Call for Conscientious Objection

You do not have enemies. The people with another faith, another culture or other color are not your enemies. Your only enemies are the people who send you to war.
Those who send you to war do not do it for your concern, but for their own. For their profit, their power, their advantage, their luxury.
Why do you fight for them? Do you have a part in their profit? Do you have a part in their power? Do you have a part in their luxury?
And against whom do you fight? Did the so-called enemies

do something to you? Cassius Clay refused to fight in Vietnam. He said the Vietnamese did not do anything to him.
Or you GIs. Did the Afghanis, the Iraqis, the Iranians and so on do something to you?
Or you, young Russians: Did the Chechenyans do something to you? And if yes, do you know what your government did to them?
Or you, young Israelis: Did the Palestinians do something to you? And if yes, do you know what your government did to them? Who caused the mischief you are to fight? Do you know which powers you serve when you drive with tanks through conquered areas?
Who, for heaven’s sake, causes the mischief for whose pretended abatement the youth is sent to war? Your governments, your own legislators, the rulers of your own country cause it.
The world of banks and corporate groups, of the arms industry and militaries that you serve and whose war commands you obey that cause it. Do you really want to support their world?

If you do not want to do that ignore war service. Ignore it with such insistence and power that they no longer come for you. “Imagine it was war and nobody would go there.” No person on earth has the right to force someone else to go to war.
If they want to draft you to war service then turn the tables. Write to them where and when they have to report, with which socks, underwear and skirts they should turn up in. Tell them, unmistakably, that they have to go to war themselves from now on if they want to achieve their dirty concerns. Use your connections, your media, your youth and your power to turn the tables. If they want war they are to get into the tanks and dugouts themselves, are to drive through mine fields and to get cut by shrapnel weapons themselves.
There would no longer be war on earth if those who cause the wars had to fight the battles themselves, and if they had to experience on their own body what it means to get mutilated or burnt, to starve, to freeze to death, to faint of pain.
War is the opposite of every Human Right. Those who command war are always wrong. War is an active cause of endless disease: crushed and burned children, bodies, torn to pieces, destroyed village communities, lost relatives, lost friends or lovers, hunger, cold, pain and escape, cruelty against the civilian population – this is war!
Nobody is allowed to go to war. Behind the laws of the rulers there is a higher law: “Thou shall not kill.” It is the moral duty of all courageous people to elude from war service. Do it plentifully, and do it until nobody wants to go to war any longer. It is an honour to refuse war service. Show that honour until it is recognised by all.
The soldier is the polished deformity of the human being. The uniform is the fool’s dress of the slaves.

Command and obedience are the logic of a culture that is afraid of freedom.
Those who agree to war, and if it is only to the obligatory military service, make themselves guilty of complicity. To obey military service jars with every ethic. As long as we are human beings we have to make every effort to stop this madness. There will be no human world as long as military duty is accepted as societal duty.
The enemies are always the others. But think about it: If you were on the “other” side, you yourself would be the enemy. The roles are exchangeable.
“We refuse to be enemies.” The tears cried by a Palestinian mother about her killed child are the same as the tears of an Israeli mother whose child was killed by a bomb attack.
The warrior of the new times is a warrior of peace.
One has to have the courage to protect life and to become soft if our co-creatures are treated with harshness. Train your body, strengthen your heart and stabilise your mind to achieve the soft power against all resistance. It is the soft power which overcomes all hardness.
A German rock band (“Die Ärzte”) sang:
Your violence is a silent scream for love. Your military boots long for tenderness. You never learnt to articulate yourself, your parents never had time for you … because you have problems nobody cares about, because you are afraid to cuddle..., that is why you are a fascist.
These are connections which we have to see and change, if we want to put an end to war.
The collective expansion of violence which we experience on earth is the explosion of energies which have been blocked for a long time, which did not fit into the established system. The American or Russian or Israeli guys which roam through Baghdad or Grozny or Ramallah in tanks with loud music and shoot into houses – they come from a background which was unable to give a positive direction to these overflowing energies.
A young man is asked why he is in the mercenaries. He answers: Because I want to become a real man. He has to show hardness, has to learn how to kill, in order to be a “real” man!
We definitely need new ways of living together, new communities and new living spaces in which it is possible to become a real man by softer means, where one is not scared of love and one does not need military boots to hide one’s own longing.
“Make love, not war.” This was a profound sentence by the American conscientious objectors at the time of the Vietnam War. May this sentence move in all young hearts. And may we all find the intelligence and the will to follow it forever.
In the name of love,
In the name of the protection of all creatures,
In the name of the warmth of all that has skin and fur,
Venceremos.

Dieter Duhm

Further information:
Institute for Global Peacework (IGP)
Monte do Cerro, P-7630 Colos, Portugal
Phone: 00351-283 635 484 - Fax: 00351-283 635 374
email: info@dieter-duhm.de