Generation after generation religious values have summoned men
to undertake the works of mercy and peace. In times of crisis
these values have further required men to cry out in protest
against institutions and systems destructive of man and his
immense potential.
We declare today that we are one with that history of mercy
and protest. In destroying with napalm part of our nation's
bureaucratic machinery of conscription we declare that the
service of life no longer provides any options other than
positive, concrete action against what can only be called the
American way of death: a way of death which gives property
a greater value than life, a way of death sustained not by
invitation and hope but by coercion and fear.
We confess we were not easily awkened to the need for such
action as we carry out today. In order for communities of
resistance to come into being, millions had to die at America's
hands, while in the process millions of America's sons were
torn from familiy, friends, health, sanity and often life
itself. Victim and executioner have been trapped in the same
dragnet of death.

roots of the Vietnamese struggle

We have had to trace the roots of the Vietnamese struggle and
suffering and admit that all too many of those roots converge
in the soil of American values and priorities.
And we have had to adjust to the discovery that in that same
soil have been engendered many of the other tragedies already
underway. At home and abroad, opponents of America's economic,
political and military commitments share with the innocent
death by overt violence and the gunless violence of the status
quo: death by starvation and malnutrition, death from despair,
death from overwork and exhaustion and disease. America, in the
meantime, celebrates its "way of life": the canonization of
competition and self interest, a high standard of living which
rests on the backs of the poor. The values of brotherhood, joy
liberation and love become less and less comprehensible to out
society. The world's wealthiest, most heavily-armed people,
inheritors of a nation born in genocide against the Indians
and built in great measure upon the toil of slaves, suffocate
beneath myths of freedom and popular political control. Leaders
of the religious establishment - preoccupied with mortgage payments,
film-ratings, pills - automatically conscript the Creator of
life into the ranks of America's high command, leaving others
to apply the prophetic message they ritually recite. Vietnamese
burn, Biafrans starve, tanks dominate the streets of Prague: at
home Americans buy diet colas and flesh (that is, caucasian)
colored bandaids, see dissenters clubbed to the streets, counsel
the poor to patience, cry out for law and order...
The tragedy worsens. While the number of American casualties
in Vietnam has doubled during the past year, and the number of
bombing raids nearly tripled since the President's "de-escalation"
announcement of March 31, the very fact of US discussions with
the North Vietnamese has convinced many previously dissident
Americans tht their government now desires a peaceful settlement.
The presence of American soldiers in anti-revolutionary struggles
elsewhere in the world goes unobserved.
For a growing number of us, the problem is no longer that of
grasping what is happening. We know it by heart. Ours is rather
a problem of courage. We wish to offer our lives and future to
blockade, absorb and transform the violence and madness which
our society has come to personify.

a movement of resistance to slavery

We who burn these records of our society's war machine
are participants in a movement of resistance to slavery,
a struggle that remains as unresolved in America as in
most of the world. Man remains an object to be rewarded
insofar as he is obedient and useful, to be punished
when he dares declare his liberation.
Our action concentrates on the Selective Service System
because its relation to murder is immediate. Men are
drafted - or "volunteer" for fear of being drafted - as
killers for the state. Their victims litter the planet.
In Vietnam alone, where nearly 30,000 Americans have
died, no one can count the Vietnamese dead, crippled,
the mentally maimed.
Today we destroy Selective Service System files because
men need to be reminded that property is not sacred.
Property belongs to the human scene only if man does.
If anything tangible is sacred, it is the gift of life
and flesh, flesh which is daily burned, made homeless,
butchered - without tears or clamour from most Americans -
in Vietnam Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Peru, Guatemala,
Bolivia, Columbia, Nigeria, South Africa, Harlem, Delano,
Watts, and wherever the poor live and die, forgotten
people, the anonymous majority. So property is repeatedly
made enemy of life: gas ovens in Germany, concentration
camps in Russia, occupation tanks in Czechoslovakia,
pieces of paper in draft offices, slum holdings, factories
of death machines, germs and nerve gas. Indeed our nation
has seen, with such isolated exceptions as the Boston Tea
Party, devotion to property take ever greater precedence
over devotion to life. So we today, in the face of such
a history, proclaim that property has sanction only insofar
as it serves man's need and the common good.

America's marriage to coercion

We strike at the SSS because the draft, and the vocational
channelling connected with it are the clearest examples at
hand of America's marriage to coercive political methods,
exercised within as without its borders. In destroying
these links in the military chain of command, we forge
anew the good sense of the Second Vatican Council: "Man's
dignity demands that he act according to a free conscience
that is personally motivated from within, not under mere
external pressure or blind internal impulse." (Constitution
of the Church in the Modern World).
We use napalm because it has come to symbolize the American
way of death: a merciless substance insensitive to life and
the sound of the human heart, blind to human pain, ignorant
of guilt and innocence. Indeed Napalm is the inevitable
fruit of our national un-conscience, the sign of our numbness
to life.
Finally, we use napalm and strike at the draft as a point
of continuity in the nonviolent struggle recently carried
forward in Maryland. There last November four resisters,
using their own blood, stained the Baltimore draft records
and again, last May, a community of nine burned the 1-A files
in Catonsville. At that time they declared, as we declare
today, "Some property has not right to exist."
We have no illusions regarding the consequences of our action.
To make visible another community of resistance and to better
explain our action, we have chosen to act publicly and to
accept the consequences. But we pay the price, if not gladly,
at least with a profound hope. Just as our own hearts have
spoken to us, just as we -- not long ago strangers to one
another -- have been welded into community and delivered
into resistance, so do we see the same spirit of hope and
courage, the same freedom pouring into others: joy surprisingly
is made possible only in the laying aside of plans for a
comfortable, private future.
Our action is not an end in itself. We invite those who
are ready to lay aside fear and economic addictions in order
to join in the struggle: to confront injustice in words and
deeds, to build a community worthy of men made in the image
and likeness of God... a society in which it is easier for
men to be human.

DON COTTON, MICHAEL CULLEN, FR. ROBERT CUNNANE, JAMES FOREST,
JERRY GARDNER, BOB GRAF, REV. JON HIGGENBOTHAM, FR. JAMES
HARNEY, FR. ALFRED JANICKE, DOUG MARVY, FR. ANTHONY MULLANEY,
FRED J. OJILE, BRO. K. BASH O'LEARY, FR. LARRY ROSEBAUGH



On September 24, 1968, fourteen men, including five priests
and a protestant minister, removed approximately 10,000 1-A
draft files from Milwaukee's Selective Service boards and
burned them with home-made napalm in a near-by square dedi-
cated to America's war dead. They are now under indictment
by state and federal authorities and have already served
a month in the Milwaukee County Jail due to their inability
to raise bail; bail was originally set at $415,000.
Subsequently it was reduced to $95,000.