Books about Resisters from Amazon.com

A long time ago in China, there existed three Books of Peace that proved so threatening to the reigning powers that they had them burned. Many years later Maxine Hong Kingston wrote a Fourth Book of Peace, but it too was burned--in the catastrophic Berkeley-Oakland Hills fire of 1991, a fire that coincided with the death of her father. Now in this visionary and redemptive work, Kingston completes her interrupted labor, weaving fiction and memoir into a luminous meditation on war and peace, devastation and renewal..
Price: $4.89 [Notify me when price goes down.]

During World War I, thousands of rural southern men, black and white, refused to serve in the military Some failed to register for the draft, while others deserted after being inducted. In the countryside, armed bands of deserters defied local authorities; capturing them required the dispatch of federal troops into three southern states.

Jeanette Keith traces southern draft resistance to several sources, including whites' long-term political opposition to militarism, southern blacks' reluctance to serve a nation that refused to respect their rights, the peace witness of southern churches, and, above all, anger at class bias in federal conscription policies. Keith shows how draft dodgers' success in avoiding service resulted from the failure of southern states to create effective mechanisms for identifying and classifying individuals. Lacking local-level data on draft evaders, the federal government used agencies of surveillance both to find reluctant conscripts and to squelch antiwar dissent in rural areas.

Drawing upon rarely used local draft board reports, Selective Service archives, Bureau of Investigation reports, and southern political leaders' constituent files, Keith offers new insights into rural southern politics and society as well as the growing power of the nation-state in early twentieth-century America..
Price: $25.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In a remote Inupiat Eskimo village in 1971, the friendship and love between a young female shaman, a traditional hunter and a draft-dodging ecologist leads to tragedy..
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The Story of America’s Peace Seekers

While terrorists kill in pursuit of their goals, there are people whose goal is never to kill, no matter what the situation Here, Milton Meltzer explores Americans’ long tradition of pacifism From the Quakers of colonial times to the conscientious objectors of Vietnam, Americans have risked much to stand against violence in any and every form. First published in 1985, Ain’t Gonna Study War No More is now fully updated and revised by the author..
Price: $12.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor unleashed rampant racism and distrust towards "all things alien," and it raised perplexing questions of national identity that still reverberate Persons of Japanese ancestry were the victims of frequent racist acts and culturally biased governmental loyalty investigations, and, finally, of exclusion and imprisonment. The majority of Japanese Americans complied with government actions during this period, including the drafting of Japanese Americans into military service. Many loyal Japanese Americans saw such service as an opportunity to display their allegiance to the United States. However, some 200 Japanese Americans drafted into the Army refused to serve in combat while their families languished in internment camps. The history of Japanese Americans in World War II does not record the stories of these resisters. It does not mention the War Department Special Organization to which many of them were transferred or the individuals who were tried and sentenced by military courts to long prison terms. The 200 conscientious military resisters felt betrayed by the government and viewed the decision to imprison Japanese Americans as an immoral acquiescence to West Coast racism. Though their actions were frowned upon at the time by many of their own families, and certainly by the military, the draft resisters are now positively recognized in the Japanese American community. Yet, their story remains largely untold, overshadowed by the heroic stories of those Japanese Americans who served on the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Here, for the first time, the resisters' story is related in vivid detail. Castelnuovo does not abandon the narrative with the end of World War II. Instead, she follows many of the resisters into the post-war years, assessing the ramifications of their actions on their lives as individuals and within the broader context of the Japanese American community. Happily, most of the resisters were eventually re-embraced by their community, but, until now, they have been forgotten by students of World War II. That is an oversight Soldiers of Conscience will certainly remedy..
Price: $37.40 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"For those people that want to know how it's done". A very rare and exciting book by the worlds greatest magician - Escape artist Harry Houdini Houdiini spent his life in studying magic. while he traveled around the world as a performer he was also watching and collecting magic tricks and illusions from many different cultures. Originally entitled "Miracle Mongers and Their Methods" this book is a complete expose' of the modus operandi magicians

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Focusing on the draft resistance movement in Boston in 1967-68, this study argues that these acts of mass civil disobedience turned the tide in the antiwar movement by drawing the Johnson administration into a confrontation with activists who were largely young, middle-class, liberal, and from suburban backgrounds--the core of Johnson's constituency..
Price: $16.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

More than 50,000 draft-age American men and women migrated to Canada during the Vietnam War, the largest political exodus from the United States since the American Revolution. How are we to understand this migration three decades later? Was their action simply a marginal, highly individualized spin-off of the American antiwar movement, or did it have its own lasting collective meaning?

John Hagan, himself a member of the exodus, searched declassified government files, consulted previously unopened resistance organization archives and contemporary oral histories, and interviewed American war resisters settled in Toronto to learn how they made the momentous decision. Canadian immigration officials at first blocked the entry of some resisters; then, under pressure from Canadian church and civil liberties groups, they fully opened the border, providing these Americans with the legal opportunity to oppose the Vietnam draft and military mobilization while beginning new lives in Canada. It was a turning point for Canada as well, an assertion of sovereignty in its post-World War II relationship with the United States. Hagan describes the resisters' absorption through Toronto's emerging American ghetto in the late 1960s. For these Americans, the move was an intense and transformative experience. While some struggled for a comprehensive amnesty in the United States, others dedicated their lives to engagement with social and political issues in Canada. More than half of the draft and military resisters who fled to Canada thirty years ago remain there today. Most lead successful lives, have lost their sense of Americanness, and overwhelmingly identify themselves as Canadians.

(20010415).
Price: $16.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Memoir / Politics / Viet Nam War / Spirituality / Witchcraft:

The image of a young, clean-cut, athletic man burning his draft card while standing atop a sound truck outside the Armed Forces Induction Center in New York City on October 15, 1965 is perhaps the most dramatic and enduring portrait of early resistance to the Vietnam War.

Thirty five years later, David Miller's concise and provocative memoir revisits that historic moment and describes the personal/political motivation surrounding his act of defiance, including his subsequent trial and imprisonment.

In the ensuing thirty years, Mr. Miller helped raise four daughters, continued a life of political activism, and embarked upon a transformative journey to ecofeminist witchcraft.

Then, with inspiration and insight from the Mayan sacred ballgame, the author's life threads of ballplaying, non-violent political action, and witchcraft combined to reveal the underlying sexual meaning of our American sacrificial warrior ballgame culture. Shown to be spiritual cousins, the blood ball game of the Mayans and the blood sport games of football, basketball, and baseball both usurp the creation powers of women and nature and hide the symbols of these powers in a yearly cycle of cosmic ballgames controlled by men in a hierarchy of competitive aggression. David Miller's remedy for the patriarchal ballgame dance, under which we labour grievously, is a non-competitive, seasonal dance with the sun, moon, stars, earth, and one another.

Historic, timely, and prophetic, I Didn't Know God Made Honky Tonk Communists is an antidote to a worldwide obsession with the 'greatness' of sacrifice in war. Here, we are reminded of the vision and sacrifice of those, in and out of the military, who looked at the reality of the Vietnam War and said, "Hell, no.".
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