Civil Disobedience Quotes
His assumption about whether an army was “willing or able to train its guns on inoffensive people” was a little naïve. The Ottomans had massacred the Armenians, and soon the German troops would murder innocent civilians. As did the Japanese. The Russian Communists on many occasions massacred civilians engaging in passive resistance. In Cambodia, the Kmer Rouge Army killed almost 2 million, most of whom had educations which might have made them passive resisters. Islamic Fascist governments like Syria and Iran used heavy weapons to kill citizens in their own homes because they were in neighborhoods that housed many passive resisters. Extreme Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorists regularly killed innocent civilians in their homes, on the streets or in busses, just to intimidate others to surrender to their religious and political demands. He was right that democratic governments and armies would not engage in such killing of their own people, but there are unfortunately still many other governments.
There were anti-Vietnam war protests going on throughout the country that year. In many of them, especially at universities, protesters took over buildings, and shut down operations. Most Republicans and many Democrats wanted the protests to end, mostly because they feared the spread of the anti-Vietnam war sentiment would catch on and become a position held by most Americans (which it did just as they feared,) They were restrained in what they could do legally by the 1st Amendment. However, there was much breaking of minor laws in many of the demonstrations and that was the focus of the effort to suppress the demonstrations. But in the tradition of civil disobedience, it was the lawbreaking that tended to get the press attention and coverage, so the leaders of the anti-war movement advocated even more lawbreaking, hence Dirksen’s statement to the convention.
Refusing induction into the armed forces during the Vietnam War:
