Policy Thoughts

Civil Disobedience is the breaking of a law in order to protest that or another law to inspire a change in law. Historically, civil disobedience has been instrumental to the expansion of human rights and for our collective progression towards a more equal and just society. Moreover, in this synthesis the individual’s moral obligation to participate in and the overall necessity of civil disobedience will be reaffirmed. This determined, a premise that one should generally avoid violent disobedience will be established and the scenarios wherein it is necessary to partake in violence will be outlined. This will illuminate the fact that in a near-perfect society with integrationist aims, violent civil disobedience is never justified; only in a non-near-perfect society or with separationist aims is violent disobedience justified. Firstly, the necessity and justification of civil disobedience is confirmed through an analysis of various texts. In his book “In Defense of Anarchism”, ...

The Second World War was the bloodiest conflict in history, with an estimate of over forty-five million dead (“BY THE NUMBERS”). Many consider that the entry of the United States of America into the war as a major turning point in the tide of the conflict. However, it is important to recognize that US’s engagement in the foreign conflict was not done without deliberation and without criticism. Many people in the United States, known as non-interventionist or isolationist, did not want to fight in Europe. The enrollment in the war was also not the result of a single event, a misconception for which Pearl Harbor holds a pedestal. Instead, the process for the United States to join World War II on the Allies’ side was a tedious one, one condemned by many, wherein the Lend Lease Act of 1941 was the hallmark for those pro-war and interventionist. The Lend Lease Act was, in effect, an outcome of the shift of popular motivations from the observed isolationism in the 1930s to interventionism...