July-August 2005:
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Conscientious Objection
Rejecting a Culture of Militarism

By Steve Theberge

he war in Iraq has sparked outrage, indignation and action across the globe. From South Africa to South Carolina, people have repeatedly filled the streets with marches and demonstrations, their voices unified in opposition to the brutal occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. In spite of the unprecedented popular and international resistance to the war, it grinds on and on with no end in sight. As recruitment numbers plummet and the United States becomes even more entangled in the barbed wires of occupation, antiwar sentiment has flowered within the ranks of the military and the popular imagination.

With the threat of the draft continually dangled over our heads and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan becoming more gruesome every day, hundreds of service people, in a trend reminiscent of wars past, are laying down their guns and refusing to fight, often in the face of severe harassment and punishment from military authorities. Among the wider civilian population, many young people are preparing documentation of their opposition to this war, as a way to bolster future resistance to a formal draft.

The growth of these actions signals an important transition in the antiwar movement. As many people recognize the limited effectiveness of mass demonstrations, they are shifting their efforts to locally rooted community organizing campaigns based on challenging military recruiters or supporting resisters and antiwar veterans. The myriad small, individual acts of resistance—a school adopting an “opt-out” policy, a young man refusing to register with the Selective Service System, or (with increasing frequency) a soldier refusing to return to Iraq—are having a slow but profound impact on our work as a movement for peace and justice.

COs in History
Conscientious objection, in its multiple and disparate forms, has been a tool of resistance since the early colonial days in North America; the refusal of military service was what led Quaker pacifists to found some of the early colonies on the East Coast. Centuries later, upwards of 43,000 people refused to take part in World War II—6,000 of whom were imprisoned for their actions. Popular understanding of conscientious objection for moral, political or religious reasons grew throughout the Fifties and Sixties. By the end of the war on Vietnam, more than 170,000 men were reported to have been officially recognized as COs, while thousands of others burned their draft cards and sometimes went to jail or started new lives in other countries.

When Congress replaced the lottery draft with the allegedly all-volunteer Army in 1980, many people relaxed. Yet while the particular urgency and pressure felt during Vietnam has faded from our popular culture, the Armed Forces have done everything possible to make up their lost ground, using a variety of tactics.

The economic draft—also called the “poverty draft”—takes advantage of social service cutbacks, failing public schools, and skyrocketing college tuition. The recent “Stop-Loss” program has been called a “backdoor draft” because it extends soldiers contracts without their permission. In addition, a huge number of reservists have been forced into full-time military service, and retired soldiers have been recalled by the dozens.

Resistance from Within
All those factors have created a context in which conscientious objection from within the military has become an effective tool for resistance to war. During the first Gulf War in 1991, 2,500 men and women volunteers serving in the Armed Forces refused to fight in Saudi Arabia, and today, as the war in Iraq drags on, more and more enlisted people are turning their backs on a war they perceive as unjust.

Support campaigns for enlisted COs have popped up across the world, especially in countries that host American military bases, such as Germany. In Canada, the War Resisters Support Campaign, which calls itself a “broad-based coalition of community, faith, labour and other organizations and individuals,” is organizing support for a number of soldiers seeking asylum. Stateside, COs such as Pablo Paredes and Camilo Mejia, supported by a number of organizations, have traveled tirelessly, speaking out against the war and building popular support for conscientious objectors. Paredes and Mejia (among hundreds of others) have helped transform the face of antiwar organizing and have been of great service in building a cohesive and broad-based movement.

First Steps
For many soldiers, disillusionment begins as their feet touch the ground in Iraq. As Daryl Anderson, who served in Iraq with the elite 82nd Airborne Division, says about arriving in Baghdad, “you realize that there’s death and destruction all over the place. No weapons of mass destruction in sight. We’re fighting people that we’re supposed to help, but in fact they hate you and every time you walk down the street they shoot at you because you occupy their country.”

It became increasingly difficult for Anderson to reconcile what he was told in training and what he was commanded to do every day. “You’re asked to get in their houses, in their businesses, block the roads, but you’re an occupying power, you’re messing up their daily life,” he told the Pacific News Service, a Canadian news organization, “You’re not a liberator. You raid their houses and kill their family.”

Serving in Iraq quickly changed from a humanitarian mission to a desperate campaign simply to stay alive. “Because you’re in Iraq in a kind of war situation and unable to distinguish friends from foe,” he says, “you adopt these drastic measures. You commit these crimes, these acts that you would never do under normal conditions. And even though in your unit everybody is against what you’re doing, nobody can say anything because you’ll end up in jail. That’s not what I had imagined when I enlisted.”

Jeremy Hinzman, a resister now living in Canada, never imagined what he would be ordered to do when he joined up. “What I didn’t know—or understand at the time—was how deeply repulsed I am by the prospect of taking somebody else’s life,” he told the Pacific News Service. “Even after going through the Army training, all those systematic processes put in place to make you overcome your moral barriers and kill another person, no matter how hard I tried—and I assure you I tried very hard—I couldn’t bring myself to believe that killing could ever be justified.”

The broad legal definition of a conscientious objector—“a person who objects to participation in all forms of war, and whose belief is based on a religious, moral or ethical belief system”—opens up plenty of space within the antiwar movement for COs like Hinzman or Anderson, as well as civilians who dedicate themselves to non-cooperation with the war machine. High-profile conscientious objectors such as Camilo Mejia, Stephen Funk and Kevin Benderman receive national media attention, the dedicated support of the antiwar movement and the brittle hostility of the pro-war right. Such public figures are a key element in building popular resistance to the war—they humanize the face of the antiwar movement and have been an essential link between the more established peace movement and the ever-expanding military families and veteran antiwar communities.

Many soldiers who are contemplating conscientious objection or are in the process of becoming COs have pointed to early resisters to the Iraq war as key inspirations. War resister Ryan Johnson, in a June 7 interview with Amy Goodman of Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now, named Camilo Mejia and Aidan Delgado as particular inspirations. “It let me know,” he said, “that there were other people like me that weren’t wanting to go to the war and that there’s people just trying to get it out there to, you know, soldiers and civilians alike, letting them know that they’re not the only ones that don’t believe in it.” Johnson has since successfully crossed the border to Canada.

It is heartening that the antiwar movement has begun to extend its tactics beyond street protests. The explosive growth of counter-military recruitment activism has distinctively shifted the character and tone of antiwar organizing. It has recentered the focus on the very personal impact of war on our communities, highlighting the power that everyone has in resisting the expansion of the war machine.

As a complement to the conscientious objection of war resisters, many long-time peace and antiwar organizations have stepped up or reinitiated their educational campaigns around civilian objection. Additionally, concerned parents have begun assembling “CO portfolios” to help establish their children’s antiwar credentials in anticipation of a draft. For civilians, conscientious objection can be a key element of an effective movement for peace and justice. Refusing to cooperate with recruiters and the Selective Service System, resisting war taxes, or any other number of such activities are straightforward (although sometimes challenging) ways to confront militarism

Movement Building
The upsurge in CO support work brings up a number of significant questions for the peace and justice movement, not least, how do we effectively support individual COs without turning into a movement that exists only to help individuals?

At issue here is the difference between individual resistance and mass-based opposition. Clearly, a community of individual conscientious objectors divorced from a larger movement and a holistic political analysis will not end the war in Iraq. One of the key tools in the resistance to the war on Vietnam was a sustained and cohesive movement against the draft, a movement that necessitated a substantial cultural shift in the way that Americans understood the function and practice of war. Support centers for conscientious objectors sprang up outside military bases, soldiers refused to fight, and many young men refused any and all cooperation with the draft board. Conscientious objection, whether for political, moral, or religious reasons formed an umbrella under which thousands of young men were able to collect themselves, helping give shape to a larger movement.

Three years after the official launch of the war on Iraq, we are in a similar moment of cultural transformation, a moment in which popular opposition to war has never been higher. We have the opportunity to greatly expand our political base and to build strong international ties with COs from other nations occupying Iraq. We need to take stock of the tactics and strategies that have worked in the past, assess our resources and the challenges ahead of us and push forward with a unified civilian and enlisted movement to end the war in Iraq.

Steve Theberge (youth@warresisters.org) is WRL’s Youth and Counter-Militarism Coordinator.