In that small college campus community, I met many lifelong heroes and role models who helped sustain my thinking about peace, justice and democracy for decades to come. I learned about other heroes of draft resistance at college, too. (What a great education! In subsequent years, we would fight against US wars in Central America and to get human rights restored in other lands, like Guatemala. We would work to end Apartheid in South Africa--the state against which Nancy Landon-Kassebaum as US senator led the divestment movement in Congress.) What's more, I learned at college that there is already a national network in place to oppose not only another possible selective service in the US, but also the nuclear arms race and other Cold War-era nonsense.
Dear America,
We need to make the peace and justice movement mainstream and permanent, and we need senators, like Kassebaum, who will tell the world again: America stands for human rights, peace and justice everywhere--at home and abroad.
Kevin Stoda, a Kansan in Exile
A Concluding Note:
In my third article, I'll continue my discussion about the need for heroes and role models to promote resistance to war and the U.S. military industrial complex, and to related power structures in our world. I'll also continue the story of my personal journey, which includes much focus on the education of youth and the older public aimed at fighting off the dominant image of America, portrayed as mainstream by the major media, as a nation committed to permanent war. What we need now is a counter-insurgency against the dominant American mindset that war is inevitable.
References:
[1] Clemis, Martin G. (2009) Crafting non kinetic warfare: the academic military nexus in US counterinsurgency doctrine. Small Wars and Insurgencies, 20:1, 160-184.
[2] Ibid.
Read more on the topic in Roberto J. Gonzalez' (2010) MILITARIZING CULTURE: ESSAYS ON WARFARE STATE, U.S.A.: Left Coast Press.
[3] By the way, Ellsberg specifically referred to six of those heroes in his insightful debate on Democracy Now last month, entitled: "Was Snowden Justified?" See:
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/2/14/debate_was_snowden_justified_former_nsa
[4] The only US president raised in Kansas was D.D. Eisenhower, who had warned Americans of this very military industrial complex. It left states like Kansas without work when the country was not gung-ho for militarization, as it had been with WWII and in the early part of the Cold War.
[5] Infoplease provides a short history of Selective Service in the USA:
Conscription was established (1863) in the U.S. Civil War, but proved unpopular (see draft riots). The law authorized release from service to anyone who furnished a substitute and, at first, to those who paid $300. General conscription was reintroduced in World War I with the Selective Service Act of 1917. All men from 21 to 30 years of age (later extended 18 to 45), inclusive, had to register. Exemptions from service were granted to men who had dependent families, indispensable duties at home, or physical disabilities. Conscientious objector status was granted to members of pacifist religious organizations, but they had to perform alternative service. Other war objectors were imprisoned, where several died. By the end of World War I about 2,800,000 men had been inducted.
The United States first adopted peacetime conscription with the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940. The act provided that not more than 900,000 men were to be in training at any one time, and it limited service to 12 months--later (1941) extended to 18 months. After the United States entered World War II, a new selective service act made men between 18 and 45 liable for military service and required all men between 18 and 65 to register. The terminal point of service was extended to six months after the war. From 1940 until 1947--when the wartime selective service act expired after extensions by Congress--over 10,000,000 men were inducted. A new selective service act was passed in 1948 that required all men between 18 and 26 to register and that made men from 19 to 26 liable for induction for 21 months' service, which would be followed by 5 years of reserve duty.
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