In our present age of permanent war, it is almost impossible to recall a time when armed conflicts clearly began and ended. In that ancient, bygone era — say, before 2003 — one could judiciously ruminate on an impending war before it got rolling and make a choice about it. Most people, even then, didn’t see it that way — for them there was no choice. If the government said, “War — jump to it,” invariably most of us said, “How high?” whether that meant picking up a gun, plunking down our taxes, or throwing our full spiritual and political weight behind it. It seemed automatic and inevitable and foreordained. Choice, it seemed, had nothing to do with it at all.
But there was a choice, and some took it seriously. And even today, when war is on a dizzying spin-cycle whirling with such tremendous velocity that it virtually disappears before our very eyes — and when the ever-expanding remote-control battlefield increasingly exceeds every horizon — we still have a choice. Groping our way back to such a decision-point is crucial. Though it will be different than before — a choice made in the midst of the 24/7 careening, never-ending centrifugal spin and not amid the more contemplative lull that we once were afforded before all hell would break loose — this choice must be rescued and learned and applied, given the Pentagon and the NSA’s monotonously relentless planning. What better teachers do we have than those who seized this opportunity in the past? Who better than those who chose?
History is chock full of conscientious objection, though it sometimes takes some hunting around to glimpse it. Violence and injustice — and what is more violent and unjust than war? — often prompts an equal and opposite reaction, from lone individual figures to whole communities, like those of the historical peace churches, including the Mennonites and the Quakers. In virtually no case is this easy. Pacifist religious groupings, where one can feel nurtured and supported in the scandalous belief that killing is wrong, ultimately prepare their members to “pay up,” as Daniel Berrigan — the Jesuit priest and activist who was imprisoned for his resistance to the Vietnam War and has been conscientiously objecting ever since — once pithily described it. To hold stubbornly to such a belief in a society where killing is a matter of policy means there are often bound to be consequences.
This is what happened on the eve of World War II. Some 37,000 men facing the first peacetime draft in U.S. history chose to become conscientious objectors, or COs. Many of them — though not all — were members of peace churches who, fearing what happened to their young men who faced torture in U.S. prisons when they resisted induction during the First World War, negotiated the creation of an alternative: Civilian Public Service, which came into being on Dec. 19, 1940 — 73 years ago today — virtually a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Some men chose to serve during World War II as non-combatants in the armed forces as medics and the like. Others opted for prison. (Here’s an astounding statistic that gives one pause in light of today’s Bureau of Prisons: during the Second World War fully one out of six men in federal prisons was a draft resister!) But thousands joined the Civilian Public Service in camps flung across the United States, where they performed hard labor nine hours a day, six days a week. Most of them were held until 1947, two years after the war ended.
In 2002, Judith Erlich and Rick Tejada-Flores produced The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It, a documentary that explores this choice that some men made in the run up to the Second World War to resist the draft based on their religious or ethical principles. They were often assigned to work in horrendous mental institutions that later spurred many to build movements to reform those systems.
In contrast to the nearly uniform support for the war among the larger public, Civilian Public Service members formed community that strengthened, rather than undermined, their commitment to nonviolence. Indeed, the documentary stresses “the CPS camps became incubators for many of the techniques of nonviolent resistance used later in the civil rights and peace movements.” As James Tracy, author of Direct Action, puts it, “A new movement, termed by its adherents ‘radical pacifism’ would emerge. … Far from feeling despondent about the overwhelming popular support for the war effort in the United States, radical pacifists found the shared resistance and the sense of emerging movement in their distinct camp and prison communities exhilarating.” Many COs — including those like David Dellinger and Bill Sutherland, who led successful desegregation strikes in prisons — became key organizers in a variety of new movements over the next several decades.
The irony is delicious. Intending to both punish and isolate conscientious objectors, the government actually provided a training ground for future activists and opportunities to hone these skills. I am reminded of a much more modest example of this, when a thousand of us were arrested at a nuclear weapons lab in California in the early 1980s and were held for two weeks. The sheriff’s intention apparently was to dissuade this from happening again. In fact, it had the opposite effect. For two weeks, we were treated to innumerable workshops from the likes of Daniel Ellsberg, who had released the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, which immeasurably strengthened our solidarity as a community. We grew as activists. It was a state-sponsored school in nonviolent activism, something that would bear fruit over the next decade. We, like the COs during World War II, were deepening our own skills and commitment to the conscientious objection to the status quo that had landed us in custody, if only for a tiny fraction of the time they served.
Where are our COs today? In our time of permanent war, the Edward Snowdens and Chelsea Mannings are showing us how powerful conscientious objection still is. Like them, each of us can make a choice to withdraw our consent from ongoing war. And, like the COs of the Second World War, our many forms of conscientious objection — both minor and monumental — can not only resist violence but offer us a training ground with opportunities for solidarity and growth as agents of nonviolent transformation. The acts of conscience taken now will open unexpected opportunities for moving social change forward.
Would be interesting if Swarthmore College would finally lift its embargo on the 1940s “Columbia University-12” Conscientious Objectors — 12 young men shifted from CPS, i.e., at times something like prison, with bars, barbed-wire, armed guards, & militarily-trained attack dogs — literally, to Columbia University Graduate School, via Eleanor Roosevelt’s 12-scholarships plan. 12 young men chosen included Steve Cary, who would chair the board of directors of the U.S. American Friends (Quaker) Service Cmte many years; and Mulford Sibley, a University of Minnesota professor publishing core nonviolence works; Mennonite-Brethren leaders; and Darrell Randall, a leader in anti-apartheid work across Southern Africa. Swarthmore appears to be still blocking access to those names and their papers on file at Swarthmore.
Thank you for this. “On Gandhi’s Path: Bob Swan’s Work for Peace and Community Economics,” details the life of a WWII CO resister. Two years in jail and 3 in federal probation was his “university and monastery”.
Author Stephanie Mills, a personal friend, tells this story very well. I have known a few other CO war resisters, all of course non-violent. You have issued a call and the reasons why for it. very well
Discover within the Courage to Dare and Resist Violence
So, it’s soon to be Armistice Day this 11-11-13. This is also called Remembrance Day, because it’s the day WWI ended with an armistice signed on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month 1918. This was called the war to end all wars since it was so horrific and spurious that a future war of this magnitude would seemingly be impossibly insane to contemplate. It was so repulsive and horrific that dozens of nations decided to outlaw war forever by signing an agreement to finally end the scourge of war forever. Endorsed in 1928 and still on the books, called the Kellogg-Briand Pact which is still legally binding. It was signed into law by the Senate by a vote of 85-1.
So much for the hope that war would be a thing of the past and that humanity learned its lesson which only lasted till 1954 when this hope became a Americanized federal holiday to honor American vets which makes it the 6th time within the year hired guns are celebrated to honor the dishonorable. With 5 other holidays glorifying narcissist self-worship by those bookends of evil (patriotism-militarism), enough is enough. Do you folks see a pattern here? Why do you want to become Sparta? Illegal exported aggressive violence is not a defense of das fatherland or homeland. It is however the epitome of odium.
Off to terrorize by vicious onslaught peoples all over the world is not defensive protection of American shores but simply a pretext to acquire by force trade routes, contracts and acquisition of resources for corporate self-interests. This is what the founding fathers warned us about and advised us not to do. “If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.” -James Madison
“No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. ” -James Madison
“Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.” -James Madison
The Great War as it was called, to make the world safe from, I mean safe for diluted democracy, or more honestly for the plutocracy was simply war for economic dominance between two conflicting sides. From this insidious war begot WW2, and then morphing into the cold war to vomit out into our present ‘war’ of terror, using terrorism on those who dare not to succumb to our invasive hectoring. Always an enemy to fear fight and conquer from the genocide and ethnic cleansing of 330+ Indian tribes to our present slaughter we are committing around the world which couldn’t be done without amoral troops and idiotic blind-support.
I understand the concept (but personally disagree with) that nations or empires need to defend their borders as in our case, from the NSA, from FBI invented and funded plants, retaliation from CIA terror attacks on allies, civilians, drone terrorism inflicted on grandmothers, pregnant women, children medics, american citizens, from southern neighbors coming back to their land that was stolen by us, from the truth.
Yet our storm troopers are used for aggressive warfare all over the world and it is not just immoral it is illegal. The ‘war on terror’, ‘support the troops’, ‘navy, a force of good’, God bless america’ and the other meaningless, silly slogans are designed to compel one and all to fall in line in quiet obedience and goose-stepping compliance is the prodding of dumbed down sheelpe. Because we must support the troops, does this mean that we support the policies that send our kids to kill and die in lands not our own, or what they do over there?
Thank you Marine General Butler who wrote the greatest essay concerning this in his: “War is a Racket.” Thank you conscientious objectors, you have the courage and brains to be the real heroes of peace. For the vets by becoming unthinking assassinations, gangsters of capitalism, unethical war ho’s, hired guns not for your nation’s defense but for self-serving, greedy oligarchic owners thank you from the graves of over 1 million Iraqis, hundreds of thousands
of Afghans, Yemis, Pakistanis, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, slaughtered people of many nations all over the world just to make you feel good and warm about an odious thing. How many were slaughtered and for what, for a filthy polluted false flag and for a lie?
What honor is there in dishonorable acts? Heroes are those who save lives not those who take them. Support the troops? Is this an implication to basically; support the team? What if the ‘team’ is committing acts that are illegal and immoral violating virtually everything the team members were taught as children at home, at church and at school to honor as probity? And after we do our carnage we then walk away without a backward glance, patting ourselves on the shoulders pretending our horror was a good deed. And you expect any civil human being with a conscience to honor this dishonor, to thank a vet? Are you that psychopathic?
If I can convince one kid not to join the military, then I have accomplished much. Thank a vet for becoming a gangsta’ of capitalism, a war ho, becoming un-american by joining a force that has mutated into the greatest terrorist criminal organization the world has ever known, that is nefarious? Thank a vet for being a killing machine for the 1%? Thank a vet for being un-american by committing un-american acts? I’m not ungrateful, just a bit more honest and objective, less nationalistic and a bit more empathetic to your victims. I simply prefer to follow the messages of the prince of peace who teaches one to love ones enemy and commands us not to kill, to put down the sword rather than to blindly, without conscience, follow the god of war like stupid lemmings to the butchery of others. Thank a vet? For making us all less free, less safe by killing human beings who are no threat to us, destroying buildings, towns, cities, ancient civilizations, while militarily occupying other lands? This noxious nationalistic addiction to manic militarism and phony paux patriotism is killing this society’s sullied soul. Thank a vet? No thanks.
“There’d be no war today-If mothers all would say: “I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier.” Because you know our leaders would never fight. The rich profit and the poor die…That is nothing to be thankful about…
toto