Between 1966 and 1967 the issue about conscientious objection strikingly surfaced worldwide to becoming urgent in the following two years, together with student dissent, several demonstrations were organized to protest against the Vietnam war.
That conflict represented for the young people a new way for new a recognition and elaborating a large collective rethinking, interweaving the ferments coming from distant cultural “places”: from post-Vatican Council Catholicism, aspiring to Pacem in terris (1963), to American counterculture.
I will try to explain the reasons that urged in the United States, in Great Britain, in France, in Italy, Catholics, Communists, Socialists, workers, the capelloni and intellectual young people of the 1960s not to wear the uniform of the army and to refuse war as a conflict resolution device. In particular, I will concentrate on the Italian context examining the practices and the language used by the members of the conscientious objection movement.