[Shadow_Group] Why the US Ruling Class Hates the Draft

[shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca]

REALITY CHECK:

WHY THE U.S. RULING CLASS HATES THE DRAFT

 

From: SOLDIERS IN REVOLT: DAVID CORTRIGHT, Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1975 

 

In addition to encountering defiance of its orders, the draft system became the target of an increasing number of violent attacks—what amounted to a small-scale, guerrilla war. 

 

Draft Director Curtis Tarr’s first semiannual report opened with a description of “systematic” attacks in June of 1970 that nearly destroyed all the records necessary to maintain the draft in the states of Delaware and Rhode Island.

 

It’s no wonder that the Nixon administration moved promptly to eliminate the draft as a principla means of fulfilling its promise to pacify America.

 

The draft has never been popular in America, but Vietnam sparked the largest eruption of public outrage since the Civil War, nearly crippling the Selective Service System and creating widespread social upheaval.

 

One measure of this was a sharp jump in the number of conscientious-objector registrations, which reached a record total of over sixty-one thousand in fiscal year 1971; the last three years of conscription witnessed nearly 145,000 successful C.O. claims.  In fiscal year 1972, in fact, there were actually more conscientious objectors than draftees.

 

These figures do not include the far greater number who attempted but failed to qualify as objectors (approximately 125,000 applied during fiscal 1971).

 

In addition, many hundred thousands more swamped the system with draft-classification appeals to state or presidential review boards (over 168,000 such appeals in fiscal 1969).

 

And millions of others obtained phantom disabilities, flocked to exempt occupations and schools, or employed any one of a hundred other means of dodging the draft.  An entire generation seemed absorbed in just one overriding concern: to escape the clutches of Uncle Sam. 

 

The most visible and effective form of opposition to Selective Service was overt resistance.

 

The Chicago Area Draft Resisters (Cadre) has estimated that by early 1971 total induction refusals exceeded fifteen thousand and the number of people failing to report approached one hundred thousand.

 

By the latter years of the war, nearly every major city faced a huge backlog of induction-refusal court cases.  In New York, for example, the eastern-district federal court listed 2,162 complaints of Selective Service violations in fiscal year 1970.

 

The Oakland, California, area experienced particularly high levels of draft resistance: In a six-month period ending in March 1970, 50 per cent of those called failed to report, and 11 per cent of those that did show refused induction. 

 

In Chicago, the number of reported draft delinquencies tripled in three years, from 1,495 at the end of 1966 to 4,324 in December 1969.  During fiscal year 1969, Selective Service officials listed 31,8311 delinquency investigations.  For the entire Vietnam War era, 206,000 persons were reported delinquent to the Justice Department by Selective Service. 

 

In addition to encountering defiance of its orders, the draft system became the target of an increasing number of violent attacks—what amounted to a small-scale, guerrilla war. 

 

By September 1969, sixty-five of the nation’s four thousand local boards had been attacked or harassed, including eleven incidents of burning or mutilation of records.

 

Draft Director Curtis Tarr’s first semiannual report opened with a description of “systematic” attacks in June of 1970 that nearly destroyed all the records necessary to maintain the draft in the states of Delaware and Rhode island.

 

In the same report, Tarr went on to lament “a long list of attacks against Selective Service operations,” including bullet holes in the Marysville, California, office and assaults so frequent in Berkeley that the windows of the local board had to be replaced with plywood.

 

A later report stated that “a survey of disruptions at local boards showed almost 300 incidents from January through September, 1970.” 

 

Selective Service headquarters in 1972 furnished the House Internal Security Committee a copy of its “events log” covering the period January 1971 through March 17, 1972.

 

Occupying twenty pages of Congressional testimony, the remarkable document lists 196 acts of disruption directed against the draft during those months.  

 

It’s no wonder that the Nixon administration moved promptly to eliminate the draft as a principal means of fulfilling its promise to pacify America. 

 

[This doesn’t mean they’ll never use it again.  It explains why Rumsfeld and the overwhelming majority of those in the Bush regime oppose it.  They also know that the money to pay for new troops has to come out of the high-teach weapons budget, which feeds the war-profiteers building all those goodies.  They also know that even if the draft started tomorrow, it would take several years to put the armed forces support structure in place to handle a massive increase in troop levels.  Iraq won’t wait.  Kerry and his stooges tried to whip up the issue to get “the youth vote” instead of condemning the war, which is hardly a surprise, given the Democratic Party’s eternal and unchanging love of and commitment to the Empire.]

from GI Special www.militaryproject.org<http://www.militaryproject.org/>   
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