Against the Draft: Essays on Conscientious Objection from the Radical Reformation to the Second World War (review)

This is a stimulating and thought-provoking book, although perhaps not always as the author would wish. For those North Americans whose knowledge of conscientious objection (I will refer to both conscientious objectors and objection as CO in this review) reaches no farther back than World War I, with a vague understanding of an Anglo-American tradition of religious-based CO stretching back one or two centuries earlier, this study will be a revelation. Peter Brock's formidable range of languages and his many decades of studying CO (he was born in 1920) have taken him all over Europe and almost five hundred years back in time. We learn of CO in sixteenth-century Poland, among seventeenth-century Quakers pressed into the Royal Navy, in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, in nineteenth-century Hungary, and all over Europe in the twentieth century's two total wars. Some of the narratives—particularly the last one, about the experiences of Jehovah's Witnesses CO in Nazi Germany—are extraordinarily moving in their tales of faith in the face of enormous pressure and savagery. In addition, although Brock is an open supporter of CO, he is scrupulous in not constantly attacking governments and armed forces who must cope with CO, and is very careful to point out that many military personnel have had varying degrees of respect for the firm convictions of CO.

In terms of new or different insights into CO, the book is oddly unsatisfying and repetitive. Each chapter describes the origins and detailed beliefs of the group of CO being discussed; the policies of the government in question toward CO; and several individual stories of CO resisting military service. There are no overarching conclusions; no probing analyses of the religious, philosophical, or political views of those opposing CO (everything is from the CO point of view); no discussions of how CO may have changed over time—or why it has not changed. In particular, one significant philosophical issue about CO is mentioned in several places, but never brought together. This is the extent to which uneducated men, or men with less than average intelligence, can reason in depth about conscientious objection to war and bearing arms, or whether the issue is one of sincerity and depth of conviction, regardless of education or intelligence. Finally, there is one egregiously inaccurate statement at the very beginning of the book: "Besides, compulsion was not often used to raise armies or militias [before 1525]" (p. 3). In fact, conscription has been ubiquitous, and purely voluntary service almost nonexistent, in almost all human societies from the earliest civilizations of ca. 3000 BC to the present, and seeing such an erroneous remark made me wonder about how much Brock knows about matters beyond the world of CO itself.

Yet it is possible there is not much more to be said. It may be that as a deeply held faith—religious or secular—that CO does not respond well to analytical dissection. In that case, Peter Brock has produced a fascinating work about that faith, which will inform, and move, those who read it, regardless of whether they have sympathy with those who conscientiously object to bearing arms.