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There is need for civil disobedience

Since I was a teenager I have written letters, taken part in discussions and debates, been active in different organisations, and have actively worked for human and animal rights, democracy, solidarity and on environmental issues. I have been a Green Party councillor. I have a godchild and I give money to a project to build schools in Gambia. At a glance I may seem ambitious, but if you take a closer look I have in most cases merely been airing my opinions, not taking concrete action. I have therefore come to the conclusion that I'll have to do more if I want to be a responsible member of society. To give some time now and then to writing a letter or to give a little money is not a sacrifice and doesn't create any lasting change; it only eases my mind.

We often say that things are wrong but that we can do nothing. This is the illusion which most of us are caught in. We are good at passively protesting but very bad at taking action and responsibility. We live in a world where twenty percent of the world's population lives off eighty percent of our planet's resources, and I think few of us would argue that this relationship is just. Still not many of us resist what is wrong. This is precisely our problem, that we are passively protesting. Obedience is what upholds injustice. Without obedience no Holocaust, without obedience no Hiroshima bomb, therefore we most brake our obedience.

The reason for the imbalance in resource distribution in the world is that a rich minority have seized power over a poor majority by war, political policies and trade. The wealth of the West was created with the help of slavery and colonialism. It gave us cheap labour and cheap raw materials.

The policies which uphold injustice (and also create it in the West) are a continuation of the violence which has been used by the powerful throughout history. Coercion is no longer needed in order to steal land and resources from the third world. Multinational (now also transnational) companies take care of that and ordinary citizens like us take part in the oppression by buying goods without asking how they were produced. People often work twelve or fourteen hours a day, without protection against pesticides, and without any rights, so that we Westerners can buy cheap bananas, coffee, chocolate etc.

We must be prepared to pay, so that people other than ourselves can enjoy better living conditions. We must be prepared to make sacrifices - if not, we are no better than yesterday's slave owners. Our wealth was built on the oppression of other people. This is the truth I can no longer escape, and this is why I have decided to take part in an action against nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate tool for preserving the imbalance in resource distribution in the world. Therefore it is most important to get rid of them if we shall be able to create a more just society.

One can not get rid of nuclear weapons by voting. There is no political party that has promised to disarm them. Our democracy fails us here, as most people do want to get rid of them. Therefore there is a need for civil disobedience. I cannot see this differently.

I am prepared to accept what personal consequences may follow from our action; I have prepared myself for the possibility that I may spend some time in prison. Many people are asking how I can put myself in such a situation, how I can make such a sacrifice, but to tell the truth it would be a bigger sacrifice for me not to do it. I am convinced that what I'm doing is right and not to do it would then be wrong.

Of course, nuclear weapons pose a threat to all people, now and to future generations, but my main motivation for taking part in an action against the Trident system is solidarity with the poor.

I am approaching my forties and I think it is about time that I take action. I have read enough not to be able to blame ignorance. Throughout the years I have often thought about the meaning of life. I think it must be about making the world a little better. Even if I might not be very successful I will at least have tried.

Ann-Britt Sternfeldt

We cannot give away the responsibility

As a Christian I feel it is my duty to work for a more just world. Justice is a precondition for peace. It is easy to forget all the people who don't have what they need for a decent life, easy to forget how intimately their lives are connected to ours, and above all easy to think that we can do nothing to change the situation. We all have power, if only we take it.

This action is for me a way to take personal responsibility for the state of the world. To start the disarmament that is needed, both of the weapons themselves and of the terrible injustice of the world. Sometimes taking responsibility involves carrying out acts of civil disobedience.

There are many very good laws. But there are also unjust laws which uphold oppression and protect horrendous means of power, like Trident. Knowing this I think it is my responsibility not to obey such oppressive laws. Our laws are based on ethical values. If a law doesn't seem to correspond with many people's ethics, and risks people's lives, it is important to initiate a dialogue which could lead to the law being changed. Our democracies are not perfect. Throughout history, civil disobedience has been used to develop human and political rights. I think there will always be a need for civil disobedience in any democracy.

With our action we want to shed light on the purpose of nuclear weapons in the world of today. Many people are working for a nuclear free world. It seems to be possible now after the end of the cold war. But why is it so difficult? Why do the nuclear states hold on to their weapons? I don't think it has much to do with defence strategies. These weapons are used to preserve the unjust distribution of the world's resources. I used to live in Latin America and I have seen what poverty means. Allowing poverty to exist, and even increase, is a crime that all of us in the rich part of the world are guilty of. We take part in the oppression of the poor when we accept that weapons are exported, when we support multinational companies, when we keep our money in banks which support weapon producers. First of all we must remove those hindrances which the western world has placed before the poor which prevents them from living worthwile lives; debt, tariff barriers, weapons which are exported to the local power-holding elite, the support for multinational companies, the threat from our military forces. This will not happen unless ordinary people like us make it happen. We cannot leave the responsibility to those in power in political and financial positions. We all have the power - we only have to take it.

Annika Spalde

August 1998

Disarm the Oppression of the Poor!
No Peace without Justice - No Justice without Peace

We have tried to render one Trident submarine harmless with the help of simple carpenter hammers and by that started the disarmament of this submarine's nuclear capability. We have done it publicly, nonviolently and responsibly. We have tried to follow just laws and to break unjust laws. We are hoping for aquittal in court but do face the risk of ending up in prison and receiving restitution. You do not perform an act with such serious consequences without deliberation. A of thought has forced me to act in this way. Here is my personal explanation.

We three ordinary citizens have, using simple tools, started the disarmament of one of the world's most powerful weapons, a nuclear submarine. A weapon which carries an explosive power greater than all the explosive power used in all the wars at the human history - comparable to more than 400 Hiroshima bombs. A weapon whose cost could instead be used to during 7 years feed 1 million starving children in Bangladesh or 500.000 children in Ethiopia. Half of theese expences are water and wood.

We live in a world where millions of people belong to the unfortunately, the eternal condemned. Close to enormous wealth and welfare, people live in poverty and with oppression, war and persecution. It has been like that for a long time, way too long. Our action shows the possibility of breaking the obedience and passivity towards this injustice. We hope to inspire and challenge others to resist this worldorder.

Tens of thousands of children are starving to death every day at the same time as we are producing even more billionaires. The rich countries have a weapon capacity which could destroy the earth several times over, even thoug the cold war has ended. Nuclear weapons are no longer so much a question about the survival of humankind or a war in Europe - they are about the western world's defence of the unjust distribution of resources. Gradual disarmament was believed to be a road to peace during the cold war. Today the situation is different, nuclear weapons are, even more than before, about the monopoly of horror by the rich world, and by that their power to control the global order. The risks and eventual use of nuclear weapons were earlier at the core of debate; in my belief, it is rather about how nuclear weapons are permanently used in the same way as a pistol which is pointed at someone's head. The nuclear pistol is primarily pointed at those who do not have and who, in this global order, are to be prevented from taking what they need from the wealth that exist around them. Nuclear weapons make no sense today, nine years after the fall of the Berlin wall, unless the reason that they exist is precisely so that the rich minority can keep the poor in their designed place in this global apartheid society.

According to my understanding, nuclear weapons seem to be pointed at the third world, at their demands for a just distribution of the resources of the world. They are the insurance against the demands of the poor for water, food, protection and community - the kind of things which belong to their absolute rights as a part of the human race.

While the children in the slum's of Rio are searching for a place to sleep during the night, while the drunken black men in Cape Town are begging for money for food, while the out-caste women in Calcutta are searching for work , the western world is consuming luxury, going on diets and face-lifts, and the Trident submarines are protecting this world order of hypocrisy and barbarism.

We are living in a world where we who have been from birth members of the privileged have an obligation to intervene. We have a duty to resist the oppression which is an obstruction to community, understanding and equality. We who belong to the privileged, we who live on welfare in the western world, are participating in and gaining from this inequality, whether we want to or not. We are guilty but we also have the freedom to resist in a way that the victims do not have. It is this freedom or this responsibility that I have tried to take.

Welfare is possible for all people on this earth - if we share the affluence of the eath's resources. We can afford to give all human beings food, water, a roof over their head and a meaningful life. But we do not afford with the enormous distortion between the incredibly rich and the unbelievably poor. We can not afford the billionaires that need the protection of the military from the justified demands of the poor.

Not only Trident submarines and other nuclear weapons are used as power tools against the poor; the law is another device in the hands of the guardians of this world order. The law of property rights, nearly declared holy in the western world, has become so absurd that it is even considered to apply to the right of a country to own weapons of mass destruction, a country's right to threaten others with these weapons and to protect the existing interests of power. In a world that is characterized by incredibly unjust power relations, the laws that protect nuclear weapons and the unequal world order become themselves unjust. It becomes both necessary and a duty to break the laws that support the mass murder that is going on. We in the ploughshares group Bread not Bombs have consciously and purposefully broken certain laws and followed other just laws, in an attempt to break the criminal obedience that rules the greater part of the population in the western world. The peace- and solidarity movements of the western world have also been guilty of criminal obedience to the power used by the weapons and the law. After my own, too long, criminal obedience, I have gathered the courage to overcome my fear, to take my responsibility and to break the law that protects the terror regime of nuclear weapons.

I have chosen to do civil disobedience, nonviolent and public, as a means to break the law. Civil disobedience in the form of disarmament is a symbolic attempt to fulfil the utopia of the community of human kind and everyone's right to live. The disarmament of the nuclear capability of a Trident submarine is actually about doing the impossible possible and the unthinkable thinkable - that ordinary people are actually able to intervene and break the power that oppresses, that it matters what I do - even against the power of nuclear weapons.

All governments say they want to get rid of famine and poverty but the question is if they are prepared to give away their interests in power willingly? Governments, alone or in cooperation as, for example, in the UN, seem to act too weakly or even by strengthening the oppression. But when there exists a demand from the people they can not ignore, the political leaders and the company owners have to listen. The civil disobedient disarmament is a demand that is impossible to ignore - the powerholders are given the choice to let us go on with the disarmament of Trident and by that abolish nuclear weapons - or to put us all in prison.

The day when thousands of justice-aware people prefer to be in prison than to accept that oppression goes on tormenting our fellow humans, the oppression will cease to exist and the community will be possible. No government can reign or keep their legitimity in a country where thousands of people are breaking the laws and are not afraid of prison. Also no society will break into chaos if the lawbreakers act publicly and without violence against others.

I am hoping, demanding and dreaming of a world that is ruled by the community of world citizens - a community where the poorest, the most oppressed, the most despised are in the centre.

But even if our action does not lead to any benefits for the poor and oppressed, there exists a joy and beauty in our awkward attempt to render a weapon harmless that is pointed against the smallest of us. The attempt in itself is enough to restore our common human dignity.

Stellan Vinthagen
One of the privileged World Citizens