Insubordinate movement in Spain

[1] Conscientious objectors, therefore, refused to join the Spanish Armed Forces, but were nevertheless prosecuted and tried by it, and in many cases ended up in military prisons.

[1] A few of them, however, considered that the longer duration of the PSS penalised objectors, amounted to forced labour, and deprived ordinary workers of their jobs; they demanded complete abolition of military service.

By doing so they committed a crime and were tried again, but the existence of a largely unfavourable public opinion to compulsory military service made the judicial proceedings, especially when the penalty included imprisonment, a considerable political cost for the government.

Anarchist groups also played an important role in the antimilitarist struggle, promoting most of them total disobedience tactics (such as the CNT, CGT and FIJL organisations).

[5] Regarding the strategy to follow in civil disobedience, there were also different viewpoints: Those who could not be "insumisos" (for example, men who had already completed military service or women) put up initiatives of "self-incrimination": based on the legal principle that whoever incites someone to commit an offence is also guilty, they signed statements accusing themselves of promoting insubordination.

Many people used self-incriminations to establish an active link with the insubordinate movement, among them prominent intellectuals, politicians, filmmakers, singers, actors and other personalities and celebrities.

[6] Attempts to do something similar in other countries, such as Germany and France, failed due to the lack of a social base and popular support.

The success of insubordination in Spain has been attributed to an antimilitarist sentiment supposedly rooted in the Spanish society and linked both to the resistance against conscription during the Carlist Wars and during the Rif War between 1909 and 1927, and even some have tried to establish a relationship of this movement to the wide diffusion of anarchism in Spain (a minor phenomenon elsewhere), specially in the first decades of the twentieth century.