There were those who through WW1 and WW2 were reviled, insulted, beaten up, imprisoned, and treated to a whole host of other brutal and degrading treatments. There crime, they were conscientious objectors and refused to kill other human beings on the dictate of the state. The state takes a very strong dislike to those who will not kill on its orders. The state always demands obedience, submission and subservience, it must always have control over the population. it is estimated that there were approximately 60,000 men registered as conscientious objectors during the first world war.
Conscientious objectors are humans with a conscience, something that will not be tolerated by the state in times of its wars of plunder and power grabbing, which takes in almost all wars.
Anarchists feature strongly in that band of conscientious objectors, as did Quakers. These people were usually labelled cowards, though the courage they showed in the presence hatred and abuse demanded much more courage than to submit and become a subservient order taker.
Some did take their place in the military, but usually only as medics and ambulance drivers. Which ever road the took, it required courage, determination and perseverance. Their history is seldom, if ever, written in that frame.
Conscientious objectors are humans with a conscience, something that will not be tolerated by the state in times of its wars of plunder and power grabbing, which takes in almost all wars.
Anarchists feature strongly in that band of conscientious objectors, as did Quakers. These people were usually labelled cowards, though the courage they showed in the presence hatred and abuse demanded much more courage than to submit and become a subservient order taker.
Some did take their place in the military, but usually only as medics and ambulance drivers. Which ever road the took, it required courage, determination and perseverance. Their history is seldom, if ever, written in that frame.
As one small glimpse of those labelled cowards who opted for non-combatant roles and went as medics etc. this extract gives a tiny insight into the falseness of that label. others of course faced brutality in prisons up and down the country.
The burial detail, which had come for the corpses in the pigpen, was surprised. The “dead” were getting up and speaking English. Qu’est-ce que c’est? Ah, they were an ambulance crew. British volunteers, in the trenches with the French Army on the Western Front. In the ruins and wreckage near the front lines, they’d found nowhere else to sleep.The medical corpsmen were all pacifists, serving humanity even as they refused to serve in any military. Still, they lived like the troops. They bunked in rat-infested dugouts, on the floors of shelled buildings, in hay-filled barns. They dove for cover when incoming shells moaned and screamed, and struggled with their masks when the enemy fired gas canisters. At any moment, they could be called to go to the front lines, gather wounded men, and drive—lights off on roads cratered by shells, packed with trucks and troops, with every jostle making the blood-soaked soldiers in the back cry out in pain—to a hospital.
Today it is more obvious than ever that all wars are fought to enhance the wealth and power of the privileged, to protect or increase the resources to be exploited for those same privileged, to increase their power over competitors. However they are never fought by those privileged, there aren't enough of them to protect their wealthy and privileged position, hence their demand that we the ordinary people do the fighting for them. We are tasked with killing ordinary people from over there, so that our pampered, privileged lords and masters can maintain their powerful and wealthy position. Still so many still fall for this preposterous policy, the reality being that the only war that the ordinary people should fight is the class war.
