Dissenters, Deserters, and Objectors to America’s Wars

0:00:05.7 Aaron Powell: This is Free Thoughts. I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:09.4 Trevor Burrus: And I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:10.7 Aaron Powell: Our guest today is Chris Lombardi, she’s a freelance journalist and co-​editor of Democratic Left Magazine. Today we’re discussing her new book I Ain’t Marching Anymore: Dissenters, Deserters and Objectors to America’s Wars. Welcome to the show, Chris.

0:00:25.7 Chris Lombardi: Hi, thanks a lot.

0:00:28.0 Aaron Powell: How far back does the tradition of American dissent go?

0:00:31.4 Chris Lombardi: Well, in a sense, it’s a country founded on dissent, right? Dissent is disagreement with the powers that be, and you’re talking about a revolution that happened, but I think it actually is earlier than that, because I can track stuff during the First Indian War, and young recruits saying, “Excuse me, I’m not supposed to be doing this,” or “I don’t wanna do this anymore,” or “My contract is over, my contract is only five years, and now you want me to keep serving and that doesn’t make any sense.” So it’s back in 1754 is what I always think of.

0:01:01.2 Aaron Powell: You ask… You’ve mentioned contracts, and this is one of the things I found really interesting about the early portions of the book, was how much of the objections… There was certainly a lot of religious dissent at the time, but how many deserters or dissenters were essentially grounding it in contract disputes. How did those work at the time, what do these contracts look like, because we tend to think more of the military today as just you’ve joined up and now you’re just kind of part of this thing, as opposed to being a contract arrangement.

0:01:31.9 Chris Lombardi: The contracts were… In the beginning, they were like three years, it was just basically, as long as they thought the battle was gonna go, or the campaign was gonna go. It evolves. In the very beginning, soldiers could elect their officers also, it was a much more democratic kind of situation. You know, a contract, you’re talking about, when a citizen is like a new concept, suddenly I am a citizen and I have rights, and this is one of the rights I have, is, if the institution has entered into a contract with me and doesn’t deliver what it said it would do, I have a right to stop, to stop doing what I do.

0:02:08.5 Trevor Burrus: Was there any attempt to force… So Quakers are the most famous dissenters of the Revolutionary era. I mean, was… Did that cause people to be angry, especially if the time being like, everyone has to do their part to split off from Great Britain, were the Quakers seen as someone who were not doing their part, or was there any attempt to overcome their objections and put them into armies?

0:02:33.0 Chris Lombardi: The Quakers, as you know, have been making trouble since the 1700s, the 1600s, and they were making trouble then. They started to make trouble about slavery at one point when the Second Amendment is being debated and they realized that Quakers were already, [0:02:48.2] ____ people about that, that they were starting to speak out about slavery. So they certainly… The relationship of governments to what they call the peace churches was always dynamical and strange, but by then actually it had evolved to that peace churches at least had a right to negotiate that stuff, they could buy out the contract of someone and they could say… Say no, we have alternative service.

0:03:15.7 Chris Lombardi: Now, if you had someone that wasn’t a Quaker, they were shit out of luck. My book starts, as you know, with a young man who was Lutheran, and he’s standing in the middle of the Battle of Brandywine and saying, “Oh my God, God tells me I shouldn’t be killing anybody,” and he stood there and let the orders fly in the ears because he didn’t want to do it, and he ended up getting in prison for a while and eventually became a Quaker after. You know… Then there’s been a dynamic situation of… To the point where it’s almost not dissent, we’ve got the government saying, okay, you get to do that instead, and then, because people go, “Wait a minute, I still want to do dissent.”

0:03:55.0 Aaron Powell: Were there non-​religious dissenters, was there philosophical dissent back then?

0:04:01.3 Chris Lombardi: I think there was. We don’t know much about… ‘Cause what there were record of is the peace churches, that’s who keeps track of this stuff, but I know that there’s… There are poets who talk about it as far back as the Revolution. In those days, I think if you were, had this belief that was wrong, it had to be coming from God. The concept of non-​religious beliefs was not… It was kind of alien.

0:04:25.3 Aaron Powell: And you mentioned slavery, but could you talk a bit more about the ways that abolitionism and antislavery movement, and then also there’s a lot about treatment of Native Americans factoring into early American dissent, like how those played out.

0:04:42.9 Chris Lombardi: It’s maybe because all the new scholarship about Americans, I feel guilty suddenly, all… All of [0:04:47.2] ____ bad guy, ’cause they’re taking land away from Americans… Native Americans. Awareness of that is unfortunately kind of sparse among actual… People who are actually helping the government enforce their foreign policy or their domestic policy. I talk a little bit about Simon Girty, who was a white Indian, actually, who was a translator for the army until he saw what they were doing, and he ended up defecting to Canada. And I talk about William Apess, who was half-​Indian, half African-​American, who… He was actually enlisted, thinking, do I really wanna fight the wars of the white man? He did anyway, and he was treated very badly, and he did serve out his term and he ended up becoming an activist afterward on behalf of Native Americans.

0:05:37.2 Chris Lombardi: So I have these few people that I can point to saying resistance to settler colonialism is part of this trend I’m tracking, but it’s relatively sparse, I think. The slavery thing is a whole another dynamic, I think that… An uncle of mine read my book and he said, “It’s about race.” It’s not all about race, but just figuring out how racist you are is certainly part of the dynamic of anyone thinking about how to be in this country, and the abolitionists, there’s a whole business of at some point they weren’t passivists anymore, because they were really into, we have to have a war against these guys, you know, and the peace movement kind of fell apart after Civil War, it wasn’t respectable anymore to be just passivist, because you want to… You know, John Brown died for you, kind of.

0:06:27.7 Chris Lombardi: It’s something I think about peaceful organizations. The most pacifist ones are kind of the canary in the coal mines saying, “This is wrong,” and then people who are less pacifist are saying, “You know, you’re right. And I stand against it.” But it’s hard.

0:06:44.1 Trevor Burrus: We saw, as you mentioned, the Quakers did have special solicitude, and your story about the Lutheran at the Battle of Brandywine did not receive that solicitude. But did we see in the Antebellum period or maybe up to the War, did we see a growth in the religions, the different kind of belief systems that did receive solicitude for their objections to wars? Or was it just the Quakers who had this sort of special exemption that others weren’t given?

0:07:11.8 Chris Lombardi: Well, I say Quakers, but there’s Mennonites, Brethren, the whole group of peace churches out there. And I think that some of them did grow more doing what they call the First Great Awakening, which is the period leading up to the Civil War. And what I’m thinking now, in terms of the kinds of resistance that I’m noticing back then, though, it’s less religious than, as you say, the contract being valid or being under-​fed. The United States, you think we underpay our soldiers now? We really underpaid soldiers then. Washington even complained about this. Everybody was complaining about this. But the way that rank and file soldiers complained about it is they could desert, and they did.

0:07:52.1 Aaron Powell: What happened to deserters? The people who, say, ran off, deserted because of a contract dispute, because they said, “You know, I’m not being fed,” or whatever. What did the military do to them? Or how were they treated?

0:08:04.1 Chris Lombardi: Well, it changed. At one point, Washington kinda cracked down. At some point, the deserters, they just lost half of your crew and you could keep going. But by the time of the Revolution, a lot of high profile mutineers were actually executed, actually shot.

0:08:25.5 Trevor Burrus: On the mutineers or the deserters, was it possible to have your case… So we talked about the contract aspect, where someone could say, “I enlisted for two years or I enlisted for three years,” and then walk away. And this was always a problem, as you pointed out. This was something that Washington struggled with to keep the army together, and it occurred a lot in the Civil War. Was it possible to… Could you walk away? So if you were correct, that your three-​year enlistment was up and you wanted to leave camp and walk back home, were they gonna catch you for that too or did they let you go?

0:09:01.7 Chris Lombardi: I mean, it’s possible they wouldn’t. You’re talking about, you don’t have huge, huge armies of military police out there to grab you. So it’s possible, but… What’s his name? Jacob Ritter was captured by the British, not by the Americans. But it was not the standard, obviously. And they didn’t have appeals processes. Now, if someone wants to get out of the military, they can appeal. They can negotiate, counsel can negotiate with the officer and say, “This is not… This doesn’t make any sense. You don’t want them anymore.” But those kinds of, those structures didn’t exist back then.

0:09:44.7 Aaron Powell: On that, one of the interesting things that you mention in the book is that early draft of the Second Amendment contained a conscientious objectors clause, effectively. A carve-​out that was removed.

0:09:57.3 Chris Lombardi: Written by, what’s his name, Madison. Madison actually wrote that.

0:10:00.6 Aaron Powell: What did it say and why was it taken out?

0:10:04.1 Chris Lombardi: It was originally, “No person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.” That was the line that got cut out that Madison included with the rest of the right to bear arms. It was really about people’s right to their own autonomy, and it included the right to not have to fight in any wars. But this was probably… The hate of the Quakers is one of the reasons that it got cut out.

0:10:32.0 Trevor Burrus: I imagine, but it’s fairly broad, though. It says religious scruples, so it seems like it could encompass the Lutheran at Brandywine. We will never know, I guess. But there are… I mean, in the future, where there are other objections under the free exercise clause that people made to service in the military, of course.

0:10:53.0 Chris Lombardi: There’s a lot of conversation in the CO community about how we can possibly take advantage of all this extra religious freedom that the Hobby Lobby types have secured and how we can extend that to people who realize they can’t be in the military. Hasn’t happened yet.

0:11:08.2 Trevor Burrus: So if we go up to the Civil War, I was interested from both sides of this. So from the Confederate side, we definitely have border states and people like this not really getting into the army or actively fighting against the Confederacy. Do the Confederates have conscription? Did they use conscription? And did they sort of force…

0:11:30.9 Chris Lombardi: They did. They did.

0:11:31.6 Trevor Burrus: And did they force people…

0:11:33.5 Chris Lombardi: It was one of those poor man gets recruited for rich man’s needs.

0:11:38.0 Trevor Burrus: Did they not care about objections in that context?

0:11:41.8 Chris Lombardi: It was not… There wasn’t a bunch of… There was Quakers in the South who were trying to make this happen. There’s no… I know not a lot of that was reported.

0:11:50.4 Trevor Burrus: And as for the North, we have some very interesting resistance to the draft, of course.

0:11:56.9 Chris Lombardi: Yeah. Well, there’s the whole racism thing there and the draft riots. It’s kind of… It’s always… The Civil War kind of flips the script on looking at a war that you’re talking about resistance to, ’cause people who were fighting it thought of themselves as resistors. There was this [0:12:13.2] ____ safe power. So it’s more complex. But I decided at a certain point that I was gonna look at the whole context of what resistance meant in those days, and that included the people who were fighting. And that’s how you end up with talking about the Massachusetts 54th and the black soldiers who realized that they were fighting for something much more important than anybody is realizing at that time.

0:12:37.7 Aaron Powell: Well, this brings up, there’s… One of the interesting things in the book is how there’s kind of very different perspectives represented within this broader anti-​war or objector movement. And one of them is, maybe you can explain this, is the difference between people who consider themselves as non-​combatants and then what I think we call absolutist conscientious objectors.

0:13:06.3 Chris Lombardi: It’s not really a book about conscientious objection. I start with a conscientious objector, but I’m talking about all kinds of resistance beyond that. Absolutist conscientious objectors are people who don’t want to do alternative service, don’t even want to… Don’t even want to work in a hospital, ’cause they don’t wanna support the structure, the military structure. And as a middle-​aged lady, I’m less patient with those guys now, but the guy in World War I who was going to stay in the jail no matter what happened, and they treated World War I conscientious objectors very badly. But he wanted to stand up for what he believed, to an extreme. And then there are others who say, “Okay, I’ll be in jail for a while,” or “I will help build the fort, but therefore I’m not carrying a weapon.” It’s a range, always.

0:14:01.8 Trevor Burrus: Do we see a post-​Civil War growth in the nature of these objectors, because if you think about the time, as you said, at the beginning, it’s religious and contractual to some degree, and then the Civil War, and then we have a growth in different types of religions, but we also have a growth in just general learning in society, for example, so people can make philosophical objections to this, and so do we see just sort of a divergence of left-​wing anarchists of the late 19th century or different types of different religious sects or other people who just have a philosophical objection, is that kind of a movement that starts gaining ground after the Civil War?

0:14:45.5 Chris Lombardi: Well, after every war, there’s sort of an anti-​war movement that evolves after, because people don’t want that kind of damage anymore. Now, with the Civil War being what it is, kind of singular, but Josephine Shaw Lowell, who’s one of the big fighters against the Philippine War, like, “Excuse me, my brother got killed in that, a real war, and now you’re gonna send people to fight this one,” and it’s all that, and you have that certainly with the Vietnam War and people who are World War II veterans who say, “Excuse me, my war was worth it. This one is not.” And there’s the whole back and forth with that. Same thing we say about secular, it’s definitely the people that are visible in World War I and after are much more secular, it’s true, even if they have a religious background.

0:15:32.2 Aaron Powell: What was the relationship between anti-​war dissent and objection and the early women’s rights movement?

0:15:40.5 Chris Lombardi: There’s an intersection there, for sure. The women’s rights movement, you’re talking about in the 19th century, it’s the Women’s Peace Party and all of that, there’s a lot of people who were involved in suffrage efforts early. A lot of them were involved in women’s peace movements. You’re talking about certainly in the beginning of the 20th century, you got Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which was founded after the Civil War, around the early 1900s. And they become a big enough group that they were supporting other women’s struggles as well, including suffrage. In the Philippine War there’s also the business of… There’s the Anti-​Imperialist League, and then there’s a women’s organization which is not the Anti-​Imperialist League, ’cause that’s all… It’s racist and sexist, but they do a lot of the heavy lifting, and they actually talk to young soldiers who are trying to speak out and help that happen.

0:16:36.1 Trevor Burrus: You’ve mentioned the Philippines War a couple of times, and that’s a particularly interesting one and often forgotten, the Spanish-​American War, and often forgotten, I think, by Americans for how brutal it was and how imperialistic it was, but we had on a couple of years ago Stephen Kinzer, who wrote a book called The True Flag, about the dissent in that war in a political environment. It was a strangely brutal, colonialistic war that many people thought went against America’s core values, so did we see a pretty big ramp up in dissent just to that war in particular?

0:17:16.6 Chris Lombardi: Anti-​Imperialist League was a very odd duck. I talked to Evan Thomas about it, and his daughter wrote a whole book about… ‘Cause Evan Thomas is descended from one of my characters, actually, and he and his daughter wrote a book about that. But his book, The War Lover, which is his book about Teddy Roosevelt, who fought in the Spanish-​American War, and he just brushed off the group as feckless. But it was very odd group, you had Andrew Carnegie, you had all these rich people saying, “Excuse me, this is not really good for business,” and then you had all these Civil War veterans who were saying, “That was my war,” and then you have the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, that’s when you talk about women’s groups and the whole dynamic that that happens.

0:18:10.2 Chris Lombardi: And they did not have… Eventually it had a colored auxiliary, which is really kind of very Plessy v. Ferguson. But they did not engage with the huge number of Black soldiers who were fighting, and that became some other dimension that had happened there. So as a lobbying group, it wasn’t… It was kind of feckless because they didn’t really know what they were doing in terms of how to actually appeal to the government saying that this doesn’t make any sense. Mark Twain was the most visible, obviously, of that league, and he like many people started off saying, “Yes, we do need to help those people in the Philippines civilize,” but no, realizing that that wasn’t what was happening.

0:19:01.3 Aaron Powell: Picking up on Mark Twain, was there in this early period, so let’s say, pre-​World War I, was there a robust anti-​war literature? In the book, you talk about Ambrose Bierce, but was that a thing, and what influence did kind of anti-​war, particularly fiction, have?

0:19:26.9 Chris Lombardi: Ambrose Bierce actually invented anti-​war literature. He invented war literature, actually. We have this bizarre dynamic of war literature, people read it ’cause it’s moving and fascinating, but then we keep making more war movies because we love the war so much, and… But it was not… There was The Red Badge of Courage, which is also an anti-​war book, but that was not by a veteran. My criteria for who gets to be in this book, because otherwise it’s everybody, is they have to have worn a uniform at some point. [0:20:04.1] ____. And Bayard Rustin is in there because he was a JROTC, so it doesn’t have to be much. But Stephen Crane’s not in there for that reason.

0:20:16.2 Chris Lombardi: I mean, this whole intense anti-​war movement between the wars, that includes basically everybody, and includes a lot, and before, between the Civil War and Philippines, there’s… There’s some… There’s a sense that war is a destructive terrible thing. But there’s also a sense of I want my young man to go be a patriotic human being, so I’ll let it happen.

0:20:43.5 Aaron Powell: We’ve talked a bit about race, and one of the striking things was, it seemed like there were… There were a lot of people, and this, I think, is most of the people that we’ve been talking about so far, who objected to participation in wars on anti-​imperialist, pacifist, like the problem is the fighting itself grounds, but there also was a history of people who objected to conscription, enlistment and so on, because the military was segregated or because different racial groups were treated differently within it, and so it seems like their problem was less with war itself, and more that they weren’t going to be equal participants in it, if they were forced into it. Was there conflict between those, because they seem to be at… Working at very different purposes?

0:21:38.6 Chris Lombardi: I think there’s more of an alliance going on, actually. NAACP was a group of… Founded by blacks and whites together, some of them who’d been veterans, some whom had not, and you mentioned being forced to, the whole concept of the resistance saying that if you’re going to make me be part of this thing that sustains your country, you’d better treat me right. Winfred Lynn, who was a CO against segregation, he said, “I will go fight in the Canadian Army, but I’m not gonna fight in your army, unless you desegregate it.” I mean, I see your point, but I think that when you have people that… Who are setting up against military segregation for the most part, they knew the mixed bag that war was, they weren’t saying, “You have to do this.”

0:22:25.4 Chris Lombardi: You know, WEB Dubois, decided, okay, the war’s happening, therefore, I have to make… I wanna make sure that black people are treated right. Dubois, a big peacenik, for most of his life. But in 1917, 1918, he writes that editorial saying, we have to come together and support this war, and therefore by the way, you have to treat black soldiers right. That did not happen, but he tried. But he ended up being arrested for running a Peace Center in the 1950s.

0:23:00.7 Trevor Burrus: That brings us to the interesting World War I anti-​war movement in America. Of course, there was a broad anti-​war movement internationally before the war, led mostly by socialists and left-​wing and Christian nationalists and a bunch of different groups, but from a troop side, we did see the sort of inauguration of one, a draft in World War I, I mean, it wasn’t the first draft, but… And two, we had things like the Espionage Act and all these kind of actions against people who spoke out against the war. It seemed like that ramped up a significant amount in the World War I era, the sort of persecution of anti-​war people, soldiers or otherwise. Did you… Did we see… Was there a true, like kind of renaissance of dissenters during World War I in America compared to previous wars?

0:23:50.0 Chris Lombardi: I don’t know if it was a renaissance, but it certainly was a place where you had to stand up and kind of be counted. People would not have necessarily been a public dissenter at all saying, “I have to stand up in the middle of this war and do something,” and you just said that. And you talk about the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act as well, there’s a whole business of which publications are gonna be… Are going to be clamped down on, and certainly in terms of the war that’s going on, what’s that gonna do for the constituency that you’re trying serve? There’s The Messenger, A. Philip Randolph’s thing, cracked down on hugely. Dubois’s was not, because he agreed to affirm the war. When Red Summer’s coming up, you’ve got actual physical casualties from that stuff.

0:24:35.1 Aaron Powell: Can you tell us about Smedley Butler, who he was…

0:24:39.9 Chris Lombardi: I’d love to. I was so glad to be able to… I didn’t know where I was gonna fit him in, because, you know, that’s part of the book and it’s already a Russian novel, right? Too many characters, too many plots, but life is too many plots, too many characters. I’m so glad Adam Hochschild was my sort of mental mentor for this, ’cause I was like, wait a minute, if he does that, I can do that. But Smedley Butler was… He was Mr. Military Man his entire life. And he realized at a certain point around World War I that he’s been fighting for the resources, for natural resources, all… All the wars he fought in were for natural resources. So he retired and he was like, “No, not gonna do this.” And he wrote several books, he spoke at the Bonus March, which is my other favorite thing to talk about. And he joined the Socialist party, actually, but he was very clear-​eyed about what he had done and that he needed to try to make up for it.

0:25:49.1 Aaron Powell: And what kind of influence did he have? I mean, was he taken seriously by people because of his military background or…

0:25:54.6 Chris Lombardi: Well, yeah, he was a police commissioner in Philadelphia. As someone who lives in Philadelphia, I think… I find that amusing that he then left, he could not… Could not tame Philadelphia. He didn’t become President or anything, but he was taken seriously. I mean, you know the fate of people who are outside the mainstream politically, and that [0:26:13.4] ____.

0:26:15.2 Aaron Powell: I’m well aware of that.

0:26:17.3 Trevor Burrus: Especially at the time, yes. Yeah, and if you join the Socialist party, you might be in prison. Now, it seems that when people think about wars, especially ones that America has been involved with, going up to World War II, well, that’s the just war, that’s the…

0:26:35.0 Chris Lombardi: That’s the good war, right.

0:26:36.1 Trevor Burrus: That’s the one that needed to be fought, that’s the one that, you know, on both sides, but I don’t think that that opinion was as broadly held, maybe for a few reasons, maybe anti-​semitism, for example, but there were dissenters to World War II also, correct?

0:26:49.6 Chris Lombardi: There were, I mean, mostly I talk about Lew Ayres, who was an actor who decided… He had been in the movie All Quiet on the Western Front, and he decided that he did not want to get involved in something that traumatic. But he also wanted to support the war by being a non-​combatant. Opposing the war itself was harder and harder, once the consciousness of what was happening with the Nazis, so it was… You know, you had Quakers who refused to serve. But in those days, you could… It was the agreement that they could. And there was a… What do you call it? Civilian Service Program, and you had these little encampments where people would do medicine, medical experiments, they would build someone else’s farm, they would do something alternative.

0:27:40.0 Chris Lombardi: And however, as you said before, then they decided to resist the segregation going on in those camps. And you have… The reason that they stopped having Civilian Service Program camps is that you basically got a generation of huge, of well-​trained dissenters. National Public Radio was founded by those guys who were in those camps. It was definitely… It was a school for dissent.

0:28:05.7 Aaron Powell: What role did Hollywood play in this? You mentioned All Quiet on the Western Front, which was of course an extremely important novel, but then was turned into this quite important movie, and there’s a… There’s a world of difference, I think, between people reading fiction that describes war and being actually able to see the brutality of it on a large screen. And so Hollywood… You know, we… Hollywood was, of course, in the Red Scare, was bashed for being pro-​communist and so on, but like, was Hollywood largely anti-​war? Was it hard to make anti-​war films in Hollywood early on? What was that like and what were the kind of major players in this?

0:28:49.7 Chris Lombardi: What I know about World War I, is it’s… World War II was the area where you’ve got Hollywood industrial strength, getting as many pro-​war movies as they could possibly get made. It’s interesting because, in general, Hollywood is more anti-​war, but they also are dependent on the government for cooperation to film anything involving a war. Gotta get that plane, gotta get this… And it’s a strange dynamic, and that was true in World War I, World War II as well. I mean, I have a friend who wrote this biography of Lew Ayres called Hollywood’s Conscientious Objector, who talks a lot, a little bit about how that movie was received and how that movie was changed. And then right after World War II, they took some stuff out and they put a new frame on it, saying that we have to deal with the new German threat.

0:29:43.3 Trevor Burrus: I think if you go from something like Audie Murphy, who, you know, became a Hollywood star after being the most decorated American soldier in World War II, and the kind of movies that they had there, and then you run forward to, say, Apocalypse Now, obviously, the interim event there is Vietnam, which maybe is the thing that actually changed most of, not just Hollywood’s inclination towards war and their attitude towards war, but also Americans more broadly, and their view of dissenters to these kind of wars, would be my guess.

0:30:19.9 Chris Lombardi: I think that this appeal that war has to performers, even veterans who are very anti-​war will say, you know, this movie is great because it got war right. And that we’re all kind of pulled toward that stuff, whether we want to or not.

0:30:39.2 Trevor Burrus: So I guess that does get to the question about Vietnam because for most people, and maybe that’s one of the things that your book is trying to explain, the broader, longer history of this, but for most people, when they think about anti-​war dissenters, they think about Vietnam.

0:30:58.4 Chris Lombardi: Yeah, they think about hippies.

0:31:00.9 Trevor Burrus: They think about hippies, and quote unquote draft dodgers and the burning your draft card, and all these kind of things, which… It’s an interesting time, but it didn’t begin that way. I mean, I think in say in 1960, when we were still doing a quote unquote police action in Southeast Asia, we didn’t see that level of that. Is there any sort of moment that kind of ramped this up or individuals that maybe were the people who really push this forward during that era?

0:31:27.5 Chris Lombardi: Well, and you tell me about Jeff Sharlet, you’re gonna make me talk about Jeff Sharlet, who was an intelligence officer, who was there in the early years of the war, and he noticed what was going on, and he noticed that this was a police action that was obviously, you know, we were on the side of whoever we wanted to be, but it’s not necessarily helping the people on the ground. And people were dying, people were suffering. And he comes back and goes to college on the GI Bill and ends up editing a magazine called Vietnam GI, which is one of the first big GI publications. Ultimately, there were 300 or so of these publications at every military base in the country and in the world, and putting together what was happening and opposing what was happening.

0:32:27.1 Chris Lombardi: And it was something that I only I managed to do a little bit of in my book. Not so much but… That this GI press was when the superiors at the Army decided, looking at this stuff, and they noticed it’s like, oh, my goodness, and they they quoted, their report only quoted the bad stuff, It quoted that, you know “Kill your officer!” kind of stuff, And that was not what… Not what most of them were about, but they had jokes, they had testimony of what was happening every single, every stage. They were the ones the first recorded things like National Guard troops who would not act against civilians in Chicago. What we know about what was happening there was from that press and Jeff Sharlet started that.

0:33:17.7 Chris Lombardi: He was one of the first and he saw what was happening early on, and then of course, the other I can talk about is all those World War II veterans who noticed really early. What’s his name? [0:33:34.0] ____, who was a Quaker who then, was actually a 1AO objector during Korea, who was on a train, he was active in support of the Civil Rights movement, and he saw news of what was happening in Vietnam, he said, “Oh, that’s what I should be doing now.” And he’s a giant in all of this, and people, Philip Berrigan and Howard Zinn said, “This cannot stand.” And they saw, they saw early what was going on, and they were the first [0:34:09.2] ____.

0:34:12.4 Trevor Burrus: For… Our listeners might not know this too, but the, arguably the beginning of the modern American libertarian movement, or certainly the modern American young libertarian movement, was the 1969 Young Americans for Freedom convention, when the libertarians got together and organized a draft card burning and then got thrown out, and that was kind of the start of the libertarian movement separating off. But one of the main, most prominent people in Vietnam dissent was John Kerry, who a lot of our listeners probably only remember as the defeated presidential candidate, and maybe they heard about the Swift boating of him, but can you tell us what he was doing, particularly The Winter Soldier, what that was?

0:35:06.4 Chris Lombardi: John Kerry was a young man who, as we know, was in the military, but he was in the military, partly he was a fairly privileged young man, so he went in and was a support operator during Vietnam. And then he joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War at the moment that it was having its most intense phase of power. And right after Mỹ Lai, the Mỹ Lai massacre, when the trial of the main perpetrator was happening, all the people in the organization said, “Excuse me, that happens every day. That’s happening all the time in Vietnam, you have to make this more public.” And they had these hearings in Detroit, they had it in Detroit because they thought, “Oh, we’ll do it in Detroit, that shows we’re of the people,” instead of doing it in DC or New York, “We’ll do it in Detroit,” and the people I talked that were like, “I don’t [0:35:55.0] ____ when they decided to do that.”

0:35:56.8 Chris Lombardi: But they had these hearings that happened over three days in February, and it got zero press. I mean, it got local press in Detroit, but you know, the rest of the country was paying attention to the moon shot. It’s 1971 so it’s the third moon shot, and John Kerry says to them at his interview, “You know, we should go to DC. We should actually just go and take over all of DC.” And unlike what happened this past January, they went to practice democracy and hundreds of Vietnam veterans went to DC and Kerry most famously spoke at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which you were referring to, I think, where he said the same things that he was saying at Winter Soldier, but to the Senate hearing room and to the nation.

0:36:57.4 Chris Lombardi: And then at the end of the week, they all threw their medals in the pot. These are people who had earned purple hearts and all of that and bronze stars saying, “None of this is worth anything, because I know what’s happening in Vietnam right now.” That was a very powerful moment. And it’s one that Kerry refuses to talk about ever since. He also… He wrote a book called The New Soldier. Have you seen it? It’s a very earnest book. It’s hard to get ahold of it. I dug really hard to get it. And I don’t have a copy of it, but it’s very much we’re creating a new world, we’re doing something important, and it had pictures of all [0:37:43.7] ____, from the hearing room and the whole encampment.

0:37:49.1 Chris Lombardi: He then went on, went on to become a senator, as you know, and then became who he is now, he’s now Climate Envoy. But I tried to contact him too, ’cause I was writing about Winter Soldier. [0:38:01.9] ____ and he got… Official declined. At least he knew somebody is showing… Jane Fonda wouldn’t do it either.

0:38:12.9 Trevor Burrus: I’m not terribly surprised about Jane Fonda. It is interesting, though, because I talk to my parents, who went to college in the ’60s, in Oklahoma, so they were on the East Coast or something, but the way that I feel like our country has generally, I mean, there’s exceptions, but come to remember Vietnam, takes the dissenters and raises them to a much higher level than they were thought of at the time, which was being absolute traitors to the United States and maybe pseudo-​communists or something like this. That we now remember Vietnam as if you weren’t against it at the time, or you’ll say, “Well, I was never quite for the war,” or something. ‘Cause being in Vietnam is super, super cool now.

0:38:58.2 Trevor Burrus: Which kind of means that it was an absolute catastrophe of war in ways that are hard to even explain, but that it was ultimately good for dissenters, like in the image and just the idea of being against war is something that you can validly be and you can stand up for and receive respect for that. Would you agree with that?

0:39:17.7 Chris Lombardi: Except that, you know, during Iraq, the whole country can turn on a dime and say, no, anti-​war is not… Is not anything [0:39:27.3] ____ to be.

0:39:27.9 Trevor Burrus: Oh, yeah. When the drums of war start beating…

0:39:31.8 Chris Lombardi: Consent gets manufactured every war.

0:39:34.2 Aaron Powell: That’s like the… We had the Vietnam protests, but then that led to kind of a renewed jingoism under Reagan. And so can you talk about that, and particularly like it was interesting, I liked the discussion about the movie Rambo as somewhat representative of this.

0:39:52.6 Chris Lombardi: It’s [0:39:52.6] ____ about Rambo as this masculinist ideal. There’s a lot of rage going on afterward and people who were not in anti-​war movement felt somehow victimized by it. And there’s a whole, like grabbing that energy and running with it, which is what Reagan did. So that… And why nationalists did it too. You know, Vietnam veterans who were not anti-​war felt completely marginalized and insulted by anti-​war veterans, and they took it very seriously, and then some of them nurtured their already existing prejudices and said, “We have to fight for a new white world.”

0:40:35.9 Chris Lombardi: And the white nationalist movement that we saw in Oklahoma City, that started there. There’s a book by Kathleen Belew about this. Rambo, it’s funny, because the very first Rambo movie is pretty anti-​war. But then it gets metastasized into what is [0:40:52.2] ____ for common sense, I think Rocky 7 or something. It got… It created a whole another consciousness around that. So when Reagan, the Reagan era, that’s its beginning.

0:41:05.8 Aaron Powell: Bringing us up to the present day, how did the rise of electronic warfare… So you talk a lot about drones and drone operators, and also the internet, change the nature of the anti-​war movement?

0:41:24.3 Chris Lombardi: When talking about the present day movement, we’re also talking about a volunteer army, we’re talking about a totally different situation, even though a majority of people who fought in earlier wars, a lot of them are also enlisted anyway. But certainly in Vietnam, most of them had enlisted, but we’re talking about armed forces had been shipped, professionalized. I’m looking at this whole trend right now, I’m working on, as a chapter, a conscientious objection for a textbook. And the Europe and the United States have done this transition to a military caste, to a poverty draft, and we rely on those other people that we’re hiring to do this now.

0:42:02.3 Chris Lombardi: And that was… When you’re talking about electronic… The drones in that drone war, you’re asking some of the smartest of the crew [0:42:09.8] ____ and getting them to do that. And so the dissent happens on such an individual level, ’cause they’re not supported by anybody, except groups like I used to work for, that when you work on a drone program, and you realize that what’s happening and you don’t want be part of that, it’s a very very individual search for a solution. And that’s why you get the whistleblowers, that “I’m seeing is wrong,” and you have to see it. And so you end up with Chelsea Manning, and you end up with Billie Winner, who wasn’t a dissenter about the war, she was a dissenter in terms of information that was happening in the election, but it’s just a much more difficult path.

0:42:52.0 Trevor Burrus: That kind of seems to not bode too well for the future of… It doesn’t bode too well for the future of anti-​war necessarily in this… Or dissenters, if, A, as you said, we have this military class and, B, our wars are increasingly fought with drones and other types of removed technology, and we don’t have a draft right now, we still have registration for the draft, but we don’t… Most of our American war efforts have been trying to put fewer boots on the ground in these situations so you can fight a war in Libya with robots and precision “targeting,” so that it’s much less about standing up and saying, “I refuse to march,” ’cause they’re not marching anywhere, and I guess rather doing kind of the stuff you mentioned, leaking, dissenting to the way we fight the wars and going against a thing that you probably voluntarily engaged in as opposed to, say, a draft in the case of Chelsea Manning, for example.

0:43:57.6 Chris Lombardi: If you didn’t know any people that would not have, however it is, 1.8 million people in uniform right now. So I think that it’s true that trying to build a movement around that is more challenging. But a refusal to co-​operate with the institution is still a refusal to co-​operate with the institution and that can make that happen. Not easy to do, though. It’s still not easy to do. I think that there is a point to organizing it, there’s still a point to organizing it, it’s not… And I think that the path, anybody that wants to be part of this still, is to talk to people that are supporting [0:44:34.7] ____, who are doubting… Understanding what’s going on, or support Daniel Hale, who’s right now still, who’s in prison now for having leaked about the drone program, right this second.

0:44:49.0 Chris Lombardi: There’s a lot of stuff you can do easily, or contact the Biden administration and say, “Are you sure you want to spend 800 million right now? In the Pentagon right now, this second?” Anything else you’re trying to do? A lot of things you try. You can work on. It’s as challenging as it’s ever been, but it’s still possible.

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0:45:26.7 Aaron Powell: Thank you for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.