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There are many reasons someone may join the military: for pride, for money or to defend their country. But what concerned TEDx speaker Maria Santelli was what happens when they realize they’ve made a mistake.

Santelli is the director for the Center on Conscience and War (CCW). The center works with servicemen and women who, after voluntarily enlisting in the military, found that killing violates their conscience and are applying for discharge as a “conscientious objector.”

“When I talk with conscientious objectors every day, I hear that sense of relief expressed over and over,” she said. “Even if they haven’t been discharged yet, if no action has been taken yet, that simple act of declaring themselves conscientious objectors, that brief act of reclaiming their conscience, gives them a sense of relief.”

Santelli explained that the culture of war and violence in the United States masks the true horrors of war. She argued that society compels its citizens to join the army for money, access to education or service to the community, but national leaders have neglected to illustrate the personal consequences of killing.

“Our government, our media schools and even our churches take great pains to obscure the reality of war and military service,” she said. “So sometimes people don’t know what they’re getting themselves into. And they find themselves in a crisis of conscience.”

This “crisis of conscience” is the realization that their actions are in opposition to their moral and ethical beliefs, or the conscience. In the military a crisis of conscience means that a service member faces the choice of either violating orders or violating their conscience by killing.

“This type of trauma, this wound to the soul, is not characterized by fear for one’s life,” Santelli said. “It’s characterized by inner conflict, moral injury. A natural response to a very unnatural experience.”

The CCW walks the prospective conscientious objector through the official application to request a discharge from the military on grounds of moral and ethical beliefs. Santelli said it is this process, along with counseling, that provided her with a new perspective on the military, one that shows trends of nonviolence and cooperation instead of war.

“Their application compels a discussion of the morality of war,” she said. “It teaches us about our true nature, the default position for humanity is that of a conscientious objector. One percent of us have volunteered; the other 99 percent have said no. We have a choice, and we’ve made it. We said we’d rather not be involved.”

This ability to be discharged on grounds of conscientious objection has come about through many years of court cases, protests and work by the CCW and other organizations, through years of mandatory drafts and religious persecution, she said. But Santelli ended by saying that society is on the right track to leaving war in the past.

“Conscience is the law inscribed on the human heart,” she said. “When we follow the counsel of the conscience, we make good decisions. And when it comes to war and violence, the vast majority of us have already decided. Being a conscientious objector is what it means to be human.”

Pipe Dream had the chance to sit down with Santelli before her talk 

Pipe Dream: Why did you decide to come speak at Binghamton University?
Maria Santelli: Well, I was invited! And I feel very privileged to do the work that I do, to work with the people that I work with. We call them soldiers of conscience, people in the military who have crisis of conscience and seek discharge so they can follow their conscience. Our organization has been doing that work for 75 years — I’ve only been a small part of it for the past three and a half years — but I feel so honored by the work. So having the opportunity to speak to anyone about it is something I scoop up.

PD: What exactly is a “crisis of conscience?”

MS: Though it’s different for everyone, I think it’s when you feel like what you’re doing is in opposition to your conscience. Something is wrong, you’re being asked to do something or being prevented from doing something, and your conscience is telling you that that’s wrong. And when you’re in the military, that puts them in a very difficult position, because you’re faced with the biggest ill: taking a human life. Because while it’s important to know that they absolutely have rights as citizens of the United States, they feel like they don’t have options. They feel trapped.

PD: Are there people who are skeptical or critical of the work your organization does?

MS: That’s what they tell us, they tell us that violence is human nature. And people do make decisions based on patterns that they’re told or they observe. And what do we see on the news? We see violence. We see people hurting each other. We don’t see the thousands upon thousands of examples of people cooperating with each other every single day. By far, humans cooperate many more times than they compete or engage in violence. So it’s quite clear — the evidence shows empirically. Technology, globalization, for all its ills, has increased cooperation across borders. We’re not innately violent. We have survived as a species because of our cooperation, not because of our competition. No one has ever experienced trauma due to an act of kindness. If violence was natural, we would thrive. And we don’t. We spent $15 billion in the past 15 years on Iraq and Afghanistan, and terrorism and threats to our security have increased. If we spent $15 billion on an Ebola vaccine and the number of Ebola cases continued to rise, wouldn’t we change course? But it’s not our job to argue this — we don’t get into politics. Politics is complex and debatable. That’s not a conscientious objector’s role. What’s not complex and debatable is what someone’s conscience will allow them to do.

PD: Has there been a larger history of conscientious objection, and how was it dealt with before organizations like yours?

MS: Conscientious objection has been around as long as there’s been war. March 12, we celebrated the feast day of a conscientious objector in the year 295 who said, “I’m a Christian, I can’t fight.” And he was beheaded. There’s references to conscientious objection in Deuteronomy in the Bible. And there’s been a history of both repression and accommodation of it. We have conscientious objectors in the Revolutionary War. Washington himself would relieve soldiers from duty, saying, “You don’t want to be here,” it violates your “moral scruples” as they called it at the time. In the Civil War, both the North and the South had conscientious objectors, and accommodated and repressed them. World War I, objectors were starved, held in shackles, were sent into the woods with nothing but a little bit of water and some materials for cooking. This was to break them, get them to acquiesce and fight. And the conscience does not lay down that easily. When someone believes strongly in something and has taken that stance, they have the power to persevere.

PD: Are there any trends you’ve noticed for those who chose to opt out as to why they’ve had a change of heart?

MS: A common theme is a deep love for humanity. We throw around cynical reasons why people might join the military, like college money or a steady paycheck, or three meals a day. Sure, people join the military to get something. And they join the military to give something. There’s a deep need to do something good, something bigger than yourself. They’re looking for security, identity, connection. All those things draw people to the military. And as to why they have a crisis of conscience, it varies as much as the person themselves. Some are religious; back in the day, you had to be religious. You had to believe in God, a supreme being. Fifty years ago, the Supreme Court decided that wasn’t necessary, that someone could have an ethical and moral opposition to war. We get objectors from all over the spectrum, some from the right side, people who gravitate toward a libertarian political philosophy. People would assume that a lot of conscientious objectors come from the left side of the spectrum, but that’s not necessarily true. We need to get beyond what we see as positions and look beneath that to the underlying interests and values that form those positions. These libertarians, I read the first draft of their application to become a conscientious objector, and I hear Ayn Rand and property theft, and I hear these buzzwords that I associate with not really being too nurturing of humanity. But when I talk with them and find what values they feel are violated by being at war, these libertarians are coming from a really beautiful place that is based in equality and fairness and justice and love. And pacifism, in a weird way.

PD: Why do you think it’s important to talk about this on a college campus?

MS: I think everybody has the capability to make good decisions with an open mind to absorb new information. But I feel that particularly young people, they feel like their heels are a little less dug in the sand than older people. This is an exciting opportunity to talk to people who are looking at what they want to do with their future and how they hope to influence the world.