Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies on Law and Order Paperback – 24 Jan. 2014

Howard Zinn is an author that makes you think about prejudices and look at events with a new perspective. When you finish his book something new is open to think about.

Politics of the book.

Great if your feeling like a revolutionary. Opens your eyes to how and why most laws are created... to keep the man down.

Howard Zinn explains the importance of civil disobedience to maintain freedom in a healthy democracy. This should be required reading in public schools

No es lo que esperaba. El autor hace una contestación a un escrito previo de un juez de la Corte Suprema de EEUU, que desarrolla como nueve falacias de los argumentos del juez. Todos los argumentos están muy centrados en los temas de su época (Guerra de Vietnam y desobediencia civil iniciada por Martin Luther King). Me resultó demasiado especifico de ese momento y totalmente focalizado en EEUU. Solo leí hasta la mitad...

At what point are citizens justified--and perhaps even obliged--to violate the law of the land in pursuit of justice? When is civil disobedience justified? And just what is civil disobedience, anyway?These are the sorts of questions Howard Zinn sets out to explore in his masterful Disobedience and Democracy. The book first appeared in 1968 in response to a small pamphlet by Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas defending a minimalistic interpretation of civil disobedience. But Zinn's book, and the debate in general, is just as relevant today as it was 40 years ago.The crux of the debate is between those legalists who think that justice is identical to law, and those progressives who think that justice is sometimes quite distinct from law and that in fact the law is often one of the weapons by which governments wield and legitimize their power ("congealed injustice," as Zinn powerfully says [p. 4]). Legalists suppose that any contravention of laws, even shady ones, inevitably leads to social chaos. Progressives believe that sometimes genuine advances in social and economic justice can only be achieved by disobeying unjust laws or unjust conditions protected by the law of the land.In a series of compact and extremely strong arguments, Zinn critically responds to what he sees as nine errors in the legalist attitude to civil disobedience, and in the process defends the progressive view. Zinn argues that the rule of law isn't an end in itself, that practitioners of civil disobedience aren't morally obliged to accept punishment for their actions, that unobnoxious laws can be broken with impunity when resisting unjust ones, that civil disobedience isn't needn't be absolutely nonviolent, that civil disobedience is a necessity in a democratic society in which the judicial system frequently sides with the government, that there's a double standard of morality typically invoked by governments, and that the interests of government and the people aren't identical. Zinn concludes his argument by spelling out seven characteristics of principled civil disobedience (pp. 119-22).Zinn says several times that "we have been naive in America about the efficacy of the ballot box and representative government to rectify injustice" (p. 65). This is especially so in foreign policy, he claims, with elected officials pursuing wars regardless of the opposition of the public to those wars. That's why, he concludes, we need to be ever mindful of both the need and the righteousness of civil disobedience. This is good to keep in mind as we prepare to once again perform the ritual of a presidential election.__________* p. 123.

.. And honestly it's pretty interesting to read on its own anyway!

very good