Ain't Gonna Study War No More The Story of America's Peace Seekers

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT COURAGE. NOT THE COURAGE IT takes to go into battle, but the courage to organize resistance to war when a fever for it inflames the country, and the courage to refuse military service under pain of being called a coward and enduring the threat of prison or even execution. In the 1980s, refusal to register for the draft within thirty days of a man's eighteenth birthday could bring penalties of up to five years in prison and a ten thousand-dollar fine. Yet of the twelve million or more young Americans required to register for the draft by the middle of 1984, five hundred thousand had not a much higher proportion than in the early years of the Vietnam War. At eighteen, or approaching that age, men had to decide whether to register for the draft. Facing that decision, a surprising number of the "me" generation who were coming of age during the eighties were saying, "Not me." It appeared that an antidraft, anti-intervention movement had resurfaced-a sign that a considerable number of young people would no longer blindly follow our leaders into war. If you ask, "What war?" the box score on mass violence around the world provides the answer. Let's take just the early 1980s: - Forty-five of the world% 164 nations were involved in wars. Estimates of the number of people killed range from one million to five million. - There were ten conflicts in the Middle East Persian Gulf, another ten in Asia and Africa, seven in Latin America, and three in Europe. Five of these were conventional wars between nations and twenty-five were internal guerrilla struggles. - In 1981, the forty-five nations involved in conflicts spent more than $528 billion on their armed forces. The United States and the USSR and its satellites were the major suppliers of their military weapons. Facts, facts, facts. "We are the best informed people on earth ' " said the poet Archibald MacLeish of his fellow Americans. "We are deluged with facts, but we have lost or are losing our human ability to feel them." The young Americans who refused publicly to register for the draft were violating the law in the hope that their willingness to accept prosecution and punishment would draw the Peoples attention to the facts about war. They denounced war because it destroys life, corrupts society, and violates morality. They considered U.S. military intervention in the affairs of other nations to be wrong. They worried that what began as conventional war could escalate to a nuclear war. For the young, especially, the threat of a nuclear attack is frightening. They live with the threat of imminent annihilation. They fear that they may never reach adulthood. But is war inevitable? Are we powerless to shape our future? By refusing to make that first connection with the military-registering for the draft-some young men separated themselves from the machinery of war. Such action by itself may not stop war from coming. This they knew. But at least they would not take part in the killing process. How does a soldier who has been through that process feel? Here is the voice of Alfred Doblin, a German who served in the Kaiser's army in the First World War. He speaks through Becker, a character in his novel A People Betrayed: You receive a mobilization order. An agency, an office that you don't know, writes go here, go there, go to your death, to your ruin, go, so that you lose a leg, so that you get a bullet in your spine. Be careful, my boy, there will be gas, poison gas, mustard gas; swallow some. And you'll soon notice it may cost your head, your leg, your lungs, your life, and no one will ever replace them, since your mother gave all that to you just once. And you've been expecting it for a long time. During peacetime You prepared yourself for it, in the midst of your Kant and Plato. And you--don't question. You don'Meltzer, Milton is the author of 'Ain't Gonna Study War No More The Story of America's Peace Seekers', published 2002 under ISBN 9780375822605 and ISBN 0375822607.