Draft Registration Will Be Either Ended or Imposed on Women
A choice must now be made. It is officially unconstitutional to discriminate against 18-year-old women by not forcing them to sign up to be forced against their will to kill and die for Venezuela’s oil or some other noble cause.
Yes, the fine U.S. judiciary has declared for-men-only Selective Service registration to be verboten.
That’s not to say there isn’t debate on the matter. One side holds that women should be treasured as the delicate witless pieces of property they are because the Bible says so, and therefore they must be kept out of war entirely. The other side says that good modern liberal progressive feminists should demand the right of every woman to be forced, on pain of prison or even death, to help murder a million Iraqis for the cause of creating ISIS or some similar high purpose. Enlightened women demand not only equal pay, but equal moral injury, PTSD, brain injury, suicide risk, lost limbs, violent tendencies, and the chance to board airplanes first while everybody thanks them for their “service.”
To comply with the Constitution, the U.S. government now must either . . .
1. Abide by the U.N. Charter and the Kellogg
Briand Pact and stop launching wars.
2.
3. Undo
corporate-personhood and dollar-speech, eliminating the
influence of war profits and stop launching
wars.
4.
5. Impeach and remove fascist warmongers and
stop launching wars.
6.
or . . .
Wait a minute, sorry, I saw the word “Constitution” and lost touch with normalized illegality. What I meant to say was: To comply with the Constitution, the U.S. government now must either . . .
1. Impose draft registration on men and women alike,
or
2.
3. Abolish draft registration.
4.
Which
brings us to an even crazier debate, that between the huge
percentage of peace activists who favor not only draft
registration but a draft, and those of us who want to see
the draft abolished and war along with it. Those favoring a
draft as a means to peace may tend to line up with those
favoring the feminist right to be forced to kill and die.
You’ll have to ask them how comfortable they are in that
company. Those of us favoring the abolition of draft
registration, of course, find ourselves lined up beside
misogynistic warmongers.
How do I like that company? Frankly, I couldn’t care less. It’s not the point. I agree, on the topic of ending wars, with libertarians who want to end wars for the same reasons they want to end schools and parks and environmental protections. I agree on withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan with certain carefully selected and not acted upon statements made by the current occupant of the White House. “You can’t help people being right for the wrong reasons,” said Arthur Koestler. “This fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity. It is an expression of a lack of self confidence.”
But how can I be so confident that ending Selective Service is the right thing to do?
The military draft has not been used in the United States since 1973. Neither has the War Powers Resolution, but that could very well change this month. The draft machinery has remained in place, costing the federal government about $25 million a year. Males over 18 have been required to register for the draft since 1940 (except between 1975 and 1980) and still are today, with no option to register as conscientious objectors or to choose peaceful productive public service. The only reason for keeping Selective Service in place is because the draft might be started up again. While most states’ governments claim that making voter registration automatic would be too much trouble, they have made draft registration automatic for men. This suggests which registration is seen as a priority.
We’re all familiar with the argument behind peace activists’ demand for the draft, the argument that Congressman Charles Rangel made when proposing to start up a draft some years back. U.S. wars, while killing almost exclusively innocent foreigners, also kill and injure and traumatize thousands of U.S. troops drawn disproportionately from among those lacking viable educational and career alternatives. A fair draft, rather than a poverty draft, would send — if not modern-day Donald Trumps, Dick Cheneys, George W. Bushes, or Bill Clintons — at least some offspring of relatively powerful people to war. And that would create opposition, and that opposition would end the war. That’s the argument in a nutshell. Let me offer 10 reasons why I think this is sincere but misguided.
1. History doesn’t bear it out. The drafts in the U.S. civil war (both sides), the two world wars, and the war on Korea did not end those wars, despite being much larger and in some cases fairer than the draft during the American war on Vietnam. Those drafts were despised and protested, but they took lives; they did not save lives. The very idea of a draft was widely considered an outrageous assault on basic rights and liberties even before any of these drafts. In fact, a draft proposal was successfully argued down in Congress by denouncing it as unconstitutional, despite the fact that the guy who had actually written most of the Constitution was also the president who was proposing to create the draft. Said Congressman Daniel Webster on the House floor at the time (1814): “The administration asserts the right to fill the ranks of the regular army by compulsion…Is this, sir, consistent with the character of a free government? Is this civil liberty? Is this the real character of our Constitution? No, sir, indeed it is not…Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war, in which the folly or the wickedness of government may engage it? Under what concealment has this power lain hidden, which now for the first time comes forth, with a tremendous and baleful aspect, to trample down and destroy the dearest rights of personal liberty?” When the draft came to be accepted as an emergency wartime measure during the civil and first world wars, it never would have been tolerated during peacetime. (And it’s still not anywhere to be found in the Constitution.) Only since 1940 (and under a new law in ’48), when FDR was still working on manipulating the United States into World War II, and during the subsequent 75 years of permanent wartime has “selective service” registration gone on uninterrupted for decades. The draft machine is part of a culture of war that makes kindergarteners pledge allegiance to a flag and 18-year-old males sign up to express their willingness to go off and kill people as part of some unspecified future government project. The government already knows your Social Security number, sex, and age. The purpose of draft registration is in great part war normalization.
2. People bled for this.
When voting rights are threatened, when elections are
corrupted, and even when we are admonished to hold our noses
and vote for one or another of the god-awful candidates
regularly placed before us, what are we reminded of? People
bled for this. People risked their lives and lost their
lives. People faced fire hoses and dogs. People went to
jail. That’s right. And that’s why we should continue
the struggle for fair and open and verifiable elections. But
what do you think people did for the right not to be drafted
into war? They risked their lives and lost their lives. They
were hung up by their wrists. They were starved and beaten
and poisoned. Eugene Debs, hero of Senator Bernie Sanders,
went to prison for speaking against the draft. What would
Debs make of the idea of peace activists supporting a draft
in order to stir up more peace activism? I doubt he’d be
able to speak through his tears.
3. Millions dead
is a cure worse than the disease. I am very well
convinced that the peace movement shortened and ended the
war on Vietnam, not to mention removing a president from
office, helping to pass other progressive legislation,
educating the public, communicating to the world that there
was decency hiding in the United States, and — oh, by the
way — ending the draft. And I have zero doubt that
the draft had helped to build the peace movement. But the
draft did not contribute to ending the war before that war
had done far more damage than has any war since. We can
cheer for the draft ending the war, but four million
Vietnamese lay dead, along with Laotians, Cambodians, and
over 50,000 U.S. troops. And as the war ended, the dying
continued. Many more U.S. troops came home and killed
themselves than had died in the war. Children are still born
deformed by Agent Orange and other poisons used. Children
are still ripped apart by explosives left behind. If you add
up numerous wars in numerous nations, the United States has
inflicted death and suffering on the Middle East to equal or
surpass that in Vietnam, but none of the wars has used
anything like as many U.S. troops as were used in Vietnam.
If the U.S. government had wanted a draft and believed it
could get away with starting one, it would have. If
anything, the lack of a draft has restrained the killing.
The U.S. military would add a draft to its existing
billion-dollar recruitment efforts, not replace one with the
other. And the far greater concentration of wealth and power
now than in 1973 pretty well assures that the children of
the super-elite would not be
conscripted.
4. Don’t underestimate support for
a draft. The United States has a much greater
population than do most countries of people who say they are
ready to support wars and even of people who say they would be willing to fight a
war. Forty-four percent of U.S. Americans now tell Gallup
polling that they “would” fight in a war. Why aren’t
they now fighting in one? That’s an excellent question,
but one answer could be: Because there’s no draft. What if
millions of young men in this country, having grown up in a
culture absolutely saturated in militarism, are told it’s
their duty to join a war? You saw how many joined without a
draft between September 12, 2001, and 2003. Is combining
those misguided motivations with a direct order from the
“commander in chief” (whom many civilians already refer
to in those terms) really what we want to experiment with?
To protect the world from war?!
5. The
supposedly non-existent peace movement is quite
real. Yes, of course, all movements were bigger in
the 1960s and they did a great deal of good, and I’d
willingly die to bring back that level of positive
engagement. But the notion that there has been no peace
movement without the draft is false. The strongest peace
movement the United States has seen was probably that of the
1920s and 1930s. The peace movements since 1973 have
restrained the nukes, resisted the wars, and moved many in
the United States further along the path toward supporting
war abolition. Public pressure blocked
the United Nations from supporting recent wars, including
the 2003 attack on Iraq, and made supporting that war such a
badge of shame that it has kept Hillary Clinton out of the
White House at least once so far. It also resulted in
concern in 2013 among members of Congress that if they
backed the bombing of Syria they’d been seen as having
backed “another Iraq.” Public pressure was critical in
upholding a nuclear agreement with Iran last year. There are
many ways to build the movement. You can elect a Republican
president and easily multiply the ranks of the peace
movement 100-fold the next day. But should you? You can play
on people’s bigotry and depict opposition to a particular
war or weapons system as nationalistic and macho, part of
preparation for other better wars. But should you? You can
draft millions of young men off to war and probably see some
new resisters materialize. But should you? Have we really
given making the honest case for ending war on moral,
economic, humanitarian, environmental, and civil liberties
grounds a fair try?
6. Doesn’t Joe
Biden’s son count? I too would love to see a bill
passed requiring that congress members and presidents deploy
to the front lines of any war they support. But in a society
gone mad enough for war, even steps in that direction
wouldn’t end the war making. It appears the U.S. military
killed the Vice President’s son
through reckless disregard for its own cannon fodder. Will
the Vice President even mention it, much less make a move to
end the endless warmaking? Don’t hold your breath. U.S.
Presidents and Senators used to be proud to send their
offspring off to die. If Wall Street can out-do the gilded
age, so can the servants of the military industrial
complex.
7. We build a movement to end war by
building a movement to end war. The surest way we
have of reducing and then ending militarism, and the racism
and materialism with which it is interwoven, is to work for
the end of war. By seeking to make wars bloody enough for
the aggressor that he stops aggressing, we would essentially
be moving in the same direction as we already have by
turning public opinion against wars in which U.S. troops
die. I understand that there might be more concern over
wealthier troops and greater numbers of troops. But if you
can open people’s eyes to the lives of gays and lesbians
and transgendered people, if you can open people’s hearts
to the injustices facing African Americans murdered by
police, if you can bring people to care about the other
species dying off from human pollution, surely you can also
bring them even further along than they’ve already come in
caring about the lives of U.S. troops not in their families
— and perhaps even about the lives of the non-Americans
who make up the vast majority of those killed by U.S.
warmaking. One result of the progress already made toward
caring about U.S. deaths has been greater use of robotic
drones. We need to be building opposition to war because it
is the mass murder of beautiful human beings who are not in
the United States and could never be drafted by the United
States. A war in which no Americans die is just as much a
horror as one in which they do. That understanding will end
war.
8. The right movement advances us in the
right direction. Pushing to end the draft will
expose those who favor it and increase opposition to their
war mongering. It will involve young people, including young
men who do not want to register for the draft and young
women who do not want to be required to start doing so. A
movement is headed in the right direction if even a
compromise is progress. A compromise with a movement
demanding a draft would be a small draft. That would almost
certainly not work any of the magic intended, but would
increase the killing. A compromise with a movement to end
the draft might be the ability to register for non-military
service or as a conscientious objector. That would be a step
forward. We might develop out of that new models of heroism
and sacrifice, new nonviolent sources of solidarity and
meaning, new members of a movement in favor of substituting
civilized alternatives for the whole institution of
war.
9. The war mongers want the draft
too. It’s not only a certain section of peace
activists who want the draft. So do the true war mongers.
The selective service tested its systems at the height of
the occupation of Iraq, preparing for a draft if needed.
Various powerful figures in D.C. have proposed that a draft
would be more fair, not because they think the fairness
would end the warmaking but because they think the draft
would be tolerated. Now, what happens if they decide they
really want it? Should it be left available to them?
Shouldn’t they at least have to recreate the selective
service first, and to do so up against the concerted
opposition of a public facing an imminent draft? Imagine if
the United States joins the civilized world in making
college free. Recruitment will be devastated. The poverty
draft will suffer a major blow. The actual draft will look
very desirable to the Pentagon. They may try more robots,
more hiring of mercenaries, and more promises of citizenship
to immigrants. We need to be focused on cutting off those
angles, as well as on in fact making college
free.
10. Take away the poverty draft
too. The unfairness of the poverty draft is not
grounds for a larger unfairness. It needs to be ended too.
It needs to be ended by opening up opportunities to
everyone, including free quality education, job prospects,
life prospects. Isn’t the proper solution to troops being
stop-lossed not adding more troops but waging less war? When
we end the poverty draft and the actual draft, when
we actually deny the military the troops it needs to wage
war, and when we create a culture that views murder as wrong
even when engaged in on a large scale and even when all the
deaths are foreign, then we’ll actually get rid of war,
not just acquire the ability to stop each war 4 million
deaths into it.
There’s also the danger of the path begun with expansion of draft registration to women leading next to compulsory short-term “national service” for all. This might even be done with military and non-military options, though one can imagine what the struggle would look like to try to give the non-military servitude — excuse me, service — the same compensation and benefits as the military.
I recommend that we actually find common ground to what little extent it exists with those who say that we should treasure women so much that we would never send them off to kill or die. Then we should work to expand that admirable outlook to include men too. Can’t we treasure men that much?
We should help find young women and men career prospects outside the machinery of death. Help create the universal right to free college. Repair the unfairness of the poverty draft and the stop-lossing of troops by giving young people alternatives and ending the wars. When we end the poverty draft and the actual draft, when we actually deny the military the troops it needs to wage war, and when we create a culture that views murder as wrong even when engaged in on a large scale and even when all the deaths are foreign, and even when women are equally involved in the killing, then we’ll actually get rid of war, not just acquire the ability to stop each war four million deaths into it.
We need a movement with women and men from around the world to create a global treaty banning all military conscription for all people.
We need a movement to abolish sexism, racism, environmental destruction, mass incarceration, poverty, illiteracy, and war.
--
David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio.He is a 2015, 2016, 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee.
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