The Limits to protest(disc)

[Ace Pace]

No, no news article.

Where, in your minds, are the limits to legal protests to a goverment action? Is it rallys? Blocking roads? Attempted destruction of goverment property? Filling up the countries jails in attemps to block entry of murderes? Armed rebellion?

To put this in prespective, in Israel the anti-disenagment from is doing all of those, bar armed rebellion, and personally, thats far beyond the limit.
Where do you see the limit?

[B4UTRUST]

As one of our founding father's said it is our duty to protest and rebel against a tyranical government. They rebeled against England, rioting, destroying government property, looting, stealing, killing soldiers and armed attacks against the English.

If it is truely neccessary and the good gained far outweighs the evil lost then my answer is as far as is truely neccessary.

[Ace Pace]

Thanks, okey, then lets do a hypthetical(RAR!):
*thinks*
Your a beliver in the Manifest Destiny of the United States to rule North America, and the goverment has decided some area of north america *checks map*, say everything north of Augusta(Maine) was illegally settled and should be givin back to Canada and they are going to force everyone out of there.
How far would you go in protesting this(asumming you belived that action was wrong)?

[frigidmagi]

I don't believe in Manifest Destiny and I would protest that to the point of armed resistence.

[The Morrigan]

I tend to assess the limits of the right to protest in terms of what is reasonable in the circumstances, what is needed to make a point and how severely the government is likely to retalliate.

For example, in a liberal democracy like 21st century Australia (which I use as an example because I happen to live there), I would generally consider any form of violent protest to be not only unnecessary, but in many cases detrimental to one's cause. Everybody over 18 has the right to vote, there is no law against staging a peaceful protest and there is a reasonable chance that if enough people exert enough power over the government, the government will eventually have to listen to their demands or risk getting voted out at the next election. I'm not saying that the system is perfect, but it's better than a repressive dictatorship.

On the other hand, where a government denies basic civil rights to its citizens, is unlikely to bow to either domestic or international pressure and is likely to react to even a relatively peaceful protest with violence, I would be more willing to consider more violent forms of protest to be justified, up to and including armed rebellion. For example, I think the citizens of Zimbabwe would be perfectly justified in taking up arms to stop the government from slinging them out of their homes.