Tag: Conscientious Objection

Peace & Justice History for 6/3

June 3, 1900

The International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), a consolidation of seven smaller east coast needle trades unions, was founded.
Read more
 
Herman Grossman, ILGWU president
June 3, 1946
In Irene Morgan v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in interstate travel was unconstitutional as “an undue burden on commerce.”

The southern states refused to enforce it, however, and Jim Crow (the term for laws, local and state, that enforced segregation) continued as the way of life in the South.
Eleven years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, a young woman named Irene Morgan rejected that same demand on an interstate bus headed to Maryland from Gloucester, Virginia.
Read more about Irene Morgan 
Recovering from surgery and already sitting far in the back, she defied the driver’s order to surrender her seat to a white couple. Like Parks, Morgan was arrested and jailed. But her action caught the attention of lawyers from the NAACP, led by (future Supreme Court justice) Thurgood Marshall, and two years later her case reached the Court.

Headlines when Irene Morgan won out over Jim Crow (JC) segregation law
June 3, 1957
Thousands of scientists, led by Barry Commoner and Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, issued a call for banning nuclear weapons testing: “As scientists we have knowledge of the dangers involved and therefore a special responsibility to make those dangers known.”
“…Then on May 15, 1957, with the help of some of the scientists in Washington University, St. Louis, I wrote the Scientists’ Bomb Test Appeal, which within two weeks was signed by over two thousand American scientists and within a few months by 11,021 scientists, of forty-nine countries….” –Linus Pauling
 
Linus Pauling at a disarmament demonstration photo: Robert Carl Cohen

Read “An Appeal by American Scientists to the Governments and People of the World.”

Pauling is the only person to win two unshared Nobel Prizes, for Chemistry in 1954; for Peace in 1962. Read his acceptance speech, “Science and Peace”
June 3, 1964
Conscientious objection, the refusal to bear arms in time of war on the grounds of moral or religious principles, became legally recognized in Belgium.
A history of European conscientious objection 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjune.htm#june3

Peace & Justice History for 2/5

February 5, 1830
America’s first daily labor newspaper began publication in New York City.
George Henry Evans, a 29-year-old journeyman printer, was the publisher of “New York Daily Sentinel.”

George Henry Evans
More about George Henry Evans 
February 5, 1991
49 German troops conscientiously objected to serving in Turkey during the Gulf War. The German peace movement actively supported U.S. soldiers stationed there by helping them file for conscientious objector (CO) status. By the end of the month, there were nearly 30,000 civilian COs refusing to serve in the military.
February 5, 2007

Lieutenant Ehren Watada
Lieutenant Ehren Watada faced a court martial for refusing to deploy to Iraq and for publicly criticizing the war, the first officer since Vietnam to be so tried. A volunteer from Hawaii who joined the U.S. Army prior to the invasion in 2003, he had refused to serve because:
“It would be a violation of my oath because this war to me is illegal in the sense that it was waged in deception, and it was also in violation of international law.”
Initially having served in South Korea, he learned more about the Iraqi conflict and the bogus claims of Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. He offered to resign or serve in Afghanistan but was refused:
“Mistakes can happen but to think that it was deliberate and that a careful deception was done on the American people – you just had to question who you are as a serviceman, as an American.”

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryfebruary.htm#february5

Peace & Justice History for 12/24

December 24, 1865
Months after the fall of the Confederacy and the end of slavery, several veterans of the Confederate Army formed a private social club in Pulaski, Tennessee, called the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Its first priority, declared in its creed, was “to protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs, and outrages of the lawless, the violent, and the brutal.”
In fact, the Klan terrorized and killed former slaves, sympathetic whites and immigrants.

Three Ku Klux Klan members, September 1871.
The building where it happened still stands with a bronze plaque reading, “Ku Klux Klan organized in this, the law office of Judge Thomas M. Jones, Dec. 24, 1865.” When the building was purchased in 1990, the new owner, Don Massey, instead of removing the plaque, simply reversed it, showing the smooth back side.
More on the Klan 
December 24, 1924

Costa Rica indicated its intention to withdraw from The League of Nations to protest lack of progress on regional issues, particularly U.S. dominance of the hemisphere.
The Monroe Doctrine, declared by President James Monroe in 1823, established the U.S. sphere of influence encompassed the entirety of North and South America, as well as the Caribbean island nations.
Read more 
December 24, 1947
President Truman pardoned 1,523 of the 15,805 World War II draft resisters who had been convicted and served time in prison for their offense. Five years later on the same day, shortly before leaving office, he granted full pardon and restoration of civil and political rights to former convicts who had served in the peacetime army or who had not been covered by his earlier pardon, as well as all convicted peacetime deserters.
Read more 
December 24, 1991
Parents of reservists from Grocka protested at Army headquarters in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, worried their sons would be caught up in the war threatened by Serbian nationalist expansionism.
December 24, 1992
President George Herbert Walker Bush pardoned six Reagan administration appointees in the Iran-Contra case, among them former Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, and Robert McFarlane, the President’s former national security advisor.He did so with less than one month to go in his presidency, and one week before Weinberger’s trial on four felony charges was to begin.
These people and others were responsible for selling arms to the revolutionary government of Iran in hope of the release of hostages held in Lebanon, despite then-President Ronald Reagan’s repeated pledge not to negotiate with hostage-takers.

The Iran-Contra Boys

Otto Reich /Elliott Abrams /John Poindexter/Edwin Meese George H.W. Bush/Casper Weinberger/Oliver North/Robert McFarlane

The money raised through the arms sales was used to fund the Contra insurgents in Nicaragua, who were violently trying to overthrow the government. This support was in violation of an explicit legal ban on such activities under the Boland Amendment [see December 21, 1982].

Text of Bush’s Grant of Executive Clemency
U.S. presidential pardon history: 
More about presidential pardons: 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorydecember.htm#december24

Peace & Justice History for 12/23

December 23, 1943
A 135-day strike by 23 conscientious objectors (COs) ended dining hall segregation at Danbury Federal Penitentiary in Connecticut.
The number of conscientious objectors had increased from 15 in early 1941 to 200 by the time of the strike.
December 23, 1944
General Dwight Eisenhower endorsed the finding of a court-martial in the case of Eddie Slovik, who was tried for desertion, and authorized his execution. It was the first such sentence against a U.S. Army soldier since the Civil War, and Slovik was the only man so punished during World War II.
He made no secret of his unwillingness to enter combat, but his pleas to be reassigned to noncombat status were rejected.
Eisenhower ordered that Slovik’s execution be carried out to avoid further desertions in the late stages of the war.

Eddie Slovik
Read more 
December 23, 1946
University of Tennessee refused to play Duquesne University, because they might have used a black player, Chuck Cooper, in the basketball game [see July 14, 1887].
Cooper went on to be drafted (the first black player ever) by the Boston Celtics, playing his first NBA game on the same day as the debut of head coach Red Auerbach, guard Bob Cousy, and center “Easy” Ed Macauley.

Chuck Cooper, graduate of Duquesne University
December 23, 1961

James Davis
James Davis of Livingston, Tennessee, was killed by the Viet Cong, the insurgents in South Vietnam, and became the first of some 58,000 U.S. soldiers killed during the Vietnam War.
Lyndon Johnson later referred to him as “the first American to fall in defense of our freedom in Vietnam.”
Over two million Vietnamese would die before the end of the war.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorydecember.htm#december23

Peace & Justice History for 12/20

Vermont Freedom To Marry Passes, and more on this date:

December 20, 1946
The morning after Viet Minh forces under Ho Chi Minh launched a nighttime revolt in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi, French colonial troops cracked down on the communist rebels. Ho and his soldiers immediately fled the city to regroup in the countryside.
That evening, the communist leader issued a proclamation that read:
Ho Chi Minh, Paris 1946

“All the Vietnamese must stand up to fight the French colonials to save the fatherland. Those who have rifles will use their rifles; those who have swords will use their swords; those who have no swords will use spades, hoes, or sticks. Everyone must endeavor to oppose the colonialists and save this country. Even if we have to endure hardship in the resistance war, with the determination to make sacrifices, victory will surely be ours.” The first Indochina War thus began.
December 20, 1960
North Vietnam announced the formation of the National Front for the Liberation of the South (usually known as the National Liberation Front or NLF), designed to replicate the success of the Viet Minh, the umbrella nationalist organization that successfully liberated Vietnam from French colonial rule.

National Liberation Front flag 
Ho Chi Minh biography (two separate links.)
December 20, 1990

Kansas reservist Dr. Yolanda Huet-Vaughn refused orders to serve in the first Gulf War (Desert Storm) and was later sentenced to prison. The Kansas medical board withdrew her hospital privileges.
“The issue was not whether I belonged in the military but whether the military belonged in the Middle East waging war. I did not want to focus on the personal decision. I was trying to focus on the decision for which each and every American would have to be responsible.” — Yolanda Huet-Vaughn
What if they gave a war and nobody came? 
December 20, 1994
100,000 Chechnyan civilians linked hands in a 65 km-long human chain (40 miles) to protest the Russian invasion of their country and attack on their capital, Grozny.
Read more  OR TRY HERE if you don’t have an account with the NYWT.
December 20, 1999
The Vermont Supreme Court rulled in Baker v. State of Vermont that homosexual couples were entitled to the same benefits and protections as wedded couples of the opposite sex.
History of the Freedom to Marry 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorydecember.htm#december20

Peace & Justice History for 12/13

December 13, 1917
Denmark, which was not involved in World War I, recognized the right of conscientious objection (CO) to military service. Norway had done so in 1900, Sweden in 1920. The Netherlands went so far as to write it into their constitution in 1922, and Finland enacted it in 1931.

European Bureau for Conscientious Objection    
Their history 
———————————————————————-
December 13, 1942
Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels recorded in his journal his contempt for the Italians’ treatment of Jews in Italian-occupied territories. “The Italians are extremely lax in their treatment of Jews. They protect Italian Jews both in Tunis and in occupied France and won’t permit their being drafted for work or compelled to wear the Star of David.”
———————————————————————–
December 13, 1981
Poland’s new military leaders issued a decree of martial law, drastically restricting civil rights and suspending the operations of the Solidarinosc (Solidarity) trade union. The union’s activists reacted with an appeal for an immediate general strike to protest.
In-depth history of U.S. and the Solidarity movement 
————————————————————————-
December 13, 1982
At the United Nations Second Special Session on Disarmament, the two resolutions for a nuclear freeze (a verifiable end to all testing, production and deployment of nuclear weapons by the Soviet Union and the United States) passed 119-17 and 122-16. The socialist and developing countries voted solidly for a freeze, while the U.S. and member countries of the NATO alliance voted against it.
—————————————————————————
December 13, 2001

In Belgium, 80,000 labor and anti-globalization activists began several days of protests at a European Union summit conference in Brussels.
Despite a massive police presence, unlike other similar meetings, events remained peaceful.
—————————————————————————–
December 13, 2001
President George W. Bush served formal notice that the United States was withdrawing from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia (then the Soviet Union). “I have concluded the ABM treaty hinders our government’s ability to develop ways to protect our people from future terrorist or rogue state missile attacks.”
The anti-ballistic missile system, known during the Reagan administration as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or, commonly, Star Wars, are referred to as National Missile Defense (NMD). To date, research, testing and limited deployment have cost approximately 500 billion dollars.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorydecember.htm#december13

Peace & Justice History for 10/12:

October 12, 1492

Natives of islands off the Atlantic shore of North America came upon Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, who was searching for a water route to India for Spanish Queen Isabella.
October 12, 1945
Pfc. Desmond Doss became the first conscientious objector ever to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Doss, a Seventh Day Adventist, enlisted in 1942 but refused to carry a rifle or train on Saturdays. On the island of Okinawa, under heavy Japanese fire, he saved the lives of 75 sick and wounded soldiers by lowering them, one by one, down a 400-foot cliff.

The guest house at Walter Reed Army Medical Center is Doss Memorial Hall in his honor.
Read more (includes movie trailer)
October 12, 1958
A Reform Jewish Temple in Atlanta (the city’s oldest) was firebombed with fifty sticks of dynamite in retaliation for Jewish support of local black civil rights activists. The Temple’s Rabbi, Jacob Rothschild, was outspoken in his support of civil rights and integration, and was a friend of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. before he became well known nationally.

From Georgia PBS 
October 12, 1967
British zoologist Desmond Morris stunned the world with his book, “The Naked Ape,” a frank study of human behavior from a zoologist’s perspective. Morris had earlier studied the artistic abilities of apes and was appointed Curator of Mammals at the London Zoo.
Read more 
October 12, 1967
“A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority” appeared in The Nation and the New York Review of Books. 20,000 signed it, including academics, clergymen, writers. It urged “that every free man has a legal right and a moral duty to exert every effort to end this war [Vietnam], to avoid collusion with it, and to encourage others to do the same.”
This document became the main basis for the federal government’s criminal prosecution (for encouraging draft evasion) of five of the signers: Dr. Benjamin Spock, Marcus Raskin, Mitchell Goodman, Michael Ferber, and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin.
Read the Call 
October 12, 1970
Lt. William Calley was court-martialled for the massacre of 102 civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai; far more actually died during the incident. 
The full sad story 

   
Lt. Calley
October 12, 1977
“Regents of the University of California v. Bakke” was argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. The question: Did the University of California violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, by practicing an affirmative action policy that resulted in the repeated rejection of Bakke’s application for admission to its medical school?
Read more 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october12

Peace & Justice History for 9/29:

September 29, 1923
Great Britain began to govern the formerly Turkish province of Palestine under a League of Nations mandate to create a Jewish national home.
The British Mandate For Palestine established at the San Remo Conference, 1920
(Note from A: I searched this link; the one Peace History had was no longer present on the site.)
September 29, 1943
Six conscientious objectors, imprisoned at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, for refusing to serve in World War II, began a hunger strike against censorship of mail and reading material by federal prison authorities.
September 29, 1983
The municipal council of Woensdrecht, a southern Dutch town, voted against cooperating in the possible siting of 48 U.S. nuclear-tipped cruise missiles at the nearby air base.
The council voted Tuesday by 9 to 4 not to cooperate with the national government, and to stop any activities that might lead to the missiles being sited at the base.
September 29, 2002

A London crowd – estimated between 200,000 and 500,000 – protested British and U.S. plans for a “preemptive” (that is, without provocation) invasion of Iraq.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryseptember.htm#september29

Peace & Justice History for 9/9:

September 9, 1862
Minnesota Governor Alexander Ramsey declared that “The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state.”
The previous month the Dakota, or Santee, Sioux, long burdened by treaty violations and late or unfair payments from Indian agents, killed four settlers and decided to attack settlers throughout the Minnesota River valley. The number killed was estimated between 300 and 800, until 9/11 the largest civilian death toll in the U.S. The number of Indian deaths was not recorded.
September 9, 1944
Religious conscientious objector Corbett Bishop was arrested after walking out of a Civilian Public Service Camp. During subsequent trials and imprisonments, he refused any type of cooperation with the government until he was released 193 days later.
 
“I’m not going to cooperate in any way, shape or form.
I was carried in here.If you hold me, you’ll have to carry me out.War is wrong. I don’t want any part of it.” – Corbett Bishop, 1906-1961
September 9, 1963
Students at Chu Van An boys’ high school in Saigon tore down the government flag and raised a Buddhist flag to protest the corrupt Diem regime in South Vietnam; 1,000 were arrested.
September 9, 1971
The Attica (New York) State Penitentiary revolt began. The interracial revolt was led by blacks but featured cooperation between prisoners of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

It was finally brutally suppressed by the state five days later, upon orders from Governor Nelson Rockefeller who refused to become directly involved. 29 prisoners and 10 guards were shot and killed by attacking state troopers in the bloodiest prison confrontation in U.S. history.

The prisoners had been demanding improvements in their living and working conditions at the increasingly overcrowded facility.
September 9, 1980
Eight activists from the Atlantic Life Community were arrested after hammering the nose cones of two missiles at the General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. 
Read about Plowshares 8
 
The Plowshares 8 (in alphabetical order):
Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Dean Hammer, Carl Kabat, Elmer Maas, Anne Montgomery, Molly Rush, and John Schuchardt.

This action would become the first of an international movement of dozens of “Plowshares” anti-nuclear direct actions.
 A chronology of Plowshares actions 
September 9, 1997
Sinn Fein (pronounced shin fayn), the Irish Republican Army’s allied political party, formally renounced violence by accepting the principles put forward by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell (D-Maine) who was mediating the talks between the Irish Republicans and the British Unionists on Northern Ireland’s future.
Senator George Mitchell
The Mitchell Principles:
• To democratic and exclusively peaceful means of resolving political issues;
• To the total disarmament of all paramilitary organisations;
• To agree that such disarmament must be verifiable to the satisfaction of an independent commission;
• To renounce for themselves, and to oppose any effort by others, to use force, or threaten to use force, to influence the course or the outcome of all-party negotiations;
• To agree to abide by the terms of any agreement reached in all-party negotiations and to resort to democratic and exclusively peaceful methods in trying to alter any aspect of that outcome with which they may disagree; and,
• To urge that “punishment” killings and beatings stop and to take effective steps to prevent such actions.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryseptember.htm#september9

Peace & Justice History 8/25

August 25, 1969
Company A of the 3rd Battalion, the 196th Light Brigade, refused to advance further into the Songchang Valley of Vietnam after five days of heavy casualties; their number had been reduced from 150 to 60.
This was one of hundreds of mutinies among troops during the war.
“He [President Nixon] is also carrying on the battle in the belief, or pretense, that the South Vietnamese will really be able to defend their country and our democratic objectives [sic] when we withdraw, and even his own generals don’t believe the South Vietnamese will do it.” –James Reston in the New York Times
GI resistance in the Vietnam War: https://libcom.org/article/gi-resistance-vietnam-war

(Note from A: Sometimes, people recall things that don’t make it into these newsletters. I referred someone one time to the page, where you can contact the owner/writers, and let them know. They appreciate that, and you’ll see the item next time! Just in case.)

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august251969