How you can resist funding the government →
other forms our opposition can take →
disrupting the military →
encouraging soldiers to desert / defy orders, supporting conscientious objectors
On I criticized the Appeal to Global Conscience that was issued by some anti-war figures.
Although the appeal was worded as though it were a call to action, it was mostly a call for someone else to take action, and for the right-thinking readers of the appeal to urge them on from the sidelines.
On MLK Day I contrasted that Appeal with the resolution that launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott and showed how that resolution was not a call for someone else to take action, but a determination by the people who adopted the resolution to take action themselves.
Now there’s a new anti-war appeal that is much better in this regard: A Call to Resist the War in Iraq.
A group of (mostly Christian, but theoretically interfaith) religious leaders from Connecticut called Reclaiming the Prophetic Voice has started circulating the appeal and plans to make it public .
Here are the calls to action embedded in this new appeal:
We believe it is the moral responsibility of every U.S. citizen to raise our voices and take action to stop this illegal war and bring our soldiers home.
We believe it is our duty as both Americans and members of the international community to insist that our government immediately adhere to the international agreements binding us, including the Geneva Accords protecting prisoners from torture and indefinite detention.
Many members of the armed services are seeking ways to avoid service in Iraq or leave the military completely; some young men are refusing to register for Selective Service.
Increasing numbers of enlisted men and women are risking prison sentences or forced immigration in order to avoid collaboration in an immoral war.
We applaud these choices and will do all that we can to encourage others to follow their example.
More specifically, we support and will spread the word about the G.I. Rights Hotline and other efforts to support soldiers in withdrawing from the military.
We will counsel young men turning eighteen on the moral obligations as well as risks inherent in a refusal to register with the Selective Service, and we will raise funds to support them in their legal defense.
Should a draft be reinstituted we will encourage young men and women not to comply.
The War Crimes Tribunals following World War Ⅱ declared, “Anyone with knowledge of illegal activity and an opportunity to do something is a potential criminal under international law, unless the person takes affirmative measures to prevent the commission of the crimes.”
We, the undersigned, commit ourselves to undertake all affirmative measures available to us to fulfill our obligations under these treaties, which have guided our world for half a century.
We will continue to raise our voices and engage in nonviolent resistance until our government has withdrawn from Iraq and brought our soldiers home.
It’s kind of vague, but if you take away the fuzzier calls to “raise our voices” or “insist that our government” behave there remain calls to action that are actually calls to action.
An email announcing this put things more directly:
…we are organizing around two specific, and very connected acts of nonviolent resistance to the war for : first, by deliberately violating, on a nationwide scale, the federal law which tells us that we can not encourage a soldier to exercise their right of conscience by refusing his or her orders to fight in an immoral war; and second, by organizing nonviolent actions at recruiting stations, where young people are lured into the military (and this war) with false promises.…
…we will [also] be encouraging and organizing a variety of resistance tactics and strategies in an ongoing nonviolence campaign, including (but not limited to) alternative direct action strategies and the “Hang Up On War” campaign of federal phone tax resistance.
Our goal is to involve the greatest number of fellow citizens and activists possible in some form of nonviolent resistance against the war, and to focus these energies to build public opposition and bring the war to an end at the earliest possible moment.
This is a call for people to obstruct military recruiting, to counsel soldiers to disobey their orders and to give them sanctuary and support as they turn their backs on the military — in other words, actions that are probably considered high treason over much of your AM dial.
Attorney General Gonzales will probably spend many a wistful daydream imagining such traitors as these being dipped in boiling oil or broken on the rack.
In other words: That’s more like it!
Excuses, excuses: Between working hard at this contract and experiencing a two-day internet outage at home, I haven’t been able to update The Picket Line much lately — which is too bad, because there has been plenty to write about.
As Yoo saw it, Congress doesn’t have the power to “tie the President’s hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique.”
He continued, “It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function.
They can’t prevent the President from ordering torture.”
If the President were to abuse his powers as Commander-in-Chief, Yoo said, the constitutional remedy was impeachment.
He went on to suggest that President Bush’s victory in the election, along with the relatively mild challenge to Gonzales mounted by the Democrats in Congress, was “proof that the debate is over.”
He said, “The issue is dying out.
The public has had its referendum.”
And yet there’s activism afoot:
With the sort of astute planning that has made the U.S. peace movement so effective, Northern California War Tax Resistance held a workshop for prospective war tax resisters in the middle of the afternoon on .
Still, the event attracted a dozen people who were determined to start resisting their taxes and were eager to find out how.
The invitation for some of these troops effectively to desert comes from members of the Irish parliament and even a former Irish army commandant, Ed Horgan — who made it clear he wouldn’t make such a suggestion lightly.… ¶ Irish and international law on refugees makes it clear that soldiers are not excluded from making asylum applications, which can be made to any Irish police officer (Garda) or immigration official.
Soldiers who face being forced to obey “unlawful orders” are explicitly mentioned in the refugee statutes.
And that’s just what I was able to filter from the krill while I was busy doing other things.
I continued a series of Picket Line entries critiquing some of the calls-to-action that have been coming from the anti-war movement.
My intent was to do this in the spirit of constructive criticism, but I allowed myself to get a little carried away in paraphrasing the The National Pledge of Resistance, which I characterized as “being almost comically vague.”
The group Iraq Pledge of Resistance has released a new call, however, which is much improved, in that it calls for more-specific actions and asks the people signing on to the call to be the ones to take the action (as opposed to those many and worthless calls to urge other people to take action).
In short, the new call announces a coordinated effort to disrupt military recruiting efforts, and to encourage U.S. troops to refuse their orders.
Please note that this National Call for Nonviolent Resistance encompasses both legal actions and civil resistance/civil disobedience.
We intend to serve notice to our government that we will be acting forcefully, nonviolently and — for some of us — risking arrest, legal jeopardy and our own freedom to underscore our determination to end this war.
For those who cannot take such risks at this time, we encourage you to participate in the campaign by supporting those who are.
We urge all to act according to their conscience, talents and organizational capabilities to resist the war in Iraq and challenge this administration’s ability to wage it.
Specifically, “[t]o in any way support or encourage a soldier to disobey orders is an illegal action, as specified in 18 United States Code, Sec. 1381 and Sec. 2387” and “we intend to support soldiers who are speaking out and otherwise resisting by organizing widespread, coordinated civil disobedience of this law.”
We are calling for this action to be done in a widespread and massive way to demonstrate to the government that its citizens will willingly break a law that abrogates our right of free speech and dissent, and which conceals the truth about this immoral war and its oppression of our soldiers — and that we will freely risk the consequences of doing so in the service of the higher moral principles at stake.…
As we organize this act of nonviolent resistance to support the troops, we must be fully aware that soldiers are at far greater risk in resisting the war then we on the outside might be for supporting them in doing so.
Therefore, it is our moral responsibility to share that risk to the extent that we can by openly and publicly violating these laws.
While we understand that many among us have pacifist principles which compel us to resist all war, the focus of this action is not to compel members of the military to refuse their orders, nor to blame those who do not, but rather for us to collectively disobey an unjust law while simultaneously offering encouragement and support for soldiers who choose to refuse orders to fight in Iraq or who otherwise speak out.
This represents real progress, in my opinion.
It acknowledges that to end this war is going to take some serious individual sacrifice and effort, and it takes pains to say that they’re not just expecting other people to do this work for them.
The statutes voted Best Laws to Violate in by Peacenik Magazine are:
18 USC § 1381. Enticing desertion and harboring deserters, Whoever entices or procures, or attempts or endeavors to entice or procure any person in the Armed Forces of the United States, or who has been recruited for service therein, to desert there from, or aids any such person in deserting or in attempting to desert from such service; or Whoever harbors, conceals, protects, or assists any such person who may have deserted from such service, knowing him to have deserted there from, or refuses to give up and deliver such person on the demand of any officer authorized to receive him — Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
§2387. Activities affecting armed forces generally (a) Whoever, with intent to interfere with, impair, or influence the loyalty, morale, or discipline of the military or naval forces of the United States: (1) advises, counsels, urges, or in any manner causes or attempts to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty by any member of the military or naval forces of the United States; or (2) distributes or attempts to distribute any written or printed matter which advises, counsels, or urges insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty by any member of the military or naval forces of the United States -Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction. (b) For the purposes of this section, the term “military or naval forces of the United States” includes the Army of the United States, the Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, Naval Reserve, Marine Corps Reserve, and Coast Guard Reserve of the United States; and, when any merchant vessel is commissioned in the Navy or is in the service of the Army or the Navy, includes the master, officers, and crew of such vessel.
You gotta look hard to find the silver lining to the cloud over Abu Ghraib, but the Christian Science Monitor
comes up with a good nominee:
If any lesson can be drawn from the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse legal fallout so far, it may be this:
The lowest-level soldier has the highest level of responsibility.
The rank and file must clearly know right from wrong — both in terms of their own actions and orders from superiors.
“What the average soldier is going to take away from Abu Ghraib is a reinforcement of what he learned at boot camp — that he’s responsible for his actions,” says Mary Hall, a former military judge now in private practice.
“These Abu Ghraib courts-martial are a blunt reminder to even the newest private that they have a duty to just say ‘no.’ ”
Raise your hand if you went to boot camp and came away from it with the understanding that when given an order, you have the duty to carefully evaluate its morality and legality and then just say “no” if the order does not meet your standards.
Still, it’s nice to imagine what might happen if an epidemic of questioning authority suddenly broke out in the military.
Groups like Courage To Resist are trying to bring that about:
Objection and resistance by military servicepersons is a healthy and important assertion of Democracy in a country where the decisions to invade Iraq, to maintain an occupation, and engage in widespread human right violations and torture were made undemocratically in violation of international law and based on continuing lies and disinformation.
This is one part of a three-part strategy aimed at shortening the war and preventing future wars by exacerbating staffing problems in the military: encourage deserters and conscientious objectors, interfere with recruitment, and prepare to frustrate the draft if it should come back (the fourth part, removing U.S. soldiers from the field of battle by force, has been outsourced).
I am of the opinion that in a modern war like the one in Iraq, where the ratio of American dollars spent to American soldiers buried is in the million-to-one range, that another way we can strike at the war effort is to try to defund it.
Certainly the military does a fine job of losing money on its own, but I still think they need our help.
Much of the anti-war movement has lately turned away from marching and pleading with legislators and such and has decided to try to make the U.S. less eager to make war by exacerbating its “human resources” shortage.
I think this new focus shows promise.
It has a concrete, measurable goal that can be reached incrementally, results can potentially be seen both on a large scale and on a very human scale, and it is an actual, non-symbolic impediment to militarism, making it more difficult and more expensive.
There is a danger, though, that by focusing on encouraging desertion and conscientious objection within the military, and on discouraging recruiting, the anti-war movement will fall in to the easy habit of regarding its struggle as something that mostly involves other people — members of the military and potential recruits — changing their behavior.
One way to address this is to remind people that conscientious objection is for everyone.
A good example of this is provided by the Church of the Brethren Christian Citizenship Seminar, which was held in New York and Washington, D.C.:
Former conscientious objectors (COs) Enten Pfaltzgraff Eller and Clarence Quay shared the stories of their struggles, as did more more recent COs Andrew Engdahl and Anita Cole.
Eller and Quay each chose not to register and instead did alternative service, although Eller’s service came after a lengthy court case.
Engdahl and Cole arrived at their decisions after entering the military, and they asked for reclassification.
“When Jesus said ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,’ that has to be now, not later,” Eller said.
“You have to struggle with where God is calling you and how you’re going to follow.”…
Several speakers addressed a different form of conscientious objection, war tax resistance.
Phil and Louise Rieman of Indianapolis and Alice and Ron Martin-Adkins of Washington, D.C., explained why they had decided not to pay the portion of their taxes that support military operations — and the consequences that can come with that choice.
Marian Franz of the National Peace Tax Fund provided additional background on this form of witness.
“If we say that war is wrong, and we believe war is wrong, then why would we pay for it?” Louise Rieman said.
“It was more than I expected,” said Chrissy Sollenberger, a youth participant from Annville, Pa.
“I didn’t think there was so much about conscientious objection to talk about.
I just thought it was saying no to being drafted, but it’s so much more than that.…
It feels like we have more power now to make those choices.”
Lately, I’ve been doing some volunteer work for Courage to Resist, an American group that supports members of the U.S. military who have turned against its wars and have refused to fight.
While each story is unique and interesting in its own right, there’s also an awful, relentless monotony in it.
Many of the stories follow the same basic pattern: Some kid, hoping to improve on a mediocre lot in life and motivated by a desire to do something worthwhile for his (or sometimes her) country, talks to a military recruiter and gets a great song-and-dance about opportunity and how in the military we’re all one big happy family that sticks by each other through thick and thin.
Once in, the corruption, dishonesty, and betrayal of the military and its degrading, cruel, and dehumanizing culture start to pile on, and the new soldier starts to understand that he’s been had.
Sent overseas, he discovers quickly that his actual mission doesn’t bear any resemblance to the noble stories the government and propagandists are pitching back home, and that his life and his mission are considered far less important than ass-covering up the chain of command.
When he tries to get help — for instance for his injuries, for his post-traumatic stress disorder, or for the family he’s left behind — he finds that the “big happy family that sticks together” quickly becomes disparagement, abuse, bureaucracy, and wholly inadequate assistance: at best they’ll try to drug you up to keep you quiet.
Finally deciding to get out, he then finds that the military has dozens of ways of making you suffer if you try to leave, and that there’s often no exit except as an outlaw.
David Cortelyou dropped out of high school, got an equivalency certificate, but couldn’t find work, so he signed up.
He was trained as a fire support specialist and deployed to Iraq in 2005. In Iraq he learned that when you’re surrounded by cruelty and killing, “it was either laugh about it, cry about it, or say nothing and go insane.”
When an insurgent blew himself up nearby while laying an IED, they laughed about it.
When his platoon tortured to death a dog that was hanging around one of their guard points — “slit its throat, smashed its skull with a shovel, cut its belly open, broke its leg” (and then killed its puppies when they found out it was a mother) — they laughed about it.
And that was in Bi’aj, which was relatively “safe” (a mortar destroyed his tent once, but he was out on mission at the time).
In contrast, Ramadi, where he was assigned next, was “hell on earth.”
His platoon was assigned to train and support green cavalry scouts, but because his battalion commander considered his platoon to be too valuable an asset to waste on such works, the cav scouts went out unsupported, making rookie errors and taking considerable casualties.
And the cav scouts got mutilated.
I’ll say it: the cav scouts, they got their asses kicked in Ramadi.
I can’t remember how many memorial services I went to where I talked to the guys afterwards and they told me about what was going on.
Their commander was sending them down black routes, which is a road that it’s a 100% chance that you’re gonna get hit, whether it be IED or small-arms. You don’t go down black routes, because it’s 100% that you’re gonna get hit.
You’re gonna get hit by something.
So they have routes and whatnot mapped out so you know where to go and where not to go.
Well, their commander would send them down black routes because it got them to their objective faster.
Half way to the objective they’d have to turn around and come back because they were loaded down with casualties — dead or otherwise.
And I kept hearing about this, and I like, “well, what the hell — we’re supposed to be there for these guys’ support and they don’t have the support they need, they’re getting pinned down by small-arms fire, and if we woulda been there we coulda called in artillery, they would have had an extra rifle firing friendly rounds.”
On another occasion “we had to escort a few paperweight, pencil-pushers, desk-jockeys, office pokes, people who had never been outside the wire for combat situations, no clue what they were doing” and when they hit a mine, one was killed, and the remaining desk-jockeys made matters worse by clumsily interfering with radio communications while Cortelyou’s team was trying to call in a medevac.
But, “laugh about it, cry about it, or say nothing and go insane.”
Preparing to go out on another route clearance mission, his crew were delayed at the gate by a convoy of trucks bringing back the casualties from another battle.
And because it was… it was right across the street, quite literally right across the street from the front gate — about five minutes after it ended we had a bunch of Iraqi police trucks — these white Chevrolet pickup trucks that they use for their police vehicles — and about five minutes after it ended these vehicles started pulling in the front gate and the backs of them are loaded with dead — not just wounded, but dead — soldiers.
And I’m not talking about a few bodies in the back, I’m talking these trucks — five or six trucks — loaded, piled on top of each other, with dead bodies, dead Iraqi police.
And the last truck that came in only had like four bodies in it, but they had let the tailgate down.
And sitting on the tailgate, this large, fat, Iraqi police member had been hoisted on the tailgate — and, uh, laugh about it, cry about it, or say nothing and go insane: we laughed about it.
Who cares?
They were Iraqi.
“Oh, and by the way, did you see that fat fucker on the last truck?”
’Cause he was, he was a huge guy.
Every bump they hit, you could see his fat jiggle.
And it was ridiculous, because he was only half-way on the truck as it was, and because he was so large, every bump they hit his fat jiggled and shifted his weight — he ’bout damn near fell off the back of the truck.
And so, we laughed about it — ha ha!, the Iraqis can’t fight as well as we can, whatever, and did you see that fat fuck on the back truck?
— and after that, nothing was ever said about it.
And to be honest, I had completely forgotten about that, about the trucks.
It wasn’t until about seven or eight months ago I was sitting here talking to one of the NCOs from my platoon, down-range, he and I were sitting here talking about some shit that had happened there.
He mentioned it and at first I had no clue what he was talking about… no clue.
I thought he was just bullshitting with me and makin’ shit up.
And then he explained, “no man: the truck that came in that was loaded with dead IPs. You don’t remember that, man?
You were a gunner at that time, you should’ve seen it.”
And he kept trying to explain it to me and I couldn’t remember.
And then he mentioned the fat man on the back truck, and as soon as he mentioned the fat man on the back truck it came back to me like a dam had just broken open or something, and the first five minutes of remembering it was like I was there again watching these trucks roll in.
…Yeah, that was a real bad month for us: soldier dies in my arms, two weeks later we get a convoy full of dead IPs, every day for three or four weeks after that we were attending memorial services…
…There’s a lot of other stuff that happened in Iraq that I can’t even talk about, just stupid shit like that that just bears on my mind every single day.
I got to think about the stupid shit: the dog, the guy that blew himself up, the truck full of people, the battle buddy dying in my arms, the chain of command stupidity I guess.
And every day I’ve got to think about this and try and deal with it.
And the Army, their way of trying to help, is to give me pills and get me doped up so I forget about it, or so I don’t talk about it.
David switched from “laugh about it” to “say nothing and go insane.”
When they were being processed out of Iraq, as part of the process they were asked if they had any psychological issues they wanted to deal with first.
Some of the other soldiers interviewed by Courage to Resist mentioned this same sneaky trick.
They ask you if you need help while you’re in Germany waiting to be processed home, and they make sure you know that if you say “yes” that’s going to delay your processing and keep you away from home that much longer, and so, in Cortelyou’s words, “98% of the people say, ‘no; fuck no.
We’ve been in Iraq for 15 months, we don’t want to be cooped up in a shrink’s office rehashing everything that happened, we want to be going out partying, getting drunk, whatever.’ ”
So that’s what we did.
And it wasn’t until about two months later that I started having nightmares, and… not flashbacks, but just, I started getting really tense and nervous and anxious about everything.
A car door slams too hard and I freak out.
Driving down the road, even now — this is a year later, a year later — I still, driving down the road, find myself looking on the sides of the roads.
I’m not just spacing out, I’m looking for things: tripwires, pressure plates, shit that’s not supposed to be there.
When I walk past people, I find myself being suspicious of ’em, especially if they have their hands in their pockets.
Every time I leave my room, I pat my chest — a year later, a year down the road and I still look for my weapon — and because it’s not folded across my chest, yeah, now I don’t, but I still look for it.
But I used to look for it and when it wasn’t there I would turn around and go back into my room and look for it.
Now all I do is just pat down my chest looking for the strap, and if it’s not there, then I just… it clicks, and okay, yeah, hello, you’re not in Iraq anymore; you don’t have a weapon.
And I used to go back into my room searching for my weapon, and it would take me five or 10 minutes to realize that, hello, wise guy, you’re in Germany not Iraq, you don’t have a weapon.
Two, three months later, I had all these problems, all these issues, and because of the platoon I was in I was scared to go to anybody for help.
Because my platoon was, you know, the John Wayne handbook prodigy: tough skin, tough guys, big burly tough guys, don’t cry, don’t talk about problems, and whatever — and all that macho bullshit.
So instead of talkin’ to anybody about it, I started burning myself to feel human, because a lot of shit that happened downrange wasn’t human.
After months of suicide attempts with overdoses of pills washed down with alcohol, and of burning himself, getting “blister on top of blister on top of blister, so I had a good four of five inches of just blistered skin” on his palms and wrists and fingers so he could feel the pain and think “alright, you’re still human, whatever, I guess,” someone finally called him on it.
But “instead of ‘hey, man, do you need to sit down and talk about something, you maybe wanna go to chaplain or maybe a mental health specialist — do you wanna talk about something?’
— no no, no no: ‘hey man, did you know you can get in trouble for damaging government property?’ ”
They said that?
They said that by burning yourself you could get in trouble for damaging government property?
Yeah.
So you were property.
I was pissed.
I was furious.
For one, I’m already having problems because I got this feeling like I’ve turned into a machine — a machine that can kill without second thoughts, a machine that can look at a dead person and laugh about it.
And so I’m already having a little bit of… identity issues, if you will.
And now I’m told that I’m government property, and I’m damaging it?
All right, well, fuck you very much, Uncle Sam: I’m done.
If this is how you’re going to react to a soldier having a problem, I’m done; I quit.
He went AWOL, then turned himself back in.
He got a mental health referral for a discharge from a mental health specialist that worked for the Army, but not much in the way of assistance — though everyone he talked to, from the psychiatrist to the chaplain, seemed to want to give him pills.
He didn’t want to go on pills, in part because his suicide attempts had been with pills, but he seemed to have to explain this over and over again to the same people until it was like talking to a brick wall.
Between the mental health discharge recommendation and the disciplinary hearing for going AWOL, which he thought also would end in a discharge, Cortelyou figured that at least his combat service was over.
But then they told him that they were assigning him to a unit that was due to redeploy as soon as he served a three-month disciplinary restriction.
I was just there, just kind of passing in and out of time, not knowing what I was going to do.
I can’t be in the military; it’s not that I don’t want to be: I can’t. I can’t stand being around people in uniform, I can’t stand being in uniform, because every day all it is is a constant, 24-hours, seven-days-a-week reminder of not only what I did but what I witnessed and kept my mouth shut to.
So again in December, late December, just after Christmas, I went AWOL again.
And this time I was gone for 40-some-odd days; I’d become a deserter.
This time, the Army gave him a Chapter 14 discharge for a pattern of misconduct and the commission of a serious offense.
He was released from the Army earlier .
Cindy Sheehan points out
that one advantage of practicing war tax resistance is that it makes you more
credible in your work encouraging soldiers to refuse to deploy or to resist
in other ways:
Even if you do go to prison for taking a principled stand, wouldn’t that be
better than killing a baby in one of those countries, or killing your own
mother’s baby?
You may also say: “Cindy it’s easy for you to say, you are not risking prison
yourself.” But I do, I risk it everyday because I am a conscientious tax
objector. I refuse to pay my income taxes. Personally, I find it morally
repugnant to be a combat “enabler.”
Please don’t bloody your hands for the Empire.
Peace is only possible if we do the morally upright thing, because our
governments will not.
You see the beauty of my proposal is
it needn’t wait on general revolution.
I bid you to the one-man revolution —
The only revolution that is coming.
Today, instead of dredging up something from the archives about historical
tax resistance campaigns and movements, I want to spend some time looking at
individual tax resistance in service of what
Ammon Hennacy called
the “one-man* revolution.”
Whether Hennacy got the name from Frost’s poem, or Frost from him, or whether
each came up with it independently, I don’t know. The idea goes back much
further than either, and in particular is especially pronounced in Thoreau’s
thinking.
This idea is that, contrary to what the organizers of the world are
always telling us, the key to curing society’s ills is not necessarily to
organize at all. You don’t need a majority, or a critical mass, or a
disciplined revolutionary vanguard. Just get your own house in order and
commit yourself to your own personal revolution — that’s the most crucial
and practical thing you can do.
“One-man revolution” is the answer to the question posed by radicals and
reformers who feel overwhelmed by the task ahead. “What can one person do?”
they ask (half-hoping, I suspect, that the answer will be “nothing, so don’t
sweat it”). They think the revolution that will finally put things right is
scheduled for later — when the masses see the light… when a crisis comes… when
we find a charismatic leader… when we unite the factions under one banner…
when… when… when…
The one-man revolutionary says: no, the revolution starts here and now. Your
first task as a revolutionary is to overturn the corrupt, confused, puppet
governor of your own life and to put a more responsible sovereign in its
place.
As to what the policies of this new sovereign ought to be, well, that’s up to
you. I’m not going to cover the details of how Hennacy’s and Thoreau’s one-man
revolutions played out and what specific decisions they made along the way.
Today instead I’m going to look at the reasons they gave for why the one-man
revolution is practical and effective, in answer to the
“What can just one person do?” skeptics.
These reasons can be roughly divided into five categories:
With the one-man revolution, success is in reach. It may not be easy, but
you can win this revolution with your own effort. Furthermore, whether or
not you succeed, the struggle itself is the right thing to do.
You don’t need to wait for a majority. You don’t need to water down your
message to try to win mass appeal or group consensus. You can start
immediately from a firm platform of integrity and honesty. This also makes
you more self-reliant so that you can endure challenges better, which
makes you more effective and far-reaching than those revolutionaries who
always have to check to see if the rest of the pack is still with
them.
Political revolutions that are not also accompanied by individual
revolutions don’t make enduring radical change — they just change the
faces of the clowns running the circus while leaving the corrupt structure
intact.
The world sometimes is changed radically and for the better by
the efforts and example of a single, one-in-a-million character. But the
first step is not to set out to change the world, but to develop that
character.
By fighting the one-man revolution, you are not as alone as you may think
you are: you “leaven the loaf” and cause all society to rise, you attract
other one-man revolutionaries to your side, and you sow the seeds that
inspire others.
You can win the one-man revolution
Ammon Hennacy’s theory of the one-man revolution crystallized, appropriately
enough, while he was being held in solitary confinement. He’d been sentenced
for promoting draft evasion during World War Ⅰ and then thrown in “the hole”
for leading a hunger strike of prisoners to protest awful food. Because he
refused to name names, he was kept there for several months.
Locked up alone in a cell 24/7, unable to communicate with his comrades in the
prison or outside, given the silent treatment by the guard, and overhearing
the day-in day-out torture of the inmate in the adjoining cell — this was not
the most promising situation for a revolutionary.
The only book they allowed him was the Bible (and they even took this away and
replaced it with a smaller-print version for no other reason but to inflict
another petty torment in the dim light of his cell). In the course of reading
and reflecting on what he read — particularly
the Sermon on the
Mount — he decided that the revolution could be fought and won even where
he stood.
To change the world by bullets or ballots was a useless procedure. …the only
revolution worthwhile was the one-man revolution within the heart. Each one
could make this by himself and not need to wait on a majority.
(A few days back I saw a bumper sticker that read “Jesus was a community organizer.”
But if you read the Sermon on the Mount, you won’t see any organizing going on there at all — Jesus is urging people individually to get their lives in order so that their deeds will be like a light shining before others to inspire them.
Do you see any “we must,” “we ought to,” “we should work together to,” or “once there are enough of us” in that sermon?
Jesus isn’t addressing an organization but an assembly.)
You can start now, with full integrity
Lloyd Danzeisen expressed one of the advantages of the one-man revolution in
a letter to Hennacy: “You are lucky and of course very wise to be a ‘one man
revolution,’ for you do not have to discuss your action over and over again
(with committees) but can swing into action.”
The advantage of organizing and working together is superior numbers, and, in
theory anyway, greater force. But there are many disadvantages. It takes a lot
of time and negotiation to get a bunch of people to take action together, and
usually this also involves finding some lowest common denominator of principle
or risk that they can all agree on — which can mean watering down the core of
what you’re fighting for until it seems less like a principle than a petty
grievance.
What such a movement gains in quantity it may lose in quality, and the force
it gains from numbers it may lose from the diffuse, blunted, half-hearted
effort of the individuals that make it up, or from the fact that much of their
energy is expended in the organizing itself rather than the ostensible goals
of the organization.
The advantage of drawing a large crowd of half-hearted followers is rarely
worth the effort.
It is not too hard to sway a crowd of wishy-washy people by appealing to the
half-truths they already believe and being careful not to attack any of the
nonsense they adhere to. But what does this get you? A crowd of wishy-washy
people who are just as vulnerable to falling for the next demagogue who comes
along with patronizing speeches. Instead, Hennacy recommends, we should
“appeal to those about ready to make the next step and… know that these are
very few indeed.… We can live and die and never change
political trends but if we take a notion, we can change our own lives in many
basic respects and thus do that much to change society.”
Thoreau noted with approval that the abolitionist revolutionary
John
Brown had not gathered around him a large party of well-wishers
and collaborators, but instead had been very selective about whom he let in on
his plans:
A one-man revolutionary is more effective and harder to defeat
A one-man revolutionary — a “man of good principles” — is individually more
effective and harder to defeat than that same person would be as part of a
movement. This may seem paradoxical to people who are used to thinking in
terms of “strength in numbers” or “the whole is greater than the sum of its
parts.”
This is for two related reasons:
First, because as a one-man revolutionary you are self-motivated, you do not
get thrown into confusion if the lines of communication down the chain of
command are disrupted, and you don’t lose momentum by looking about to check
if your comrades are still with you or if they have retreated or surrendered.
And second, because this makes it difficult for your opponents to get a
foothold in trying to persuade you with threats or with bribes to give up the
fight.
For example, Hennacy tells of one of his captors trying to trick him:
Detective Wilson said that the young Socialists arrested with me for refusing
to register had all given in and registered. (Later I found out that he had
also told them that I had registered.) [But] I felt that if they gave in,
someone had to stick, and I was that one.
The detective assumed that Hennacy valued his belonging more than his
integrity, and so made a completely ineffective attack. Thoreau similarly
noted that his captors had failed to understand his motives, assuming he
valued his freedom from confinement more than his freedom of action:
People often draw the wrong conclusion from the success of the “divide and
conquer” tactic when used by governments against opposition movements. The
lesson proved by this is not that unless we stay united we are weak,
but that to the extent that our strength depends mainly on our unity we
are vulnerable.
Without the one-man revolution, no other revolution is worth the trouble
The problem with the mass, popular, peasants-with-pitchforks sort of
revolution is that it’s so unreliable. You put everything on the line, shed
buckets of blood, endure betrayals and unfriendly alliances and hard
compromises, and finally (if you’re lucky) cut off the king’s head and take
charge… and then what? As often as not, you end up with something as bad as
before.
Political revolutions, says Hennacy, “only changed masters.” — “We made a
revolution against England and are not free yet. The Russians made a
revolution against the Czar and now have an even stronger dictatorship. It is
not too late to make a revolution that will mean something — one that will
stick: your own one-man revolution.”
Tyranny is not something that only infests the top of the org chart. The
tyrant doesn’t cause tyranny, but is its most obvious symptom.
Tyranny lives as tenaciously in the tyrannized as in the tyrant. This is why
Thoreau was careful to say (emphasis mine):
Not, “when the workers seize power” or “when we get money out of politics” or
anything of that sort, but “when men are prepared for it.” We must prepare
ourselves, one one-man revolution at a time, and when we have, we will get the
government we deserve (self-government, if Thoreau is right and if we ever do
deserve such a thing).
Be careful how you define “success.” You can do everything you set out to do,
but if you haven’t set out to do anything worth doing, you still fail. Even in
mundane things, you’d be wise to keep your eye on a bigger picture. Thoreau
mused in his journal:
Success and failure have superficial and deep components that may contradict
each other. John Brown set out to launch a rebellion that would end American
slavery; the government stood its ground and defended slavery against the
rebellion and had Brown hanged. Who was successful? Who won? A victory for
evil is just a triumphant form of failure.
At the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, Brown was called insane by the pulpit,
popular opinion, and the press (even — especially — the liberal,
abolitionist press). Some gave as evidence for his insanity the most
extraordinarily sane thing about him:
You’d think with the example of Jesus hovering over Western Civilization,
people would be skeptical of traditional notions of success: being captured
and tortured to death by your enemies and having your followers scorned and
scattered throughout a hostile empire doesn’t seem much like a victory. But
Thoreau thought the response to John Brown proved that even after centuries of
Christianity, “[i]f Christ
should appear on earth he would on all hands be denounced as a mistaken,
misguided man, insane & crazed.”
You don’t have to believe that history will eventually smile on you and turn
your seeming defeats and setbacks into obvious victories. You don’t have to
believe the nice-sounding but unlikely sentiment that Hennacy attributed to
Tolstoy: “no sincere effort made in the behalf of Truth is ever lost.” You
just need to remember that the seemingly small victories in an uncompromising
one-man revolution can be more worthwhile (when seen from the perspective of
what is worthwhile, not just what is expedient) than huge triumphs
rotting within from compromise and half-truths.
Slavery in particular was such an unambiguous evil that it was one of
“those cases to which the rule of
expediency does not apply,” Thoreau said. He made this comparison: if the
only way you can save yourself from drowning is to unjustly wrest a plank away
from another drowning man, you must instead do what is just even if it kills
you. If you are “victorious” in wresting away the plank, and thereby save your
own life at the cost of another, you lose.✴
“Hennacy, do you think you can change the world?” said Bert Fireman, a
columnist on the Phoenix Gazette.
“No, but I am damn sure it can’t change me” was my reply.
If you want to change things you have to get 51% of the ballots or
the bullets. If I want to change things I just have to keep on doing
what I am doing — that is: every day the government says “pay taxes for war”;
every day I do not pay taxes for war. So I win and they lose. The One Man
Revolution — you can’t beat it.
Do not let your opponent set the norm. Generally a minority is jeered at
because they are so small. It is quality and not quantity
that is the measure. “One on the side of God is a majority” is the perfect
answer which I have given dozens of times with success.
Sometimes, a single one-man revolutionary really does change the world. Maybe
the world was already ripe for changing, but it still needed a one-man
revolutionary to break from the pack and make the change happen.
We can’t all be Christ, Buddha, Gandhi, or Joan of Arc.
(Steve Allen said that
Ammon Hennacy fulfilled more of the role of a
Lenny Bruce; Hennacy’s
wife suggested Don Quixote.) It is only one-in-a-million who moves the world.
But despite the odds we all should aspire to be this one in a million.
Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary
church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the
ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the
ordinary intellectual. Therefore one who has love, courage, and wisdom is one
in a million who moves the world, as with Jesus, Buddha, and Gandhi.
Even if we fall short of this goal ourselves, by choosing this goal we not
only choose the only goal worth choosing, but we adjust our standards so that
if we are ever lucky enough to meet this one in a million, we will be
more likely to recognize her or him. Most people are incapable of recognizing
or comprehending the hero in real life — they lionize the dead martyred heroes
of past generations, while joining the lynch mobs to martyr the heroes of
their own.
It only takes a little leavening to leaven the loaf
By being virtuous in an out-of-the-ordinary way you encourage people to call
ordinary vices into question and you force the devil’s advocates to show
themselves by coming to the devil’s defense. Thoreau was convinced that one
person was enough to leaven the loaf:
Hennacy said that his “work was not that of an organizer but of a Sower to sow
the seeds.”
We really can’t change the world. We really can’t change other people! The
best we can do is to start a few thinking here and there. The way to do this,
if we are sincere, is to change ourselves!
When they are ready for it [my emphasis again — ♇], the rich, the
bourgeois intellectual, the bum, and even the politician and the clergy may
have an awakening of conscience because of the uncompromising seeds of
Christian Anarchism which we are sowing.
You have a plan to reform the world? As the saying goes: “show me, don’t tell
me.” Thoreau:
So often we hear of a Big Plan that, were it enacted as designed, would solve
the Big Problems. But the problem with the big plans is that they never seem
to get enacted, or if they do, they never seem to work as designed, as the
same problems show up in new guises. Meanwhile the planners waste their time
and energy and don’t change what is changeable. Tolstoy put it this
way:
An alcoholic who spoke with Hennacy had much the same sentiment: “the
AA fixed me
up. You are right in not wanting to change the world by violence; the change
has to come with each person first.”
The present American peace movement, stubbornly paying for the imperial armies
it says it opposes, reminds me of drunks meeting in a tavern at happy hour to
organize a prohibition movement that will solve their alcohol problem.
Your one-man revolution isn’t as lonely as it may seem
Hennacy and Thoreau also had faith that if you begin the one-man revolution,
this will attract like-minded souls to you and you to them, and that you will
find yourself working in concert with comrades you never knew you had:
Hennacy: “In reading Tolstoy I had gained the idea that if a person had the
One Man Revolution in his heart and lived it, he would be led by God toward
those others who felt likewise.… This was to be proven in a most dramatic way,
and was to usher me into the second great influence of my life: that of the
Catholic Worker movement.”
The One-Man Revolution
So what do you have to do to be the exemplar and sow the seeds?
Accept responsibility, and act responsibly.
Build yourself a glass house and start throwing stones.
Accept responsibility, and act responsibly
Most political action amounts to “who can we find to take responsibility for
this problem” — the One Man Revolutionary asks “what can I do to take
responsibility for this problem?”
Not that everything is your responsibility, or that the world is
looking to you personally to solve all of its problems. But you should at
the very least examine your life to see what problems or solutions you are
contributing to with it. Can one person make a difference? You are
already making a difference — what kind of difference are
you making?
In Thoreau’s time, the evils of slavery and of wars of conquest were sustained
by the active allegiance and support of the ordinary people around him, many
of whom nonetheless congratulated themselves for their anti-war, anti-slavery
opinions.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that because the one-man revolution is in your
heart that it can just stay there, locked up inside, without leaking out into
the world around you.
The one-man revolution doesn’t necessarily require living in
opposition to society and the status quo, but it does require holding fast to
justice and virtue. When society and the status quo are opposed to justice and
virtue, as they so often are, this puts them in opposition to you as well.
Build yourself a glass house and start throwing stones
Your friends and even your enemies will come to your aid when you try to hold
yourself to a high standard. All you have to do is to make yourself vulnerable
to charges of hypocrisy. People love to point out hypocritical moralists, in
part because some hypocritical moralists are hilarious, but also in part
because it helps people excuse their own failures to hold themselves to high
standards. If you build yourself a glass house and throw stones from it,
everyone will volunteer to keep you on the straight-and-narrow.
Hennacy:
I have… put myself in a glass house. If so I must needs take whatever stones
come my way. I have the right by my life of integrity to criticize, but I
must also take whatever criticism comes my way in all good humor.
[A] spoiled and arrogant priest wanted to know if I was “holier than thou.” I
told him I hoped by Christ I was, for if I wasn’t I would be in a hell of a
fix. I used this blunt method to deflate his spurious piety.
At times those who do not want to have their inconsistencies pointed out say
in a super-sweet voice to me “judge not, lest ye be judged.” I reply, “O.K.,
judge me, then.”
While both Thoreau and Hennacy strike me as stern with others, and
maybe not always fun to be around (as Hennacy would say: “I love my enemies
but am hell on my friends”), they were anything but joyless. Thoreau’s
vigorous, enthusiastic love of life and the world are legendary, and Hennacy’s
character too was eager, life-affirming, and generous (even in its criticisms).
Utah Phillips came home from the Korean war a drunken brawler, checked in to
Hennacy’s Catholic Worker hospitality house in Salt Lake City, and eight
years later checked out again, sober, a pacifist, and an anarchist. He
remembered Hennacy this way:
He was tough without being hard — tough without that brittle hardness that
some tough men have that would shatter if you struck it too hard. “Love in
Action,” Dorothy Day called him — Dostoyevsky’s words: “Love in action is
harsh and dreadful compared to love in dreams.”‡
Neither Thoreau nor Hennacy had any tolerance for bliss-bunnyishness, but both
were cheerful; both knew how to be dutiful without being dour. Thoreau:
I’ve tried here to put forward the strongest affirmative case for the
practical effectiveness of the one-man revolution, at least as it can be found
in Hennacy’s and Thoreau’s writings.
They make a strong and persuasive argument, I think, but not an airtight one.
I wish more evidence was preserved of them in dialog with incisive critics of
the one-man revolution, to hear how they would respond to the best arguments
against it.
But what keeps the argument for a one-man revolution from persuading people is
not, I think, the strength of the counter-arguments, but just the fact that to
accept the argument is not enough — it demands much more than a “Like,” and
much more than most people think they have to give. To be persuaded is to be
overwhelmed, to take the first step off the path and into uncharted territory,
and only a few of us have the courage to take that step.
* Can we all be mature here and recognize that in Frost’s and Thoreau’s and Hennacy’s time words like “man,” “men,” “he,” “his,” and “him” could either be intended by the author to stand exclusively for males or for people in general depending on the context, which the discerning reader (I think) can still be trusted to understand?
✴ This is an old thought experiment, see for instance Cicero’s De Officiis Ⅲ.23 in which he says much the same.
Thoreau’s “ten honest men” also hearkens back to the Bible, in this
case the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. When God threatened
to destroy the cities, Abraham asked him if he would still be willing to
destroy them if there were fifty righteous people there who would be
destroyed with the rest. God said in that case, he’d back off. Then Abraham
said, what about 45? how about 40? 30? 20? 10?
He managed to negotiate God down to ten before God got sick of the act and walked away.
Alas, there weren’t even that many righteous people, so God torched the place.
For that matter, Thoreau’s note that in his speech to a mostly-shocked crowd “the seed has not all fallen in stony & shallow ground” also has Biblical roots, as does his “do not let your right hand know what your left hand does” remark.
Even if you’re not a Christian, you almost have to be familiar with the King James Bible just to acquire the vocabulary of metaphors you need to understand the centuries of English-language literature that came after.
By using phrases like these and drawing on the stories they evoked in his
audience, Thoreau is reminding them that his arguments, while challenging,
are rooted in a tradition they can understand and already are familiar with.
As good Christians, they have probably already tried to imagine the Kingdom
of God as being like a little yeast leavening a whole loaf, or whether or not
they are the sort of good ground on which the seeds of good teaching would
land and flourish, or whether if angels came to destroy their town they
would be among the ten righteous people who could argue for them to spare it.
‡ This comes from The Brothers Karamazov, where it is delivered by a saintly monk named Zossima.
He is talking with a woman who is going through a spiritual crisis, and who has
fantasized about going into a religious order and becoming a Mother Theresa
kissing-the-wounds-of-lepers sort. Zossima says that such things are nice
thoughts to have because “some time, unawares, you may do a good deed in
reality,” but they’re just daydreams of saintliness, not the real thing.
If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on the right
road, and try not to leave it. Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of
falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own
deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being
scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you
will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself. Avoid
fear, too, though fear is only the consequence of every sort of falsehood.
Never be frightened at your own faint-heartedness in attaining love. Don’t be
frightened overmuch even at your evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing
more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing
compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action,
rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if
only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and
applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labour and fortitude,
and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.
Today I’ll try to convey what I heard about the state of Colombia at the conference.
I’m no expert on the country or the region, my Spanish is iffy, and in such a short time I’m sure I only got an incomplete story, but here goes:
Militarism in Colombia
Colombians have been suffering from a long armed conflict featuring multiple guerrilla/paramilitary groups, the Colombian military, and private armed security forces.
Colombia has the highest military spending in the region (by percentage of gross domestic product), and has a larger army than Brazil (which dwarfs Colombia in population and land area).
And that doesn’t count the spending and personnel of non-government military actors.
This militarism has infected civil society by promoting the idea that security means superior force of arms, and by increasing armed violence in the cities in the form of street gangs and organized crime.
In addition, the expansion of the military has come alongside a shrinking of social welfare spending as Colombia has adopted neoliberal policies, with the result that people now can most effectively get needed government benefits by joining the military (and this in turn has meant an increase in families with at least one member in the military, which tends to boost public support for militarist policies).
Colombian street artist Toxicomano (I think) decorated many of the planters along Bogotá’s Avenida Septima with antimilitarist messages: “The sound of weapons does not allow for listening to ideas,” “nobody wins,” “We don’t want to learn to kill!!”
Some parts of Colombia, including at least one entire department (state) are under martial law, with the civil government subordinated to military rulers sometimes to the extent of its near irrelevance.
The U.S. government sees Colombia as its regional partner in expanding its own military influence… something like a multi-level marketing scheme.
Colombia has bases that function like the U.S. School of the Americas, where military figures from countries around the region and beyond come to get training from U.S. and Colombian forces on how to use the latest techniques and gadgets the military industrial complex is selling.
The expert speakers at the conference were by and large cynical about the ongoing peace talks between the government and the guerrilla group called FARC.
This was for several reasons, such as:
the talks do not include all of the armed factions fighting in Colombia (which means, among other things, that FARC, rather than dissolving or disarming, may just be absorbed by another faction)
the talks do not address the social justice issues and in particular the war on drugs which fuel the conflict
the talks do not involve representatives of Colombian society in general but only the belligerents and so are likely to result in a necessarily political resolution but one that evades political accountability or transparency
Some speakers emphasized that militarism has so degraded the ethics of society that nothing short of a grassroots revolution of cultural values will be sufficient to implement a real peace in Colombia.
Former Colombian constitutional court justice and presidential candidate Carlos Gaviria Díaz addressed the conference and said that he feels “the central problem of Colombia is ethical character.”
Carlos Gaviria Díaz addresses the conference
Conscientious Objection in Colombia
The Constitutional Court of Colombia, the nation’s highest authority on the interpretation of the Colombian constitution (similar to the role of the U.S. Supreme Court in this regard) decided in that conscientious objection to military service is protected by the constitution.
However, the legislature has not implemented a law to govern the process draftees must follow to be designated conscientious objectors.
The military also has not implemented its own process.
Under the Colombian governmental establishment, the military and the courts are co-equal branches of government, so the courts cannot command the military to institute any particular process for dealing with conscientious objectors.
The result of this “vacío jurídico” (legal vacuum) is that every objector who is drafted has to sue in court to be released, and must rely on the vicissitudes of individual, often hostile judges to win conscientious objector status.
In a future post, I’ll write about some of the efforts being made to improve this situation, and how conference participants helped in this campaign.
Press Gangs in Colombia
an anti-batida propaganda poster I saw at the ACOOC headquarters in Bogotá
There is an ongoing draft in Colombia that affects males of a certain age.
There are grounds for exemption (being an only child, being disabled, etc.) but those who are exempted must pay a tax in lieu of military service.
Upon serving, being exempted and paying your tax, or not being one of those selected in the draft, you are given a military ID card.
You must carry this ID on your person at all times, and it is also required for things like getting a job in the above-ground economy, being granted a university degree, getting a passport, or owning property.
That said, this is a very leaky system: young men or their families can buy a card at a sliding scale (this is extralegal but commonplace), and one conscientious objector I heard about even traded a t-shirt for an ID card from a sympathetic official.
The military frequently conducts round-ups of military-aged men — swooping in quickly and detaining everybody, then taking anyone who does not have a card or whose card indicates that they have neither served nor been granted an exemption to the induction center to be immediately drafted.
These round-ups are illegal but there seems to be no political will or power to stop them.
These round-ups are called “batidas” in Colombia, and ACOOC says they have received reports of 45 different batidas from around the country in alone, and that the organization gets about 10–20 calls a day complaining about the practice.
Police sometimes collaborate with the military — seizing ID cards from young men and then turning them over to the military who induct them under the excuse that they were found without a card.
Offenses committed by members of the military in Colombia (such as, say, unlawful detentions like these) are by law prosecuted in military, never civil, courts.
This means impunity in cases like these (and much worse cases — the military has done similar round-ups in the past called “false positives” in which it has massacred those it rounded up and then declared them to have been guerrillas in order to boost its body count).
ACOOC, working with War Resisters International, has created a standardized form that it and other groups working in this area can use to carefully document reports of batidas so that these reports will be maximally credible to the relevant human rights authorities.
A second campaign is trying to eliminate the requirement to have and carry a military ID card.
This campaign is using a public awareness campaign, is lobbying universities to work to remove the ID requirement for graduation, and is also asking foreign companies with offices in Colombia not to require the IDs from those they hire.
Peace Communities
There are about a dozen “peace communities” in Colombia’s war zones that are trying to adopt and defend a policy of neutrality and grassroots demilitarization.
I think I have heard that this has included refusing to pay war taxes to guerrilla/paramilitary groups.
These communities are being assisted by International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR) volunteer consultants and observers.
Derek Brett, the IFOR’s UN representative (who has also worked there on behalf of Conscience & Peace Tax International), tells me that these communities have some of the highest casualty rates in the war.
In one notorious case, one of the outspoken leaders of the movement was tortured and killed along with his family.
A group of anti-war veterans has launched a campaign to try to convince drone operators, who are raining death on people around the world from the comfort of their cubicles at places like Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, and Beale Air Force Base in California, to abandon their posts.
The stress apparently comes in part from what was supposed to be one of the benefits of the job: being stationed far from the battlefield and close to home.
Drone operators report difficulty going from killing people in their day job to trying to act like civil people in ordinary life.
It’s like the stress of reentering civilian life from combat that is such a staple of past wars, but on a daily basis instead of all at once.
A Defense Department study in 2013, the first of its kind, found that drone pilots had experienced mental health problems like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft who were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.
