Australian Christian Conscientious Objectors during the Vietnam War Years 1964–72

Many young Christian men faced a moral dilemma when selective military conscription was introduced in Australia during the Vietnam War from 1964–72. The legislation was the National Service Act in 1964 (NSA). Some believed that their Christian conscience did not allow them to kill or serve in the army. Most of them sought exemption as a conscientious objector decided at a court hearing. Others chose non-compliance with the NSA. All exercised nonviolent Holy Disobedience in their individual opposition to war and conscription for it. Holy disobedience stresses the importance of nonviolent individual action, which was an idea of A.J. Muste, a great Christian pacifist. The research reported here is strongly influenced by his approach. It is believed to be the first study which explicitly considers Christian conscientious objectors. A data set was compiled of known Christian conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War years from authoritative sources. Analysis allowed identification of these men, the grounds on which their conscientious beliefs were based and formed and how they personally responded to their moral dilemma. Many of their personal stories are told in their own words. Their Holy Disobedience contributed to ending Australia’s participation in the Vietnam War and military conscription for it.

Hunter Beattie (1876–1951): A Conscientious Objector at the Margins

Glasgow was the Scottish city in which the Open Brethren movement grew most profusely. During the First World War, significant sections of the leadership of their assemblies supported the British war effort. One individual who stood apart from this was the evangelist and homeopath, Hunter Beattie. He was the leading individual in an assembly in the east end who launched an occasional periodical in which he expounded his pacifist views. His publication was criticized in a Sunday newspaper, and his subsequent military hearing and criminal trial was covered by the newspaper. Other leading Glasgow Brethren publicly disassociated themselves from his position, which, in turn, led to criticism of them by some Brethren non-combatants. As well as giving an example of the treatment of conscientious objectors during the First World War, the paper examines the positions adopted towards war by both Beattie and his antagonists, illuminating aspects of the Brethren, their social class and relationships to society. It examines how some Brethren rejected a completely marginal status in church and society, but others saw the attraction of the margins.

War of conscience: antivaccination and the battle for medical freedom during World War I

The nineteenth century British antivaccination movement attracted popular and parliamentary support and ultimately saw the 1853 law which had made smallpox vaccination compulsory nullified by the 1898 ‘conscientious objector’ clause. In keeping with popular public health discourse of the time, the movement had employed rhetoric associated with sanitary science and liberalism. In the early twentieth century new discoveries in bacteriology were fuelling advances in vaccination and the medical establishment was increasingly pushing for public health to move towards more interventionist medical approaches. With the onset of war in 1914, the medical establishment hoped to persuade the government to introduce compulsory typhoid inoculation for soldiers. This article analyses antivaccination literature, mainstream newspapers and medical press along with parliamentary debates to examine how the British antivaccination movement engaged with this new threat of compulsion by expanding the rhetoric of ‘conscience’ and emphasising medical freedom while also asserting scientific critique concerning the effectiveness of vaccines and the new laboratory based diagnostic practices. In spite of ‘conscience’ fitting well with an emerging public health discourse of individual subjectivity, the mainstream press ridiculed the idea of working-class soldiers having a conscience, coalescing around the idea that ‘conscientious objection’ be reserved for spiritual, philosophical and educated men who objected to military service. Moreover, in spite of engaging in reasoned scientific critique, parliament and press consorted in the demarcation of scientific knowledge as exclusive to medical scientists, reflecting a growing allegiance between the state and the medical establishment during the war. Any scientific arguments critical of medical orthodoxy were subjugated, labelled as ‘crank’ or ‘faddist’ as well as unpatriotic. The antivaccination narratives around conscience contributed to or were part of an evolving discourse on consent and ethics in medicine. Potential parallels are drawn with current and likely future debates around vaccination and counterhegemonic scientific approaches.

Militarized Mestizajes

Chapter 5 focuses on how the War on Terror’s permutations of Latina/o war literature, theater, television, film, and popular music present methodological and political challenges to conventional understandings of Latina/o relationships to power as inherently oppositional to capitalism and US imperialism. These relatively new genres include Latina/o War on Terror combat action memoir and related oral histories; wounded warrior narratives; protofascist Special Forces Über-warrior memoir and biographical profiles; Conscientious Objector testimonio, ideologically ambivalent wartime theater, and pacifist performance art; military command memoirs by junior and senior officers; as well as Latina/o spy memoir, biography, and historical fiction. Despite the authors’ profound differences in cultural heritage, experiences, and aesthetic capacities, their cultural productions cohere around intersecting, and diverging, violence-based theories of knowledge and being that extend through, but also far beyond warfare and wartime contexts. They also demonstrate the stark right-wing turn in a large segment of contemporary Latina/o life writing, which accentuates the wide range of ideological trajectories identified in earlier chapters.

Written Out of Life: The Death of Keith Vaughan and his Journal

When the British painter Keith Vaughan (1912–77) ingested a lethal cocktail of barbiturates, having made the decision to end his life after a long struggle with cancer, there was only one thing left to do: write one final entry in his journal, the lifelong literary account he had commenced in 1939 and maintained ever since. Vaughan’s journal is an extraordinary document, its 61 volumes spanning 38 years of impassioned ideas and personal development from his difficult wartime years as a conscientious objector through his post-war life as a successful but troubled artist. This paper focuses on the final volume of Vaughan’s journal, commenced in August 1975 and ending on the morning of 4 November 1977. It considers how Vaughan used journal-writing at a time of great suffering to reflect upon his life and his reasons for leaving it. By revealing the crucial role that Vaughan’s final volume played in justifying that his life had ceased to have forward momentum or meaning, this paper argues for the close relationship between the practice of journal-writing and questions of futurity, positing Vaughan as an exemplary author-subject who uses diary or journal forms to postulate a potential future and their relationship to it.

Fidelity to Patients

The central claims of Chapter 5 are that health care professionals who serve a gatekeeping role are fiduciaries for their patients (normatively speaking), they therefore have a fiduciary duty of loyalty to them, and this duty prohibits them from making typical conscientious refusals because doing so jeopardizes health interests of their patients. This chapter explains why this argument works even though typical objectors tend to view the fetus or embryo whose life is at risk as their second patient. At the same time, the author agrees that making a referral to a colleague who is willing and able to provide the offending service, rather than providing it oneself, can be a morally appropriate option for a conscientious objector. The chapter as a whole defends the approach to typical refusals of prioritizing patient interests, specifically for cases where the objector and patient have an existing fiduciary relationship. The author also extends her analysis to atypical refusals in reproductive health care.

Professional Responsibility and Conscientious Objection

Conscientious objection is a controversial topic in society and medical ethics. The central issue in medicine is whether claims of conscientious objection allow medical professionals to refuse to perform tasks that would otherwise be their duty. To inform the ongoing discussion, this chapter reviews the opposing views on conscience in the philosophic literature that describe conscience as either a moral sense or the dictate of reason. Both views hold that conscience should be obeyed, and that keeping promises is a conscience-given moral imperative. The chapter then considers exemplars of conscientious objection—Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.—who were willing to bare the burdens of their convictions. It concludes by showing that doctors who put their own interests before their patients’ welfare violate their professional commitments and misappropriate the title “conscientious objector” because they are unwilling to bear the burdens of their choices while instead imposing burdens on patients and colleagues.

Ted Studebaker

Already registered with the Selective Service as a conscientious objector due to his long-held religious convictions, Ted Studebaker volunteered to serve for 2 years in Vietnam, where he coordinated community organization projects in a small village of Di Linh. Toward the end of his 2-year tour of duty, in 1979 he was killed by Viet Cong troops who broke into his house. Although decidedly antiwar, Studebaker volunteered to fulfill his duties as a citizen of the United States, a country he loved. Studebaker made his choices based upon his religious beliefs. His efforts were a small counterbalance to the immense resources devoted to waging war. Studebaker’s life and death as a civilian social worker in a combat zone during active war illustrates an alternative path for social workers who brave dangerous conditions to serve others.