Support the Center on Conscience and War

Leave a Comment / March 29, 2025

Remarks at Center on Conscience and War event on March 29, 2025.

I’ve admired and collaborated with the Center on Conscience and War for many years and worked with many of its board members and Counseling Director Bill Galvin and former Executive Director Maria Santelli. Maria was for about 10 years on the Advisory Board of World BEYOND War, where I’m the executive director. We’ve benefitted greatly from her advising. So I’m happy to be asked to speak about the Center on Conscience and War, and about what more we can do for conscientious objectors, and for schools and lives free of intrusive recruiters and their propaganda. But I want to avoid giving advice to the experts on these things.

Opposing war can be a difficult thing in a war culture. When you believe that abolishing war is necessary for life on Earth to survive, and for war’s millions of direct victims to survive, and to prevent the harm to billions of people caused by massive investment in death and destruction instead of in life and production, then it’s difficult to be told that peace is controversial, or impolite, or unacceptably political, or an assault on the sainted troops or the shameless profiteers or all the people in one’s own neighborhood whose jobs depend on not looking too closely at what those jobs are.

If you’re going to dare to speak against war, the easiest way to do it is to avoid people and specifics. It’s OK to wish for peace in general, if you don’t oppose any particular wars. After all, you might be in the pay of the enemy if you do that. And the very last thing you want to do is to mention any people — not politicians, not employees of the industrial death machine, and especially not members of the U.S. military. Since I work on opposing war globally, I almost said “a military” instead of “the U.S. military.” But actually, in the United States it’s fine to denounce all members of all other militaries. In fact, failure to do so is highly suspicious.

Ignoring all the easy paths, the Center on Conscience and War focuses on the particular horrors that are expected of particular members of the U.S. military. And it does not excuse them, or label those committing these horrors as simply victims. Neither does it mirror childish warlike thinking and label members of the U.S. military irredeemably evil. In the real, complex world that we all still tentatively live in, people change. I always wonder about the growing notion that one should not partner on anything with someone who’s ever done anything you disagree with. I’ve done things I disagree with. Must I refuse with Groucho Marx to join any club that would have me for a member? Here in the real world, many of our best peace activists are veterans of militaries. The culture that gives more weight to the voices of veterans needs to be changed. But those veterans working for peace have already changed and are using their voices for the betterment of the world.

What the Center on Conscience and War does is to support members of the military, not by thanking them for their atrocities, but by helping them to know and insist upon their rights. CCW provides a service to people, who are sometimes deemed heroic whistleblowers when their work has involved secrets they reveal, but who usually go unheralded for changing their direction for the better, or for finding what CCW calls in its name “conscience.”

The Center on Conscience and War has a history, as does our culture as a whole, deeply involved with religion. Unreligious people like me sometimes look askance at the word “conscience.” Why imagine something separate from the rest of you to which you must answer? And why must you answer to it only sometimes, when something becomes a “matter of conscience”? Why not flip that switch on and duct tape it in that position all day every day? But the point of speaking of a conscience, it seems to me, is to suggest that someone who has joined or looked into joining a military cannot just become intelligent but already is intelligent, cannot just become caring and moral but already is caring and moral. Of course, we should strive to avoid bad choices prior to making them, not just afterwards. But that isn’t always possible or easy. So we don’t simply educate people to transform them into new people entirely unlike who they’ve been, but rather appeal to their longstanding understanding of what it means to be someone they themselves can respect, including someone who does not kill and destroy. I almost added “for no good reason,” but I don’t think that’s good enough. The refusal to kill and destroy is not self-indulgence, just the opposite, because there generally can be no good reason. I say “generally” because our culture supports a whole legion of philosophy professors to invent sadistic theoretical situations with people on trolly tracks and so forth, but they have to invent those situations because they are not real.

In appealing to the intelligence and morality of members of the military, and insisting upon their basic human rights, including the right to cease volunteering for something they’ve learned too much about, CCW is subverting the very foundations of support for war. If members of the U.S. military are not statistics or obedient automata but human beings with thoughts and agency, then so are the members of every other military. And they’ve all been told similar things and treated in similar ways. When we support the right to conscientious objection everywhere (as when CCW has defended the rights of Ukrainians) and on both sides of every war, it becomes a lot harder to pretend we’re working for whichever side someone calls the enemy, and a little harder to mindlessly accept war as just the way the world is. If one member of one military refuses to any longer take part because he or she has remembered that killing is evil, then in theory every member of every military could remember that, and if they did, then in reality there would be no more war.

The same goes for military tax resistance, which has a long, long, long way to go to become effective, but which may develop firmer footing as a higher and higher percentage of taxes goes to wars. Counter-recruitment, on the other hand, is already effective. That is, militaries, including the U.S. military, are struggling to recruit the number of people they want. The more we can improve our schools, especially history class, and our media and our social media, and keep the recruiters’ tests out and the recruiters’ spying out, and keep truthtellers available, and make moral career choices available, the better this trend may develop. Already the U.S. is beginning to catch up to some other countries in the percentage of people telling pollsters they would not fight in a war.

We live in very strange times. The people in Washington preventing the expansion of military draft registration to women do so precisely out of lack of respect for women. The people talking about peace negotiations and disarmament are openly bigoted, xenophobic champions of increased militarism, ethnic cleansing, and colonialism. If I can predict anything, it is that we will need to rapidly adjust our approach to peacemaking as the weirdness progresses. The admirable work of CCW supporting individual conscientious objectors must go on being done regardless of whether those individuals agree with me or anyone else on politics, or labor rights, or environmental protection, or international law, or immigration, or anything else. The work of opposing military spending must go on welcoming the strange support of those who oppose war spending because they oppose all spending, not because it is for war.

But, with all of that having been said, I think we will be taking one step forward and eight steps back if we don’t transform our whole culture, if we do not work across an array of issues for a holistically better world. That means an abolition movement with a list of items to abolish: war, fossil fuels, militaries, prisons, nuclear energy, police, nuclear weaponry, campaign bribery, health insurance companies, the death penalty, the livestock industry, Wall Street, borders, the NSA, the CIA, the United States Senate, Fox News, MSNBC, the Star Spangled Banner, the cyber truck. Make your own list.

It also means a movement with a list of items to create: international law, diplomacy, conflict management, unarmed civilian protection, green energy, conservation, single-payer health coverage, drug treatment, truth and reconciliation commissions, reparations commissions, restorative justice, organic farms, good schools, public referenda, a democratized United Nations, and — importantly — a culture of peace, celebrations of peacemaking, holidays for peacemaking (conscientious objectors day is May 15), and a realworld test of that prediction of John F. Kennedy’s that war would be around until the conscientious objector has the prestige and respect that was given to the soldier.

I also think we need to work on this transformation locally and globally, not just in the most difficult, toxic place there is: the national level. Did you see them singing in the National Cathedral at the funeral of former president Jimmy Carter? Singing the words “imagine there are no countries.” Should we laugh or cry? I don’t know, but we should hear the words and work toward them — not toward rule by multinational oligarchs, but toward rule by a balanced combination of local, regional, and global self-governance.

Even admitting that laws exist may be out of fashion in Trump’s Washington, but most people see a purpose in having some, and Center on Conscience and War clearly supports acting on and strengthening laws protecting the right to refuse to engage in warmaking. It may be worth noting, if only for laughs, but hopefully also for inspiration, that engaging in warmaking is a violation of laws: the Hague treaties of 1899 and 1907, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, various regional treaties, nations’ laws against murder, and numerous treaties banning various weapons and requiring disarmament. Since 1970, our governments have been obliged to negotiate complete disarmament of all weapons by the treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. The current U.S. president says that nothing he does can be a crime. And we are supposed to think that a refusal to participate in an orgy of mass murder is a threat to the rule of law? It may be law’s last defense.

Of course, for better or worse, laws are what we make them. The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution came out of discussions of preventing a standing army by supporting militias, and in early drafts included the right to conscientious objection to war, and now the thing means the individual right to deadly weapons of descriptions unimaginable when the law was written — and that supposedly for the purpose of waging war against the government. Clearly, we need not only better laws, but a culture of widespread understanding of them and of the importance of refusing illegal and/or immoral orders.

I think we should honor conscientious objectors and counter-recruiters. I think we should honor writers and artists and filmmakers who counter war propaganda. I think we should have holidays and monuments and memorials in tribute. And I think we owe conscientious objectors and all peace advocates something else. I think there should, in the case of each war, eventually be a reckoning. There should come a moment when we acknowledge who was right. I think this would boost the prestige and respect of all peacemakers, because war-belief is short-lived. Wars don’t look good once they get going for months, never mind years, never mind when they’ve left the corporate news entirely. At some point everyone who was falsely accused of working for Russia or Serbia or Hamas should get a correction, and not on page 23, but on the front page. At some point, everyone who said victory in each war would be swift and glorious and beneficial should get a correction, instead of a promotion. In fact, we should develop a culture in which the designation of someone as an “expert” has at least some relationship to ever having been right about anything. This would make every conscientious objector more of an expert than every columnist and commentator who has never caught on.

Something else that might bring prestige and respect to conscientious objectors might be their role in creating the Civil Rights movement, and doing so while opposing the single most popular and mythologized war in U.S. culture, the war imagined as good, imagined as so good as to outweigh the hundreds of bad ones, namely World War II. You all probably know this story, but I think it’s safe to say that most people do not. I’m pulling this out of my book Leaving World War II Behind:

In October 1940, eight students at Union Theological Seminary refused to register for the draft, even as conscientious objectors (or to accept the exemption offered to theology students). Their reasoning was as follows: “War consists of mass murder, deliberate starvation, vandalism, and similar evils. Physical destruction and moral disintegration are the inevitable result. The war method perpetuates and compounds the evils it purports to overcome.”

These students did not believe they would prevent U.S. warmaking, but neither were they acting without concern for the consequences of their actions. They believed they were near the beginning of a long struggle to build a movement that could prevent wars. “We do not contend,” they said, “that the American people maliciously choose the vicious instrument of war. In a very perplexing situation, they lack the imagination, the religious faith, and the precedents to respond in a different manner. This makes it all the more urgent to build in this country and throughout the world a group trained in the techniques of non-violent opposition to the encroachments of militarism and fascism. Until we build such a movement, it will be impossible to stall the war machine at home. When we do build such a movement, we will have forged the only weapon which can ever give effective answer to foreign invasion. Thus in learning to fight American Hitlerism we will show an increasing group of war-disillusioned Americans how to resist foreign Hitlers as well.”

This would be good advice for us right now, if the story ended there, but it doesn’t. David Dellinger, one of the eight students who made the statement above, worked against poverty during the Great Depression, went to prison rather than fight in WWII, worked for civil rights, and was one of the Chicago 7 arrested during the Democratic National Convention in 1968. When the WWII student draft resisters were locked up in Federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, Dellinger, who was white, happened to walk into the first Saturday night movie with a black friend. They were ordered to sit in segregated sections, but Dellinger sat with his friend — an offense that landed him in solitary confinement. The war objectors then organized, inside the prison, and later in other prisons, at significant risk to their lives, protests against racial segregation. They won the integration of the dining hall of Danbury Federal Prison, an early victory for what would grow into a national civil rights movement.

Jim Peck, who spent the war years in prison as a draft resister and was also at Danbury, said: “The most effective way for an individual to start outlawing war is simply to refuse to take part in it.” He would not fight against Hitler, not due to a lack of a sense of responsibility to stop Hitler, but rather due to a stronger sense of responsibility to stop war. Dellinger and Peck would apply lessons from civil rights actions in prison to civil rights actions out of prison after the war. So would Bayard Rustin, the future organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, who was also imprisoned for draft resistance during WWII. Dellinger and Rustin were both imprisoned in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, where they organized protests against racial segregation. Rustin did the same at Ashland Prison as well.

In 1940, A.J. Muste, who also refused to register for the WWII draft when it was extended to his age group, hired Rustin, James Farmer, and other new staffers for a campaign of the antiwar group, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, to apply Gandhian tactics to the struggle against Jim Crow. In April of 1947, eight black and eight white men embarked from Richmond, Va., on a two-week trip called the Journey of Reconciliation. They attempted to board 26 buses and trains. Twelve of them were arrested, and three of them served 22 days on a chain gang in North Carolina. James Peck was among those brutally beaten. He was the only participant to also participate in the Freedom Rides of 1961, where he was again brutally beaten.

Eight participants in the Journey of Reconciliation, including Peck and Rustin, were formerly imprisoned conscientious objectors to WWII. One of them, Wally Nelson, had done three-and-a-half years in federal prisons during WWII, where he had engaged in a 107-day hunger strike against racial segregation and been force fed for the last 87 days he spent behind bars. Another of them, George Houser, had been locked up at Danbury. These men took a terrible punishment for refusal to participate in the single most terrible disaster thus far, and turned it into something that actually advanced freedom and democracy, namely a newly energized and creative movement to end systemic racism.

In the bizarro world we now inhabit, all actions toward peace by passionate racists and promoters of hatred, violence, and injustice, should be encouraged. But the solution we need ultimately lies in supporting peace and justice and social responsibility all together, not as separate movements, and we can look to conscientious objectors for how to do it.

https://davidswanson.org/support-the-center-on-conscience-and-war/