the 13 colonies going to war against Great Britain? What other contextual factors might be involved? The declaration is explicit in defining rights for men.
Nuremberg Trials The Nuremberg Trials that were held following WWII became a model for retributive justice , international criminal law, and the definition of a crime against humanity. The Bolshevik Revolution Bolshevik army marching near the Kremlin, Credit: US War Department.
National Archives and Records Administration. Wikimedia Commons. Credit: Daniel Case. Truth Commissions Around the World The Gambia was not the first country, nor will it be the last, to implement a truth commission in the wake of a revolution.
Bearing Witness through Art The artists, musicians, authors, poets, and filmmakers featured in this section have created works that serve purposes beyond artistic creation. Can you think of another historical example of an artifact bearing witness to the human side of war and its aftermath? How were street art, poetry, social media, and filmmaking used to organize what came to be known as the Arab Spring movement that occurred in parts of Africa and the Middle East?
Can you come up with artwork artifacts associated with the Hong Kong protests that began in Spring ? Hint: Start with this ArtnetN ews story. The Harlem Renaissance The Harlem Renaissance was a social, artistic, political, and cultural movement that began near the end of WWI and lasted into the s.
The Phillips Collection. Fair Use of copyrighted material. Library of Congress. War and Poetry Poetry and art are useful media for processing human experiences, as well as broadcasting these experiences across social boundaries.
What would it be like to fight for freedom abroad while your loved ones are being oppressed at home? What does it mean to fight a war abroad and at home?
War and Photography In April , graphic photos article includes a photo of a corpse of prisoners being tortured and abused were leaked to the press. Why do you think that is? Compare the open access given to journalists during the Vietnam War versus war-reporting policies enacted during the Gulf War. How do devices such as cell phones, digital cameras, and social media change the nature of reporting on reform and revolution, particularly during wartime?
Unlike artists and activists, reporters have a responsibility to provide unbiased reportage. How realistic is this expectation? Do you think this is even possible? Do you think some war-related images should not be shown or shared with the public?
Or do people have the right to full access, regardless of how shocking or explicit the images are? War and Music Music can profoundly affect the war effort, whether in support of or as a rejection. Reform through Civic Action The First Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees citizens freedom of assembly protest , petition, speech, and the press.
Questions for Critical and Creative Thinking How many types of non-violent protest can you come up with? Check your list against this one provided by The King Center. Civil Disobedience Civil disobedience is the refusal to comply with a government law or policy on the grounds it is immoral. Why or why not? Freedom of Speech Among western democracies, the United States stands alone in upholding free speech to the point of not censoring hate speech. Should they be banned and their signs censored?
Do you think speech should always be free and unregulated? Or should hate slogans and swastikas be censored under certain circumstances? Should it be banned or censored? Should it be supported by public funds?
Bearing Witness through Storytelling Bearing witness is a civic action that involves observing events without intervening and changing their outcome. In the mouth of the Socialist, of the revolutionist, the internal fact, the cardinal truth, that for which alone we fight, and which alone is entitled to all we can give to it - that is the abolition of the system of wage slavery under which the proletariat is working. The standpoint from which they proceed is that of middle class interests as against the interests of the upper capitalists or monopolists.
The railroad monopolists are now fleecing the middle class; these want to turn the tables upon their exploiters; they want to abolish them, wipe them out, and appropriate unto themselves the fleecings of the working class which the railroad monopolists now monopolize. With this reactionary class interest in mind, the duper-Populist steps forward and holds this plausible language:. The reform straws are regularly taken in by this seeming truth; they are carried off their feet; and they are drawn heels over head into the vortex of capitalist conflicts.
Not so the revolutionist. His answer follows sharp and clear:. Guess you do want to nationalize the railroads, but only as a reform; we want nationalization as a revolution. You do not propose, while we are fixedly determined, to relieve the railroad workers of the yoke of wage slavery under which they now grunt and sweat.
By your scheme of nationalization, you do not propose, on the contrary, you oppose all relief to the workers, and you have set dogs at the heels of our propagandists in Chautauqua County, N. While we, the revolutionists, seek the emancipation of the working class and the abolition of all exploitation, duper-Populism seeks to rivet the chains of wage slavery more firmly upon the proletariat.
There is no exploiter like the middle class exploiter. For the same reason, the middle class, the employer of few hands, is the worst, the bitterest, the most inveterate, the most relentless exploiter of the wage slave.
You may now realize what a grave error that man will incur who will rest satisfied with external appearance. Take now an illustration of the revolutionary principle that the material plane on which man stands determines his perception of morality. Each of these looks at morality from the standpoint of his individual or class interests. The man who owns a silver mine considers it the height of immorality to demonetize silver.
The importer who can be benefited by free trade thinks it a heinous crime against good morals to set up a high tariff. The man whose wage slaves come on Monday somewhat boozy, so that he cannot squeeze, pilfer out of them as much wealth as he would like to, becomes a pietistic prohibitionist. He claimed, you know, that he traveled through the country with a collection of wax figures representing the great men and criminals of the time. On one occasion he was in Maine.
At about that time a little boy, Wilkins, had killed his uncle. Of course, the occurrence created a good deal of a sensation, and Artemus Ward tells us that, having an eye to the main chance, he got up a wax figure which he exhibited as Wilkins, the boy murderer.
A few years later, happening again in the same Maine village, it occurred to him that the boy Wilkins had proved a great attraction in the place. The people flocked in, paid their fifteen cents admission, and Artemus started to explain his figures. Three years ago you showed us the boy, Wilkins, he was a boy then, and died since; how can he now be a big man?
The material plane, on which the fraudulent showman stood, determined his moral impulse on patriotism. The higher the economic plane on which a class stands, and the sounder its understanding of material conditions, all the broader will its horizon be, and, consequently, all the purer and truer its morality.
Hence it is that, today, the highest moral vision, and the truest withal, is found in the camp of the revolutionary proletariat. Hence, also, you will perceive the danger of the moral cry that goes not hand in hand with sound knowledge. The morality of reform is the corruscation of the ignis fatuus ; the morality of revolution is lighted by the steady light of science.
Take another illustration, this time on the belligerent poise of Socialism, to distinguish reform from revolution.
The struggles that mark the movements of man have ever proceeded from the material interests, not of individuals, but of classes. Individuals from the former class frequently took leading and invaluable part on the side of the latter, and individuals of the latter regularly played the role of traitors to civilization by siding with the former, as did, for instance, the son of the venerable Franklin when he sided with the British.
Yet in both sets of instances, the combatants stood arrayed upon platforms that represented opposite class interests. Revolutions triumphed, whenever they did triumph, by asserting themselves and marching straight upon their goal.
On the other hand, the fate of Wat Tyler ever is the fate of reform. Of all revolutionary epochs, the present draws sharpest the line between the conflicting class interests. Hence, the organizations of the revolution of our generation must be the most uncompromising of any that yet appeared on the stage of history.
The program of this revolution consists not in any one detail. It demands the unconditional surrender of the capitalist system and its system of wage slavery; the total extinction of class rule is its object. Nothing short of that—whether as a first, a temporary, or any other sort of step can at this late date receive recognition in the camp of the modern revolution.
Upon these lines we organized in New York and Brooklyn, and prospered; upon these lines we have compelled the respect of the foe. And I say unto you, go ye, and do likewise. And now to come to, in a sense, the most important, surely the most delicate, of any of the various subdivisions of this address.
We know that movements make men, but men make movements. Movements cannot exist unless they are carried on by men; in the last analysis it is the human hand and the human brain that serve as the instruments of revolutions. How shall the revolutionist be known? Which are the marks of the reformer? In New York a reformer cannot come within smelling distance of us but we can tell him. We know him; we have experienced him; we know what mischief he can do; and he cannot get within our ranks if we can help it.
You may not know the external marks of the revolutionist. Let me mention them. The modern revolutionist, i. The modern revolutionist knows full well that man is not superior to principle, that principle is superior to man, but he does not fly off the handle with the maxim and thus turn the maxim into absurdity. He firmly couples the maxim with this other that no principle is superior to the movement or organization that puts it and upholds it in the field. The engineer knows that steam is a powerful thing, but he also knows that unless the steam is in the boiler, and unless there is a knowing hand at the throttle, the steam will either evaporate or the boiler will burst.
Similarly, the revolutionist recognizes that the organization that is propelled by correct principles is as the boiler that must hold the steam, or the steam will amount to nothing. He knows that in the revolution demanded by our age, organization must be the incarnation of principle.
Just the reverse of the reformer, who will ever be seen mocking at science, the revolutionist will not make a distinction between the organization and the principle. The prisoner was charged with having stuck his hand and arm through a window and stolen something, whatever it was. The judge sentenced the man to the penitentiary. Again, the modern revolutionist knows that in order to accomplish results or promote principle, there must be unity of action.
He knows that, if we do not go in a body and hang together, we are bound to hang separate. Hence, you will ever see the revolutionist submit to the will of the majority; you will always see him readiest to obey; he recognizes that obedience is the badge of civilized man. The savage does not know the word. Hence, also, you will never find the revolutionist putting himself above the organization. The opposite conduct is an unmistakable earmark of reformers. Another leading mark of the revolutionist, which is paralleled with the opposite mark on the reformer, is the consistency, hence morality, of the former, and the inconsistency, hence immorality, of the latter.
As the revolutionist proceeds upon facts, he is truthful and his course is steady; on the other hand, the reformer will ever be found prevaricating and in perpetual contradiction of himself.
Finally, you will find the reformer ever flying off at a tangent, while the revolutionist sticks to the point. The scatterbrained reformer is ruled by a centrifugal, the revolutionist by a centripetal force. Somebody has aptly said that in social movements an evil principle is like a scorpion; it carries the poison that will kill it.
So with the reformers; they carry the poison of disintegration that breaks them up into twos and ones and thus deprives them in the end of all power for mischief; while the power of the revolutionist to accomplish results grows with the gathering strength that its posture insures to him.
The lines upon which we organize in New York and Brooklyn are, accordingly, directly opposed to those of reformers. This is the sine qua non for success. Right here allow me to digress for a moment. Keep in mind where I break off that we may hitch on again all the easier. Did you ever stop to consider why it is that in this country where opportunities are so infinitely superior, the working class movement is so far behind, whereas in Europe, despite the disadvantages there, it is so far ahead of us?
Let me tell you. In the first place, the tablets of the minds of our working class are scribbled all over by every charlatan who has let himself loose. In Europe, somehow or other, the men who were able to speak respected and respect themselves a good deal more than most of our public speakers do here.
They studied first; they first drank deep at the fountain of science; and not until they felt their feet firmly planted on the rock bed of fact and reason, did they go before the masses. So it happens that the tablets of the minds of the European, especially the Continental working classes, have lines traced upon them by the master hands of the ages.
Hence every succeeding new movement brought forward by the tides of time found its work paved for and easier. But here, one charlatan after another who could speak glibly, and who could get money from this, that, or the other political party, would go among the people and upon the tablets of the minds of the working classes he scribbled his crude text.
So it happens that today, when the apostle of Socialism goes before our people, he cannot do what his compeers in Europe do, take a pencil and draw upon the minds of his hearers the letters of science; no, he must first clutch a sponge, a stout one, and wipe clean the pot-hooks that the charlatans have left there. Not until he has done that can he begin to preach and teach successfully. Then, again, with this evil of miseducation, the working class of this country suffers from another.
The charlatans, one after the other, set up movements that proceeded upon lines of ignorance; movements that were denials of scientific facts; movements that bred hopes in the hearts of the people; yet movements that had to collapse. A movement must be perfectly sound, and scientifically based or it cannot stand. A falsely based movement is like a lie, and a lie cannot survive. All these false movements came to grief, and what was the result? Uriah Stephens was swept aside; ignoramuses took hold of the organization; a million and a half men went into it, hoping for salvation; but, instead of salvation, there came from the veils of the K.
Local, District and General Assemblies the developed ignoramuses, that is to say, the labor fakers, riding the workingman and selling him out to the exploiter. Disappointed, the masses fell off. Thereupon bubbled up another wondrous concern, another idiosyncrasy -- the American Federation of Labor, appropriately called by its numerous English organizers the American Federation of Hell. Reforms and revolutions are the two ways in which those improvements can be achieved, but they are quite different from each other.
Some of the key aspects that differentiate a reform from a revolution include:. A reform aims at improving the status quo by modifying laws, policies and practices, whereas a revolution aims at completely overthrowing the status quo, eliminating the existing order and reinstating a new and improved system;.
In the case of a reform, change is brought about gradually, meaning that there is no drastic disruption of the existing political system — thus allowing citizens to adapt to the changes in an easier way and allowing all social groups to move forward in a cohesive manner. Conversely, a revolution is a drastic and sudden change that often has backlashes on the social groups that have to deal with the legacy of violence; and.
Reforms are reversible whereas a revolution is not. For instance, various political parties and politicians often overrule decisions and policies implemented by their predecessors, underlying the reversibility of peaceful and progressive reforms.
Conversely, once the existing political, economic and social order has been overthrown through a violent revolution, there is no way back and all changes are permanent. Building on the differences highlighted in the previous section, we can identify a number of other aspects that differentiate a reform from a revolution.
All countries and almost all governments are bound to undergo a process of change and improvement to adapt to progress. Throughout history, various social groups have fought for their rights and for better conditions, pushing for political change and resorting to violent means when reforms failed to materialize.
The concept of reform implies the modification of an existing entity — generally a government, a law or a policy — in order to bring about progress and social, political and economic change.
Reforms are usually peaceful and gradual, and the changes they bring about can often be reversed. When governments fail to enact the necessary reforms to meet popular demand and to promote justice and equality, tensions can build and escalate rather quickly, to the point that a failed reform can translate into a violent revolution.
When the status quo becomes unbearable, a revolution becomes inevitable, and people resort to violent means to achieve their goals. Revolutions employ drastic measures to obtain a radical — and generally irreversible — change. In addition, during a revolution, countries often cease to comply with international regulations, overlooking their duties and responsibilities towards their allies and partners. Once the revolution is completed, the newly appointed government resumes relations with foreign countries, sometimes renegotiating some treaties and covenants.
Conversely, during a time of reform, governments may revise their role on the international scene, renegotiating treaties or parts of treaties in order to improve the existing conditions.
Therefore, a reform results in the modification of the existing order, both at a domestic and international level, whereas a revolution results in the overthrow of the existing government — often employing violent means — and in the modification of the existing international balance. Difference Between Reform and Revolution. Difference Between Similar Terms and Objects. MLA 8 Squadrin, Giulia.
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