text:
Peter Debye

Peter Joseph William Debye (March 24, 1884 – November 2, 1966)  was a Dutch-American physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry.

Early life
Born Petrus Josephus Wilhelmus Debije in Maastricht, Netherlands, Debye enrolled in the Aachen University of Technology in 1901. In 1905, he completed his first degree in electrical engineering. He published his first paper, a mathematically elegant solution of a problem involving eddy currents, in 1907. At Aachen, he studied under the theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, who later claimed that his most important discovery was Peter Debye.

In 1906, Sommerfeld received an appointment at Munich, Bavaria, and took Debye with him as his assistant. Debye got his Ph.D. with a dissertation on radiation pressure in 1908. In 1910, he derived the Planck radiation formula using a method which Max Planck agreed was simpler than his own.

In 1911, when Albert Einstein took an appointment as a professor at Prague, Bohemia, Debye took his old professorship at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. This was followed by moves to Utrecht in 1912, to Göttingen in 1913, to ETH Zurich in 1920, to University of Leipzig in 1927, and in 1934 to Berlin, where, succeeding Einstein, he became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (now named the Max-Planck-Institut) whose facilities were built only during Debye's era. He was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1935. From 1937 to 1939 he was the president of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.

In May 1914 he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and in December of the same year he became foreign member.

Family and personal life
Peter Debye was described as a martinet when it came to scientific principles, yet he was always approachable and made time for his students. His personal philosophy emphasized a fulfillment of purpose and enjoyment in one's work. Debye was an avid trout fisherman and gardener, collector of cacti, and was "always known to enjoy a nice cigar".

While in Berlin as an assistant to Arnold Sommerfeld, Debye became acquainted with Mathilde Alberer. Mathilde was the daughter of the proprietor of the boarding house in which Debye was staying. Mathilde would soon change her citizenship and in 1913, Debye married Mathilde Alberer. Debye would enjoy working in his rose garden with Mathilde Alberer late into his years. They had a son, Peter P. Debye (1916–2012), and a daughter, Mathilde Maria (1921–1991). Peter became a physicist and collaborated with Debye in some of his research, and had a son who was also a chemist.

Debye was a faithful Catholic who insisted his family go to church.

Scientific contributions
His first major scientific contribution was the application of the concept of dipole moment to the charge distribution in asymmetric molecules in 1912, developing equations relating dipole moments to temperature and dielectric constant. In consequence, the units of molecular dipole moments are termed debyes in his honor. Also in 1912, he extended Albert Einstein's theory of specific heat to lower temperatures by including contributions from low-frequency phonons. See Debye model.

In 1913, he extended Niels Bohr's theory of atomic structure, introducing elliptical orbits, a concept also introduced by Arnold Sommerfeld. In 1914–1915, Debye calculated the effect of temperature on X-ray diffraction patterns of crystalline solids with Paul Scherrer (the "Debye–Waller factor"). In 1923, together with his assistant Erich Hückel, he developed an improvement of Svante Arrhenius' theory of electrical conductivity in electrolyte solutions. Although an improvement was made to the Debye–Hückel equation in 1926 by Lars Onsager, the theory is still regarded as a major forward step in our understanding of electrolytic solutions. Also in 1923, Debye developed a theory to explain the Compton effect, the shifting of the frequency of X-rays when they interact with electrons.

Later work
From 1934 to 1939 Debye was director of the physics section of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. From 1936 onwards he was also professor of Theoretical Physics at the Frederick William University of Berlin. These positions were held during the Nazi Germany in Germany and, from 1938 onward, Austria.

In 1939 Debye traveled to the United States to deliver the Baker Lectures at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. After leaving Germany in early 1940, Debye became a professor at Cornell, chaired the chemistry department for 10 years, and became a member of Alpha Chi Sigma. In 1946 he became an American citizen. Unlike the European phase of his life, where he moved from city to city every few years, in the United States Debye remained at Cornell for the remainder of his career. He retired in 1952, but continued research until his death.

Much of Debye's work at Cornell concerned the use of light-scattering techniques (derived from his X-ray scattering work of years earlier) to determine the size and molecular weight of polymer molecules. This started as a result of his research during World War II on synthetic rubber, but was extended to proteins and other macromolecules.

In April 1966, Debye suffered a heart attack, and in November of that year a second one proved fatal. He is buried in the Pleasant Grove Cemetery (Ithaca, New York, US).

2006 controversy
In January 2006, a book (in Dutch) appeared in The Netherlands, written by Sybe Rispens, entitled Einstein in the Netherlands. One chapter of this book discusses the relationship between Albert Einstein and Debye. Rispens discovered documents that, as he believed, were new and proved that, during his directorship of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Debye was actively involved in cleansing German science institutions of Jewish and other "non-Aryan elements". Rispens records that on December 9, 1938, Debye wrote in his capacity as chairman of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (DPG) to all the members of the DPG:

''In light of the current situation, membership by German Jews as stipulated by the Nuremberg laws, of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft cannot be continued. According to the wishes of the board, I ask of all members to whom these definitions apply to report to me their resignation. Heil Hitler!''

Many biographies published before Rispens' work, state that Debye moved to the US because he refused to accept German citizenship forced on to him by the Nazis. He planned his departure from Germany during a visit with his mother in Maastricht in late 1939, boarded a ship in Genoa in January 1940 and arrived in New York in early February 1940. He immediately sought a permanent position in the US and accepted such an offer from Cornell in June 1940. That month, he crossed the US border into Canada and returned within days on an immigration visa. He was able to get his wife out of Germany and to the US by December 1940. Although his son already was in the US before he departed, Peter Debye's 19-year-old daughter and his sister-in-law did not leave. They lived in his official residence in Berlin and were supported by Debye's official Berlin wages (he carefully maintained an official leave of absence for this purpose).

Further, Rispens alleges that Albert Einstein in the first half of 1940 tried to prevent Debye from being appointed in the United States at Cornell. Einstein allegedly wrote to his American colleagues: "I know from a reliable source that Peter Debye is still in close contact with the German (Nazi) leaders" and, according to Rispens, called upon his colleagues to do "what they consider their duty as American citizens". To support this, Rispens refers to a well-known letter from Debye to Einstein and Einstein's response to it. Van Ginkel investigated 1940 FBI reports on this matter and traced the "reliable source" to a single letter directed to Einstein and written by someone whose name is lost. This person was not known personally to Einstein and, according to Einstein, probably did not know Debye personally either. Moreover, this accusatory letter did not reach Einstein directly but was intercepted by British censors who showed it to Einstein. Einstein sent the British agent with the letter to Cornell, and the Cornell authorities told Debye about the affair. Thereupon Debye wrote his well-known 1940 letter to Einstein to which Einstein answered. The latter two letters can be found in the published Einstein correspondence.

Rispens alleges that Debye sent a telegram to Berlin on 23 June 1941 informing his previous employers that he was able and willing to resume his responsibilities at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut, presumably to maintain his leave of absence and keep the Berlin house and wages available for his daughter. A copy of this telegram has not been recovered thus far. In summer 1941, Debye filed his intent to become a US citizen and was quickly recruited in the US to participate in Allied War research.

It has been well documented in many biographies, and also in Rispens' book, that Debye and Dutch colleagues helped his Jewish colleague Lise Meitner in 1938–1939 (at great risk to himself and his family ) cross the Dutch-German border to escape Nazi persecution and eventually obtain a position in Sweden.

Predating Rispens' work, and in contrast to it, an article by Rechenberg appeared 18 years earlier concerning Debye's letter. The article describes Debye's missive in more detail and presents a very favorable picture of Debye in his efforts to resist Nazi activists. Moreover, this article points out that Max von Laue, well known for his anti-Nazi views, gave his approval to the letter from the DPG chairman.

International response
Debye's son, Peter P. Debye, interviewed in 2006 at age 89 recollects that his father was completely apolitical and that in the privacy of their home politics were never discussed. According to his son, Debye just wanted to do his job at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and as long as the Nazis did not bother him was able to do so. He recalls that his mother urged him (the son) to stay in the US in the event of war. Debye's son had come to the US on a planned 2-month vacation during the summer of 1939 and never returned to Germany because war broke out.

In an opinion article published on the Debye Institute website, Dr. Gijs van Ginkel, until April 2007 Senior Managing Director of the VM Debye Instituut in Utrecht deplored. In his article he cites scholars who point out that the DPG was able to retain their threatened staff as long as could be expected under increasing pressure from the Nazis. He also puts forward the important argument that when Debye in 1950 received the Max Planck medal of the DPG, nobody objected, not even the known opponent of the national socialists Max von Laue, who would have been in a position to object. Also Einstein, with his enormous prestige, was still alive, as were other Jewish scientists such as Lise Meitner and James Franck who both knew Debye intimately. None of them protested against Debye's receiving the highest German scientific distinction. In fact, Albert Einstein, after many years of not participating in the voting for the Max Planck Medal nominees, joined the process again to vote for Debye.

Maastricht University also announced that it was reconsidering its position on the Peter Debye Prijs voor natuurwetenschappelijk onderzoek (Peter Debye Prize for scientific research).

In a reply on the DPG website, Dieter Hoffmann and Mark Walker also conclude that Debye was not a Nazi activist. They remark that Max von Laue also was required and obliged (as a civil servant) to sign letters with Heil Hitler. They also state that the DPG was one of the last scientific societies to purge the Jewish members and only very reluctantly. They quote the response of the Reich University Teachers League (a National Socialist organization) to the Debye letter:

''Obviously the German Physical Society is still very backward and still clings tightly to their dear Jews. It is in fact remarkable that only "because of circumstances beyond our control" the membership of Jews can no longer be maintained'' In May 2006, the Dutch Nobel Prize winner Martinus Veltman who had written the foreword to the Rispen book, renounced the book's description of Peter Debye, withdrew his foreword, and asked the Board of Directors of Utrecht University to rescind their decision to rename the Debye Institute.

Various historical investigations, both in The Netherlands and in the US, have been carried out subsequent to the actions of the University of Maastricht. The earliest of these investigations, carried out by the Cornell University's department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology released a report on 31 May 2006, which states that:

''Based on the information to-date, we have not found evidence supporting the accusations that Debye was a Nazi sympathizer or collaborator or that he held anti-Semitic views. It is important that this be stated clearly since these are the most serious allegations.''

It goes on to declare:

Thus, based on the information, evidence and historical record known to date, we believe that any action that dissociates Debye's name from the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell is unwarranted.

In June 2006, it was reported that the scientific director of the (formerly) Debye Institute had been reprimanded by the board of directors of the University of Utrecht for a new publication on Debye's war years on the grounds that it was too personally biased with respect to the Institute's naming dispute. According to the board, the book should have been published not as a Debye Institute publication, but as a personal one. The book was banned by the University of Utrecht and both Directors of the (former) Debye Institute were forbidden to have any further contact with the press. A dozen professors of the Physics Faculty, amongst whom Cees Andriesse, openly protested against the interventions of the Board and the censorship of their protest by the university.

In May 2007, the universities of Utrecht and Maastricht announced that a new committee headed by Jan Terlouw would advise them regarding the name change. Also, in the beginning of 2007 an official report was announced, to be published by the NIOD and authorized by the Dutch Education Ministry (then scheduled for fall 2007).

2007 NIOD report
The report describes Rispens' presentation of Debye, as an opportunist who had no objection to the Nazis, as a caricature.

''[I]t can be stated that Debye was rightly called an opportunist after his arrival in the United States. We have seen that he showed himself to be loyal to the dominant political system, first in the Third Reich and then in the United States, while at the same time keeping the back door open: in the Third Reich by retaining his Dutch nationality, in the United States by attempting to secretly maintain some contacts with Nazi Germany via the Foreign Office.''

It concludes that Debye's actions in 1933–45 were based on the nineteenth-century positivist view of science which saw research in physics as generating blessings for humankind. The report states that, by his contemporaries, Debye was considered an opportunist by some and as a man of highest character by others. The report asserts that Debye was not coerced by the Nazis into writing the infamous DPG Heil Hitler letter and that he also did not follow the lead of other societies in doing so but, rather, other societies followed his lead. The NIOD report also concludes that Debye felt obliged to send the letter and that it was, for him, simply a confirmation of an existing situation. The report argues that Debye, in the Third Reich, developed a survival method of ambiguity which allowed him to pursue his scientific career despite the political turmoil. Crucial to this survival method was the need to keep ready an escape hatch, for example in his secret dealings with the Nazis in 1941, if needed.

Yet, the report also states that the picture of Debye should not be oversimplified as Debye's actions were also motivated by his loyalty to his daughter, who had remained in Berlin. In general, Debye developed a survival method of ambiguity, that "could pull the wool over people's eyes".

2008 Terlouw report
In January 2008 the Terlouw Commission advised the Boards of Utrecht and Maastricht Universities to continue to use Peter Debye’s name for the chemistry and physics institute in Utrecht, and to continue awarding the science prize in Maastricht. The Commission concluded that Debye was not a party member, was not an anti-semite, did not further Nazi propaganda, did not cooperate with the Nazi war machine, was not a collaborator, and yet also was not a resistance hero. He was a rather pragmatic, flexible, and brilliant scientist, idealistic with respect to the pursuit of science, but only superficially oriented in politics. With respect to sending out the DPG letter, the Commission concluded that Debye found the situation inescapable. The Commission pointed out that the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences also took away Albert Einstein's honorary membership, emphasizing the circumstances in which these decisions had been taken. The Commission stated that now, seventy years later, no judgment can be made concerning the decision of Debye to sign this letter in the exceptionally difficult circumstances in which he then found himself. Nevertheless, the Commission describes the DPG letter as an extraordinarily unpleasant fact, forming a dark page in his life history. Finally, the Commission concluded that based on the NIOD report since no bad faith on Debye’s part has been demonstrated, his good faith must be assumed and recommended that the University of Utrecht retain the name of the Debye Institute of NanoMaterials Science and that the University of Maastricht continue to associate itself with the Peter Debye Prize. Utrecht University accepted the recommendation, Maastricht University did not. But in February 2008, the Hustinx Foundation (Maastricht), originator and sponsor of the Peter Debye Prize, announced that it will continue to have the prize awarded. The City of Maastricht, Debye's birthplace, declared that it sees no reason to change the names of Debye Street and Debye Square.

Debye the spy
In a 2010 publication Jurrie Reiding asserts that Debye may have been an MI6 spy. Reiding discovered that Debye was befriended by the well-documented spy Paul Rosbaud. They first met around 1930 when they were both working as editors for two scientific journals. They collaborated in the escape of Lise Meitner in 1938. According to Reiding, Debye was well connected in German scientific and industrial circles and could have provided MI6 with valuable information. For example, as board member of the German Academy for Aviation Research he was acquainted with Hermann Göring. Reiding also offers an explanation for Debye's hasty departure on 16 January 1940 for the United States: the date coincided with the planned (but later delayed) German invasion of the Netherlands a day later, information possibly provided to him by Rosbaud.

This hypothesis is contested by Philip Ball, as he notes that friendship with Rosbaud is no gauge of Debye's political stance. Rosbaud was well-connected with many people and Debye, while he was a friend of Rosbaud's, seems to have also felt regard for geologist Friedrich Drescher-Kaden, an ardent Nazi.

Awards and honors

 * 1927 – elected International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
 * 1930 – Rumford Medal for work relating to specific heats and X-ray spectroscopy
 * 1936 – Nobel Prize in Chemistry (entry at nobelprize.org) "for his contributions to the study of molecular structure," primarily referring to his work on dipole moments and X-ray diffraction
 * 1936 – elected member of the American Philosophical Society
 * 1937 – Franklin Medal from The Franklin Institute
 * 1947 – elected member of the United States National Academy of Sciences
 * 1963 – Priestley Medal
 * 1965 – National Medal of Science
 * 1982 – Alpha Chi Sigma Hall of Fame

Eponyms

 * Debye shielding – In plasmas, semiconductors and electrolytes, the process by which a fixed electric charge is shielded by redistributing mobile charged particles around it.
 * Debye length – The typical distance in a plasma required for full Debye shielding.
 * Debye model – A model of the heat capacity of solids as a function of temperature
 * Debye – a unit of electric dipole moment
 * Debye frequency – a characteristic vibrational frequency of a crystalline lattice.
 * Debye relaxation – The dielectric relaxation response of an ideal, noninteracting population of dipoles to an alternating external electric field.
 * Debye sheath – The non-neutral layer, several Debye lengths thick, where a plasma contacts a material surface.
 * Debye–Hückel equation – A method of calculating activity coefficients
 * Debye function – A function used in the calculation of heat capacity.
 * Debye–Scherrer method – A technique used in X-ray powder diffraction.
 * Debye–Waller factor – A measure of disorder in a crystal lattice.
 * 30852 Debye – A minor planet (originally named 1991 TR6).
 * Lorenz–Mie–Debye theory Theory of light scattering by a spherical particle.
 * Debye (crater) – A lunar crater located on the far side and in the northern hemisphere of the moon.

title: Peter Debye


text:
The War Game

The War Game is a 1966 British pseudo-documentary film that depicts a nuclear war and its aftermath. Written, directed and produced by Peter Watkins for the BBC, it caused dismay within the BBC and within government, and was withdrawn before the provisional screening date of 6 October 1965. The corporation said that "the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting. It will, however, be shown to invited audiences..."

The film premiered at the National Film Theatre in London, on 13 April 1966, where it ran until 3 May. It was then shown abroad at several film festivals, including Venice where it won the Special Prize. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1967.

The film was eventually televised in Great Britain on 31 July 1985, during the week before the fortieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the day before a repeat screening of Threads.

Synopsis
In an opening text scroll, it is stated that Britain's nuclear deterrent policy threatens a would-be aggressor with devastation from Victor and Vulcan Mk II nuclear bombers of the Royal Air Force. Due to the number of bases for these "V bombers" (particularly in a crisis situation that, the text scroll claims, would see the bombers dispersed throughout Britain), as well as major civilian targets in cities, a narrator claims that the United Kingdom has more potential nuclear weapon targets than any other country in the world.

On Friday, 16 September the UK declares a state of emergency. The Chinese have invaded South Vietnam, and the United States has authorised tactical nuclear warfare there. The Soviets and East Germans threaten to invade West Berlin if the US does not change course.

In Kent, southeast England, homeowners must billet and feed evacuees. Ration cards are issued and the emergency siren system is tested, which it is estimated would provide some 2$1/2$–3 minutes warning until impact, or under thirty seconds in the case of a submarine attack. A run on construction supplies, and price gouging, puts them out of the reach of many citizens.

Conventional warfare breaks out on the inner German border. Two NATO armoured divisions are overwhelmed by Soviet and East German forces, and U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson authorises tactical nuclear weapon use. Honest John missiles are fired. The narrator remarks that many Soviet IRBMs are believed to be stored above ground, making them vulnerable, and the Soviet Union would be obliged to fire all of them at a very early stage to avoid their destruction.

On 18 September at 9:13am, a doctor visits a family in Canterbury. As he is leaving, the air-raid sirens wails, followed by a klaxon from a police car. The doctor rushes back in with two civil defence workers and brings tables together to create a makeshift shelter.

Three minutes later a one-megaton warhead airbursts six miles away. A defence worker and a boy in the yard are struck by the heat wave causing third-degree burns and melting of the eyeballs. Inside, furniture ignites before the shock front hits the house. Rochester is struck by a warhead. The air in the firestorm is replaced by methane, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide, and the temperature rises to 500 degrees. By 10:47 am, British V bombers reach the Soviet Union to inflict the same devastation on that country's cities.

Two bishops state that the faithful must "learn to live with, though need not love, the nuclear bomb".

In the aftermath, each surviving doctor is faced with at least 300 casualties. The worst affected are left to die alone or are shot by armed police, who also shoot looters in hunger riots. There are far too many dead to bury; the bodies are burned. Wedding rings are collected for later identification, a practice seen after the Bombing of Dresden. Infrastructure is destroyed, there is overwhelming radiation sickness, PTSD, and a rising incidence of suicide. As happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many become apathetic and profoundly lethargic, living in their own filth. Civil disturbance is met with execution by firing squad. Sick and wounded orphans are without hope for their future. Society collapses and scurvy sets in.

On Christmas Day a service is held in a refugee compound in Dover. The narrator says there is silence in the press regarding the dangers of nuclear war, even as the stockpile of nuclear weapons grows. "Silent Night" plays over the closing credits.

Style
The story is told in the style of a news magazine programme. It wavers between a pseudo-documentary and a drama film, with characters acknowledging the presence of the camera crew in some segments and others (in particular the nuclear attack) filmed as if the camera was not present. The combination of elements also qualifies it as a mondo film. It features several different strands that alternate throughout, including a documentary-style chronology of the main events, featuring reportage-like images of the war, the nuclear strikes, and their effects on civilians; brief contemporary interviews, in which passers-by are interviewed about what turns out to be their general lack of knowledge of nuclear war issues; optimistic commentary from public figures that clashes with the other images in the film; and fictional interviews with key figures as the war unfolds.

The film features a voice-over narration that describes the events depicted as plausible occurrences during and after a nuclear war. The narration attempts to instil in the viewing audience that the civil defence policies of 1965 have not realistically prepared the public for such events, particularly suggesting that the policies neglected the possibility of panic buying that would occur for building materials to construct improvised fallout shelters.

The public are generally depicted as lacking all understanding of nuclear matters with the exception of a character with a double-barrelled shotgun who successfully implemented the contemporary civil defence advice, and heavily sandbagged his home. The film does not focus on individual experiences, but rather the collective British population, who rely on government preparations and are not fully convinced of the dangers of nuclear war until the final hours before the attack.

Production
Of his intent, Peter Watkins said:

"... Interwoven among scenes of 'reality' were stylized interviews with a series of 'establishment figures' – an Anglican Bishop, a nuclear strategist, etc. The outrageous statements by some of these people (including the Bishop) – in favour of nuclear weapons, even nuclear war – were actually based on genuine quotations. Other interviews with a doctor, a psychiatrist, etc. were more sober, and gave details of the effects of nuclear weapons on the human body and mind. In this film I was interested in breaking the illusion of media-produced 'reality'. My question was – 'Where is 'reality'? ... in the madness of statements by these artificially-lit establishment figures quoting the official doctrine of the day, or in the madness of the staged and fictional scenes from the rest of my film, which presented the consequences of their utterances?"

To this end, the docudrama employs juxtaposition by, for example, quickly cutting from the scenes of horror after an immediate escalation from military to city nuclear attacks to a snippet of a recording of a calm lecture by a person resembling Herman Kahn, a renowned RAND strategist, hypothesizing that a counterforce (military) nuclear war would not necessarily escalate immediately into countervalue-targeted (i.e. civilian-targeted) nuclear war. The effect of this juxtaposition is to make the speaker appear out of touch with the "reality" of rapid escalation, as depicted immediately before his contribution.

The film was shot in the Kent towns of Tonbridge, Gravesend, Chatham and Dover. The cast was almost entirely made up of non-actors, as was Watkins' preference, casting having taken place via a series of public meetings several months earlier. Much of the filming of the post-strike devastation was shot at the Grand Shaft Barracks, Dover. The narration was provided by Peter Graham with Michael Aspel reading the quotations from source material.

Release
The War Game itself finally saw television broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC2 on 31 July 1985, as part of a special season of programming entitled After the Bomb (which had been Watkins's original working title for The War Game). After the Bomb commemorated the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The broadcast was preceded by an introduction from Ludovic Kennedy.

On 27 August 1968, nearly 250 people at a peace rally in the Edwin Lewis Quadrangle in Philadelphia, attended the screening of the film sponsored by the Pennsylvania Coalition. Like the United Kingdom, the film was also banned from National Educational Television in the United States due to its theme.

Reception and legacy
The film holds a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 93% based on 14 reviews, with an average score of 8.46/10.

Roger Ebert gave the film a perfect score, calling it "[o]ne of the most skillful documentary films ever made." He praised the "remarkable authenticity" of the firestorm sequence and describes its portrayal of bombing's aftermath as "certainly the most horrifying ever put on film (although, to be sure, greater suffering has taken place in real life, and is taking place today)." "They should string up bedsheets between the trees and show "The War Game" in every public park" he concludes, "It should be shown on television, perhaps right after one of those half-witted war series in which none of the stars ever gets killed." David Cornelius of DVD Talk called it "one of the most disturbing, overwhelming, and downright important films ever produced." He writes that the film finds Watkins "at his very best, angry and provocative and desperate to tell the truth, yet not once dipping below anything but sheer greatness from a filmmaking perspective [...] an unquestionable masterpiece of raw journalism, political commentary, and unrestrained terror."

Accolades
The film won the 1967 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

In a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes drawn up by the British Film Institute in 2000, voted for by industry professionals, The War Game was placed 27th. The War Game was also voted 74th in Channel Four's 100 Greatest Scary Moments.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: The War Game


text:
Talk:Egg (disambiguation)

Usual sense
Maybe we should have an article on eggs in the usual English sense here, and the gamete bit under ovum. Otherwise, there's no good place to discuss bird eggs, the amniote egg, and so on. Vicki Rosenzweig —Preceding undated comment added 13:01, 30 January 2002 (UTC)

 * Just continue the article. As I originally framed it, it had the technical definition, and then actually talked about the common usage. Sure, the details of gametes should be in an ovum or gamete article, but the distinction between common parlance and technical term needs to be made clear in this article (i.e. suppose a kid's mom is visiting a fertility clinic, and the kid hears a discussion about his mom's "eggs." A kid may not know what a gamete is, but saying the technical definition here and linking to the article about the technical side will help point where to find more info). Basically, I think that the structure is fine (a short, technical clarification, followed by more depth about the common use is perfect for this article, IMHO. --BlackGriffen — Preceding unsigned comment added by 165.123.179.xxx (talk • contribs) 19:09, 1 February 2002 (UTC)

 * On further thought, I decided that the ovum/egg-in-shell pairing doesn't work. For one thing, when fertilized the ovum becomes a zygote; for another, I want to include fish and insect eggs. Much work to follow. Vicki Rosenzweig —Preceding undated comment added 15:43, 25 February 2002 (UTC)

Chinese egg preservation
What in the world is that long paragraph about Chinese egg preservation? - Montréalais 00:51, 14 Sep 2003 (UTC)

 * Exactly my question.
 * From the article:
 * "As much has been said about the mode of preserving eggs, it may not be uninteresting to say a few words about the Chinese methods, as related by a French chemist, M. Paul Champion, who has lately visited that country, and published a very interesting book on the ancient and modern industries of that curious people."
 * Sounds as if it has been copied verbatim from the 1911 Cookery Britannica. --KF 01:46, 6 Jan 2004 (UTC)

 * I say we remove it, or trim it down to the bare minimum. I don't think we need to go into detail about the method here.  We just need to get across the point that "rotten eggs are considered a delicacy in China".  dave 21:54, Feb 13, 2004 (UTC)
 * Why would they eat rotten food? It's fermented stuff like cheese or pickled stuff. - M0rphzone (talk) 05:48, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

Egg proverbs
I also have a problem with these egg proverbs. I have only ever heard of one of them in my life. I think the rest are probably from 1911 as well. dave 21:55, Feb 13, 2004 (UTC)

Weight measurements
"weighs x grams" is fine in informal use for articles like this -- in physics or engineering articles we should make the weight/mass distinction, but the imprecision here due to the lack of distinction is far less than that of approximation, unless you've got a very high gravity gradient across your lab. -- The Anome 15:04, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)
 * Ok. I was the one who added the picture with the caption, and I didn't know if it was ok to write weighs.  Thanks for the help.  (BTW, should I include the english system measurements as well?) --Ed Senft! 15:09, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

True or false??
True or false: it is better to have this article at Egg (disambiguation) and Egg (food) at Egg. 66.245.87.154 01:18, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

 * It would probably be best to have more than one entry. 137.240.136.81 06:57, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

 * I would prefer rather to have Egg (biology) moved here to Egg. --Revolución (talk) 01:59, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

there's some weird dash thing that is clearly not relevant, i dno how ot take it out — Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.53.50.68 (talk) 17:10, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I've cleaned up the page that was left broken with some unreverted vandalism/test edits and previous bad formatting in the early years. - M0rphzone (talk) 05:48, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

Addition
I added The Egg (building).--Scallop 22:29, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

EG&G
Would anyone object to a link to EG&G here? Their website is www.egginc.com, so I could see confusion. Lord Bodak 16:25, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
 * go for it. Jon513 16:58, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Eggs are here song
Eggs, get your eggs here! Fresh and white eggs are here! White shell, yellow middle! That's the best of what you are! Come into my tummy, oh so very yummy! CRACK CRACK CRACK! I love you egg... Come to me! Get your eggs here! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 38.116.200.53 (talk) 15:34, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

^^Lyrics to the 'Eggs are here' music by I.M. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Staka (talk • contribs) 03:09, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

I like eggs, yes I do! I like eggs! How 'bout you! Yes indeedy dandy! WWOOOOHHOOO! Eggs are cool yo! That's all. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.254.231.20 (talk) 02:22, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

 * ^Found the YouTube video on this: egg song - M0rphzone (talk) 05:52, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

geometrical egg
can egg also be considered as a geometrical shape? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 84.197.57.169 (talk) 07:50, 9 March 2007 (UTC).

 * No. "Oval" means egg-shaped (or, loosely, elliptical). 2A00:23C5:FE0C:2100:108D:9A01:C395:E534 (talk) 15:36, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

General Question
What comes first? Chicken or the egg? I say chicken.. It evolved from whatever then layed an egg. Staka2ont) 03:15, 23 July 2007 (UTC).

 * There is an article The chicken or the egg which deals with this question. I don't think that is should be reference in this disambiguation page.  I can't imagine someone typing in "egg" who expected that article. Jon513 10:23, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Vandalism?
I reverted an edit that looked like pure vandalism.

I'm not one of the people working on this article, but I just happened to be visiting this page right after it happened. Finnicks 05:44, 28 August 2007 (UTC)
 * good job. For some reason this page is commonly vandalized.  Jon513 06:26, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Egg carving
I didn't find anything on wikipedia about egg carving, so, if it's interesting for somebody, we can share some information...

My carved eggs gallery: http://public.fotki.com/newballsas/ballsas-carving-eggs/ (log in needed)

my contacts: (english, russian, lithuanian languages)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Egg (biology) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 04:00, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Darning Egg
Does it really belong in science and technology? I think it should be in other uses. AmazinglyLifelike (talk) 14:49, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

 * I agree, and I have moved it there. Adpete (talk) 03:52, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

title: Talk:Egg (disambiguation)


text:
Civil and political rights

Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from infringement by governments, social organizations, and private individuals. They ensure one's entitlement to participate in the civil and political life of society and the state.

Civil rights generally include ensuring peoples' physical and mental integrity, life, and safety, protection from discrimination, the right to privacy, the freedom of thought, speech, religion, press, assembly, and movement.

Political rights include natural justice (procedural fairness) in law, such as the rights of the accused, including the right to a fair trial; due process; the right to seek redress or a legal remedy; and rights of participation in civil society and politics such as freedom of association, the right to assemble, the right to petition, the right of self-defense, and the right to vote.

Civil and political rights form the original and main part of international human rights. They comprise the first portion of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (with economic, social, and cultural rights comprising the second portion). The theory of three generations of human rights considers this group of rights to be "first-generation rights", and the theory of negative and positive rights considers them to be generally negative rights.

History
The phrase "civil rights" is a translation of Latin jus civis (right of the citizen). Roman citizens could be either free (libertas) or servile (servitus), but they all had rights in law. After the Edict of Milan in 313, these rights included the freedom of religion; however, in 380, the Edict of Thessalonica required all subjects of the Roman Empire to profess Catholic Christianity. Roman legal doctrine was lost during the Middle Ages, but claims of universal rights could still be made based on Christian doctrine. According to the leaders of Kett's Rebellion (1549), "all bond men may be made free, for God made all free with his precious blood-shedding."

In the 17th century, English common law judge Sir Edward Coke revived the idea of rights based on citizenship by arguing that Englishmen had historically enjoyed such rights. The Parliament of England adopted the English Bill of Rights in 1689. It was one of the influences drawn on by George Mason and James Madison when drafting the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776. The Virginia declaration heavily influenced the U.S. Bill of Rights (1789).

The removal by legislation of a civil right constitutes a "civil disability". In early 19th century Britain, the phrase "civil rights" most commonly referred to the issue of such legal discrimination against Catholics. In the House of Commons support for civil rights was divided, with many politicians agreeing with the existing civil disabilities of Catholics. The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 restored their civil rights.

In the United States, the term civil rights has been associated with the civil rights movement (1954–1968), which fought against racism.

Protection of rights
T. H. Marshall notes that civil rights were among the first to be recognized and codified, followed later by political rights and still later by social rights. In many countries, they are constitutional rights and are included in a bill of rights or similar document. They are also defined in international human rights instruments, such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Civil and political rights need not be codified to be protected. However, most democracies worldwide do have formal written guarantees of civil and political rights. Civil rights are considered to be natural rights. Thomas Jefferson wrote in his A Summary View of the Rights of British America that "a free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate."

The question of to whom civil and political rights apply is a subject of controversy. Although in many countries citizens have greater protections against infringement of rights than non-citizens, civil and political rights are generally considered to be universal rights that apply to all persons.

According to political scientist Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr., analyzing the causes of and lack of protection from human rights abuses in the Global South should be focusing on the interactions of domestic and international factors—an important perspective that has usually been systematically neglected in the social science literature.

Other rights
Custom also plays a role. Implied or unenumerated rights are rights that courts may find to exist even though not expressly guaranteed by written law or custom; one example is the right to privacy in the United States, and the Ninth Amendment explicitly shows that other rights are also protected.

The United States Declaration of Independence states that people have unalienable rights including "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". It is considered by some that the sole purpose of government is the protection of life, liberty and property.

Some thinkers have argued that the concepts of self-ownership and cognitive liberty affirm rights to choose the food one eats, the medicine one takes,   and the habit one indulges.

Social movements for civil rights
Civil rights guarantee equal protection under the law. When civil and political rights are not guaranteed to all as part of equal protection of laws, or when such guarantees exist on paper but are not respected in practice, opposition, legal action and even social unrest may ensue.

Civil rights movements in the United States gathered steam by 1848 with such documents as the Declaration of Sentiment. Consciously modeled after the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments became the founding document of the American women's movement, and it was adopted at the Seneca Falls Convention, July 19 and 20, 1848.

Worldwide, several political movements for equality before the law occurred between approximately 1950 and 1980. These movements had a legal and constitutional aspect, and resulted in much law-making at both national and international levels. They also had an activist side, particularly in situations where violations of rights were widespread. Movements with the proclaimed aim of securing observance of civil and political rights included:
 * the civil rights movement in the United States, where rights of black citizens had been violated;
 * the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, formed in 1967 following failures in this province of the United Kingdom to respect the Roman Catholic minority's rights; and
 * movements in many Communist countries, such as the Prague Spring and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and the uprisings in Hungary.

Most civil rights movements relied on the technique of civil resistance, using nonviolent methods to achieve their aims. In some countries, struggles for civil rights were accompanied, or followed, by civil unrest and even armed rebellion. While civil rights movements over the last sixty years have resulted in an extension of civil and political rights, the process was long and tenuous in many countries, and many of these movements did not achieve or fully achieve their objectives.

Problems and analysis
Questions about civil and political rights have frequently emerged. For example, to what extent should the government intervene to protect individuals from infringement on their rights by other individuals, or from corporations—e.g., in what way should employment discrimination in the private sector be dealt with?

Political theory deals with civil and political rights. Robert Nozick and John Rawls expressed competing visions in Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia and Rawls' A Theory of Justice. Other influential authors in the area include Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, and Jean Edward Smith.

First-generation rights
First-generation rights, often called "blue" rights, deal essentially with liberty and participation in political life. They are fundamentally civil and political in nature, as well as strongly individualistic: They serve negatively to protect the individual from excesses of the state. First-generation rights include, among other things, freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, (in some countries) the right to keep and bear arms, freedom of religion, freedom from discrimination, and voting rights. They were pioneered in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century during the Age of Enlightenment. Political theories associated with the English, American, and French revolutions were codified in the English Bill of Rights in 1689 (a restatement of Rights of Englishmen, some dating back to Magna Carta in 1215) and more fully in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 and the United States Bill of Rights in 1791.

They were enshrined at the global level and given status in international law first by Articles 3 to 21 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and later in the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In Europe, they were enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights in 1953.

Civil and political rights organizations
There are current organizations that exist to protect people's civil and political rights in case they are infringed upon. The ACLU, founded in 1920, is a well-known non-profit organization that helps to preserve freedom of speech and works to change policy. Another organization is the NAACP, founded in 1909, which focuses on protecting the civil rights of minorities. The NRA is a civil rights group founded in 1871 that primarily focuses on protecting the right to bear arms. These organizations serve a variety of causes, one being the AFL–CIO, which is America's union that represent the working-class people nationwide.

title: Civil and political rights


text:
Russian roulette

Russian roulette (Русская рулетка) is a potentially lethal game of chance in which a player places a single round in a revolver, spins the cylinder, places the muzzle against the head or body (of the opponent or themselves), and pulls the trigger. If the loaded chamber aligns with the barrel, the weapon will fire, killing or severely injuring the player.

Origin
According to Andrew Clarke, the first trace of Russian roulette can be found in the short story "The Fatalist", which was written in 1840 and was part of the collection A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, a Russian poet and writer. In the story, which is set in a Cossack village, the protagonist, Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin, claims that there is no predestination and proposes a bet in order to prove it, laying about twenty gold pieces onto a table. A lieutenant of the dragoons of the Tsar, Vulič, a man of Serbian origins with a passion for gambling, accepts the challenge and randomly takes one of a number of pistols of various calibres from its nail, cocks it and pours gunpowder onto the pan. Nobody knows if the pistol is loaded or not. "Gentlemen! Who will pay 20 gold pieces for me?", Vulič asks, putting the muzzle of the pistol to his forehead. He then asks Grigory to throw a playing card in the air, and when the card lands, he pulls the trigger. The weapon fails to fire, but when Vulič cocks the pistol again and aims it at a service cap hanging over the window, a shot rings out and smoke fills the room.

Etymology
The term Russian roulette was possibly first used in a 1937 short story of the same name by Georges Surdez, published in the January 30, 1937, edition of Collier's magazine: "'Did you ever hear of Russian Roulette?' When I said I had not, he told me all about it. When he was with the Russian army in Rumania [sic], around 1917, and things were cracking up, so that their officers felt that they were not only losing prestige, money, family, and country, but were being also dishonored before their colleagues of the Allied armies, some officer would suddenly pull out his revolver, anywhere, at the table, in a café, at a gathering of friends, remove a cartridge from the cylinder, spin the cylinder, snap it back in place, put it to his head and pull the trigger. There were five chances to one that the hammer would set off a live cartridge and blow his brains all over the place."

References to the term in the context of the Collier's story appeared in some newspapers during 1937. The first independent appearances of the term in newspapers began in 1938 with the reports of young men being killed while playing it. The earliest instance appears to have been the death of a 21-year-old former journalism student in Austin, Texas, appearing in The Austin Statesman and some other Texas newspapers on January 8, 1938. At least four other deaths were attributed to Russian roulette during the year: a 34-year-old policeman in Peoria, Illinois, a 20-year-old in Houston, an 18-year-old in Saratoga Springs, New York, and a 16-year-old in Los Angeles.

Subsequently, the term became a metaphor for taking foolhardy risks and its usage steadily increased in reportage of diplomacy, politics, economics, medicine and sports.

Probability
Calculations in this section is based on the use of a six-shot revolver with a single chamber loaded. Abnormal factors, such as the possibility of a dud round, are not included.

Variant: revolver re-spun after each trigger pull
With this variant, turn order is essential, because the probability of losing decreases the later one's turn is.

Given a six-shot revolver, for any given single trial (pull), the probability of losing is $$\tfrac 16 \approx 16.7\%$$. However, since all players only come into the game if and when each of the players before them has caught an empty chamber, the all-game loss probability for player $$k$$ (starting from 0) is reduced to $$(\tfrac 56)^{k} \cdot\tfrac 1 6$$. The all-game loss probabilities for each of the six players are hence, in order, $$16.7\%$$, $$13.9\%$$, $$11.6\%$$, $$9.6\%$$, $$8.0\%$$, and $$6.7\%$$ to one decimal place. More generally, for a revolver with $$n$$ chambers, player $$k$$'s all-game loss probability is $$(\tfrac{n-1}{n})^{k}\cdot\tfrac {1}{n}$$.

The probability of the revolver having fired after six pulls is $$1-(\tfrac{5}{6})^6$$, or about $$66.5\%$$. More generally, for a revolver with $$n$$ chambers, the probability of the revolver having fired after $$k$$ pulls is $$1-(\tfrac{n-1}{n})^k$$, as this would be an instance of a geometric distribution where the success probability is $$\tfrac{1}{n}$$.

The average number of pulls for the gun to fire is $$n$$ in this variant (six pulls, for a six-shot revolver).

Variant: revolver only spun once at the start
With this variant, turn order has no effect on the all-game loss probability, which remains the same for all players, but influences the single-pull probability, which increases with each pull.

Given a six-shot revolver, at pull $$k$$ (starting from 0), the fact that all $$k$$ previously tested chambers were empty reduces the total number of possible locations of the bullet to $${6-k}$$, and the loss probability is therefore $$\tfrac{1}{6-k}$$. The single-pull loss probabilities for each of the six players are hence, in order, $$16.7\%$$, $$20\%$$, $$25\%$$, $$33.3\%$$, $$50\%$$, and $$100\%$$ to 1 decimal place. More generally, for a revolver with $$n$$ chambers, the loss probability at pull $$k$$ (starting from 0) is $$\tfrac{1}{n-k}$$.

However, since, like in the re-spinning variant, all players only come into the game if and when each of the players before them has caught an empty chamber, the all-game loss probability for player $$k$$ is

$$\tfrac {1}{n-k} \cdot \prod_{i=0}^{k-1} \frac {n-i-1}{n-i} = \frac {\cancel {n-1}}{n} \cdot \frac {n-2}{\cancel {n-1}} \cdot ... \cdot \frac {\cancel {n-k}}{\cancel {n-k-1}} \cdot \frac {1}{\cancel {n-k}} = \frac {1}{6} \approx 16.7\% $$

for $$k>0$$ and $$\frac {1}{n-k} = \frac {1}{6} \approx 16.7\%$$ for $$k=0$$. Hence, the all-game loss probability for all players is $$16.7\%$$ to 1 decimal place.

The probability of the revolver having fired after six pulls is $$\tfrac 66$$ or $$100\%$$ in this variant (meaning the revolver will fire within six trigger pulls). And, more generally, after $$k$$ pulls, it is $$\tfrac{k}{n}$$.

The average number of pulls for the gun to fire is $$\tfrac{n+1}{2}$$ in this variant (3.5 pulls, for a six-shot revolver).

Notable incidents

 * An American Institute of Physics profile of William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, claims that he attempted suicide by playing a solo game of Russian roulette.
 * In a 1946 U.S. legal case, Commonwealth v. Malone, 47 A.2d 445 (1946), a Pennsylvania teenager's conviction for murder in the second degree as a result of shooting a friend was upheld by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. In this case, the teenagers involved played a modified version of Russian roulette, called Russian poker, in which they took turns aiming and pulling the trigger of the revolver at each other, rather than at their own heads. The court ruled that "When an individual commits an act of gross recklessness without regard to the probability that death to another is likely to result, that individual exhibits the state of mind required to uphold a conviction of manslaughter even if the individual did not intend for death to ensue."
 * On 25 December 1954, American blues musician Johnny Ace killed himself in Texas, after a gun he pointed at his own head discharged. A report in The Washington Post attributed this to Russian roulette, but this was disputed by two witnesses.
 * Graham Greene related in his first autobiography, A Sort of Life (1971), that he played Russian roulette, alone, a few times as a teenager.
 * Malcolm X, in his 1965 autobiography, recalls an incident during his burglary career when he once played Russian roulette, pulling the trigger three times in a row to convince his partners in crime that he was not afraid to die. In the epilogue to the book, Alex Haley states that Malcolm X revealed to him that he palmed the round. The incident is portrayed in Spike Lee’s 1992 film adaptation of the autobiography.
 * In 1972, under the influence of alcohol and cocaine, the French singer and actor Johnny Hallyday played multiple games of Russian roulette with his mistress, the American singer and actress Nanette Workman. Laeticia Smet, his last wife, revealed in 2018 that he "has done this several times. But that was a long time ago ... At the time, he was playing with his destiny".
 * On 24 July 1973, Dallas Police Officer Darrell L. Cain murdered Santos Rodriguez, a 12-year-old Mexican-American child, while interrogating him and his brother about a burglary. Cain shot Rodriguez after spinning the cylinder of his revolver, Russian roulette-style, in an effort to force a confession.
 * On 10 September 1976, Finnish magician Aimo Leikas killed himself in front of a crowd while performing his Russian roulette act in Hartola. He had been performing the act for about a year, selecting six bullets from a box of assorted live and dummy ammunition.
 * The 1978 film The Deer Hunter depicts captured South Vietnamese and American soldiers being forced to play Russian roulette as their Viet Cong captors bet on who will survive. Several teen deaths following the movie's release caused both police and the media to accuse the film of inspiring the youths.
 * John Hinckley Jr., who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981, was known to have played Russian roulette, alone, on two occasions. Hinckley also took a picture of himself in 1980 in which he pointed a gun at his head.
 * On 12 October 1984, while waiting for filming to resume on Cover Up (1985), actor Jon-Erik Hexum played Russian roulette with a .44 Magnum revolver loaded with a blank. The blast fractured his skull and caused massive cerebral hemorrhaging when bone fragments were forced through his brain. He was rushed to Beverly Hills Medical Center, where he was pronounced brain-dead.
 * On 10 July 1993, former French rugby union player Armand Vaquerin died during a “demonstration” of Russian roulette in the Béziers bar “le bar des Amis” on avenue Gambetta.
 * On 5 October 2003, psychological illusionist Derren Brown appeared to take part in a game of Russian roulette live on UK television. Two days later, a statement by the police said they had been informed of the arrangements in advance, and were satisfied that "There was no live ammunition involved and at no time was anyone at risk."
 * The BBC program Who Do You Think You Are?, on 13 September 2010, featured the actor Alan Cumming investigating his grandfather Tommy Darling, who he discovered had died playing Russian roulette while serving as a police officer in British Malaya. The family had previously believed he had died accidentally while cleaning his gun.
 * On 11 June 2016, MMA fighter Ivan "JP" Cole apparently killed himself by playing Russian roulette.

Russian roulette in art

 * In literature In the chapter "Fatalist" of M. Y. Lermontov's novel "A Hero of Our Time", a bet is described that vaguely resembles Russian roulette: a single-shot pistol with a flintlock is used, the debaters do not know for sure whether it is loaded; in addition, flintlock weapons are characterized by fairly frequent misfires.
 * In the work "Azazel" by B. Akunin, in chapter five, the bet "American roulette" is mentioned, but the conditions of the bet are the same as the conditions of the game "Russian roulette", with minor additions, two revolvers are used in the bet and each duelist plays with his own weapon, continuing until a shot is fired.
 * "Russian Roulette" is the title of a book about the war in Afghanistan by journalist and writer Gennady Bocharov, which also touches on the topic that "American roulette" thanks to the dueling heroes "Azazel", Akhtyrtsev and Kokorin will be renamed "Russian Roulette". The book was written by order of the English publishing house Hamish Hamilton in 1989, and has since been published.

Drinking games
There is a drinking game based on Russian roulette. The game involves six shot glasses filled by a non-player: five are filled with water, but the sixth with vodka. Among some groups, low quality vodka is preferred, as it makes the glass representing the filled chamber less desirable. The glasses are arranged in a circle, and players take turns choosing a glass to take a shot from at random.

There is also a game called "Beer Hunter" (titled after the Russian roulette scenes in the film The Deer Hunter). In this game, six cans of beer are placed between the participants: one can is vigorously shaken, and the cans are scrambled. The participants take turns opening the cans of beer right under their noses; the person who opens the shaken can (and thus sprays beer up their nose) is deemed the loser.

Both are non-lethal compared to the game with the firearm which is almost always lethal.

title: Russian roulette


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Civil disobedience

Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws, demands, orders or commands of a government (or any other authority). By some definitions, civil disobedience has to be nonviolent to be called "civil". Hence, civil disobedience is sometimes equated with peaceful protests or nonviolent resistance. Henry David Thoreau's essay Resistance to Civil Government, published posthumously as Civil Disobedience, popularized the term in the US, although the concept itself has been practiced longer before.

Various forms of civil disobedience have been used by prominent activists such as American women's suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony in the late 19th century, Egyptian nationalist Saad Zaghloul during the 1910s, and Indian nationalist Mahatma Gandhi in 1920s British India as part of his leadership of the Indian independence movement. Martin Luther King Jr.'s and James Bevel's peaceful protests during the civil rights movement in the 1960s United States contained important aspects of civil disobedience. Although civil disobedience is rarely justifiable in court, King regarded civil disobedience to be a display and practice of reverence for law: "Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law."

History
An early depiction of civil disobedience is in Sophocles' play Antigone, in which Antigone, one of the daughters of former King of Thebes, Oedipus, defies Creon, the current King of Thebes, who is trying to stop her from giving her brother Polynices a proper burial. She gives a stirring speech in which she tells him that she must obey her conscience rather than human law. She is not at all afraid of the death he threatens her with (and eventually carries out), but she is afraid of how her conscience will smite her if she does not do this.

Conrad Grebel and Anabaptists advocated civil disobedience to oppression. Étienne de La Boétie's thought developed in his work Discours de la servitude volontaire ou le Contr'un (1552) was also taken up by many movements of civil disobedience, which drew from the concept of rebellion to voluntary servitude the foundation of its instrument of struggle. Étienne de La Boétie was one of the first to theorize and propose the strategy of non-cooperation, and thus a form of nonviolent disobedience, as a really effective weapon.

In the lead-up to the Glorious Revolution in Britain—when the 1689 Bill of Rights was documented, the last Catholic monarch was deposed, and male and female joint-co-monarchs elevated—the English Midland Enlightenment developed a manner of voicing objection to a law viewed as illegitimate and then taking the consequences of the law. (For example, they might refuse to swear allegiance to the king, and, as a consequence, accept the prison sentence legally and normally meted out to people who refused to take this oath.) This was focused on the illegitimacy of laws claimed to be "divine" in origin, both the "divine rights of kings" and "divine rights of man", and the legitimacy of laws acknowledged to be made by human beings.

Following the Peterloo massacre of 1819, the poet Percy Shelley wrote the political poem The Mask of Anarchy later that year, that begins with the images of what he thought to be the unjust forms of authority of his time—and then imagines the stirrings of a new form of social action. According to Ashton Nichols, it is perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of nonviolent protest. A version was taken up by the author Henry David Thoreau in his essay Civil Disobedience, and later by Gandhi in his doctrine of Satyagraha. Gandhi's Satyagraha was partially influenced and inspired by Shelley's nonviolence in protest and political action. In particular, it is known that Gandhi often quoted Shelley's Mask of Anarchy to vast audiences during the campaign for a free India.

Thoreau's 1849 essay Civil Disobedience, originally titled "Resistance to Civil Government", has had a wide influence on many later practitioners of civil disobedience. The driving idea behind the essay is that citizens are morally responsible for their support of aggressors, even when such support is required by law. In the essay, Thoreau explained his reasons for having refused to pay taxes as an act of protest against slavery and against the Mexican–American War. He writes,

"If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too. See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say, 'I should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico;—see if I would go;' and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute."

By the 1850s, a range of minority groups in the United States: African Americans, Jews, Seventh Day Baptists, Catholics, anti-prohibitionists, racial egalitarians, and others—employed civil disobedience to combat a range of legal measures and public practices that to them promoted ethnic, religious, and racial discrimination. Pro Public and typically peaceful resistance to political power remained an integral tactic in modern American minority rights politics.

In Ireland starting from 1879 the Irish "Land War" intensified when Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell, in a speech in Ennis proposed that when dealing with tenants who take farms where another tenant was evicted, rather than resorting to violence, everyone in the locality should shun them. Following this Captain Charles Boycott, the land agent of an absentee landlord in County Mayo, Ireland, was subject to social ostracism organized by the Irish Land League in 1880. Boycott attempted to evict eleven tenants from his land. While Parnell's speech did not refer to land agents or landlords, the tactic was applied to Boycott when the alarm was raised about the evictions. Despite the short-term economic hardship to those undertaking this action, Boycott soon found himself isolated – his workers stopped work in the fields and stables, as well as in his house. Local businessmen stopped trading with him, and the local postman refused to deliver mail. The movement spread throughout Ireland and gave rise to the term to Boycott, and eventually led to legal reform and support for Irish independence.

Egypt saw a massive implementation on a nation-wide movement starting 1914 and peaking in 1919 as the Egyptian Revolution of 1919. This was then adopted by other peoples who campaigned against European colonial rule from 1920 onwards. Zaghloul Pasha, considered the mastermind behind this massive civil disobedience, was a native middle-class, Azhar graduate, political activist, judge, parliamentary and ex-cabinet minister whose leadership brought Christian and Muslim communities together as well as women into the massive protests. Along with his companions of Wafd Party, who have achieved an independence of Egypt and a first constitution in 1923. Civil disobedience is one of the many ways people have revolted against what they deem to be unfair laws. It has been used in many nonviolent resistance movements in India (Mahatma Gandhi's campaigns for independence from the British Empire), in Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, in early stages of the Bangladeshi independence movement against Pakistani colonialism and in East Germany to oust their Stalinist government. In South Africa during the leftist campaign against the far-right Apartheid regime, in the American civil rights movement against Jim Crow laws, in the Singing Revolution to bring independence to the Baltic countries from the Soviet Union, and more recently with the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2013–2014 Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine,  the 2016–2017 Candlelight Revolution in South Korea, and the 2020–2021 Belarusian protests, among many other various movements worldwide.

Etymology

Henry David Thoreau's 1849 essay "Resistance to Civil Government" was eventually renamed "Essay on Civil Disobedience". After his landmark lectures were published in 1866, the term began to appear in numerous sermons and lectures relating to slavery and the war in Mexico. Thus, by the time Thoreau's lectures were first published under the title "Civil Disobedience", in 1866, four years after his death, the term had achieved fairly widespread usage.

It has been argued that the term "civil disobedience" has always suffered from ambiguity and in modern times, become utterly debased. Marshall Cohen notes, "It has been used to describe everything from bringing a test-case in the federal courts to taking aim at a federal official. Indeed, for Vice President Spiro Agnew it has become a code-word describing the activities of muggers, arsonists, draft evaders, campaign hecklers, campus militants, anti-war demonstrators, juvenile delinquents and political assassins."

LeGrande writes that "the formulation of a single all-encompassing definition of the term is extremely difficult, if not impossible. In reviewing the voluminous literature on the subject, the student of civil disobedience rapidly finds himself surrounded by a maze of semantical problems and grammatical niceties. Like Alice in Wonderland, he often finds that specific terminology has no more (or no less) meaning than the individual orator intends it to have." He encourages a distinction between lawful protest demonstration, nonviolent civil disobedience, and violent civil disobedience.

In a letter to P. K. Rao, dated 10 September 1935, Gandhi disputes that his idea of civil disobedience was derived from the writings of Thoreau:

"The statement that I had derived my idea of Civil Disobedience from the writings of Thoreau is wrong. The resistance to authority in South Africa was well advanced before I got the essay ... When I saw the title of Thoreau's great essay, I began to use his phrase to explain our struggle to the English readers. But I found that even 'Civil Disobedience' failed to convey the full meaning of the struggle. I therefore adopted the phrase 'Civil Resistance.'"

Theories
In seeking an active form of civil disobedience, one may choose to deliberately break certain laws, such as by forming a peaceful blockade or occupying a facility illegally, though sometimes violence has been known to occur. Often there is an expectation to be attacked or even beaten by the authorities. Protesters often undergo training in advance on how to react to arrest or to attack.

Civil disobedience is usually defined as pertaining to a citizen's relation to the state and its laws, as distinguished from a constitutional impasse, in which two public agencies, especially two equally sovereign branches of government, conflict. For instance, if the head of government of a country were to refuse to enforce a decision of that country's highest court, it would not be civil disobedience, since the head of government would act in his or her capacity as public official rather than private citizen.

This definition is disputed by Thoreau's political philosophy on the conscience vs. the collective. The person is the final judge of right and wrong. More than this, since only people act, only a person can act unjustly. When the government knocks on the door, it is a person in the form of a postman or tax collector whose hand hits the wood. Before Thoreau's imprisonment, when a confused taxman had wondered aloud about how to handle his refusal to pay, Thoreau had advised, "Resign". If a man chose to be an agent of injustice, then Thoreau insisted on confronting him with the fact that he was making a choice. He admits that government may express the will of the majority but it may also express nothing more than the will of elite politicians. Even a good form of government is "liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it". If a government did express the voice of most people, this would not compel the obedience of those who disagree with what is said. The majority may be powerful but it is not necessarily right.

In his 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, John Rawls described civil disobedience as "a public, non-violent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the aim of bringing about change in the law or policies of the government".

Ronald Dworkin held that there are three types of civil disobedience:
 * "Integrity-based" civil disobedience occurs when a citizen disobeys a law they feel is immoral, as in the case of abolitionists disobeying the fugitive slave laws by refusing to turn over escaped slaves to authorities.
 * "Justice-based" civil disobedience occurs when a citizen disobeys laws to lay claim to some right denied to them, as when Black people illegally protested during the civil rights movement.
 * "Policy-based" civil disobedience occurs when a person breaks the law to change a policy they believe is dangerously wrong.

Some theories of civil disobedience hold that civil disobedience is only justified against governmental entities. Brownlee argues that disobedience in opposition to the decisions of non-governmental agencies such as trade unions, banks, and private universities can be justified if it reflects "a larger challenge to the legal system that permits those decisions to be taken". The same principle, she argues, applies to breaches of law in protest against international organizations and foreign governments.

It is usually recognized that lawbreaking, if it is not done publicly, at least must be publicly announced to constitute civil disobedience. But Stephen Eilmann argues that if it is necessary to disobey rules that conflict with morality, we might ask why disobedience should take the form of public civil disobedience rather than simply covert lawbreaking. If a lawyer wishes to help a client overcome legal obstacles to securing their natural rights, he might, for instance, find that assisting in fabricating evidence or committing perjury is more effective than open disobedience. This assumes that common morality does not have a prohibition on deceit in such situations. The Fully Informed Jury Association's publication "A Primer for Prospective Jurors" notes, "Think of the dilemma faced by German citizens when Hitler's secret police demanded to know if they were hiding a Jew in their house." By this definition, civil disobedience could be traced back to the Book of Exodus, where Shiphrah and Puah refused a direct order of Pharaoh but misrepresented how they did it. (Exodus 1: 15–19)

Violent vs. nonviolent
There have been debates as to whether civil disobedience must necessarily be non-violent. Black's Law Dictionary includes nonviolence in its definition of civil disobedience. Christian Bay's encyclopedia article states that civil disobedience requires "carefully chosen and legitimate means", but holds that they do not have to be non-violent. It has been argued that, while both civil disobedience and civil rebellion are justified by appeal to constitutional defects, rebellion is much more destructive; therefore, the defects justifying rebellion must be much more serious than those justifying disobedience, and if one cannot justify civil rebellion, then one cannot justify a civil disobedient's use of force and violence and refusal to submit to arrest. Civil disobedients' refraining from violence is also said to help preserve society's tolerance of civil disobedience.

The philosopher H. J. McCloskey argues that "if violent, intimidatory, coercive disobedience is more effective, it is, other things being equal, more justified than less effective, nonviolent disobedience." In his best-selling Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies on Law and Order, Howard Zinn takes a similar position; Zinn states that while the goals of civil disobedience are generally nonviolent,

"in the inevitable tension accompanying the transition from a violent world to a non-violent one, the choice of means will almost never be pure, and will involve such complexities that the simple distinction between violence and non-violence does not suffice as a guide ... the very acts with which we seek to do good cannot escape the imperfections of the world we are trying to change."

Zinn rejects any "easy and righteous dismissal of violence", noting that Thoreau, the popularizer of the term civil disobedience, approved of the armed insurrection of John Brown. He also notes that some major civil disobedience campaigns which have been classified as non-violent, such as the Birmingham campaign, have actually included elements of violence.

Revolutionary vs. non-revolutionary
Non-revolutionary civil disobedience is a simple disobedience of laws on the grounds that they are judged "wrong" by a person's conscience, or as part of an effort to render certain laws ineffective, to cause their repeal, or to exert pressure to get one's political wishes on some other issue. Revolutionary civil disobedience is more of an active attempt to overthrow a government (or to change cultural traditions, social customs or religious beliefs). Revolution does not have to be political, i.e. "cultural revolution", it simply implies sweeping and widespread change to a section of the social fabric. Gandhi's acts have been described as revolutionary civil disobedience. It has been claimed that the Hungarians under Ferenc Deák directed revolutionary civil disobedience against the Austrian government. Thoreau also wrote of civil disobedience accomplishing "peaceable revolution". Howard Zinn, Harvey Wheeler, and others have identified the right espoused in the US Declaration of Independence to "alter or abolish" an unjust government to be a principle of civil disobedience.

Collective vs. solitary
The earliest recorded incidents of collective civil disobedience took place during the Roman Empire. Unarmed Jews gathered in the streets to prevent the installation of pagan images in the Temple in Jerusalem. In modern times, some activists who commit civil disobedience as a group collectively refuse to sign bail until certain demands are met, such as favourable bail conditions, or the release of all the activists. This is a form of jail solidarity. There have also been many instances of solitary civil disobedience, such as that committed by Thoreau, but these sometimes go unnoticed. Thoreau, at the time of his arrest, was not yet a well-known author, and his arrest was not covered in any newspapers in the days, weeks and months after it happened. The tax collector who arrested him rose to higher political office, and Thoreau's essay was not published until after the end of the Mexican War.

Action
Civil disobedients have chosen a variety of different illegal acts. Hugo A. Bedau writes, "There is a whole class of acts, undertaken in the name of civil disobedience, which, even if they were widely practiced, would in themselves constitute hardly more than a nuisance (e.g. trespassing at a nuclear-missile installation) ... Such acts are often just a harassment and, at least to the bystander, somewhat inane ... The remoteness of the connection between the disobedient act and the objectionable law lays such acts open to the charge of ineffectiveness and absurdity." Bedau also notes, though, that the very harmlessness of such entirely symbolic illegal protests toward public policy goals may serve a propaganda purpose. Some civil disobedients, such as the proprietors of illegal medical cannabis dispensaries and Voice in the Wilderness, which brought medicine to Iraq without the permission of the US government, directly achieve a desired social goal (such as the provision of medication to the sick) while openly breaking the law. Julia Butterfly Hill lived in Luna, a 180 ft-tall, 600-year-old California Redwood tree for 738 days, preventing its felling.

In cases where the criminalized behaviour is pure speech, civil disobedience can consist simply of engaging in the forbidden speech. An example is WBAI's broadcasting of the bit "Filthy Words" from a George Carlin comedy album, which eventually led to the 1978 Supreme Court case of FCC v. Pacifica Foundation. Threatening government officials is a way to express defiance toward the government and unwillingness to stand for its policies. For example, a supporter of some tax deniers in New Hampshire, Edward and Elaine Brown, was arrested for allegedly telling the local city councillors to "Wise up or die."

More generally, protesters of particular victimless crimes often see fit to openly commit that crime. Laws against public nudity, for instance, have been protested by going naked in public, and laws against cannabis consumption have been protested by openly possessing it and using it at cannabis rallies.

Some forms of civil disobedience, such as illegal boycotts, refusals to pay taxes, draft dodging, distributed denial-of-service attacks, and sit-ins, make it more difficult for a system to function. In this way, they might be considered coercive; coercive disobedience has the effect of exposing the enforcement of laws and policies, and it has even operated as an aesthetic strategy in contemporary art practice. Brownlee notes that "although civil disobedients are constrained in their use of coercion by their conscientious aim to engage in moral dialogue, nevertheless they may find it necessary to employ limited coercion to get their issue onto the table". The Plowshares organization temporarily closed GCSB Waihopai by padlocking the gates and using sickles to deflate one of the large domes covering two satellite dishes.

Electronic civil disobedience can include web site defacements, redirects, denial-of-service attacks, information theft and data leaks, illegal web site parodies, virtual sit-ins, and virtual sabotage. It is distinct from other kinds of hacktivism in that the perpetrator openly reveals his identity. Virtual actions rarely succeed in completely shutting down their targets, but they often generate media attention.

Dilemma actions are designed to create a "response dilemma" for public authorities "by forcing them to either concede some public space to protesters or make themselves look absurd or heavy-handed by acting against the protest."

Compliance
Some disciplines of civil disobedience hold that the protester must submit to arrest and cooperate with the authorities. Others advocate falling limp or resisting arrest, especially when it will hinder the police from effectively responding to a mass protest.

Many of the same decisions and principles that apply in other criminal investigations and arrests arise also in civil disobedience cases. For example, the suspect may need to decide whether to grant a consent search of his property, and whether to talk to police officers. It is generally agreed within the legal community, and is often believed within the activist community, that a suspect's talking to criminal investigators can serve no useful purpose, and may be harmful. Some civil disobedients are compelled to respond to investigators' questions, sometimes by a misunderstanding of the legal ramifications or a fear of seeming rude. Also, some civil disobedients seek to use the arrest as an opportunity to make an impression on the officers. Thoreau wrote, "My civil neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man I have to deal with—for it is, after all, with men and not with parchment that I quarrel—and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government. How shall he ever know well that he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he will treat me, his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighbor and well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and see if he can get over this obstruction to his neighborliness without a ruder and more impetuous thought or speech corresponding with his action."

Some civil disobedients feel it is incumbent upon them to accept punishment because of their belief in the validity of the social contract, which is held to bind all to obey the laws that a government meeting certain standards of legitimacy has established, or else suffer the penalties set out in the law. Other civil disobedients who favour the existence of government still do not believe in the legitimacy of their particular government or do not believe in the legitimacy of a particular law it has enacted. Anarchistic civil disobedients do not believe in the legitimacy of any government, so see no need to accept punishment for a violation of criminal law.

Plea
An important decision for civil disobedients is whether to plead guilty. There is much debate on this point, as some believe that it is a civil disobedient's duty to submit to the punishment prescribed by law, while others believe that defending oneself in court will increase the possibility of changing the unjust law. It has also been argued that either choice is compatible with the spirit of civil disobedience. ACT UP's Civil Disobedience Training handbook states that a civil disobedient who pleads guilty is essentially stating, "Yes, I committed the act of which you accuse me. I don't deny it; in fact, I am proud of it. I feel I did the right thing by violating this particular law; I am guilty as charged", but that pleading not guilty sends a message of, "Guilt implies wrong-doing. I feel I have done no wrong. I may have violated some specific laws, but I am guilty of doing no wrong. I, therefore, plead not guilty." A plea of no contest is sometimes regarded as a compromise between the two. One defendant accused of illegally protesting nuclear power, when asked to enter his plea, stated, "I plead for the beauty that surrounds us"; this is known as a "creative plea", and will usually be interpreted as a plea of not guilty.

When the Committee for Non-Violent Action sponsored a protest in August 1957, at the Camp Mercury nuclear test site near Las Vegas, Nevada, 13 of the protesters attempted to enter the test site knowing that they faced arrest. At an announced time, one by one they crossed a line and were immediately arrested. They were put on a bus and taken to the Nye County seat of Tonopah, Nevada, and arraigned for trial before the local Justice of the Peace, that afternoon. A civil rights attorney, Francis Heisler, had volunteered to defend the accused, advising them to plead nolo contendere rather than guilty or not guilty. They were found guilty and given suspended sentences, conditional on not reentering the test site.

Howard Zinn writes, "There may be many times when protesters choose to go to jail, as a way of continuing their protest, as a way of reminding their countrymen of injustice. But that is different than the notion that they must go to jail as part of a rule connected with civil disobedience. The key point is that the spirit of protest should be maintained all the way, whether it is done by remaining in jail, or by evading it. To accept jail penitently as an accession to 'the rules' is to switch suddenly to a spirit of subservience, to demean the seriousness of the protest ... In particular, the neo-conservative insistence on a guilty plea should be eliminated."

Sometimes the prosecution proposes a plea bargain to civil disobedients, as in the case of the Camden 28, in which the defendants were offered an opportunity to plead guilty to one misdemeanour count and receive no jail time. In some mass arrest situations, the activists decide to use solidarity tactics to secure the same plea bargain for everyone. But some activists have opted to enter a blind plea, pleading guilty without any plea agreement in place. Mahatma Gandhi pleaded guilty and told the court, "I am here to ... submit cheerfully to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen."

Allocution
Some civil disobedience defendants choose to make a defiant speech, or a speech explaining their actions, in allocution. In U.S. v. Burgos-Andujar, a defendant who was involved in a movement to stop military exercises by trespassing on US Navy property argued to the court in allocution that "the ones who are violating the greater law are the members of the Navy". As a result, the judge increased her sentence from 40 to 60 days. This action was upheld because, according to the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, her statement suggested a lack of remorse, an attempt to avoid responsibility for her actions, and even a likelihood of repeating her illegal actions. Some of the other allocution speeches given by the protesters complained about mistreatment from government officials.

Tim DeChristopher gave an allocution statement to the court describing the US as "a place where the rule of law was created through acts of civil disobedience" and arguing, "Since those bedrock acts of civil disobedience by our founding fathers, the rule of law in this country has continued to grow closer to our shared higher moral code through the civil disobedience that drew attention to legalized injustice."

Legal implications
Steven Barkan writes that if defendants plead not guilty, "they must decide whether their primary goal will be to win an acquittal and avoid imprisonment or a fine, or to use the proceedings as a forum to inform the jury and the public of the political circumstances surrounding the case and their reasons for breaking the law via civil disobedience." A technical defence may enhance the chances for acquittal but increase the possibility of additional proceedings and of reduced press coverage. During the Vietnam War era, the Chicago Eight used a political defence, but Benjamin Spock used a technical defence. In countries such as the United States, whose laws guarantee the right to a jury trial but do not excuse lawbreaking for political purposes, some civil disobedients seek jury nullification. Over the years, this has been made more difficult by court decisions such as Sparf v. United States, which held that the judge need not inform jurors of their nullification prerogative, and United States v. Dougherty, which held that the judge need not allow defendants to openly seek jury nullification.

Governments have generally not recognized the legitimacy of civil disobedience or viewed political objectives as an excuse for breaking the law. Specifically, the law usually distinguishes between criminal motive and criminal intent; the offender's motives or purposes may be admirable and praiseworthy, but his intent may still be criminal. Hence the saying that "if there is any possible justification of civil disobedience it must come from outside the legal system."

One theory is that, while disobedience may be helpful, any great amount of it undermines the law by encouraging general disobedience which is neither conscientious nor of social benefit. Therefore, conscientious lawbreakers must be punished. Michael Bayles argues that if a person violates a law to create a test case as to the constitutionality of a law, and then wins his case, then that act did not constitute civil disobedience. It has also been argued that breaking the law for self-gratification, as in the case of a cannabis user who does not direct his act at securing the repeal of amendment of the law, is not civil disobedience. Likewise, a protester who attempts to escape punishment by committing the crime covertly and avoiding attribution, or by denying having committed the crime, or by fleeing the jurisdiction, is generally not called a civil disobedient.

Courts have distinguished between two types of civil disobedience: "Indirect civil disobedience involves violating a law which is not, itself, the object of protest, whereas direct civil disobedience involves protesting the existence of a particular law by breaking that law." During the Vietnam War, courts typically refused to excuse the perpetrators of illegal protests from punishment on the basis of their challenging the legality of the Vietnam War; the courts ruled it was a political question. The necessity defence has sometimes been used as a shadow defence by civil disobedients to deny guilt without denouncing their politically motivated acts, and to present their political beliefs in the courtroom. Court cases such as United States v. Schoon have greatly curtailed the availability of the political necessity defence. Likewise, when Carter Wentworth was charged for his role in the Clamshell Alliance's 1977 illegal occupation of the Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant, the judge instructed the jury to disregard his competing harms defence, and he was found guilty. Fully Informed Jury Association activists have sometimes handed out educational leaflets inside courthouses despite admonitions not to; according to the association, many of them have escaped prosecution because "prosecutors have reasoned (correctly) that if they arrest fully informed jury leafleters, the leaflets will have to be given to the leafleter's own jury as evidence."

Along with giving the offender his just deserts, achieving crime control via incapacitation and deterrence is a major goal of criminal punishment. Brownlee argues, "Bringing in deterrence at the level of justification detracts from the law's engagement in a moral dialogue with the offender as a rational person because it focuses attention on the threat of punishment and not the moral reasons to follow this law." British judge Lord Hoffman writes, "In deciding whether or not to impose punishment, the most important consideration would be whether it would do more harm than good. This means that the objector has no right not to be punished. It is a matter for the state (including the judges) to decide on utilitarian grounds whether to do so or not." Hoffman also asserted that while the "rules of the game" for protesters were to remain non-violent while breaking the law, the authorities must recognize that demonstrators are acting out of their conscience in pursuit of democracy. "When it comes to punishment, the court should take into account their personal convictions", he said.

title: Civil disobedience