Or perhaps your actions meant that others didn’t die. And by “others,” I mean the Vietnamese whom you might have killed if you had chosen to go to war. They may be alive because of the decision that you made.
I think it’s unnecessarily nationalistic to focus on the American soldiers who died in the conflict. The overwhelming majority of deaths were on the other side, I believe, and many of those were people–men, women, children–who had no choice at all about whether to go to war. Americans had the choice to evade the draft or to submit to it, and I honor the ones who chose to evade it and thereby avoid killing people in an unjust war.
Monty, I stand by what I said.
(And yes, I agree that those who haul disease-infested corpses should be honored; I really meant that equivalence, and I equate them with soldiers under the best of circumstances, e.g., those fighting to free prisoners from death camps. You’ll note the lack of medals awarded to hospital orderlies.)
It is my understanding that getting C/O status was very difficult. So very few draftees could perform the service in that manner. So with out that legal option, what can or should a person do.
It is also my understanding that Carter did not campaign on this, if he did it certainly wasn’t a huge issue. That it was a bit of a surprise. He took the oath of office, walked in and signed the papers, then walked down Penn. Ave. with his wife.
As far as the people who did serve, even against their will, they were compensated by the government in the form of pay, and benefits. Of course, I’m sure they would rather have a leg then a benefit or their relatives would rather them around than a having a flag and 21 spent rifle casings but they got what the government thought was fair.
Now if Nixon can be pardoned, I think the draft dodgers can be pardoned as well.
I think the argument here is, if the government never had any business asking people to go to Vietnam in the first place, it has no business punishing people for not going. The clearest parrallel I can see here is a soldier refusing to follow an illegal order. If a commander orders a soldier to execute a bunch of POWs, and the soldier refuses, should he still be punished for not following orders? Of course, the draft wasn’t illegal, it was the law, so the analogy obviously isn’t perfect. But I don’t think that following the law is the be-all-and-end-all of civil responsibility. Some laws are unjust, and need to be defied, and the people who defy them do not deserve to be punished for defying them. If they hadn’t defied them, those laws might never have been overturned.
I acknowledge that breaking the law is wrong. And I don’t consider people who ran off to Canada in the same light as Rosa Parks. IMO, people who refused induction and willingly took the punishment (like Muhammad Ali), are more deserving of such a comparison.
Also, while I don’t want to turn this into a tu quoque, I think Ford’s pardoning of Nixon may have had an influence. Ford emphasized that he did it to heal the divisions caused by Watergate, and I agree that that was a much-needed thing. But my more cynical side wonders if he did it for more partisan reasons, and that same side wonders if Carter was thinking similarly when he gave a similar, blanket pardon to draft dodgers.
No. I think it’s immaterial whether they actually got drafted or not. The statement is the same.
I believe that the State has no right ever to conscript citizens into the military. Any refusal to comply with such a patently immoral action by the state is completely justified and honorable. So is the decision to serve. The decision to become a soldier belongs to the individual, not to the State.
While I agree that the amnesty was a good Idea and I applaud Carter for doing so. The military is a lot more than grunt soldiers do a dirty job so you can live in a country where you can post what you just did.
I was a navy electrician, definitely not a hero. But IMHO; it was honorable to choose to spend 4 years serving my country. Because the current war and Vietnam War were wrong in your opinion (and mine), do you apply the same criteria to the foot soldiers and all the rest of the military that fought in WWII?
Is it possible the military could serve a honorable job, especially volunteers or is a Navy snipe who has never fire a gun or injured another human, somehow doing a dishonorable thing.
I respect your posts in many other cases, but on this one I just don’t get it. You know history; you seem to understand how the world works. Could we have won the cold war without a strong military? What would the world be like if we did not go to war in WWII?
Are you aware that the Navy saves people at sea? My own ship acted as a hospital for a freighter that caught fire during a storm in the North Pacific. At risk to many crewmen, the sailors transported over the injured and dead in small open boats and fought the fire. Our Corpsman and Doctors helped all they could. I personally in a small way helped launch a rescue boat and then worked through the night getting our Old morgue back up and running. The Freezer units had not been operational for years.
I strongly object to you considering some poor kid that at age 18 that got a draft notice from the US government and chose to report rather than run up to Canada. You need to also think of the time. These were largely kids of the youth of WWII. It would have been dishonorable within the family to be a draft dodger.
If you were informed enough about Vietnam and chose to not fight, more power too you. But please don’t insult kids that did nothing worse than get drafted and tried to serve honestly. Very few participated in massacres or violated the Geneva Convention. So please don’t paint them with a broad brush.
I volunteered from 85-89 and I almost re-upped for Desert Storm, but they didn’t need ship’s electricians. If I were a CB or a corpsman I would have been back immediately and been proud to have done so.
I guess I need to thank you Daniel. I have been questioning if I am still republican. Most of my views are rather liberal. But I am still a flag waving; support the men and women in uniform even if I think the President is an incompetent jerk surrounded by evil cronies, kinda guy.
I think there was a political component to this, surely. But I don’t think this was a smart move on Carter’s part politically, because it really pissed a lot of Democrats off.
My grandparents were older working class Democrats of the WWII generation, and they weren’t happy about this at the time at all. Republicans also were very angry. The only people satisfied were liberals and younger voters, and they might have been happy with a system that imposed some requirements on draft evaders. Even if they weren’t, they probably would have accepted it.
I’ve got a lot of respect for LHoD, but his views on the military are in no way representative of most Democrats, or even most leftists. You can come over to our side and still have plenty of company in your flag-waving, troop-supporting endeavors.
So I don’t see how you can fail to draw a distinction between those who feld before they broke the law and those who broke the law and then fled to avoid arrest. Doesn’t your reply to me say that **John Mace ** was correct?
I admire such a principled stance. But what if no one volunteers to fight for a “righteous war”, like WWII? What if people believe in the cause, but are of the mind, “Fuck that, war sucks, let somebody else go.”
Mind you, I am not arguing for conscription over a volunteer army, just that if conscription is the case, I think we each have an obligation to serve, or apply for CO status. We must follow the law or be willing to suffer the consequences, which any principled practioner of civil disobedience would agree with.
Thank you for the invite, if the Dem’s could nationally provide a more moderate (How about a non-sleezy Clinton type) candidate, I would probably complete my change to Democrat. Kerry was just too old fashion liberal for me and also out of touch with the common man. I hated voting for him, but I hate Bush’s Administration far more.
I am voting for Jon Corzine for NJ Governor. He is a fairly honest, moderate Democrat. So my party registration doesn’t matter much except at primary time and I still hope to be part of a movement that takes the Republican Party all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt and disenfranchises the Religious Right.
Actually I voted Green Party.
I did not like Al Gore and as a Class of '84 Grad I have a lot of left over hatred for his wife and her petty little national way of trying to tell people how to live.
I think Bush would have been a good guy to have over for a beer and a game. I think a few hours with Gore would be painful and awkward.
Now in the last 5 years Gore has actually shown he is not a robot and I would be too busy trying to call Bush and idiot to enjoy the game and BBQ.
I still don’t trust Tippy, she would be the liberal version of Nancy Reagan.
The idea behind gracefully accepting jail time during civil disobedience isn’t about justice or responsiblity or anything like that. It’s to garner sympathy. The idea is that Joe Public will say “Look, they put all those poor guys in jail just for standing up for the rights of Black people- I don’t think thats right.” The idea is to fill the jails with people who have done something that the average person will come to realize isn’t all that wrong.
Since going to jail was exactly what most people think should happen to draft opposers, it isn’t an effective form of civil disobedience.
But, my Ancient Greek friend, there is a crucial distinction between Ms. Parks and those who went to Canada - Ms. Parks was arrested. Ms. Parks accepted the consequences of her principled decision to break an unjust law. If you attempt to avoid those consequences, you are not engaged in civil disobedience - you are simply engaged in law-breaking.
Okay, I think I’m being misunderstood in my analogy with the corpse-carrying orderlies. The point of the analogy isn’t to say that military folks are as contemptible as those orderlies; the point is to say that, at best (e.g., the concentration-camp liberators), they’re doing necessary work that is nasty and awful dangerous and horrifying, and should be both honored and pitied for doing that work. Neither the orderly nor the soldier should be glorified.
At worst, the army engages in unjust wars, and when they do, everybody who helps them do so is culpable. If I pay taxes that help buy guns, I’m culpable. If I build guns, I’m more culpable. If I load the guns, I’m more culpable; if I fire them, I’m more culpable; and if I give the order to fire them, I’m most culpable of all. Everyone who participates in an unjust war has blood on their hands; and everyone who refuses to participate has done an honorable thing.
Sua, I freely admit that evading the draft doesn’t fit into Gandhi’s model of civil disobedience. That’s okay with me: not all lawbreaking is either civil disobedience or unethical. If a law orders you to behave unethically, then your ethical obligation mostly ends at refusing to comply with the law. Allowing yourself to be punished by the state for this is icing on the cake: it may be a very effective tactic for changing the law, but that’s the only way in which it’s better than refusing to be punished.
The soldier who fights in a war and argues passionately that the war should not be fought is less ethical than the hippie who refuses to fight and just hides out; because the soldier who fights is killing people, and the hippie is not.
I recognize that I am out of the mainstream on this. I am not a complete pacifist, but I’m much closer to a complete pacifist than most Democrats.
