Abstract
Traitorous cowards or courageous heroes? Military resisters elicit fervent responses not simply because they polarize perspectives on war, nation, and citizenship, but because they encounter and embody a moral quandary which marks all conflict: The fear of harming another when one’s own life, and sense of self, is endangered. With recourse to Judith Butler’s meditations on the precarity of life and the finitude of liberal humanist ontologies, this article contemplates the ethical imperative of eschewing both the valorization and demonization of individual resisters who found perpetrating war too much to bear. My focus lies in 21st-century U.S. military resisters who journey to Canada in search of refuge, residency, and “peace of mind.” While their experiences are imbued with ethical promise for amplifying oppositional political perspectives on war, this promise is inhibited by the legal and political apparatuses in which they are constituted, through which they are individuated, and to which they remain bound.
The conscientious objector curtains his cowardice behind the statement that he objects to placing himself in a position where he might take part in killing someone. I’d guard his conscience. I’d send him to the front, but I wouldn’t give him a gun. I’d put him to digging kitchen sinks and trenches so that good men could rest until the time came for them to kill someone. Then I’d watch his conscience to see what it would do. To equate support for Conscientious Objectors with un-American activity is an indefensible betrayal of our historic uniqueness . . . WE must individually and corporately think clearly, act rationally, and, above all else, protect the touchstone of true humanity: the individual conscience. This calls for openness, not closed hearts and minds; for building bridges, not the deepening of chasms between people. We’re not talking about draft dodgers, we’re not talking about resisters. We’re talking about people who volunteer to serve in the armed forces of a democratic country and simply change their mind to desert. And that’s fine, that’s the decision they have made, but they are not refugees. I don’t appreciate people adding to the backlog and clogging up the system whose claims are being rejected consistently 100 per cent of the time.
Proem
These three vignettes, from a President, a Pastor, and an Immigration Minister, each convey how acts of military resistance, “draft dodging,” or desertion have been politically framed, spatially contoured, and morally inflected in North America this past century. While apart they offer only a series of snapshots in the long and storied genealogy of the conscientious objector, together they frame absconding U.S. soldiers as perennially emotive emblems of the political and religious divisiveness of war. It is noteworthy, however, that Theodore Roosevelt and the Reverend Jennings, speaking during the First World War and Vietnam War eras, respectively, do not appeal directly to their political or religious affiliations in their respective proclamations. Instead, it is the morality of the individual soldier, “his 1 cowardice,” and that of communities who might show “true humanity” and “openness” in their reception of objectors, to which they direct their attentions. The moral character of the objector is contested and represented on these grounds: They are either betraying the “good men” who are willing to defend, kill, even die for the nation-state, or showing a compassionate disobedience which might help reify affective bonds with the “hearts and minds” of distant strangers. Jason Kenney, conversely, circumvents and negates moral and political discussion of those 21st-century U.S. military resisters—or in his chosen parlance “bogus refugee claimants” (cited in CBC News, 2009)—who migrate north to Canada in search of refuge, by emphasizing the ostensible “free-will” of military registrants, and performatively prefiguring their endeavors as forlornly “clogging up” Canada’s immigration system.
Of course, the question of a soldier’s morality in resisting war has been entangled with shifting political, religious, and legal narratives and forms of power throughout military history, and each of the discourses articulated in the above vignettes coalesce in our geopolitical present. But Kenney’s remarks in particular speak to the vastly different legal, political, and social landscape awaiting defecting U.S. service members who venture to Canada in the 21st century from that encountered by American Vietnam War resisters who took this same Northern passage in the 1960s and 1970s. The abolition of the draft in 1973 and professionalization of the U.S. army, closer bureaucratic links between Canada and the United States since September 11, 2001, as well as tensions between Canadian and international law in relation to immigration, have together obstructed a path traveled by Americans seeking political refuge since the Revolutionary War. Nevertheless, of the tens of thousands of “desertion” cases recorded by the Pentagon since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, including 4,698 instances in 2007—the highest annual rate since the advent of the all-volunteer army in 1980 (Nichols, 2006)—several hundred resisters have migrated to Canada to evade desertion charges. My concern, and my contentions in what follows, lie with these individuals, their fraught migrations and legal struggles, and the ethical promise and finitude of their public narratives of resistance.
This article sets out to trace the historical, legal, geopolitical, and ethical complexity of military resistance through the institutions and individuals that solicit, contour, amplify, and vocalize resistance narratives. This approach differs from those various media and edited books that feature the accounts of individual U.S. military resisters and detail their epiphanic experiences of conflict. Rather than foregrounding any one source of authority or authenticity for analysis, such as an individual resister or support organization, I wish to examine the channels through which these people first become constituted as resisters, and are then able to vocalize an oppositional politics which foregrounds the (im)morality and (in)humanity of war. Twenty-first century U.S. resisters draw significant provincial, national, and international media attention centered on their acts of resistance, their journeys to Canada, and ensuing struggles to avoid deportation and incarceration. Those who have embraced the widespread media exposure which their actions and circumstances elicit, and speak out as to their political, religious, and ethical beliefs, promise to (re)invigorate public debate surrounding the ethics and morality of war, where such discussions too often descend into the dreary business of strategic aims and legal stipulations. Yet that promise, as I will argue, is curtailed both by the legal and political apparatuses in which military resisters are constituted and bound following their refusals of service, and by efforts to either demonize or valorize individuals for their acts of resistance to warfare.
My intention herein is therefore not to simply amplify individual military resisters’ already well-publicized experiences, or to provide a socio-legal analysis of their status as objectors, though both of these are necessary endeavors en route. Rather, I set out to examine the ethical implications of their public disclosures of objection. To this end, an exercise in nomenclature to explain why I favor the term “military resister” over competing descriptors such as “deserter” precedes three complementary discussions. The first surveys U.S. military recruitment strategy and works to undermine the rhetoric of free-will surrounding the all-volunteer army which, during discussions of military resistance, tends to negate the agency of the soldier in the monolithic shadow of military sovereignty. I then trace the stories of military resisters who have sought refuge in Canada, affording particular attention to the experiences of Jeremy Hinzman and Rodney Watson, with emphasis on their constitution as resisters within, and in spaces between, military, state, and international law. All this culminates in an ethical reflection on the public exposure and disclosures of 21st century U.S. military resisters which, despite frequent reference to the horrors witnessed at war and commendably peaceful spirit, are often addressed to those institutions which constitute them as resisters, and can tend toward privileging the transformation of their own individual consciences in pursuit of citizenship, acceptance, and “peace of mind.” Drawing on the relational ontological stance for which Butler (2004, 2009) has advocated, my reflections favor those forms of public disclosure which recognize our “undeniable proximity and interdependency” (Butler, 2009, p. xxvi) with distant others from those who found perpetrating war too much to bear.
I should emphasize from the outset that military resisters, and the various organizations, institutions, and individuals who support them (among whom I count myself), are not the personal focus of my critique. But I am also mindful to eschew individuated models of “the conscience” precisely because they tend to stifle debate and entrench opinion by appealing to individual morality of the resister. Instead, I contend that we should cease looking for heroes and cowards among us in pursuit of an ethical politics which, following Butler (2004), recognizes and embraces the sociality and precarity of all life.
Military Resisters
The language used to refer to those who conscientiously object to war is imbued with performative force. “Deserter,” for instance, gives rise to moral and character judgments: Someone (fellow soldiers) and something (the state, the military, the imagined bonds of the nation, and so forth) are being abandoned and weakened by the act of desertion, and once interpellated as “deserters,” soldiers must explain their reasons for absconding service. Desertion implies moving away from an object, thus lending itself to association with disloyalty and rebellion, or as Roosevelt suggests in my epigraph, cowardice. Resister, on the other hand, articulates an inverse relationship to power and invokes somewhat different moral associations. In November 2003, the Los Angeles Times banned the use of the phrase “resistance fighters” as a descriptor of anti-American forces in Iraq. Editors at the Times felt that while the phrase was accurate, it “evoked a certain feeling, that there was a certain romanticism or heroism to the [word] resistance” (cited in Whitcomb, 2003). Melissa McCoy, then Assistant Managing Editor, elaborated her concerns in stating that “sometimes certain combinations of words send an unintended signal. You combine these two seemingly innocuous words and suddenly they have this unintended meaning” (cited in Whitcomb, 2003). Presumably, her recommended replacement terms, “guerrillas,” and the moniker since favored by the U.S. military, “insurgents,” were more befitting the intended message. By refusing to recognize anti-American forces in Iraq as a resistance to something, the temporality of events was framed accordingly, and any historical or geopolitical widening of the lens was easily equated with anti-American sentiment.
Whereas desertion signifies an act of disobedience in U.S. military regulations, conscientious objection is the legitimate means for service members to express opposition to war. The Department of Defense (DOD; 2006) defines conscientious objection as “a firm, fixed and sincere objection to participation in war in any form or the bearing of arms, because of religious training and belief” (p. 27). Regulations further stipulate that while “religious or deeply held moral or ethical” beliefs are relevant to the appraisal of conscientious objection claims, “political, philosophical or sociological” convictions are not to be considered (DOD; 2006, p. 23). Tellingly, these conditions imply that sincere ethical principles are divine and come from within the soldier, allowing “him or her no inner peace if he or she is required to fulfil the present military obligation” (DOD; 2006, p. 23). When manifest, these innermost beliefs are recognized in military law. Conversely, beliefs which stem from external—cultural—sources and interactions, be it through philosophical revelations or revisions in political thinking, are categorically inadmissible reasons for conscientious objection.
One consequence of this psychological solipsism and religious reductionism is that the possibility of objecting to a particular war is made unavailable to soldiers. War and violence in general must be rejected, for if an objector “is willing to defend the United States” in any conflict at all, “he or she cannot choose when and where” (DOD; 2006, p. 23). Intentionality is negated and choice is denied: Only those whose pacifistic compulsions are deemed private, overwhelming, and involuntary qualify as conscientious objectors. Changing one’s mind, or having it changed through “exposure to new [inadmissible] beliefs” (DOD; 2006, p. 24), breaches the suspension of political subjectivity which accompanies enlistment in the all-volunteer military. This profoundly unstable and subjective bifurcation of causal influences upon the individuated “conscience” of a soldier compounds the difficulty in proving the authenticity of a conscientious objector claim.
It follows that many soldiers who refuse service and leave the armed forces are not, by U.S. DOD criteria, conscientious objectors. Neither do these individuals have exclusive claim to the term war resisters, as it is possible and common for war resisters to have no existing or former affiliation to the armed forces. A more accurate term is military resisters, which encapsulates all those who have been affiliated to the armed forces and for any one or combination of religious, philosophical, political, or ethical reasons, refused military service while under contract. The soldier, according to Deborah Cowen (2008, p. 17), is in many ways the antithesis of the citizen, as they must “suspend political voice” and any “expectations of security, safety, and freedom of movement” as conditions of service. A soldier applying for conscientious objector status is in part requesting the return of these basic guarantors of citizenship. The military resister, then, also seeks a return to civilian life, knowing that the possible loss of veterans’ benefits, voting privileges, incarceration, and various forms of social persecution await.
The All-Volunteer Army and the Politics of Consent
As with terms such as “deserter” or “resister,” “volunteer” does much political and socio-cultural work in constituting military resisters within legal and lingual discourse. The all-volunteer army implies two fallacies: First, that a soldier’s labor is either unpaid, or that the necessity of remuneration is not a primary consideration and determinant of service; and second, that soldiers exercise unfettered free-will when enlisting. Both are easily debunked, and are not my primary concern here, but even briefly surveying the genealogy of U.S. military resisters brings to light some germane, affective implications of changes in military recruitment strategy.
Amid the mass immigration and associated racial and ethnic tensions of the U.S. Civil War, the first national drafts were passed and implemented for both the Union and Confederate armies. The Union army’s Enrollment Act of 1863 was applicable to all males aged between 20 and 45 years, and enforced in states where the volunteer quotas for service were not met. In these instances, the options of substitution and commutation permitted (wealthy) draftees to directly or indirectly pay for replacements, as well as in the former case allowing families to decide between them which male should respond to the draft call. The vast majority of the 2.1 million Union soldiers in the Civil War were volunteers, with just 2% deriving from the draft, and around 6% of this total were substitutes (Geary, 1991). Notwithstanding the volunteer majority, however, the Act was met with widespread resistance, and corrupt and inequitable practices of conscription also sparked opposition to the Conscription Act of 1862 within the Confederacy. As the War waged on and conditions worsened, resistance increasingly took the form of desertion (Weitz, 1999). Even though the Conscription Act of 1917 rectified some of the more objectionable features of the Civil War Enrollment Act, including the options of commutation and substitution, resistance to mass conscription among soldiery continued to manifest during both the First and Second World Wars (Shenk, 2005).
The abolition of the draft in 1973 followed—though not causally—the widespread recognition of the Vietnam War as a human and geopolitical disaster. Mass opposition to the war was reflected in and invigorated by the zeitgeist of 1960s and early 1970s North America, as growing concerns for the rights of individuals clashed with the collective ethos of conscription. In a message to Congress in April 1970, President Richard Nixon set out his vision for an all-volunteer army, partly justifying the end of the draft by appealing to the consternation it instills in American youth: “We have all seen the effect of the draft on our young people, whose lives have been disrupted first by years of uncertainty, and then by the draft itself.” This anxiety no doubt was a troubling prospect for eligible young people caught up in the emancipatory politics and movements of the time, but historical documentation of Nixon’s presidency suggests the abolition of the draft to be part of his strategic attempt to weaken the anti-war movement by ensuring that many affluent youth would not be burdened by the threat of conscription, and would therefore cease protesting 2 . During the course of the Vietnam War, in excess of 170,000 U.S. citizens are estimated to have either evaded the national draft or refused military service. More than 50,000 fled to Canada, the largest exodus of U.S. citizens since British loyalists took this same Northern passage during the American Revolutionary War (Hagan, 2001).
Even such a brief and selective history of U.S. military recruitment reveals much about the legal, political, and public dynamics of resistance to military service. The significance of the Civil War’s Enrollment Act, and particularly its substitution and commutation caveats, was that all those who were eligible for conscription were caught in the gaze of possible recruitment. Those who were wealthy enough to pass the encumbrance of conscription were at least required to make a moral decision, and initiate a transaction, which affectively embroiled them in war. There are certain parallels here between substitution and commutation, and the market-driven all-volunteer army currently employed in the United States, notably that acquiescence to financial benefits is in both cases a driver of recruitment. Yet crucially, in the all-volunteer army the exceptional options of substitution and commutation—that is, their underpinning commercial logic—become the rule. Of course, the reasons for enlisting then and now are not confined to economic imperatives; the cultural pull of patriotism and a sense of duty which may stem from military ancestry were and remain fertile in this regard. But nevertheless, the all-volunteer army allows for those who would support war in principle, even advocate for and implement it in policy, to never be susceptible even to the prospect of service. Under these conditions, the potential for personal and collective empathy toward military resisters among those unperturbed by the gaze of recruitment is undermined.
Just as the “free-will” rhetoric surrounding the all-volunteer army often threatens to shut down discussions of the politics or ethics of resistance itself, I maintain that counter arguments of manipulation and coercion are equally stifling, particularly given that it is precisely the decision of the soldier to first agree to and then refuse participation in warfare which imbues their stories with distinct ethical qualities. In a compilation of the stories of military resisters to 21st-century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Lazare (2011) attends to the power relations U.S. soldiers initially encounter upon their recruitment, arguing that “many in the military did not sign up enthusiastically, but were coerced or manipulated into service through economic circumstances or aggressive military recruiting” (p. 2). This view is substantiated in a number of the resisters’ narratives therein, and the targeting strategies of military recruiters are well documented. 3 But if the aim is to amplify the ethical and political promise of military resisters’ experiences, then accounts of manipulation and coercion which, via the act of resistance, lead to the eventual emancipation of a troubled conscience, have significant limitations. Before discussing these, it is important to detail how these experiences are elicited and framed within and through the legal and political apparatuses which serve to constitute military resisters, particularly those who migrate to Canada in search of refuge, residency, and the public embrace widely afforded to Vietnam military resisters in the 1960s and 1970s.
Military Resisters in Canada
In his 2001 study of American Vietnam “draft dodgers” and military resisters in Canada, John Hagan highlights an unpublished memorandum archived by the Canadian immigration department which distinguished between the two. Operational Memorandum number 117 stipulated, for the first time, that a military resister seeking entry to Canada would “not be issued a visa or granted admission until he has submitted proof of his discharge” (Hagan, 2001, p. 38). In 1966, the same year as the memorandum was circulated internally within the department, deputy Minister of Immigration Tom Kent publicly affirmed that draft status was not formally mentioned anywhere in Canadian immigration legislation and was not a legal consideration for those wishing to evade military conscription or service. By this time, several thousand U.S. resisters to the Vietnam War had already made the journey to Canada and, given the country’s established tradition of accepting military resisters from, for instance, Hungary and former Czechoslovakia, Hagan (2001) would have written the following with some assurance: “The presence of [Eastern European] and earlier groups makes it extremely unlikely that Canada would ever include references to draft or military status in its immigration legislation” (pp. 37-38). Within months of his book’s publication the unforeseeable, unimaginable events of September 11, 2001, would rupture, among so many things, the optimism in his claim and the geopolitical foundations upon which it rested. As of March 2011, none of 59 U.S. military resisters who had applied for asylum since the 2003 invasion of Iraq had been successful, and in several cases resisters have been deported and imprisoned in the United States (Cannon, 2011).
Although the birth of the military resister as a legal subject position in Canada can be traced to this inconspicuous 1966 memorandum in Canadian immigration legislation, soldiers are initially constituted as resisters through military law. Many U.S. resisters cite the controversial “involuntary extension” of their contracts, known colloquially as the “stop-loss” program, as a crystallizing moment in their decisions to refuse service. As outlined in Title 10 of the U.S. Code (2009),
In time of war, or of national emergency declared by Congress or the President after November 30, 1980, the President may suspend the operation of any provision of law relating to the promotion, involuntary retirement, or separation of commissioned officers . . . So long as such war or national emergency continues, any such suspension may be extended by the President.
Senator and then Democrat presidential challenger John Kerry referred to the stop-loss policy as a “backdoor draft” in 2004, claiming, in reference to the Vietnam War, that its imposition threatened to create “another hollow army’” of disillusioned soldiers (cited in Kerry, 2004).
In an era of temporally perpetual and geopolitically pervasive war, stop loss can be initiated at any time, and U.S. soldiers might be deployed to any number of war zones and military bases. Joshua Key was deployed to Iraq just a month after the 2003 invasion. A Private First Class, Key was told during basic training that he would serve no more than 6 months in Iraq. The day before his deployment, that figure changed to 18 to 24 months. Key would later take Absence Without Leave in November 2003 and eventually move to Canada with his wife and children rather than face probable imprisonment in the United States (Riley, 2005). His experience is not revelatory, of course, as soldiers have always knowingly forfeited a great deal of agency as a condition of service. But for those who make the decision to resist orders and turn to Canada as a haven from desertion charges in the 21st century, this ambiguity in their terms of service is only the beginning of a journey through the tensions and contradictions within and between military, state, and international law.
This journey was first traveled in 2004 by Jeremy Hinzman, who then became the first U.S. soldier ever to apply for refugee status in Canada after refusing orders for a tour of duty in Iraq. Having had successive conscientious objector applications rejected while serving in Afghanistan, Hinzman left a note at his U.S. base giving reasons for his departure in the fall of 2003 and thereafter headed to Canada with his wife and child. In his application for refugee status, the ultimate outcome of which remains unresolved, Hinzman argued through his then Attorney Jeffry House (himself a Vietnam War-era “draft dodger”) that the illegality of the Iraq war, and the persecution he would face if deported to the United States, supported his case for asylum in Canada. However, following the rare intervention of the Canadian Solicitor-General Irwin Cotler into Hinzman’s case to advise the Immigration and Refugee Board that the legality of war was beyond their purview, Hinzman sought recourse to his secondary argument that his participation in an illegal war would have contravened the Nuremberg principles and Geneva Convention on War. Heeding Cotler, the Board subsequently focused on the “nature of the acts that the evading or deserting soldier would be expected to perform or be complicit in, rather than the legality of the conflict as a whole,” and ultimately ruled that Hinzman had “not shown that the U.S. has, either as a matter of deliberate policy or official indifference, required or allowed its combatants to engage in widespread actions in violation of humanitarian law.” 4
Canada’s complex geopolitical relationship with the United States, underlined by its participation in the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan and resistance to full complicity in the invasion of Iraq, is inextricable from Hinzman’s case, and more than a question of legalities. Even during the Vietnam War, Canada’s anti-war stance was not as clear-cut as is often portrayed by supporters of the Pearson and Trudeau governments and those who remember fondly and proudly Canada’s vast public opposition to U.S. military action and embracing of resisters. In fact, both Prime Ministers showed acute and astute awareness of the difficulty in maintaining a desired image as international peacekeeper and “objective” conciliatory player on the international political stage in a nation so dependent in its trade relations with the United States that any assertion of independence through conflicting national and foreign policy would threaten the two countries’ “special relationship.” After the events of September 11, Canada’s geopolitical status in this relationship can be best understood as “part of a shifting imperial hierarchy, a kind of condominium arrangement in which the Canadian government’s sovereignty is shared with that of a far more powerful state” (McKay & Swift, 2012, p. 26). While this has always been the case to some extent, the past decade has seen Canada’s peacekeeping narrative emphatically countered and co-opted by conservative historians and politicians eager to “rebrand” Canada as a country steeped in, defined by, and forever indebted to military action. Where this narrative endures it is largely mobilized to justify the War on Terror as a necessary endeavor in the pursuit of peace, whereby “peacekeeping is part of national military history very much aligned with fighting imperial wars as part of a system of Western—and more specifically Anglo-American—alliances” (McKay & Swift, 2012, p. 242).
Decisions made regarding the fate of 21st-century U.S. military resisters are clearly influenced by and to some extent emblematic of these geopolitics. For Canada’s Federal Government and Immigration and Refugee Board, the easiest decision to take appears to be no decision at all, thereby evading international public and political condemnation for deporting resisters as a matter of policy, while also maintaining sound diplomatic (and economic) relations with its Southerly neighbors. Thus, between 2004 and 2010, Hinzman’s case oscillated between Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board, Federal Court, and Supreme Court, and in 2013 its outcome remains unresolved. Hinzman and his family had been set for deportation on September 22, 2008, but on the eve of this date the Federal Court of Appeal agreed to hear his case as an appellant. In July 2010, the Court ruled unanimously that the handling of his initial application had been “significantly flawed,” as the officer had considered only the persecution Hinzman would suffer if deported, and not his “strong moral and religious beliefs” against participation in war (Gillis, 2010). Some 8 years after his initial hearing, Hinzman now awaits the decision of a different immigration officer as to whether he can legally remain in Canada and avoid the court martial which awaits him South of the border.
Hinzman’s arduous success as an appellant was mutually influenced by concomitant, divisive debates within Canadian Parliament on the issue of U.S. military resisters. In September 2010, Private Member’s Bill C-440, proposing that those who refuse to participate in wars not sanctioned by the United Nations be granted permanent residency in Canada, was defeated at its second reading by a vote of 143-136, despite two similar yet non-binding proposals having previously gained majority support in Federal Parliament, and opinion polls suggesting most Canadians to be in favor of granting military resisters Canadian residency (Angus Reid, 2009). A 2008 report issued by a Standing Committee on Immigration and Citizenship had earlier recommended that
the government immediately implement a program to allow conscientious objectors and their immediate family members (partners and dependents), who have refused or left military service related to a war not sanctioned by the United Nations and do not have a criminal record, to apply for permanent resident status and remain in Canada; and that the government should immediately cease any removal or deportation actions that may have already commenced against such individuals. (Parliament of Canada, 2008)
Tellingly, just over 2 months prior to the defeat of bill C-440, aforementioned Immigration Minister Jason Kenney had issued Operational Bulletin 202 (2010), which reminded immigration officers that “desertion is an offence in Canada” for which the maximum punishment is “life imprisonment, if the person committed the offence on active service or under orders for active service.” The Bulletin was condemned by various advocacy groups, including Amnesty International who stated their belief that
Operational Bulletin 202 misstates the law and seeks to intrude on the independence of both [Immigration and Refugee] Board members and Immigration Officers. To be consistent with Canada’s international obligations under both human rights and refugee law, Amnesty International urges [the Canadian government] to immediately withdraw the bulletin. (Neve, 2010)
Technically, then, John Hagan’s (2001) prediction that Canadian immigration legislation would be unlikely to ever refer to military status has carried through to 2013. The crucial question for Jeremy Hinzman and other U.S. military resisters taking refuge in Canada is whether any legislation which eventually comes to pass will favor their applications for residency, or work to effectively close a border which had for so long remained open to U.S. citizens seeking political refuge.
As Amnesty International points out in the above statement, the status of military resisters in Canadian immigration law is further complicated by Canada’s contravention of international law. In September 2009, Iraq War veteran Rodney Watson, having refused to return to service after his contract was involuntarily extended and thereafter absconding to Canada, became the first military resister to take Sanctuary in a Canadian church after receiving notice of his deportation. In the United States, Sanctuary has long been seen as a response to municipal and state power, and during the Vietnam War “deserters” and “draft dodgers” were afforded refuge in Churches across the country (Ridgley, 2011). Yet taking Sanctuary in a church does not technically protect an inhabitant from police or immigration authorities. Rather than invoking some archaic or sacred power, it is the publicity generated and often sought by refugees and resisters which is thought to dissuade authorities from entering Sanctuaries (Lippert, 2005). The remit of the First United Church of Canada, for instance, has always been rooted in social justice as well as various Christian denominations, and legal, political as well as Christian and moral justifications are given for affording Sanctuary to Rodney Watson. Thus, in Canada,
churches intervene only in cases where the Canadian government is itself in danger of breaching international law as a result of its failure to design a refugee determination system with adequate procedural safeguards to prevent refugees from being deported to face persecution. (Rehaag, 2009, p. 46)
Sanctuary in Canada is thereby interpellated not simply through a conflict between church and state, but within the liminal space opened up by tensions between state and international law. Watson has inhabited this space for over 4 years at the time of writing, not leaving the First United Church of Vancouver for this duration.
Tracing these journeys suggests that neither the military, the state, nor any international body holds sovereignty over the legal, political, or personal fate of military resisters. Instead, we have a constellation in which the sovereignty the military wields over its soldiery is compromised once a soldier refuses to obey, thereby activating, for instance, the judicial systems of the military and the state, the bureaucracy of immigration processes, or what Lippert (2005)—following Foucault—called pastoral power when subjecting oneself to refuge in Sanctuary. As none of these institutions or their respective modes of governance are superseded by another, and given the complex geopolitical relations between the United States and Canada, a cacophony of competing discourses results in legal impasses, political conflicts, cyclical media coverage, and the concomitant suspension of certain rights of citizenship such as voting privileges and the activation of a public political subjectivity amplified through print, online, televisual, and social media. Military resisters, from the moment they disobey military sovereignty and seek refuge in Canada, enter crevices where military, state, and international law cannot quite take hold, and stay there, indefinitely, or until protracted legal cases result in deportation. Yet at the same time their occupation of these liminal spaces is illuminated by public exposure, and the endeavors of various support groups, through which they are able to exercise personal and political opinions on war. Many resisters, including Jeremy Hinzman and Rodney Watson, consequently feel and embrace a duty to speak out against U.S. military actions in Iraq and elsewhere, while seeking to gain refuge, residence, and acceptance in Canada. My most pressing concern lies with how the institutional forms of power which interpellate the military resister inform and contour their public narratives of resistance, thereby legitimating these authorities and at once amplifying and undermining the ethical promise of the narratives themselves.
Exposure, Disclosure, and the Precarious Self
To those who have called me a coward I say that they are wrong, and that, without knowing it, they are also right. They are wrong when they think that I left the war for fear of being killed. I admit that that fear was there, but there was also the fear of killing innocent people, the fear of putting myself in a position where to survive means to kill. There was the fear of losing my soul in the process of saving my body, the fear of losing myself—to my daughter, to the people who love me, to the man I used to be, to the man I wanted to be. I was afraid of waking up one morning to realize my humanity had abandoned me. (Camilo Mejía, 2005, p. 64)
Compiled from a conscientious objector application and prison writings following his incarceration on desertion charges, these are the words of the first U.S. military resister to speak publicly against the Iraq war. Camilo Mejía, a former U.S. army staff Sergeant, chose not to venture North to Canada to evade reprimand, instead serving a jail sentence at Fort Still, Oklahoma, between May 2004 and February 2005. Mejía’s ethical quandary pivots on the fear of either ending a life or losing his own in combat, and the reverberations of these mortal encounters for his connections with loved ones, and his future self, “the man I wanted to be.” His reflections on the sociality of taking a life rhyme with Judith Butler’s (2004, 2009) meditations on the precarity of life: the recognition of all life as vulnerable and (inter)dependent, including one’s own existence and that of others who appear, or are framed as being outside of the norms of existence. Her argument, in part, is that self-reflexivity or notions of autonomy neglect the sociality which makes life precarious; any bifurcation of the self, here, and the other, there, veils the “socially and politically articulated forces . . . that make possible the body’s persistence and flourishing” (Butler, 2009, p. 3). In other words, individuated ontologies do not capture that
it is to the stranger that we are bound, the one, or the ones, we never knew and never chose. To kill the other is to deny my life, not just mine alone, but that sense of my life which is, from the start, and invariably, social life. (Butler, 2009, p. xxxvi)
Butler does not write specifically about military resisters, but her quest for an ethical oppositional politics in the face of perpetual and pervasive war helps elucidate the promise, and finitude, of their public confrontations with war-induced trauma.
With recourse to Emmanuel Levinas, Butler muses on why we might respond to the recognition of life’s precariousness with the desire to end life. Her questions are germane and disconcerting: “Why would it be that the very precariousness of the Other would produce for me a temptation to kill? Or why would it produce the temptation to kill at the same time that it delivers a demand for peace?” (Butler, 2004, pp. 134-135). In search of answers, Levinas’s notion of “the face” is drawn upon, a figurative countenance which, through symbolic forms of conveyance, makes “moral claims upon us, address[es] moral demands to us, ones that we do not ask for, ones that we are not free to refuse” (p. 131). A literal interpretation is tempting at this point: The soldier’s moral dissonance is caused by the conflicting demands of military authority, which require submission to a chain of command, and international law, which requires soldiers to disobey any orders which contravene its principles. Yet the face need not take an institutional or even a human form. It seems, rather, that the face is that vocalization, audible but not necessarily lingual, which awakens us to the precariousness of the Other, and the self. The face solicits a moral response which can lead to violent, pre-emptive actions, or the peaceful apprehension of all life. The epiphany of the military resister often becomes manifest as the latter, the former having proved unbearable. However, the ethical promise is not realized purely in making the decision to not kill, to make peace. For crucially, it is in dwelling on the moment at which we are addressed by the face that we can “yield an experience of humility, of vulnerability, impressionability and dependence, and these can become resources, if,” as she suggests to have been the case in the aftermath of September 11, “we do not resolve them too quickly” (pp. 149-150).
Resources for what? From the outset of this article I have suggested that the public disclosures of military resisters can invigorate public debate surrounding the ethics and morality of war. Some resisters publicly recognize their capacity to communicate an experience of war largely absent in mainstream U.S. media coverage, and tell stories of the horrors engendered and encountered by U.S. forces in Iraq and elsewhere. Those who migrate to Canada, as we have seen, are not only well positioned to represent their views of and views on conflict given the media interest afforded to them, but are generally thought to at least delay their chances of being deported through such public exposure. In a letter published in the Toronto Star in December 2009, Rodney Watson voiced his oppositional political perspective on the war in Iraq, before making the following plea:
I appeal to the Canadian government to honour your country’s great traditions of being a place of refuge from militarism and a place that respects human rights by supporting my decision, and the decisions taken by my fellow resisters to refuse any further participation in this unjust war. I ask that you urge your government to respect the will of the majority of Canadians by acting on the direction it has been given twice by Parliament to immediately stop deporting Iraq War resisters like me and to let us become permanent residents here. My heart goes out to the families who have lost loved ones in this unnecessary war. (Watson, 2009)
The content of his narrative is a variation on familiar themes in the stories of war resisters, but here Watson is also addressing those institutions to which he remains bound as a resister and, under certain definitions, a refugee. In a later interview, Watson addresses the military and those who would undermine his merits as a soldier and record of service based on his act of resistance: “I served my country with honour. I’m a decorated soldier, and that’s something no one can take from me. No one can say I didn’t go. No one can say I didn’t risk my life” (cited in Cannon, 2011, p. 6). Just as military resisters often speak back to the very institutions which constitute them as resisters, emotional discordance often surfaces as they come to give form, in language, to their actions past and present. In such instances, the emasculating semantics of the “traitorous coward” discourse often spark in resisters a masculine response. Watson is tasked with at once criticizing the military for its legal and moral conduct, and in the same breath paradoxically defending his own actions and decorations as a soldier. This is complicated further still as the latter position helps to legitimate his character publicly in the eyes of those who might otherwise speak or campaign against his case for asylum or citizenship in Canada through the feminized labels of “traitor” and “cowardice,” both of which imply weakness and run counter to desired imaginings of the virile, powerful nation. Authoritative actions past and present are thus invoked in pursuit of a future which is marked by precisely these contradictions, and Watson’s ethico-political quandary as a U.S. military resister in Canada consequently becomes articulated through the adoption and embodiment of gendered subject positions.
Public reactions to accounts such as Watson’s, even in Canada where resisters were once welcomed by government, range from vitriolic condemnation to compassionate support. My concern, however, lies not with the variance of public opinion, but with what we might call the act of confessing one’s story, the content of one’s conscience, in a bid for moral exoneration, political recognition, or public acceptance. Foucault (1978) suggests the confession to be “one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth” (p. 59). The confession is a process of self-examination and disclosure that allows a subject to impress upon themselves and others the notion that they have excavated and confronted the truths of their conscience. So apposite are Foucault’s (1978) ensuing remarks that they are worth relaying here in full:
The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated; and finally, a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation [sic]. (pp. 61-62)
The authorities whom military resisters address in confessing the ethical transformation of their consciences are multiple and include religious figures and deities, immigration boards who might be influenced by public opinion, soldiers currently serving who may themselves have reservations about their involvement in war, and loved ones who may be listening from afar. These authorities, as well as publics at large, may “judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile” the soldier for whatever wrongs are deemed to have been perpetrated. But as in Foucault’s final comments, the confession is also addressed to the self, a ritual which “exonerates, redeems and purifies . . . liberates . . . and promises . . . salvation.” The act of confessing what one has witnessed and perpetrated at war is thought to liberate one’s conscience from those ills: The truth of the conscience leads to freedom from power. When Camilo Mejía (2005, p. 62), from his prison cell at Fort Still, Oklahoma, announced that “Behind these bars I sit a free man because I listened to a higher power, the voice of my conscience,” he is claiming to be free of the violent requisites of military service and associated ethical encumbrance. Yet his voice is directed toward other sources of authority, be they political, spiritual, or personal, and he remains bound to them, albeit in what he apparently believes to be a less dominating relationship than his former subordination to military power.
Returning to the earlier question derived from Butler, are these the resources yielded by prehension of the precariousness of life: freedom from the burden of bad conscience, and liberation from those who solicit, receive, and judge one’s confessions? Confessing may be a useful technique for responding to the moral quandary of military resistance, and may also serve the purpose of raising public awareness of the horrors of warfare. But as a response to the face which Levinas recognizes and Butler meditates on, there is, I maintain, a crucial ethical impasse. Butler (2004) offers the following elaboration on the face and ethics:
To respond to the face, to understand its meaning, means to be awake to what is precarious in another life or, rather, the precariousness of life itself. This cannot be an awakeness, to use [Levinas’s] word, to my own life, and then an extrapolation from an understanding of my own precariousness to an understanding of another’s precarious life. It has to be an understanding of the precariousness of the Other. (p. 134, my emphasis)
The Other is present in the stories of military resisters, often graphically so, but it is the precariousness and salvation of the resister’s life which too often occupies the public gaze and defines resisters’ confessions. The Other then becomes a point of reference in cleansing one’s own conscience and justifying and evidencing one’s transformed ethical ontology. Even when confessing that they witnessed and partook in violent and dehumanizing atrocities, these are framed as epiphanic moments for the resister, temporalities in which their ethical consciences crystallized, when fighting became too much. It is their journey of self-discovery, its moral foundations and legal permutations, which most sympathetic accounts of the contemporary U.S. military resister focus on and return to, foregrounding the violence synonymous with military occupation and thus inviting publics to somehow sense resisters’ aversions to the atrocities of war. But the structure of their narratives, and the gaze of the public, remain fixed on them, or at least revert attention back to them, and this sets the scene for reactions that frame resisters as either traitorous cowards or courageous heroes. This should not surprise us, for it is the capacity of these institutions to grant resisters citizenship, acceptance, or “peace of mind,” to incarcerate them or to suspend their political rights indefinitely, which entices the resister’s confession, even when its content is critical of the institution to which it is addressed.
We have traveled, then, from the moments at which the anxiety of ending life in relation to the necessity of preserving one’s own spills into a refusal to fight, through to the public confession of this experience as a means of exposure, disclosure, and the apparent freeing of a conscience once burdened by unbearable war. In a general sense, this is a journey imbued with ethical codes which, returning to Butler, might be “resources” for an oppositional political project to the War on Terror. After all, the initial anxiety provokes a conflict between two responses to fear and, in the case of the resister, the peaceful is suggested to have prevailed. But for Levinas, as Butler (2004, p. 134) recognizes, it is from the “constant tension between the fear of undergoing violence and the fear of inflicting violence,” rather than the evasion of the face and its moral demands, that the recognition of the precariousness of all life might stem. In extreme instances, there is a certain righteousness traceable in the realizations of military resisters which implies that they have escaped the impulse to end life, to have freed the “higher power” of one’s conscience; a kind of narcissism which could act as a barrier to empathy with others who might wish to inflict violence, as well those who continue to undergo violence. For “if the ethical moves us beyond bad conscience, it is because bad conscience is, after all, only a negative version of narcissism, and so still a form of narcissism” (p. 138). As a final example, resister Kyle Snyder (Quoted in Mason, 2006) reminds us further of the ethical finitude of an emancipatory narrative in which conscience is unencumbered:
My words are my weapon now, And my voice can be heard, I am not your pawn anymore, I have crawled off your political chessboard to stand alone, You say I’m the one mad in thought yet my mind has never been so clear, The world that has created me no longer exists for now I create my own, And I am so very aware.
Who is being addressed here? Who is redeemed and freed? Who is absent? And how might correcting this absence help move beyond the unburdening of the precarious self toward prehension of the precariousness of life itself?
Military Resisters, War Resistance, and Precarious Life
War will exist until the distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today. (President John F Kennedy, cited in Safire, 2007)
The individuated responses to public exposure often exhibited by military resisters are responses to the legal, political, and military decrees that elicit and frame their stories. Resisters make difficult choices, whatever their motivation, which often stay with them long after the initial refusal of service, and their experiences in war zones are presented by themselves and others as carrying a certain epistemological authority: What they have seen gives credence to what they say. In concert with the publicity their decisions and circumstances tend to draw, military resisters appear to occupy fertile positions for advocating on ethical and political matters in relation to war, at least where they find and embrace effective platforms to do so. Yet my position regarding the ethics of exposure and disclosure among military resisters echoes my reservations with the line of argument President Kennedy espouses above. For in either instance, whether we valorize or demonize individual resisters, the result is to fan the flames of a collective narcissism that inhibits the prehension of life’s precariousness beyond the confines of local, national, and Western enclaves.
A foremost issue concerns the privileging of the individual conscience in legal, political, military, and religious discourse, and the subsequent legitimation of these authorities through narratives of military resistance. As seen in the solipsistic and reductionist DOD regulations on conscientious objection, in Jeremy Hinzman’s successful appeal to the Federal Court of Canada, and in what has been described as a landmark ruling by the European Court of Human Rights which requires states to respect individual rights to conscientious objection (Amnesty International, 2012), the individual conscience is cast as an intrinsic source of truth which, under particular influences, must be recognized. What constitutes a legitimate influence upon this model of the conscience is clearly a cause for concern, particularly in the U.S. military, as is the question of whose conscience counts or is even apprehensible in the course of a conflict. It would be profoundly progressive for authorities, from media to international courts, to extend their gaze to the consciences of those Others whose lives and deaths too often do not register in Western frames of war. But this would also somewhat miss the point: that it is the very modeling of the conscience as a singular entity which serves to inhibit the prehension of all life as vulnerable and dependent. While liberal advocations as to the rights of individuals have yielded commendable advances where state and military power was seen to encroach too closely on the conscience, as evidenced in the abolition of the U.S. draft, this emphasis on the individual and her conscience has ethical and political reverberations. Butler (2004) eloquently captures some of these:
When we argue for protection against discrimination . . . we have to present ourselves as bounded beings-distinct, recognizable, delineated, subjects before the law, a community defined by some shared features. Indeed, we must be able to use that language to secure legal protections and entitlements. . . . Although this language may well establish our legitimacy within a framework ensconced in liberal versions of human ontology, it does not do justice to passion and grief and rage, all of which tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, implicate us in lives that are not are own, irreversibly, if not fatally. (pp. 24-25)
Thus, the emphasis on the individual conscience in the legal and political frameworks discussed in this essay might work to constrain the ethical potential of military resistance narratives, just as they seem to promise the salvation of individual military resisters. We should be dissuaded, then, from casting resisters as victims, or certainly only as victims, not because they have not suffered, but because tales of their suffering too often meet their limit in debates surrounding military resistance. Resistance to war, a less personal project, demands embracement of the social ontology for which Butler advocates and which is occasionally traceable in the disclosures of military resisters. In comparison with this condition of mutual and constant precariousness, individuated models of a conscience are revealed as not just inadequate, but unethical, as they allow for assessments as to the relative value of life which oftentimes results in the recognition of some lives as more precarious and less grievable than others.
Finally, it is vital to confront this ethico-political quandary as it is faced by those organizations which represent and support military resisters, and by resisters themselves. In a history of the admirable work undertaken by War Resisters’ International since its founding in 1921, Devi Prasad (2005) offers an expression of the human conscience as the “special faculty” through which moral decisions can be made:
Conscience encourages human beings to reach into a world which is far beyond the realm of their animal instincts. This is the faculty that makes human beings different from all other animals. It can transform fear into assurance, anger into compassion, and can broaden the outlook towards other creatures and the whole world. Despite the fact that humankind is a part of nature, it has the capacity to transcend nature, a capacity that nature itself has given to it. (p. 24)
Again, as is magnified by the anthropocentrism in Prasad’s view, the concern here is that where advocacy and support groups follow military and legal understandings of the conscience as an intrinsic, individual entity which is possessed by some living creatures and not others, prehension of the mutual dependency, vulnerability, and precarity of all life is inhibited. This contradiction is borne out in my epigraph, where the Reverend Jennings at once invokes the individual conscience as “the touchstone of true humanity” that must be protected, and calls for the building of bridges between people.
The weighty challenge is to help support and develop modes of resistance that at once eschew the individuated model of the conscience inherited from Christianity and Enlightenment thought, and ensconced in modern political and legal systems, and yet retain the invaluable legal and political support that religious and other organizations have long offered to military resisters. One such example took place on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war in Rodney Watson’s site of sanctuary, where he and Iraqi-Canadian Riadh Muslih meditated on the conflict and its grievous consequences before a sympathetic audience. Organized by the War Resisters’ Support Campaign, it was a meeting of people whose support for military resisters and opposition to war converged across the persistent dividing lines of creed, “race,” and nation to make visible affective bonds and foster these anew. And crucially Watson, his epiphanic experiences and ensuing endeavors were not the center of the scene. Nor was he asked to confess his conscience, bear his soul, or strive for personal exoneration, political recognition, or public acceptance. A final offering from Butler (2009) reminds us that “an ethical attitude does not spontaneously arrive as soon as the usual interpretive frameworks are destroyed, and no pure moral conscience emerges once the shackles of everyday interpretation have been thrown off” (p. 51). In other words, it is precisely because one’s conscious cannot be unburdened or somehow disconnected from those people whose mortal suffering engendered a refusal to fight, that military resisters are imbued with ethical promise for mounting oppositional politics. Connecting resisters across geopolitical and socio-cultural borders and foregrounding what they share, and have shared, is thus one promising avenue that would complement rather than conflict with the important ongoing work undertaken by support campaigns.
Nevertheless, given that the lives of U.S. military resisters in Canada are largely constituted and contoured by Western democratic institutions that inherit and reproduce liberal humanist ontologies, it seems that resisters must be presented as bounded subjects before the law by support groups, members, sympathetic publics, and themselves, if they are to stand a chance of avoiding deportation. Herein lies the double-bind facing resisters and their supporters. As a case in point, the emblem of the War Resisters’ Support Campaign—a soldier walking away from the viewer, head bowed and rifle abandoned on the ground—lends itself to association with the individual conscience and pejorative moral associations with the putatively lone and selfish act of “desertion.” While this might have pejorative implications, the campaign must focus its attention and resources on particular resisters so as to best support their legal struggles. Consequently, it remains difficult to envisage how these legal and political endeavors can tie into wider efforts to make visible connections between U.S. military resisters and citizens of Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere whose palpable suffering often set their initial objections to war in motion. Difficult, but necessary, if military resistance and war resistance are to form an ethical convergence.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Derek Gregory, Carolyn Prouse, Jennifer Ridgley, and Brian Wilson, as well as all of those who have kindly discussed this work with me, for offering such valuable insights and lively discussions. These contentions and their shortcomings are of my own making, but they are without doubt richer for your contributions.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.