Conscientious objection is the thing with feathers.
The one common denominator is hope. Whether one defines hope as an emotion, an action or a muscle, people embark on conscientious objection to create a better future.
On Reality Winner
Last night’s 60 Minutes segment hit all the notes: Winner’s service, her awards, even her moral injury; ” I was starting to see in the news that our mission had a very high civilian casualty rating,” she told Scott Pelley. Winner was honest about what imprisonment did to her and clear about why she brokeContinue reading “On Reality Winner”
On Colin Powell
The first mention of Colin Powell in Ain’t Marching is about My Lai, about “the massacre’s initial whistleblowers [including]Thomas Glenton, who’d first tried the chain of command and been blown off by Major Colin Powell.”
So many books, making amends
When I ask a publisher for a book, I always intend to write about it soon, and/or interview its author. And sometimes I do; authors from John Sayles to Joshua Phillips have given me the opportunity write about and promote their books. The moment that book comes in the mail is still exciting for theContinue reading “So many books, making amends”
It’s not the withdrawal
Originally posted on V B I:
Soldiers with the 10th Mountain Division escort evacuees at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Afghanistan, Aug. 20 The invasion was doomed from the start. Addressing America’s current political crisis, Ezra Klein’s essay in The New York Times, “Let’s Not Pretend That the Way We Withdrew From Afghanistan Was the Problem,”…
“The delicacy and fragility of life hit me”: Kyle Toon’s Journey to Conscientious Objection
It was the police murder of George Floyd, in mid-2020, that got Toon to identify as a conscientious objector. “The delicacy and fragility of life hit me” after that May 25, he told me. With the national uprising all around him, he realized “I have to create change in myself.”
50 years since veterans swamped the Capitol — but for democracy
They crossed the Potomac — some in wheelchairs or on crutches — to Arlington National Cemetery, where a former military chaplain led a funeral service for the war dead. They refused to stop sleeping on the Mall despite orders from the Supreme Court. The war they hoped to stop didn’t end until four years later, but its course and that of the nation was altered by their movement, many of whom are still fighting for change today.
My Time as a Vietnam War-era Conscientious Objector
Originally posted on 1960s: Days of Rage:
Conscientious objector William White being dragged from his home in Sydney after being arrested, 1966 “When I chose to apply for conscientious objector status in 1969 during the height of the Vietnam War, I was a teenager and in a quandary: How was I to prove my objection…
And so it goes.
There’s the just-passed 30th anniversary of Operation Desert Storm, about which I managed to write exactly nothing and for which I now defer to Kelly Kennedy’s plangent memoir at The War Horse, which ends with Gulf War Syndrome but not before conveying so much more. There’s the 50th anniversary of “The Pentagon Papers,” as the New York Times tagged Daniel Ellsberg’s leak about U.S. misconduct in Southeast Asia. 50th anniversaries are particularly frequent, since 50 years ago the movement against the Vietnam war was at its height.
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About the Author
Journalist Chris Lombardi has been writing about war and peace for more than twenty years. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Guernica, the Philadelphia Inquirer, ABA Journal, and at WHYY.org. The author of I Ain’t Marching Anymore: Dissenters, Deserters, and Objectors to America’s Wars (The New Press), she lives in Philadelphia.
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I Ain't Marching Anymore 