Why I am a Conscientious Objector
by Guy Loftman

On July 1, 1968 the Selective Service System recognized my claim to conscientious objector status. That meant I was, for reasons of conscience, prohibited from participation in war in any form. It also meant that I did not have to face the military draft and likely service in the Viet Nam War. (I did volunteer for and serve two years of alternative civilian service, as a physical therapy orderly in the Bloomington Hospital, in Bloomington, Indiana.)

Thirty five years later I am still a conscientious objector. My reasons are still the same. As war threatens again, I will repeat them.

I am not unalterably opposed to interpersonal violence, or even to the use of deadly force. Under appropriate circumstances I might defend my life, or the life of another. But I am unalterably opposed to war. For the essence of war is that somebody else decides whether I will use violence. And I give that authority to no one. My conscience, my judgment and my response to circumstances must control my resort to violence. This is a fundamental religious belief for me. It is a belief that cannot be honored in war. For in war those decisions would be made for me.

The fact that I base my conscientious objection on my religious beliefs means that I might accept that a war could be politically sensible, even though it would not be religiously acceptable. But my religious perspective makes the political argument difficult for me to accept.

World War II is surely the most politically acceptable war. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Fascist armies were overrunning Europe. But I would not have fought. And I wonder if, even then, other choices might have been more successful in promoting long term peace and justice. Whatever the need for WW II may have been, there is little doubt that its outcome was to enshrine the right of the most powerful people in the most powerful nations to ignore the needs of weak ones. Certainly we didn't end war, and didn't establish democracy in Africa or Asia or Latin America, or Mississippi, for that matter. Does winning wars interfere with winning peace?

And if the exception proves the rule, WW II shows how pointless most of our wars have been. Viet Nam, Grenada, Panama. And we now are at risk to lose the peace in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.

War shows a failure of imagination, a failure of understanding, a failure of policy.Certainly if all people refused to join in war, the world would be a far better place.

Let it begin with us.

Guy R. Loftman, January 28, 2003

Happiness Is a Weapon
Indian author Arundhati Roy at the World Social Forum in Brazil
by Ben , LA Weekly

More on Arundhati Roy
SINCE WINNING THE BOOKER PRIZE IN 1997 for her novel The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy has been a persistent thorn in the gargantuan but peculiarly sensitive hide of the Indian political establishment. In 1998, when all of India was in the throes of atomic ecstasy, Roy spoke out against the bomb. She has rarely been silent since, becoming one of the world's most eloquent critics of corporate globalization "The only thing worth globalizing is dissent," she writes of militarism, and of the Hindu fundamentalism that now holds sway in Indian government, and that took the lives of 2,000 Muslims in pogroms in Gujarat state last year. She has been an advocate for the rights of India's "untouchable" caste and, perhaps most famously, a fearless opponent of a proposed hydroelectric dam in India's Narmada Valley that would displace hundreds of thousands of people and wreak untold environmental damage. Last March, after a year of torturous legal proceedings on a contempt-of-court charge, the Indian Supreme Court sentenced Roy to one day in jail. She had refused to apologize for her criticism of the court's rulings on the dam project, thereby "scandalizing it and lowering its dignity through her statements." In the course of the trial, judges chastised Roy for her failure to behave like "a reasonable man."

That, fortunately, she is not.
A small, fine-boned woman with wickedly playful eyes that hum almost audibly with intelligence and curiosity, Roy gave the closing oration at this year's World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. In a speech that has since been making the rounds on the Internet, Roy brought a packed soccer-stadium audience to its feet, challenging her listeners "not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness." I spoke to her in Porto Alegre the following morning.
L.A. WEEKLY: In a speech you gave at Amherst a couple of years ago (and that was reprinted in your book Power Politics), you gave two rules for writers. The first was that there are no rules, the second that there is no excuse for bad art. What does "bad art" mean for you?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Bad art for me means feeling that just because you are politically correct, you can be lax on honing the art. I see that happening a lot in India anyway. It's a pity, because then you misuse both literature and politics. When I write, I don't even think consciously of being political, because I am political. I know that even if I wrote fairy stories, they would be political. Your art is so subliminal; it comes from somewhere you barely understand yourself. I know that for me it's about a way of seeing the world everything. It's about a way of expressing or sharing your vision of the world. The outside world sees literature and politics as two separate things. I don't. But I think the reason that the establishments have always feared writers, the reason that writers are persecuted or put into jail, is because they have that weapon of clarity, and when they choose to use it, it's deadly
So it's not so much a question of dodging political responsibilities in art, but of dodging artistic responsibilities?
Yes, of course. I suppose in a way it's a slightly merciless thing to say, but you need to understand that there's a difference between literature and propaganda. When someone asks me, "Are you going to write a book about the dams?" or "Are you going to write a novel about life after capitalism?" it makes me want to laugh, because literature is much more than that literature is about everything. I don't choose a topic and say, "Now I'm going to write a novel about Iraq." It's for me a philosophy, a way of being.
Is there a novel coming?
I really hope so, but I'm very, very frightened right now in India. I called a friend of mine last night to sort of squeak with excitement about what happened yesterday. She works in central India, and she said 100,000 RSS people [the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist and quasi-fascist group with ties both to massacres of Muslims and to India's ruling party] marched with swords yesterday. Writing a novel requires a kind of calm. You can't be panicked. At the moment I'm panicked. I'm all the time feeling like I have to explain this or I have to bring attention to that, and quickly. I don't know whether to say, "Okay, if you think like this, you will always be finding a situation to worry about," or think that this is a very, very dangerous, explosive situation, and whether you want to sit back and write a book or whatever, you can'tyou really have to be out there. And yet, when you're one person in one life, you don't know whether this is just a terrible time or whether times have been like this before, and maybe you must say, "Okay, I'm retreating now, and I'll come back with another weapon in a while." It's always a battle between the knowledge of my own insignificance in ecological time and knowing that I do have a voice, and how should I use that best?
In the same speech, you talked about the danger of becoming a sort of palace jester in the free market of the literary world, that there are dangers inherent in freedom of speech. Since then you've had a lot of trouble with the courts because of your writing, and it seems that some of the dangers are far greater than just that.
"Yes. I was talking about the fact that free speech is protected in rich countries, in the countries of the North, in a way that it has never been before, and yet that freedom is such an apparent freedom. It's not a real freedom. Now we know, after September 11, that America is one of the most indoctrinated, least free places in the world. I was in Italy in October. I had gone with a group of filmmakers who had made films about issues in India, and I was talking to the press. Everybody knew that I'd been put in jail, and everybody had come there and expected us to be talking about how awful things were in India, but I said, "Look, at least I know that I'm being put into jail. At least my prim little body was taken and put into jail, but you have a prime minister who owns six newspapers and all the television channels, and you don't even know that you're in jail." There's a big difference." Continue

More Thoughts

March 22, 2003

As a combat veteran, as student of history and as someone that loves his country above all others I am deeply troubled by the direction that this country is moving. I'm deeply disturbed by an Administration which will use any means to achieve its ends. I'm deeply disgusted with a media that instead of acting as a watchdog of government has become a lap-dog.

The last national leader to launch a pre-emptive war on a country was named Hitler. Let us hope that this President will not be remembered in the same way that history regards him nor that our country is ever viewed as Germany once was.This war is a terrible tragedy. Our troops whose love of country and bravery is beyond question are being put into harm's way not because of any credible threat or attack on our country but to advance the political interests of a radical right wing cabal of dare I say it neo-Nazis committed to dominating the world militarily and economically for the benefit of a very few while cutting funds that go to help the elderly, education, and veterans. What a disgraceful use of our brave young men and women and shame on those Americans that support this action, this descent into barbarism, this flirting with fascism.

The press which once was the bulwark against government lies has been nothing more than the Ministry of Information for the government merely printing or broadcasting the pronouncements of the government without examination or investigation. The Administration claims Iraq has weapons of mass destruction without producing one shred of evidence to back its claim and the media reports it as if it were holy writ. No investigation, no examination just parroting the Administration line with no question. Of course if the media has looked they would have seen the evidence the rest of the world has seen, evidence that Iraq has destroyed or had destroyed most if not all of their biological and chemical weapons during the era of UN inspections from 1991 to 1998. They would have seen the reports of the International Atomic Energy Commission that declared there was not only no evidence of Iraqi nuclear weapons but also no evidence that Iraq was even attempting to build nuclear weapons. The Administration claims that Saddam has killed thousands of his own people and the media accepts this statement as divine truth without actually examining the facts. The focus of this statement is the Kurds of northern Iraq, people actually killed by Saddam's forces but the media neglects to mention that the Kurds were in open rebellion and that America and Britain were the countries that sold the weapons to Iraq in the first place. Nor is there any mention of Donald Rumsfeld as Reagan's envoy to Saddam to give Saddam the United States blessings on his attacks against the Kurds. The press has abandoned its traditional adversary role vis-avis the government to become its uncritical cheer-leader something only previously seen in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Mao's China. What a disgrace to our Founding Fathers and to all those that have lost their lives and spilled their blood in defense of the very freedoms this Administration is claiming to defend.

Harold P. Donle, M.A., Indianapolis, IN

Today women are taking a stand for peace and justice, many acting out for the very first time in their lives. Women are standing on street corners, holding signs asking for an end to this war, calling for peace. In the U.S., many are participating in massive die ins from California to Chicago to New York . Others are dressing out in shocking pink (codepink4peace.org) or involved in peace organizations like United for Peace.org and local groups like the Bloomington Peace Action Coalition, For Whom the Bell Tolls (a national initiative to end the death penalty and the Green Dove Network.

At the Women's March in Washington, DC-Twenty three women, including nationally recognized award-winning authors Alice Walker and Maxine Hong Kingston, Pacifica Radio's Amy Goodman were arrested in front of the White House on International Women's Day, protesting against the Bush Administration's proposed war on Iraq. They had marched from Malcolm X Park in DC, leading more than 5,000 peace activists associated with Code Pink, Women for Peace, to the White House. As thousands of anti-war activists peacefully encircled the White House holding hands, Walker, Kingston and 21 other women registered their opposition to war by singing on the sidewalk in front of the White House, which the police had blockaded.