Moral Dissent

By Parke Burgess, World BEYOND War, January 27, 2025

Every Saturday for the last few months I have been standing in vigil on my local town commons. Most of the others standing with me are focused on the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, and rightly so. They hold signs saying “Free Palestine” and the like. My focus is a bit broader. My sign reads, “War Is Wrong. Period.” To be clear, I regard it as simply factual that what Israel has been doing in Gaza easily meets the formal definition of genocide and–does this really need to be said?–I am strenuously opposed to it. It must end now, permanently, and unconditionally. This should be a given. But I am making a somewhat different point. Even the genocide’s apologists have no qualms about calling it a war, the “war on Gaza.” I am saying: yes it is a war and for that reason alone it is already morally wrong. (War and genocide are natural bedfellows, don’t you know.)

I am a war abolitionist. This is not a pragmatic position. It is moral dissent. I am not a war abolitionist because I believe the cause will soon prevail and war will imminently come to an end. I honestly don’t know whether we will abolish war before it abolishes us. But I do know with perfect certainty that war is an abomination. It is a horror that rains unspeakable suffering on masses of people, most of whom are guilty of no more than trying to live a meaningful life. It destroys the natural world thoughtlessly, carelessly, and with abandon. It shatters communities, impoverishes cultures, and instills terror in the hearts of children and, thus, everyone–for who has never loved a child or was not once one themselves? And war robs societies of all the fruits that might have been harvested were it not for the exorbitant costs of war preparation, war readiness, the waging of war, and recovery from war.

I see war abolitionism as a direct descendent of the abolition movement that ended slavery. At one time, few gave a second thought to the institution of slavery, and those who did quickly concluded that it was too embedded in the culture and too advantageous to elites ever to be abolished. But, eventually, it was. I cannot begin to comprehend how a person of integrity, of principle, or a shred of empathy could have tolerated the institution of slavery in their midst, much less defended it. What could be more morally obvious than that it is utterly wrong for one human being to bind and shackle another, forcing them to labor tirelessly until they die of exhaustion? Thankfully, the cognitive dissonance ultimately became too much to sustain.

It is another kind of atrocity, but one equally unthinkable, to wage war. And yet too many people in the world today think nothing of the routine practice of nations to train their children to murder other children en masse, to devote vast resources to build machines capable of murdering thousands, tens of thousands–even hundreds of thousands or millions–of people at a stroke, and then to unleash these forces on the slightest pretext, often for a lie, and let the thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands, even millions, perish in an orgy of brutality and pain. And now, as we all know, it has become much worse. A very small circle of powerful men hold the prerogative to annihilate all humans and quite possibly all life from the earth in one reckless exchange. What could be more obviously immoral than all this? And yet it is allowed to go on year after year, decade after decade, century after century.

I dissent! I dissent!

It matters not whether my cause has any hope of success in my lifetime or ever. From a moral perspective, the likelihood of success is irrelevant. I must stand on my local town commons with my sign and assert exactly what should never have needed to be said: War is wrong. Period.

But this cannot be all. A moral sentiment, as necessary as it may be, is not sufficient. Abolitionists now, like our abolitionist ancestors, need to be smart and strategic. It is not enough to be against something. We must be for something better. We need to communicate our moral dissent as clearly, persuasively, and broadly as possible. And we need to build an infrastructure of peace that will, one day, supplant the infrastructures of militarism. We need global associations and institutions working from the top down as well as grassroots associations and institutions working from the bottom up. We cannot wait for governments to do this. This is the people’s work, as it always has been and always must be. And we can only do this work together, making an advantage of our diversity of opinions, strategies, backgrounds, and identities. Much more binds us together in this cause than could possibly divide us.

We need to build our collective capacity to, directly and nonviolently, confront the war machine as it bears down upon us. Peace will never truly prevail until it has demonstrated convincingly and to all that it is more powerful than violence. Of course, no one knows for sure that this is possible. But for those of us who do know that the alternative is morally intolerable (and ultimately ecocidal), we must leverage our love, wisdom, ingenuity, and grit to build communities and structures that can withstand and overcome the violence that will certainly try to destroy us. And one day, if we are not too unlucky, peace will settle upon the lands and waters of this precious earth. This will not bring the end of strife, to be sure. History will march on. But no longer will humans labor under the corrosive notion that war could possibly solve anything. Children everywhere will sleep more soundly, with an innocent faith–one not felt so deeply for some millennia now–that the adults of the world, near and far, have no designs to murder them or ever send them to murder one another.