Dulce
et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
It
is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.
The
First World War poet, Wilfred Owen called it ‘The Old Lie.’ It
wasn’t sweet and fitting then, it never was, and it isn’t now.
If
the report in the New York Times is correct then hasten the
day when no one is fit or willing to fight the capitalist’s wars
for them. Hasten the day when the structural necessity of capitalism
to compete for resources and power is consigned to the trash can of
history by socialism, a social system based upon the production of
quality goods and services for free use and available to all. Ex
capitalists included.
‘The
US Army, Navy and Air Force are facing shortfalls in recruitment
targets this year, as the Pentagon struggles to compete with civilian
employment, while up to 77% of young people have been deemed
ineligible to enlist, the New York Times has said.
By
the end of its recruitment year on September 30, the US Army fell
short of its target of adding 65,000 people to its ranks, the NYT
says, instead ending up with about 50,000 new personnel. It is the
third successive year that the army has not met its goal, prompting
military bosses to cut unfilled positions and shrink its active duty
membership to 452,000 from 485,000 in 2021.
The
recruitment logjam has created “an
existential issue for us,”
Army Secretary Christine E. Wormuth told reporters this month, even
as some branches of the military relax recruitment standards and even
offer financial compensation of up to $75,000 to join.
Primary
factors in the stalled recruitment effort include many Americans
seeking employment in the private civilian sector, as well as large
sections of US youth being deemed ineligible to even apply. A recent
report by the US Department of Defense concluded that up to 77% of
young people in the United States cannot enlist for a variety of
reasons, including being overweight, drug abuse, or having physical
or mental impairments.
The
US Navy also fell short by about 7,500 hires this year, despite
recruitment initiatives, including financial incentives. Even the Air
Force, traditionally considered an attractive destination for new
recruits, added about 10% less than expected.
“It’s
been getting harder to recruit, and the military expects it to
continue to get harder,”
David R. Segal, a University of Maryland professor who studies
historical enlistment trends, said according to the NYT.
However,
one US military branch not experiencing such issues is its Marine
Corps. By the September 30 deadline, the Marines had already exceeded
its goal of 28,900 enlistments – and did so with little-to-no extra
perks or financial incentives.
“Your
bonus is that you get to call yourself a Marine,”
a Marine Corps commandant said earlier this year, according to the
Times. “That’s
your bonus.”’
Draft
Resistance and Conscience (1968)
‘Over
Vietnam, the majority of Americans go willingly to war—or at any
rate keep their fears and doubts to themselves. President Johnson,
under pressure about the war, replies that this is no time to argue;
American boys are in battle over there. Most Americans accept this
cynically emotional appeal and close their ranks—and perhaps their
minds as well.
Only
a minority, now graced (or cursed) with the name Draft Dodgers, stand
aside and refuse to join in the killing. These young men, opposed to
the Vietnam war, refuse service in the army under the United States
selective service system. They sometimes destroy their draft cards,
sometimes return them to the authorities—even give them to the
enemy, the Vietnamese National Liberation Front.
Some
of the objectors—for example the Quakers—are acting in line with
a persistent opposition to war wherever it is fought. Others resist
only the war in Vietnam:
I
am not a pacifist or a conscientious objector in the narrow sense,
but I am a conscientious objector with regard to the Vietnam war. I
do not object to conscription as such. (Michael Haag.)
I
totally want to dissociate myself from my country's course in what I
consider a disgraceful, cynical war. It is not a war against
communism. (Joel Gladstone.)
(Both
quoted in The American, 15/12/67.)
We
can see how small a minority the draft dodgers are, from the figures
issued by the U.S. Justice Department of prosecutions for draft
evasion. About 160,000 men are registered for the draft each month,
only a part of them being called up. In the year July 1965/June 1966
the call up was 336,530; only 658 men were prosecuted. For the year
July 1966/June 1967 the figures were: call up 288,000; prosecutions
1,409.
Young
Americans can apply for registration as conscientious objectors but,
according to the Sunday Times (21/1/68) the only
people likely to be granted this are Quakers or members of the
American Friends’ Church. (In this country, during 1914/18, the C.
O. Tribunals rarely accepted what they called a "political"
objection to war.) Very often, then, the only way out is to evade the
draft laws —refuse to register, destroy or return the draft card.
The legal penalty for this can be a fine of up to $10,000 and a
prison sentence up to five years. There can also be illegal
penalties—victimisation in employment or, as some of the card
burners have experienced, a beating up from patriotic hooligans.
The
draft dodgers are the latest in a long line of war resisters—a line
with a mixed pedigree. There were the Christians who refused to serve
in the Roman militiae; the Quakers who went by sledge to
Moscow to protest against the Crimean War; the unenduring resolutions
of the Second International. In this there is a discernible change;
the development of capitalism had its effect on the anti-war
movement. For capitalism made war total, with everyone under fire and
with a modem state machine recruiting all its resources—including
people—if necessary by compulsion. But at the same time capitalism
needed to school its people in its productive techniques, which gave
rise to a working class with political fights, often seeing
capitalism’s problems as political issues. Thus when conscription
came in, the opposition to it was often in political terms. Pacifism,
in the words of Christopher Driver tended to become secularised.
In
his book Pacifism and Conscientious Objection Professor
G. C. Field, who sat on a C.O. Tribunal from 1940 to 1944, recalls
among the people who came before him:
...adherents
of fifty one different religious bodies... those, comparatively few
in number, whose objections were based on ethical or humanitarian
grounds independently of any religious beliefs . . . a few whom we
classified as political objectors and a few, also, who could only be
described as objectors on aesthetic grounds.
This
was the result of a development which started in 1914. Before the
First World War, Britain was the only major European power to rely on
a volunteer army. As the war drew closer, a conscription pressure
group grew in strength and in 1902 gave birth to the National Service
League (President the Duke of Wellington; supporters Rudyard Kipling,
the Duke of Westminster, the Bishop of Chester.)
The
outbreak of war, and the growing threat of conscription, threw up an
opposition—the No Conscription Fellowship (Chairman Clifford Allen;
supporters Fenner Brockway, Bertrand Russell, Bernard Boothryd.) On
December 3 1914 the NCF declared itself:
.
. . it would, we think, be as well if men of enlistment age who are
not prepared to take a combatant’s part, whatever the penalty for
refusing, formed an organisation for mutual counsel and action.
Stage
by stage, as the war settled down into a pattern of interminable
murder, the government progressed towards conscription—its
appetite, as Philip Snowden pointed out, growing by what it fed upon.
In March 1916 the final blow came; the Military Service Act gave the
unmarried man of military age a choice between enlisting immediately
or being called up in his group. If he did neither he would be
"deemed to have enlisted”—in other words he was a soldier
whether he liked it or not.
This
was a vital provision. It meant that an objector who was turned down
by his tribunal was instructed to report to his unit. If he did not
go he was a deserter; if he was taken and then refused to put on a
uniform he was disobeying a military command. As he was legally a
soldier he was subject to army discipline; he could be sent to a
military prison, court martialled, sentenced to undergo such
experiences as Field Punishment Number One or even—as happened to
thirty four men—could be sentenced to be shot.
Under
army detention the C.O.s were subjected to a variety of brutality and
torture. In the civil prisons they fared only a little better. J.
Allen Skinner was
one who spent time in both Wandsworth and Wormwood Scrubs during
1916/17. In 1960 he was in prison again—in Brixton after a Ban the
Bomb demonstration. He told the Governor of Brixton of his earlier
sentences. "That”, said the governor feelingly "must have
been a terrible experience." (See The
Disarmers by
Christopher Driver.)
And
so it was—for Skinner and for all the other objectors to that war.
There were about sixteen thousand of them (12,000 with “political”
objections) and seventy three died as a result of the treatment they
received.
The
pacifist movement, dying down after 1918, came back to life in 1935,
once more at the approach of a major European war. That was the year
when the Peace Pledge Union was formed; over 100,000 signed its
renunciation of war. The PPU was swept along on a wave of enthusiasm;
in 1937 its Leader, the Rev.
Dick Sheppard,
was elected Rector of Glasgow University.
The
1939 war, as many thought it would, exposed the Pledge. (Professor
Field claimed: ". . . a clear-sighted pacifist friend said to
me, the Peace Pledge was really a piece of bluff”) Only about
65,000 men registered as C.O.s during the entire war and of course
not all of these had signed the Pledge. British capitalism had
learned a lesson. Conscription was in force before war was declared,
the tribunals operated with a lighter hand (about seventy per cent
of objectors were found to he “genuine”) nobody was “deemed to
have enlisted”, sentences (there were about four thousand of them)
were served in civil prisons. There was no torture, no death
sentences, hardly any discernible victimisation, no outrages worthy
of the name.
The
Second World War saw a decline in the numbers of “political”
objectors; from about 12,000 in 1914/18 to about 3,250 in 1939/45.
This can be explained by the fact that most of these in the first war
were members of the ILP which was then part of the Labour Party. By
1939 the ILP had all but disappeared arid the Labour Party no longer
had any doubts about its support for capitalism’s wars.
What
of the pacifists? The word covers a multitude of opinions on war, but
implies the basic agreement of regarding war in the idealistic sense,
as an evil in itself which can be abolished by a policy of
righteousness. Thus Dr.
Alfred Salter in
his pamphlet Religion
of a C.O. (1914):
There
is a great place waiting in history for the first nation . . . that
will dare to base its national existence on righteous dealing, and
not on force . . .
This
is typical of the pacifist attempt to deal with war in isolation from
the very surrounding conditions which cause it. It avoids the
all-important question of why governments base their existence on
force—even a government like the Attlee administration, which
included men who were objectors with Dr. Salter in 1914/18. What did
their pacifism do for their policies, when they had the chance to try
a little righteous dealing?
This
same question was still being evaded when the Second World War came.
On September 8 1939 the PPU Council agreed that “. . .in all ways
possible the PPU should strive to make the Government publish terms
of peace by consent.” In August 1944 they were demonstrating for a
negotiated peace and “just peace terms”. (See I Renounce
War by Sybil Morrison.)
It
is a massive contradiction to accept all the pre-conditions for war
and social violence—to accept the capitalist system and its
governments, its diplomacy, its “peace” talks and treaties—and
at the same time to object to war. This basic fallacy runs like a
thread through pacifist thought. The people who marched from San
Francisco to Moscow in 1961 distributed a leaflet along their route
which said:
We
believe that the Soviet Union and the United States with other
countries should pool their resources to remove such suffering—by
using the money now wasted on weapons of destruction.
And
Richard Gregg, in The Power of Nonviolence, says:
Nonviolent
resistance is more efficient than war because it costs far less in
money as well as in lives and suffering.
Pacifists
like Gregg believe that war and violence are an effect of inferior
ideas (“. . . a large part of the activities of the state are
founded upon a mistake, namely, the idea that fear is the strongest
and best sanction for group action and association.”) But it is
impossible to conceive of capitalism without war. The private
ownership of the means of production divides the world into
antagonistic classes, competing firms, rival nations and
international power blocs. It is this competitive nature of
capitalism which causes its wars, which are as much a part of the
system as the governments, the money and the treaties which the
pacifists are prepared to accept. Modern war is fought to settle the
squabbles of capitalism’s master class; it does not involve the
interests of the ordinary people except that it brings them nothing
but suffering. If the working class refuse to fight—as we say they
should—it should be on these grounds—and this should apply to all
war, not just to Vietnam, or Korea, or Algeria. If the pacifist,
idealist objection to war is futile how much more so is that which
stands out against only one particular war?
The
draft dodgers may claim to have made a start. If so, they must go on
to realise that there is nothing special about Vietnam— nothing
special about its causes, its history, its horrors. The war resisters
have won the honourable distinction of showing that capitalism need
not have it all its own way—that even in face of overwhelming
propaganda the working class can recognise a problem and protest.
They have shown their power, and that courage does not have to wear a
uniform. These qualities will stand us in good stead, when we have a
society where war is only a black memory.’
Ivan
From
Socialist Standard
March 1968
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2018/02/draft-resistance-and-conscience-1968.html
