🇬🇧 Don't go to war

 

🇬🇧Young people of Britain, hear this.. 

  Don't let yourself be persuaded to fight in a war that isn't yours to fight!! 

  You won't be protecting your families, your country, your freedom or any of those things that really mean anything. 

  You will be expected to lay your life on the line and to take the lives of innocent people who are in a position exactly like the one that you're in.. they've come from families (like your own) who are waiting and hoping for the day they'll return safely. They have the same dreams and aspirations that you do and frequently have little choice about their involvement. Since the late 16th century, conscripts have been press ganged. Organised groups of Royal Navy navies used various forms of impressment to physically coerce, trick and con unsuspecting victims for the purposes of crewing warships. Press-gangs are a frequent trope employed within film and literature, featuring marauding villains that roam the country, wielding cudgels and plying victims with alcohol, before wrestling them into submission and manhandling them unto their new seafaring life.   

    Naval conscripts could find themselves sitting ducks aboard a blazing vessel, with nowhere to run to. Or perhaps, crammed into a submarine, destined to become a watery mass grave. 

    Huge numbers of WWII frontline soldiers purposely aimed high - up over the heads of the human beings they had been ordered to  murder. 

  It's highly likely that you'll  witness terrifying atrocities being committed. So that those depraved individuals enacting said criminal acts feel secure, you may well find you have to join in too. But your shame and guilt are indelibly seared into your conscience.. you are then a killer and always will be a killer.

  You will in fact, be expected to make the ultimate sacrifice to appease the over-inflated ego of a fascist idiot, sex offender and racist dictator; The leader of a failing terrorist state that bullies every nation in the world until they capitulate. 

  From aloft, in their ivory towers, they can survey the spoils of the ruthless inhumanity they command. The only value applied to your life is that of cannon fodder. Of the young men they have unthinkingly dispatched for the purposes of decimating one nation (and its people) after another; those who escaped death, can be found lining the city streets, where they live in makeshift shanty towns. Having outlived their usefulness, people parrot the phrase; "Thankyou for your service" in their approximate direction, as if that will keep them warm on cold nights. The country and people, the freedoms of whom, they believed they had been  defending, have come to perceive them at best, as an inconvenience. At worst; human detritus.

 

When coffins are unloaded onto the runway tarmac, do you imagine their family members will be amongst them? 

  Ask yourself, do you see their kids coming home in boxes?

  Yes! You will absolutely be psychologically damaged as a result of simply being present in a combat situation. 

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV

  "In war, 

 whichever side   may call itself the   victor,there are no   winners,

 but all are 

 losers."

 *Neville Chamberlain*

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV

  Unless you have a very specific psychopathy, you can expect horrifically vivid nightmares, flashbacks, have difficulty sustaining healthy relationships, holding down a job, suffer prolonged periods of profound depression, crippling anxiety, visual and auditory hallucinations, insomnia, spontaneous onset of extreme fear, guilt, shame and complete sorrow, outbursts of uncontrollable sobbing and weeping, anger pure rage, paranoia, panic attacks, psychosis, disassociating from reality - plus you are likely to have physical injuries and/or illnesses that really never clear up and you won't just get used to having one arm or half of your face. You will forever be haunted by the faces of dead and mutilated children, young women burned to a crisp or with injuries that simply don't seem possible, people who no longer appear human - the stuff of nightmares.. you'll see them every time you close your eyes, every time you hear a certain sound or smell a certain aroma, you will no longer have dominion over your senses or thoughts.

If people could kill other people without these kind of consequences, our species wouldn't still exist. Human beings would have become extinct a long, long time ago. 

Conscientious Objectors

 

 

    Concientious Objectors© is a neon art installation by Tim Etchells (2014). 

   Etchells utilises a fragment of testimony from Alfred Evans, a conscientious objector during World War One. Evans was part of a group of 50 men, who in May 1916, were imprisoned and then sent from Britain to France, convinced that they’d be forced to fight against their will. I encourage you to delve further into the brave stand these men took in order to uphold their pacifist values in the face of impossible pressure by peers, community and society.

  There are no winners in war. There's no glory, no heroes. Real men stand up for what's right. You have a choice. There is a rich history of conscientious objectors doing precisely that... What's morally right. Please don't ruin your lives. Don't destroy the lives of others. Don't end the lives of innocent human beings.. hopefully a young person in another part of the world is thinking about this too right now.

Your forefathers went to war so that you wouldn't have to. Don't invalidate their sacrifices. Be better than the shameless criminals that want to exploit you to their own ends. If you do better, others will have the nerve to do better too for a future.. your future, that WILL be better because of you!

Links

🔗 https://timetchells.com/projects/conscientious-objectors/