Peace Witness: A Look Forward

by Joseph Olejak
Old Chatham Meeting

The world is changing and so too must the peace witness. Many Quakers over our history have refused to fight and refused to have their money conscripted for war. But all of that may be changing.

MONEY: A time honored tradition among Quakers is to refuse to pay for war either by living below the line where they are taxed or just not paying some portion of federal income tax. Quite soon all of this may be moot as money becomes a purely electronic transaction and bills and coins disappear. CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) is on the way. In the CBDC scenario there will be very few ways to avoid the system. The autonomy over money we currently enjoy will be replaced by a digital wallet that someone else controls—namely, a central bank. That loss of control over one’s money and finances has already been used by the heavy hand of government. The Canadians used it to punish striking truckers by freezing their bank accounts. Even supporters of the Canadian truckers experienced economic pressure on their resources by the government-banking complex.

Gold and silver was the first currency because its value was stable and the holder of the currency had control. As we moved away from real money to Federal Reserve Notes and now CBDC manipulation of the money system is far easier. It can be inflated or deflated at will.

Looking forward, it seems to me that Quakers and young Quakers in particular are going to have to find new and innovative ways to exercise their peace witness. Finding ways to starve the military industrial complex that doesn’t involve donating your body or your money will get harder.

FIGHTING: One way war is changing that greatly affects Quaker peace witness is the Pentagon’s move to unmanned autonomous weapons. These are weapons that can independently search for and engage targets based on programmed constraints and descriptions. What that means for Quakers is that refusing to go to war will shortly be irrelevant. These weapons (such as aerial drones already in use) can be programmed to choose targets—and there may or may not be humans choosing who will die when the bombs are dropped. The ethical considerations of these weapons for Quakers is enormous and real. They violate every single tenet of what we believe.

During the war in Iraq and Afghanistan we were sold a bill of goods about so-called “smart” weapons; how they had pinpoint accuracy and only the bad guys were killed. But even with “pilots” in a room in Nevada getting a visual feed in real time, those “smart weapons” killed children, wedding parties, and members of the press corps. Now imagine no human being in the loop to parse whether a camel is carrying a wedding party or a mujaheddin fighter. Now further consider that private companies have the data that runs the drones and provides the intel. Ukraine and Musk’s Starlink satellite network come to mind. If war was profitable in the old system imagine how much more profitable it becomes under A.I.

Minds greater than my own have warned that A.I. making lethal decisions is terrifying. We don’t know if it can be contained once trained on killing humans. This is an existential threat to human life. The Terminator movies come to mind or the episode of Black Mirror called “Metalhead.”

War is changing and so too must the peace witness. Finding ways to pull out of financial systems that support killing will be harder and harder. Doing an internet search or posting on social media and giving away your data will fund the next war.

Convening a Quaker Think Tank on these issues would be very important. I’d be quite interested in connecting with other Quakers in this way; exploring methods of war tax resistance in the brave new world of A.I. Younger Quakers need to take up these questions as A.I. is going to get more insidious in our lives with every passing day.