Trial on 12 Oct 2017 for blockade of Coulport on 11 July 2017 at Dumbarton JP Court.
Defence of Sam Donaldson
Summing Up
I am not “guilty of breaching the peace”, but rather of nonviolently working to build a more peaceful world.
As a Quaker, I am committed to working for peace. As an important Quaker text says, “We totally oppose wars and all preparation for war. We equally and actively oppose all that leads to violence among people and nations, and violence to other species and to our planet. Refusal to fight with weapons is not surrender. We are not passive when threatened by the greedy, the cruel, the tyrant, the unjust. We will struggle to remove the causes of impasse and confrontation by every means of nonviolent resistance possible. We urge all to face up to the mess humans are making of our world and to have the faith and diligence to cleanse it.”
What I did on the 11th July was to act calmly and peacefully, in line with my conscience and my religious convictions as a Quaker, to oppose illegal and immoral activity by the British Government, which is spending billions of pounds of taxes on building weapons of mass destruction, each one capable of indiscriminately murdering millions of innocents, children, adults and countless animals, capable of wiping out whole cities. These billions should instead be being spent on schools, on hospitals and on jobs in renewable energy. Just because the State is involved, this does not mean that these crimes against humanity are not crimes. Power and justice are not synonymous.
In Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from Birmingham Jail, he writes “There are two types of laws: there are just laws and there are unjust laws, and that an unjust law is no law at all.” Historically, our State has been in the wrong on key issues, on slavery, on women’s rights, on homosexuality, and today the UN’s Ban Treaty is showing the UK to again be in the wrong. The UK continues to commit billions of taxpayers money to be spent on these weapons of mass destruction, giving contracts to some of the world’s most corrupt corporations, such as BAE systems, who have a history of huge bribery scandals with Saudi Arabia, a brutal regime currently committing war crimes in Yemen with British made weaponry and training. By continuing down this path, the UK government is revealing a democratic deficit and showing its law to be no law at all.
On 10th July, I read Thoreau’s essay ‘On the Duty of Civil Disobedience’, in which he argues that under a government committed to flagrant injustices, the duty of a civilian is to oppose the injustice with civil disobedience.
Rather than endangering or disturbing public peace and order, my actions on 11th July were done to fulfil my duties as a peaceful citizen, to try and oppose grave injustices done by my government, that has revealed itself shamefully committed to a system preparing for the mass murder of innocent civilians on a daily basis.