Many conscientious service members have been speaking out despite an often oppressive and unforgiving atmosphere. Some of us have even been persecuted and attacked while exercising our civic duty of speaking truth to power in times of moral crises. The Rev. Lennox Yearwood, an Air Force chaplain, faces accusations of working against national security. Liam Madden, fellow IVAW member and co-founder of Appeal for Redress, is defending his project against comments that are similarly repeated daily to men and women in the armed forces who are speaking out; effectively demanding that our GIs remain silent and obey our leaders blindly.
The United States is not, nor will it ever be, Nazi Germany, but Jägerstätter’s witness remains relevant and powerful for our current context. As Jägerstätter’s testimony attests, the question of how a pacifist would address the problem of violence as manifested by Hitler has a response: The blame does not rest solely on Hitler, but is shared by the social classes (including the German church in status confessions) that enforced strict nationalism in the pursuit of economic revival, killing its own prophets, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in the process.
If every soldier obeyed God and their conscience rather than human leaders, as Jägerstätter did, the world would be spared just as much from the likes of the German war machine as we would the American military industrial complex. Franz Jägerstätter, just as Saints Maximilian of Tebessa and Martin of Tours before him, was courageous enough to stand by the conviction “Miles Christi ego sum; pugnare mihi non licet: I am a soldier of Christ; it is not permissible for me to fight.”
Logan Laituri is a six-year Army veteran with combatant service in Iraq during OIF II and experience with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Israel and the West Bank. He is an active member of Iraq Veterans Against the War and currently resides in Camden, New Jersey, in an intentional Christian community called Camden House, where he continues to seek ways to wage peace wherever he goes. He blogs at courageouscoward.blogspot.com.