We know that “war will stop at nothing” and we are clear that as pacifists we can have nothing to do with it. But I do not think that it is possible to distinguish between war and conscription, to say that the former is and the latter is not an instrument or mark of the Beast. Disobedience Becomes Imperative Non-conformity, Holy Disobedience, becomes a virtue and indeed a necessary and indispensable measure of spiritual self-preservation, in a day when the impulse to conform, to acquiesce, to go along, is the instrument which is used to subject men to totalitarian rule and involve them in permanent war. To create the impression at least of outward unanimity, the impression that there is no “real” opposition, is something for which all dictators and military leaders strive assiduously. The more it seems that there is no opposition, the less worthwhile it seems to an ever larger number of people to cherish even the thought of opposition. Surely, in such a situation it is important not to place the pinch of incense before Caesar’s image, not to make the gesture of conformity which is involved, let us say, in registering under a military conscription law. When the object is so plainly to create a situation where the individual no longer has a choice except total conformity or else the concentration camp or death; when reliable people tell us seriously that experiments are being conducted with drugs which will paralyze the wills of opponents within a nation or in an enemy country, it is surely neither right nor wise to wait until the “system” has driven us into a corner where we cannot retain a vestige of self-respect unless we say No. It does not seem wise or right to wait until this evil catches up with us, but rather to go out to meet it—to _resist_—before it has gone any further. As Bernanos reminds us, “things are moving fast, dear reader, they are moving very fast.” He recalls that he “lived at a time when passport formalities seemed to have vanished forever.” A man could “travel around the world with nothing in his wallet but his visiting card.” He recalls that “twenty years ago, Frenchmen of the middle class refused to have their fingerprints taken; fingerprints were the concern of convicts.” But the word “criminal” has “swollen to such prodigious proportions that it now includes every citizen who dislikes the Regime, the System, the Party, or the man who represents them.... The moment, perhaps, is not far off when it will seem natural for us to leave the front-door key in the lock at night so that the police may enter at any hour of the day or night, _as it is to open our pocket-books to every official demand_. And when the State decides that it would be a practical measure ... to put some outward sign on us, why should we hesitate to have ourselves branded on the cheek or on the buttock, with a hot iron, like cattle? The purges of ‘wrong-thinkers,’ so dear to the totalitarian regimes, would thus become infinitely easier.”