War Resistance Research Articles

Amex: Discord and Unity in the Canadian Vietnam-Era Anti-Draft Movement, 1969-1971

During the American Vietnam War of the 1960s and early 1970s, a movement dedicated to opposing the draft and assisting both draft dodgers and deserters emerged within Canada, where many of these war resisters immigrated. Exile groups were organizations in the anti-draft movement consisting entirely of American war resisters. One prominent exile newsletter was Amex: The American Expatriate in Canada. Amex’s reactions to events in the Canadian antidraft movement during its second volume (1969–1971) demonstrate how despite frequently criticizing other organizations and individuals within the movement, it ultimately advocated for unity. The newsletter's views on discord and unity within the anti-draft movement are representative of the larger movement’s success in maintaining cohesion despite disputes.

The museology of peace: How accessible, collection‐led, peace history contributes to cultures of peace

AbstractYamane and Anzai (2020) identify over 300 “museums for peace” worldwide, including large national tourist attractions, Sites of Conscience with their “dark tourism,” and small independent institutions celebrating civil society and war resistance. A subset of these, “peace museums,” focus on peace and peace movement history. The Peace Museum, Bradford, UK, uses a collection of 16,000 peace artifacts to encourage casual tourists to access past peace activism and to adopt that mantle themselves.

"Flame of Truth": the global significance of Doukhobor Pacifism

The Doukhobors (Spirit Wrestlers), a heterogeneous group of Christians in Russia and Canada, whose anti-war stance became well known when they organized a Burning of Arms ceremony in 1895, inhabit an undisputed placein the history of the peace churches and religious denominations. We argue, however, that the connection between the Doukhobors and twentieth century pacifists such as Jane Addams (1860–1935), Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi(1869–1948), and George Woodcock (1912–1995), deserves more attention. We then aim to raise awareness of Peter Nikolaevich Maloff (1900–1971), who authentically carried on the pacifist spirit of the group as he interacted not only with Gandhi and Woodcock, but also with Alexander Berkman (1870–1936), Dorothy Day (1897–1980),A. J. Muste (1885–1967), and Scott and Helen Nearing (1883–1983 and 1904–1995), among others. We finally highlight some instances of Doukhobor relations with the War Resisters’ International and the International Vegetarian Union in Europe during the late–1920s and early–1930s. In all this we draw out "Christ’s law of nonresistance to evil by violence" (Leo Tolstoy) that may be obscured to the public eye, not only because the number of self-identified Doukhobors has continually decreased due to the forces of assimilation, but also because "the scourge of war"(Preamble, Charter of the United Nations, 1945) continues to threaten the survival of life on Earth.

A Challenge to Traditional Tolerance? The British Police and the Anti-War Movement in the First World War

Peace advocates had been active in Britain since the beginning of the nineteenth century, but they were not perceived as a threat that warranted police attention. This changed with the First World War when war resistance and conscientious objection came to be widely seen as a danger to national security. This article seeks to explore the ways in which the British police, hailed far and wide, both in England and abroad, for their tolerance compared to their European counterparts, used their dramatically extended powers to supervise the anti-war campaigns and the circumstances that affected their activities.

Play for Ukraine: wargaming as a resistance pleasure

ABSTRACT This contribution addresses the significance of information and gaming technologies, particularly in the context of Ukrainian military resistance to the 2022 Russian invasion. Drawing on the case of the Play for Ukraine game developed by Ukrainian IT specialists, which involves launching attacks on websites purportedly serving the Russian army, this study examines how players effectively become digital soldiers through concealed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on Russian websites. While wargames have traditionally been recognised as integral to contemporary techno-politics and military education, this analysis argues that they can also serve as instruments of war resistance in cyberspace. By employing a science and technology studies (STS) perspective, this article explores the wargame as an active actor in sociotechnical relations. Through critical discourse analysis of Play for Ukraine social media accounts and media coverage, it delves into how wargames are embedded within war resistance practices, extending their impact beyond mere leisure and pleasure into realms of significant sociopolitical engagement.

Paper Bullets: Two Women Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis Jeffrey H Jackson

Until the publication of the English-language translation of Michael Löwy’s L’Étoile du matin (Morning Star) by the University of Texas Press in 2009, the remarkable story of the Second World War resistance activities of Claude Cahun—the gender-bending writer/photographer/montage artist with ties to Surrealism—was unknown to English-speaking audiences. Now Löwy’s story has been considerably fleshed out and told by historian Jeffrey H. Jackson in a beautifully written and carefully researched book that reads like a novel. The book is also a love story. One of the most admirable aspects of this book is the balance Jackson maintains between Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) and her1 lifelong partner Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe). Cahun is the more famous, but as the author points out, Moore was the one operating the camera in all of Cahun’s self-portraits; she also contributed art and photomontage to Cahun’s published writings. The two met as children in Nantes and were the daughters of influential and prosperous families. Lucy’s father was the Jewish newspaper owner and publisher Maurice Schwob; Suzanne was born the daughter of a Catholic doctor. In their teens, their friendship blossomed into love; by a twist of fate, they also became step-sisters when Cahun’s father married Moore’s mother. In 1920 they moved to Paris where they quickly became part of the literary and artistic avant-garde whose geographical center was the Left Bank and Montparnasse where they used their adopted names, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. They also frequently visited their family vacation retreat on the Isle of Jersey, whose peaceful setting was helpful to Cahun’s poor health. In April 1937, as war approached, the pair moved there permanently, only to be caught up in the Nazi occupation of the island in 1940.

Narrative Transformations in the Visual Representation of the Korean War Resistance—from "Battle on Shanggailing Mountain" to "The Sacrifice"

Narrative Transformations in the Visual Representation of the Korean War Resistance—from "Battle on Shanggailing Mountain" to "The Sacrifice"

The Social Movement Archive

The Social Movement Archive

Contrapuntal histories of war resistance: Mapping US war resister migrations, questioning Canada as safe haven

This paper frames two generations of war resister migration from the United States to Canada and the social movements that supported them as contrapuntal histories, disparate yet woven together, and entangled across space and time. We argue that Canada has functioned at key historical moments as safe haven for war resisters from and others fleeing conflict led by the United States, but that this role was always provisional, historically contingent, and never guaranteed. It is therefore crucial to understand the social movements that arose to support the search for safe haven at different points in geopolitical relations and histories. We develop this argument with empirical research about people who migrated to Canada during wars led by the United States in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In documenting both generations of resister migration, we move across scales to understand the highly embodied geopolitics of these journeys, which run parallel and diverge in key ways. Our analysis thus maps the shifting history of Canada as a safe haven for those seeking refuge from the violence of war and militarism in the United States.

Cold War Resistance: The International Struggle Over Antibiotics by Marc Landas

Reviewed by: Cold War Resistance: The International Struggle Over Antibiotics by Marc Landas Christoph Gradmann Marc Landas. Cold War Resistance: The International Struggle Over Antibiotics. Lincoln: Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press, 2020. viii + 359 pp. $39.95 (978-1-64012-105-8). The history of antibiotics can look back at a long and mostly venerable tradition of attracting expert historians, practitioners, journalists, and very often combinations of any of these. Bernard Dixon’s landmark popular science paper “Antibiotics on the Farm” from 1967 popularized contemporary work on horizontal gene transfer, which revolutionized the understanding of antibiotic resistance.1 Stuart Levy’s “The Antibiotic Paradox” of 1992 paved the way to the insight that antibiotics modernized the problem of bacterial infection rather than solving it.2 Beginning perhaps with Robert Bud’s “Penicillin: Triumph and Tragedy” from 2007, authors such as Claas Kirchhelle, Scott Podolsky, and Maria Santesmases have given us rich histories of antibiotics.3 At the same time, inspiring journalistic accounts continue to appear; Maryn McKenna’s “Big Chicken” of 2017 being a recent example of rock-solid and inspiring journalistic writing.4 Marc Landas’ Cold War Resistance falls into the group of more journalistic accounts. On some three hundred pages and through fifteen chapters it attempts to draw a line from Cold War politics to the emergence of antibiotic resistance. Drawing on many interesting sources, most of them published, the author goes through an enormous panorama of subjects: antibiotic drug development during World War II, the rise of the American pharmaceutical industry, Germany’s failure to participate in the invention of first generation antibiotics, Soviet science and industry under Lysenko (and Stalin), the repeated failure of phage therapy, the after-war food industry and the career of antibiotics as growth promoters, resistant staphylococcus in hospitals, and biological weapons. In addition, numerous small stories from any country that ever produced or used antibiotics are woven into the text. It is Landas’ main contention that the politicization of antibiotic drugs during the Cold War accelerated the development of antibiotic resistance. And while it is certainly correct that politics was influential in antibiotics history, starting from the drugs being a part of the allied war effort, this hypothesis is nowhere fully [End Page 280] spelled out and discussed with all its implications. The laudable aim to deliver a contextual history of antibiotic resistance results in sometimes dissociated histories where a colorful description of the battle of Stalingrad somehow leads to discussing the war-time production of antibiotics or the lack of in the Soviet Union. In a similar vein, discussion of the atomic bomb wanders through a chapter, but it is mostly left to the reader to guess what purpose this serves in the text. What does not help either is that chapters are simply numbered rather than having titles and so diverse in their content that a reader would struggle to say what each of them is about. Also, it needs to be said that the book, while mobilizing interesting published sources, is not entirely up-to-date when it comes to relevant secondary sources. As a result, the pages about Germany’s wartime effort and its accent on sulphonamides rather than antibiotics is shot through with small mistakes, all of which could have been avoided had John Lesch’s work on the issue been consulted.5 For the passages on resistant staphylococcus, insight from Kathryn Hillier’s work is missing.6 Other context is perhaps overrated. One can share the author’s fascination with Lysenkoism, but it remains an open question if the shortcomings of the Soviet pharmaceutical industry can be reduced to the idiosyncrasies of a neo-Lamarckian ideologue. The question that should have been explored systematically is how important the stated connection of antibiotic resistance and the Cold War was. If the growth of antibiotic resistance was advanced by Cold War politics, then why did it not ease or even stall after that? If we look at recent reports on antibiotic resistance in global health, it does in fact appear to be the case that the problem escalated after the Cold War ended, from the 1990s. It was then that global antibiotic production went to India...

‘Wars of Resistance and Rebellion: The Myth of Protest and Popular Dissent against the Vietnam War in Australia and Canada’

This article traces the history of war resistance in both Australia and Canada during the era of the War in Vietnam that became so culturally resonant with popular dissent from the status quo. Unlike all other major international conflicts in the twentieth century, this war represented a point of departure for Canada and Australia. Australia faithfully committed fully to the American effort, while Canada refused to commit militarily, shifting its focus to one of diplomacy. This article provides a comparison of acts of resistance to the war, arguing that while the two countries resisted the war differently a sense of national identity shifted for both, even if slowly and subtly. The history of war and nationalism engendered through its engagement needs to be nuanced enough to view acts of resistance and protest as being integrally bound together. The inevitably politicised nature of war means that the memory of war and its practice is often viewed in complete distinction and isolation from war resistance and the memory of anti-war protest. War and war resistance, I argue, are not binary opposites, not two sides of the same socio-political coin. Instead, it calls for a consideration of these issues together and critically, not artificially separating war from peace and warring from acts of resistance to it.

The Captive Maternal and Abolitionism

This keynote (article) examines political theory and organizing against anti-Blackness and police violence. It reflects on community, vulnerability and care, and political agency from the perspective of the “Captive Maternal”—a gender diverse or agender function of caretaking, protesting, movement and maroon-building and war resistance emanating from communities stalked by anti-Blackness and the legacy of 500 years of chattel slavery in the Americas.

Das Protestlied „Le déserteur“ von Boris Vian: Wahrnehmung und Aneignung in Frankreich und in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland der 1960er Jahre

There is hardly any other politically committed chanson from France which received as much response worldwide as “Le déserteur” by Boris Vian. “Le déserteur” was censored by French public radio and caused great unrest during the already heated period of the Indochinese and Algerian wars of independence. With the pacifist Easter March movement in Germany and a few years later with the increasing protest against the Vietnam War, the war resister became a symbol of various political struggles that allied a generation. From a transnational perspective, this essay examines the reception and appropriation of this subversive protest song that conveyed war resistance and disobedience.

Juvenile Crime and Dissent in Nazi Vienna, 1938–1945 by Evan Burr Bukey

Reviewed by: Juvenile Crime and Dissent in Nazi Vienna, 1938–1945 by Evan Burr Bukey Joshua Parker Evan Burr Bukey, Juvenile Crime and Dissent in Nazi Vienna, 1938–1945. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 197 pp. Second World War resistance continues to have an important relevance to Austrian national identity. The main points raised by the research in Evan Burr Bukey's Juvenile Crime and Dissent in Nazi Vienna, 1938–1945 relate to two questions. Youth resistance movements in occupied countries like France and Denmark, and in cities like Hamburg and Munich, are well documented—but what of youth resistance in the "Ostmark"? And what do we mean, as Karl Stadler once asked, by "resistance," by "dissent," and by criminalized acts prosecuted by a government that is itself criminal? Bukey's research is based on records from the Viennese Municipal and Provincial Archives and the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance. Only partial records exist—many were accidentally discarded in 1999. Bukey surveys the remaining 437 judicial records, the largest group of which are from 1945. Individual cases offer glimpses of the family backgrounds of those charged. After 1938, treason cases were tried by laws based on Prussian jurisprudence in People's Courts, whose judges often abused and humiliated those found guilty. Aside from treason, Austrian criminal code largely preserved continuity before and after 1938, though now interpreted through "völkisch norms" (11). Bukey suggests that Hitler's regime controlled youth crime more effectively in Vienna than in other large cities of the Reich (162). During the first few months after the Anschluss, youths convicted of break-ins and petty theft were often sent to youth detention centers for [End Page 164] several months. More serious theft was punished with hard labor. Moral offenses, particularly homosexuality for those over sixteen years of age, were punished more harshly. But the most severe punishments were reserved for political acts of defiance. A turning point came with the introduction of the Reich Juvenile Court Act in 1944, which sought to pass judgments based on character. Children diagnosed as "precocious juvenile criminals" were sent to the psychiatric division of a correctional facility; youth deemed capable of reform were treated more lightly (122). Homosexuality, with arrests rising sharply from 1938 to 1945, was punished under the Austrian penal code, while illicit intercourse with foreigners was punished under Nazi racial ordinances. In Vienna, 75 percent of juvenile convictions involved property crimes, and absent fathers were seen as a major cause of youth delinquency. Much of the volume's interest lies in its vignettes of everything from angry public verbal outbursts to sabotage, including a sixteen-year-old arrested for stealing switches from Viennese streetcars in 1945 (152). An eleven-year-old was discovered scribbling "Hail Moscow" on scraps of paper in a toy store, which led to the arrest of twenty children involved in a resistance ring (35). A seventeen-year-old mechanic was sentenced to three months of confinement for questioning the war effort, refusing to listen to Hitler's speeches, and proclaiming that Hitler could "kiss his ass" (88). Five youths were arrested by the Gestapo for loudly applauding at a choir performance by Russian émigrés. Several teenagers were imprisoned for joining the Austrian Freedom Movement. Others typed and distributed flysheets based on British news reports and were beaten and sent to Berlin to stand trial for high treason, sentenced either to death or to half a dozen years of prison. Former staunch Social Democrats had often become radicalized Communists under Schuschnigg's regime, a transition that increased following the invasion of the Soviet Union. Of some two thousand Communists arrested by the Vienna Gestapo, at least thirty were minors (107), who were more severely punished than other resistors. After 1943, crackdowns were made on partial Jews, often for absenteeism, labor indiscipline, attempting to flee abroad or escape deportation, or spreading "false rumors" (109). Offenses committed by Viennese adolescents "mutated as the war drew to its conclusion" (126), with the increasing theft of goods that could be sold on the black market or food and increasing refusals to work or instances of tardiness. During the war, juveniles convicted of subversive activities (whether listening to foreign...

FBI Surveillance of the War Resisters League during the Vietnam War, 1965–1973

During the Vietnam War, the FBI conducted counterintelligence operations on many groups and individuals seen as communist collaborators and national security threats. The War Resisters League, a pacifist group, was not just a target of FBI surveillance but was cast by the agency as a seditious organization. FBI records and corroborating sources show that Hoover’s aim was to consolidate his own power over the Justice Department and, in the later years of the war in Vietnam, the White House. Since the majority of existing scholarship on FBI surveillance of the WRL focuses on the interwar period between World War I and World War II, this study expands this history into the critical period between 1965 and 1973. Within this history is Hoover’s process of casting the WRL as a threat and violating members’ civil liberties to “thwart” it. This process not only had an impact on the WRL’s ability to organize but also created a dynamic between nonviolent antiwar activists and the Department of Justice that remains resonant in the twenty‐first century.

Ideology Was A Uniform to Be Taken On and Off: An Anti-Communist Prisoner’s Survival from Manchuria to Korea to India

Abstract Chi Ki-ch’ŏl’s story reveals a man not driven by ideology, but buffeted by it. He began adulthood as a Korean exile in Manchuria, where the Japanese occupation army conscripted him. After Japan’s defeat in August 1945, he joined a Korean contingent of the Chinese Communist Army and fought in the Chinese Civil War. His unit later repatriated to North Korea, where it joined the invasion of South Korea on 25 June 1950. When U.S.-led forces of the United Nations shattered that invasion in September, he quickly arranged to surrender to U.S. troops. While in custody, Chi worked with Republic of Korea (rok) intelligence to organize prisoner of war (pow) resistance to their being returned to North Korea after the impending armistice. He enjoyed privileges as an anti-Communist in the pow camps, and hoped it would continue. Although an active anti-Communist, Chi judged that he would not be able to live in South Korea as an ex-pow. After refusing repatriation to North Korea, he also rejected staying in South Korea. But Chi would survive elsewhere. He relocated to India, where he thrived as a businessman. He chose the space of neutrality to succeed as an anti-Communist, where life nevertheless reflected the contentious energy of the Cold War. Chi’s decision demonstrated how ideology, despite its importance to him, was not sufficient to translate his rejection of Communist North Korea into a commitment to South Korea.

Republicans Resurrected: Memories of the English Civil War and Peaceful Transatlantic Resistance in the Beginning Of The American Revolution (1762–1765)

At the inception of the American Revolution a transatlantic network of Real Whig Dissenters worked tirelessly to prevent what they understood to be the resurgence of seventeenth-century tyranny. For this group, religion and politics were so intertwined that a threat to one posed a threat to the other. However, recent scholarship has underestimated the importance of religion as a leading cause of the American Revolution by diminishing the civil significance of the Bishop Controversy and downplaying the religious implications of civil policies such as the Sugar and Stamp Acts. Drawing from a rich collection of manuscripts from this transatlantic network, this paper not only shows that the Bishop Controversy had civil significance, but that Dissenters viewed imperial fiscal policy through a religious lens. This transatlantic group included John Adams, Jonathan Mayhew, and William Allen in the American colonies and Thomas Hollis, Catharine Macaulay, Micaiah Towgood, and William Harris in Great Britain. They mobilized memories of religious oppression in the seventeenth-century to forge a common identity for British subjects, and some even attempted to influence public opinion by writing histories of England. Appropriating memories of the battles Britons fought to secure religious and political rights in the seventeenth-century, Real Whig Dissenters argued that the Bishop Controversy and the Sugar Act marked the beginning of a new age of a transatlantic imperial tyranny that must be resisted at all costs.

Seeking Status, Forging Refuge: U.S. War Resister Migrations to Canada

Often people migrate through interstitial zones and categories between state territories, policies, or designations like “immigrant” or “refugee.” Where there is no formal protection or legal status, people seek, forge, and find safe haven in other ways, by other means, and by necessity. In this article, I argue that U.S. war resisters to Canada forged safe haven through broadly based social movements. I develop this argument through examination of U.S. war-resister histories, focusing on two generations: U.S. citizens who came during the U.S.-led wars in Vietnam and, more recently, Afghanistan and Iraq. Resisters and activists forged refuge through alternative paths to protection, including the creation of shelter, the pursuit of time-space trajectories that carried people away from war and militarism, the formation of social movements across the Canada-U.S. border, and legal challenges to state policies and practices.

Käthe Kollwitz: Memorialization as Anti-Militarist Weapon

This essay explores Käthe Kollwitz’s antiwar graphic work in the context of the German, and later, international No More War movement from 1920 to 1925, where it played an important role in antimilitarist campaigns, exhibitions, and publications, both in Germany and internationally. Looking at Kollwitz’s production closely, we discover a deeply pragmatic artistic strategy, where the emotionality of Kollwitz’s famed prints was the result of tireless technical, formal, and compositional investigation, contrived to maximize emotional impact. By choosing the easily disseminated medium of printmaking as her main vehicle and using a deliberately spare but powerful graphic language in carefully chosen motifs, Kollwitz intended her art to reach as broad an audience as possible in engaging antiwar sentiment. In connection with the leading antiwar voices of the time, including French Nobel Prize-winning writer Romain Rolland and the founder of War Resisters’ International, Helene Stöcker, she deployed her work to reach beyond the confines of the art gallery, into internationally distributed posters, periodicals, and books.

Exile in the Desert with Sarmi Moussa

Exile in the Desert with Sarmi Moussa Melinda Smith (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Patrick Gruban In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything. —Thomas Merton [End Page 47] It was past midnight, and the bench I sat on in the small mud-brick airport in Ouargla was hard. It kept me from sleeping. I was in transit in this remote oasis town, waiting until just before sunrise to board the flight to Djanet in the southeastern Algerian Sahara. It was here that I saw Tuareg men for the first time. Two large draped forms filled the bench across from me—men dressed in their traditional indigo caftans with white turbans called cheches wrapped around their heads and draped across their faces so only dark eyes were visible. Tuareg men are sometimes referred to as “blue men” because the indigo dye can stain their skin. The pictures I had seen of Tuareg people didn’t do justice to these two imposing figures, and I watched them doze off. The Berber-speaking Tuaregs of North Africa were known for their camel-caravan journeys across the Sahara. Now they take planes when they need to, and drought has forced them to sell off their herds and crowd into tented camps and oasis towns. As the long shadows of morning stretched across the stark landscape, we landed on a sandy airstrip on the outskirts of Djanet, the small town that served as the gateway to the Tassili n’Ajjer. Near the Libyan border to the east, the Tassili n’Ajjer, which means “plateau of rivers” in the local Berber language, was named when water, trees, and grass were part of an ecosystem far different from the arid, rocky landscape it has become. The Tassili is home to more than fifteen thousand Neolithic paintings and engravings depicting the vanished savannah, where herds of cattle and other large animals foraged for grass and crocodiles swam in streams and swamps. This open-air museum was well known to the Tuareg people but was “discovered” by French archaeologists only in 1933. It has since brought a slow stream of adventurers and scientists to see the record of people who lived in this high desert nine or ten thousand years ago. I’d decided that before I left Algeria, I too needed to see this remarkable landscape and its treasures. It was the 1974 winter break from my job teaching English at the University of Oran, the major higher education institution in western Algeria. I was living in Algeria because I couldn’t bear to be an American anymore. By the early 1970s, after years of street protests against the Vietnam War, after being tear-gased and arrested and demoralized, I needed to go away. The Watergate scandal had just erupted. President Nixon had ordered the mining of Haiphong Harbor, North Vietnam’s [End Page 48] only port. Media images of the burning flesh of screaming Vietnamese children stalked me. In 1972, after I turned twenty-five, I found a way out. I didn’t flee to Canada like so many war resisters. After all, my life wasn’t threatened by the draft or the war, only my sense of identity. I fled to North Africa, an unlikely place. Algeria chose me, not the other way around. The country was recruiting English teachers for its three universities. I had a newly minted MA in teaching English as a foreign language, pursued as a passport out of the US, not a career choice. Algeria had waged an iconic struggle for independence from 132 years of French colonization. The revolution was held up as the world’s blueprint by other countries fighting for self-determination, from South Africa to Palestine. One million Algerians had died in the war. The French, in their final coup de grâce, burned the library at the University of Algiers before abandoning their colony. The country began building its own institutions, educating a new generation of skilled leaders and workers. I happily accepted a job offer. Algeria had severed diplomatic ties with the US after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. I was glad to be...