Post by goz on Mar 1, 2018 23:31:26 GMT
This is an interesting article I found when researching a claim that Cash made about religious people being more likely to be a conscientious objector in a court room than atheists, when the possible outcome was the death penalty for a defendant.
If you extrapolate that, I think this article is interesting.
www.ppu.org.uk/nomorewar/a_objecting/london/why_object.html
Conclusions:
If you extrapolate that, I think this article is interesting.
www.ppu.org.uk/nomorewar/a_objecting/london/why_object.html
Conclusions:
Conclusions
What can we learn from this quick analysis?
One of the most common assumptions about COs is that they were all religious. Even this very quick count shows that this is not the case - the nearly 50/50 split in the London data between religious and non-religious motivations is likely echoed around the country. It’s a more complicated, and more interesting, picture of what it meant to object to war than to simplify all men into a single group.
In addition to this, I think it’s important to see how varied CO motivations were. Not only are there many different groups, but as we’ve seen, each group has a variety of different types of objection within it. Not only did COs with different motivations and opinions coexist, but they also formed a mutually supporting framework. If we look at the chart it seems as if the CO movement was fragmented into different types of CO. For analysis, this is quite useful (and hopefully you’ve found it interesting!) but it does hide an important point. First World War Conscientious Objectors were varied, but they were all COs - and treated each other as such. You can see in our articles on the Tribunal newspaper that COs from different backgrounds wrote in support of each other frequently, and equal weight was given to opinions from all backgrounds.
I think this says something very important about conscientious objection, and the peace movement today. There are many “ways in” to peace, and nearly as many different reasons for objecting to war as there are objectors! Then, as now, Anti-War movements have space for hundreds of different opinions to coexist.
What can we learn from this quick analysis?
One of the most common assumptions about COs is that they were all religious. Even this very quick count shows that this is not the case - the nearly 50/50 split in the London data between religious and non-religious motivations is likely echoed around the country. It’s a more complicated, and more interesting, picture of what it meant to object to war than to simplify all men into a single group.
In addition to this, I think it’s important to see how varied CO motivations were. Not only are there many different groups, but as we’ve seen, each group has a variety of different types of objection within it. Not only did COs with different motivations and opinions coexist, but they also formed a mutually supporting framework. If we look at the chart it seems as if the CO movement was fragmented into different types of CO. For analysis, this is quite useful (and hopefully you’ve found it interesting!) but it does hide an important point. First World War Conscientious Objectors were varied, but they were all COs - and treated each other as such. You can see in our articles on the Tribunal newspaper that COs from different backgrounds wrote in support of each other frequently, and equal weight was given to opinions from all backgrounds.
I think this says something very important about conscientious objection, and the peace movement today. There are many “ways in” to peace, and nearly as many different reasons for objecting to war as there are objectors! Then, as now, Anti-War movements have space for hundreds of different opinions to coexist.