We have the founder and executive director of the Center on Conscience and War, Mike Prysner, as our special guest this week to talk about the growing movement of conscientious objectors who are calling our attention to the evil of the military-industrial complex from their perspectives on the inside. How has the Iran War driven service members to their breaking point? What tactics does the U.S. military use to convince civilians to join its death machine? How are soldiers who’ve seen the war crimes that the military is perpetuating across the world becoming radicalized, and what avenues are they choosing to voice their disillusionment? We talk about this and more in our latest episode that looks toward a future without our country’s forever wars. Watch below:

Mike knows what it’s like to be radicalized by firsthand experience of the brutality of the U.S. military. He joined the Army himself at age seventeen, right before 9/11, and was part of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. So he witnessed the rhetoric that military leadership used to get buy-in from the rank and file tasked with waging war in Iraq, and he quickly noticed the disconnect between that leadership’s lies about the patriotic righteousness of its War on Terror and the solidarity that he felt for the people being massacred by that war. He describes waiting out the rest of his time in the armed forces as a disillusioned objector to its crimes against humanity, and once Mike got out of the Army, he moved immediately to antiwar activism as an organizer with knowledge of the U.S. military’s moral bankruptcy and exploitation from the belly of the beast.

As in the case of 9/11, the military has been able to recruit by appealing to nationalism ultimately fueling imperialist projects of regime change and resource extraction across the world. But Mike also points to the other offers it makes to paint participation in those projects attractive to everyday people. And many of those offers, as you’ll hear, depend upon the economic precarity and lack of opportunities for upward mobility that also stoke support for Trump and undermine solidarity within the American working class — and between Americans and the members of the global working class that the military victimizes. Those uninterested in attending college and without other prospects might be motivated by recruitment videos promising a sense of purpose and of belonging to a larger organization often glorified in American society at large. Others turn to the military because they find material benefits they aren’t getting elsewhere. They can get food and housing guaranteed, find money for college, and access healthcare. It’s a damning commentary on how our country drives people into the service, where they risk their own lives and take other lives in the name of a nation that doesn’t even care about them.

As Mike points out, these benefits should be guaranteed to Americans in workplaces that don’t involve combat and bloodshed. But they’re not, and that leads us to the American left’s imperative of fighting for basic rights and social support programs — Medicare for All, an end to homelessness, a jobs guarantee — so that we aren’t sending people into the military-industrial complex so they can seek out the things they need to survive on a daily basis. And, as we see from the work of the Center on Conscience and War, many people who did join the military in search of those benefits are standing up against the institution that relies on promises of economic stability in order to recruit people to war. We talk about how conscientious objectors are speaking out, what risks they’re taking, and what support systems we can build to make it possible for increasingly disillusioned members of the U.S. military to grow a movement of conscientious objectors that can fundamentally destabilize our war machine.

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