I suppose that you are having a very bad time, far from your family, your friends, your work, your home, the city where you used to live; that you are suffering cold, heat, hunger… and that you live in the uncertainty of what will happen every day, every hour, every minute, especially if you are in the front line, when the combat begins and you see your comrades fall dead, wounded, mutilated. And that it ignites your rage and hatred against those who have caused it.
Your leaders call you heroes, but you are doing what you have never thought of doing, the wounds in the body are painful, but the wounds in the soul are… do you know how to name them?
I guess you don’t have much time for reflection at the front (in general, neither do we). Survive and that’s enough. From my humble position of having been an objector to compulsory military service and from my ignorance of not having been a soldier in any war, I can’t help asking you some questions to understand what you are living (and to try to understand our silence and complicity).
Why are you risking your lives and your health? To defend your ideas and values, or to earn a salary, or because you have been recruited by force?
In the first case, are you risking your life and endangering your physical and moral integrity to defend your homeland? to protect your population? to prevent your country from being attacked, invaded, occupied? or perhaps because you want to liberate the population from authoritarian governments or corrupt oligarchs?
Are you sure that war is the best way to defend the just cause you believe in? And if so, how can it be that all soldiers think that their cause is the just cause and the other’s is a wrong or evil cause?
Are you sure that the other soldier is your enemy? And that by killing him before he kills you, you will be able to impose justice and freedom for all… also to liberate the population that your enemy claims to defend?
How do you defend your people if the more the war progresses the more bombings they suffer, the more people die or are wounded, traumatized or mutilated, lose their homes, their jobs, go hungry and cold… and live in fear, such immense fear?
Are you sure that the families and friends, that the populations you defend, share what you are doing? As they suffer for you, maybe they encourage you. But are you sure that they do not also have doubts about the real causes of the war, and do not see who is benefiting and who is being harmed?
If at the beginning of the conflict you had reasons to adhere to the war proclamations of your leaders, with the horror of the war that you suffer and that you inflict, where are these reasons left? Do you believe that the war causes less pain and destruction than it wanted to avoid?
The press, the TV, the networks on each side, feed the spiral of hatred and revenge: only the others are criminals, genocidal, heartless, do atrocities? But you know how difficult it is not to fall into the spiral of hatred and revenge in war.
War brings out the worst in all of us against others and brings out the best in us towards our own. But, when you look at it, naked, out of uniform, under the stars? are we so different from each other?
Are you sure that you are not being cheated? That you are not putting the dead in a war that is not yours? Are you sure that rulers and businessmen are not treating you like chess pieces in their strategies to accumulate power and money? Do you not feel like guinea pigs with whom they are destroying obsolete weapons and with whom they are testing new ones?
If you feel that these questions are meaningless and that they even offend your honor and courage, you will unfortunately continue to kill yourselves until the final defeat (among the people there are never winners!). If you feel that the questions disturb you, that they resonate in doubts that you already have, Stop Killing. You can declare yourselves objectors, insubmissives, fugitives or deserters. Einstein said that «objectors to military service are the pioneers of a world without war». War ends when there are no soldiers left, willing to kill: either because they have died or because they have ceased to fight senselessly, stood up against orders, or fled.
Is it cowardly to risk one’s life in order not to have to kill another life? What pride, courage and intelligence does it take, to kill a human being to solve a political problem? Is it cowardly to risk one’s life in nonviolent resistance – civil, not military – to make the occupation unviable? What kind of courage does a nonviolent defense based on not cooperating and disobeying the occupier, without wanting to endanger one’s own life or the lives of others, call for?
This night of new moon and far from illuminated cities, perhaps like some of you, I have been able to admire the starry sky.
What do we feel when we realize that what looks like a cloud is the Milky Way? Yes, our galaxy with about 200 billion stars! Don’t we think it’s ridiculous that we are killing ourselves on a small planet – the Earth – from a small star – the Sun – that is part of a galaxy – the Milky Way – that is only one of the 2 trillion galaxies that gather infinitude of stars – they say there are as many as grains of sand on all the beaches of the Earth!
Shouldn’t we be collaborating? And, celebrating the «miracle» of life on this beautiful little planet?
