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Fuck The Draft - Voice your opposition


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#91 Lazarus Long

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Posted 09 January 2004 - 03:04 AM

Science and the useful Arts is an entire topic onto itself and resides at the core of the debate over secularism and the state, as well as public funding of education, Patent Law, Copyright, and even health care & reform.

My attitude about the Neo Cons is tantamount to the words of Jackson to Marshall on the issue of the Cherokee treaties.

These gentlemen have staked out a position and now they should seek to enforce it. But in this case understand it is not a backwater third world country's Supreme Court that is standing contrary to the claimed power of the Executive it is the whole world watching and sitting in judgment.

We are about to set a Shakespearian stage on issues of War, Peace, Law, and Power. We can only lose if we destroy ourselves in the process of our own defense. We face no enemy more threatening to the world at large than our own hubris. No one seeks to arm themselves to the magnitude of the Cold War unless we cannot appear to be answerable to the Rule of Law as practiced and respected globally and not merely by a few specific nations.

So far we have been lying to the court and presenting trumped up evidence, we have enacted a strategy of limited potential and result. The fact that the results as proposed were not the ones that justify this act in a legal manner prior or after is of serious concern. If this nation will behave in a rogue manner (and that is the definition of the action we have taken were it by any other nation) can it be trusted with the extent of power being requested?

Additionally the issue of Transnational Private Security forces intermingled and functioning as "Private Self Interested Militias" providing the supply chain as opposed to a Popular Militia composed of the citizens may in fact be illegal under the Constitution as it is written.

We do not have an illustrious history of respecting foreign sovereignty and the current situation has started poorly and many nations involved have long memories and are not as ignorant of our history as most of our own citizens. The same players are at it again, as the Neo Cons today might as well be the founders of the modern Democratic Party (ironically as the 'Jacksonians' were), and today the Neo Liberals opposing them are like the 'Whigs:' The reincarnation of the National Republicans who were opposed to them in that infamous telling moment of American history.

Edited by Lazarus Long, 09 January 2004 - 10:50 AM.


#92 Lazarus Long

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Posted 09 January 2004 - 04:29 AM

Added as an after thought

All of your dialogue with me regarding group competition, the root causes of war and beginning a process of deescalating violent interaction...does this have nothing to do with the matter at hand? Isn't this the very grounds that draft dodgers during the Vietnam War used to justify their actions?


Not particularly and no; they weren't any form of justification for the arguments that I used or was particularly impressed by at the time. The very issue of how an action is conscionable and "Justified" is laid out by the Constitution as I establish above. The argument the draft dodgers were proposing then was the war had been justified on illegal grounds in the form of fabricated evidence, relating to issues like the Gulf of Tonkien Resolution and our assumption of security responsibility after the colonial power and our ally was finding it too difficult to maintain order.
(sound at all familiar?)

This one constituted an illegal treaty obligation and as the war was predicated on corrupt deception to the American People they felt the argument of escape was legitimate. I did not desire to or determine to take that step. I argued for Official Conscientious Objector status and was prepared to serve unarmed.

Ironic huh, my claim was denied and then they were denied the right to induct me. [lol]

#93 randolfe

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Posted 09 January 2004 - 05:25 AM

Gosh Lazarus (or should I just call you "Laz"?), you sure know how to still up a hornets' nest. Then, you get all carried away and write endless postings.

I'm glad you mentioned the idea of "public servie" which means someone opposed to war in general or to the war in Iraq in particular, could opt to work for a couple years in a hospital or something to pay his/her "public obligation".

I don't see why you would exclude women from public service. Making them liable for the draft would just increase their political opposition to war.

Also, your fears about a military class raise interesting questions. However, it seems to me the "military" as a full time pursuit is now chosen by those with limited skills and education as one of their only means of advancement. I really doubt they would be inclined to conspire in taking over the country. The Republicans and their monied backers have already done that.

I chose to exercise my homosexual "4-F" option in the early 1960s. During the Vietnam War, I wrote two letters for heterosexual friends/employees to the U.S. Army saying that "although they were bisexual" (a lie, they were heterosexual) that they "would make fine soldiers". I concluded by urging the Army to rescind those regulations, quoted by section number and verse, which forbade homosexuals from serving in the Army. Both received 4-F deferments.

And just for the record, I "made history" by demonstrating with the League for Sexual Freedom at the U.S. Army Induction Center on Centre Street in NYC in 1964 demanding they change their exclusionary policies or at least not give gays discovered in service "dishonorable discharges" which would follow them for life.

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#94 Lazarus Long

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Posted 09 January 2004 - 06:01 AM

Laz is just fine Randolf

I don't see why you would exclude women from public service. Making them liable for the draft would just increase their political opposition to war.


Actually what I said in its unedited text from above was

BTW, to be clear I do not think gender should provide an exemption from the draft, and educational and parental status should at best be a deferment till a later date.


And since you made the error the first time I will be clearer 'gender' is not an exemption even in the case of transgendered and gender elective individuals and the service should accommodate to their needs.

I have more recently (just prior to the first Gulf War served in the military. The entire strategy of the Neo Cons who I first became familiar with when serving under Weinberger as Secretary of Defense is directed at eliminating the idea of social leveling that has been the bulwark of the Military since the 1950's.

Also, your fears about a military class raise interesting questions. However, it seems to me the "military" as a full time pursuit is now chosen by those with limited skills and education as one of their only means of advancement. I really doubt they would be inclined to conspire in taking over the country. The Republicans and their monied backers have already done that.


I don't mean above with respect to racial desegregation of the rank and file; in fact generally speaking the military has lead society (albeit reluctantly often enough) but with respect to the idea of economic advancement for lower economic strata inductees. They need not continue to apply under the growing guidelines for the current military. That is the type of stereotype the Rumsfield, Wolfie, and the Neo-Con Gang are working diligently to end and scoff at with good reason.

That is how they intend to redistribute spending within the defense budget. No more service provided by lower class uneducated citizens they can hire caterers to their affairs. This is the area I suspect may be unconstitutional and require for security reasons alone that the ranks are filled by citizens drawn from the draft.

#95 DJS

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Posted 09 January 2004 - 09:43 AM

What nonchalance Don, I am surprised, do you have the faith of a devout Christian as to believe the Lion of the Military is about to lay with the Lamb of Citizenry.?


Eekk! Imminst, where the weak are killed and eaten. [lol] I meant "the state" in the all encompassing sense of the word. Hence, I was refering to enemies foreign, rather than domestic. I am not disputing your claim, nor am I oblivious to the diametric opposition that the military and civil society pose to one another in terms of power relationships.

The argument the draft dodgers were proposing then was the war had been justified on illegal grounds in the form of fabricated evidence, relating to issues like the Gulf of Tonkien Resolution



They were probably correct based on subsequent findings showing that the "confirmed" radar evidence provided by the LBJ administration was nothing more than the signatures of whales swimming in the night...

And point taken, by the way. I guess I was committing an error by lumping the much smaller intellectual movement of pacifism with the much larger movement of the 60s/70s anti-war protest. Further, supporting a pacifist line does not justify the action of dodging a draft, although it does justify one invoking a conscientious objector status. However I am not one to judge anyone's actions on such a matter. Vietnam was obviously a difficult period for America, especially it's youth. If I were around at that time I am not sure what I would have done. Even the most patriotic couldn't have been too gungho about going over, in lieu of the ample supply of horror stories trickling back state side.

Goshdarnit, I find the ideas being expressed here to be more than a little interesting, and the time spent conducting a more thorough analysis of the information presented would be worth it's weight, but the real world is once again dragging me away from my love affair with ideas. [ang] Till tomorrow...

#96 imminstmorals

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Posted 11 January 2004 - 04:33 AM

it is inevitable

eagle wearing american flags

#97 randolfe

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Posted 11 January 2004 - 10:14 PM

This endless debate about an individual's responsibility to turn control of self over to the military and state to be used for their purposes is really frightening.

I don't want to get into Constitutional debates and other long-winded affairs. However, we should realize that during the Civil War many on both sides "hired" someone to fight in their place. This seems to me to be a more viable system insofar as their are thousands of "individual" paymasters which makes a conpsiracy among the military far less like than the single-payer system we have today.

I just watched Richard Perle and David Frum promoting their book: "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror". Perle seems to believe technology will solve all problems. He says that we need to have perfectly targeted weapons that can destroy any target within 60 seconds.

These war mongering NeoCons are really frightening. However, their argument that you can't have dialogue with The Taliban and the mullahs in Iran or Syria seems convincing. But when they want to blockcade North Korea and then resort to war if necessary to grab nuclear weapons, you want to find some remote tropical paradise to escape to until after the world finishes destroying itself.

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#98 Lazarus Long

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Posted 12 January 2004 - 05:38 PM

Randolfe the Neo Cons have it dead wrong.

The point is they plan on surviving the chaos they will cause.

Proxy armies are by definition unconstitutional and we should be very careful about this phase as it is a bait and switch that will precipitate the fall of our Republic. The Draft is built into the Constitution as the very principle of the "Calling up of the Militia" the Second Amendment implies that the principle weaponry of the state belongs in the hands of the people and today that would imply WMD's.

If we must pull the teeth of the Second Amendment then we must compensate by strengthening the involvement of the common citizen in all branches of public service in order to ensure the responsible representation of civil interest in what is a dangerously powerful military class. It will be the deathnell of our democratic society if the professional military class is established, empowered with the types of weapons proposed, becomes a competing economic interest pushing social policy towards its specific goals for its advantage, and isolated socially.

It is a fallacy that the religious fundamentalists cannot be negotiated with. This very group of neo cons has been doing so to their advantage for decades. It is they that cannot any longer negotiate because they have lost all credibility and now resort to violence to re-establish it.

The liberals have little credibility with fundamentalists because by their nature, fundamentalists are not moral relativists but the arguments of the Neo-Cons are spun to their advantage and they are attempting to lock public opinion into seeing it "only their way".




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