Conscientious objection and antimilitarism. Lexicon, forms, context, languages, conflicts

Abstract

The essay investigates how vocabulary and forms of conscientious objection change since the second half of the 1960s, moving from a predominantly intimate and individual dimension to an anti-militarist and collective one. In the first part it examines the roots: the semantic legacy of anarchism, the impact of Don Milani’s letters to chaplains and judges and the new proposals of the songwriting world. In the second part the diffusion of antimilitarist objection is instead analyzed: the languages of individual and collective declarations of objection, the redefinition in an antimili-tarist key of Capitini’s peace marches, the role of objectors’ diaries in denouncing the conditions of prisons and military justice, the geographical spread of nonviolent antimilitarism and its relations with that present the army, the role of Radicals’ Party.