Causes Of Disobedience

Howard Zinn once said, “Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.” In Zinn’s book A People’s History Of the United States, and in history, there are many cases of atrocities that involve disobedience and not obedience. Obedience is when one complies to a certain authority and disobedience, on the other hand, is when one refutes it. Zinn’s statement that disobedience leads to the world’s most terrible things is fallacious because of the many atrocities in history that began due to disobedience and how it has exacerbated many situations. One reason why disobedience leads to the world’s most terrible things is that it causes those terrible things. An example …show more content…
One example of this would be the Indian Removal Act. The Indian Removal Act which was signed by Andrew Jackson ordered all Indians to abandon their land and move westward. This was largely due to a number of white settlers traveling into the newly bought Louisiana territory purchased by Thomas Jefferson. To clear the way for the settlers, Indians had to be removed. This was an extremely terrible act towards the Indians as they have lived in their lands for many years and are now forced to adapt to new lands. However, one group of Indians, the Seminoles, fought back and disobeyed the Indian Removal Act. This is shown in Zinn’s book as, “One tribe—the Seminoles—decided to fight… Violence between whites and Seminoles now erupted… they murdered white families, captured slaves, destroyed property… It was an eight-year war. It cost $20 million and 1,500 American lives” (Page 144-146). Notably, the Seminoles disobeyed the Indian Removal Act and waged war. This war ended in huge expenses and a monumental amount of deaths. If the Seminoles were instead to comply with the act, the atrocity wouldn’t have had so many casualties. As shown, the Seminoles were disobedient which worsened their situation. Another example of this would be in 1919, after World War I where around 100,000 workers went on strike in Seattle for higher wages. This was the year after World War I where worker wages have been controlled very strictly because of the costs of the war. Although their situation was already inadequate, the strike made it worse. The government saw this as a radical resistance against order, or as many would put it: disobedience. This led to the government belligerently handling this by having the army arrest many union leaders and harassing IWW (Industrial Workers of The World) members. This is described in Zinn’s book as, “the IWW idea of the