Saturday, January 4, 2014
A QUICK REPLY TO ARFAMO
Let me offer an historical answer to arfamo posted comment. In the sixties, when I wrote In
Defense of Anarchism, the US had a universal male military draft. During the
Viet Nam War, a great many men were ordered to report for induction into the
Army and then to fight in Viet Nam. Some went willingly. Many went unwillingly.
And there were a not inconsiderable number of young men who anguished over the
question whether they had an obligation to obey even though they opposed the
policy, BECAUSE AMERICA IS A DEMOCRATIC POLITY. Now, you may dismiss such
considerations as foolish, but to those faced with the draft, they made a very
great deal of difference. My little book was, among other things, a direct
attack on this principled defense of the obligation to obey in a democracy. The
disaster of the Viet Nam War almost destroyed the Army, in response to which the
military high command switched to an all volunteer army so that the US would
never again have to justify ordering citizens to fight. This switch to an all
volunteer army was the last step in transforming the US into an imperial power.
The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars would have been next to impossible with universal
conscription. I never considered my book an argument for a utopian anarchist
society. I have always believed that we must begin wherever we are in trying to
change the world.
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3 comments:
Another topic:
Could you add your name to this list. And get many of your present and former colleagues to do so also.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/195482023/List-Signatories-Declaration
Dr. Wolff,
Has anyone covered the subject of the 'back door draft' thoroughly? The only book I have read so far, on the War on Terror, is Marcus Luttrell's Lone Survivor. but that book was so massively laced with anti-liberal propaganda that I wondered if I was getting an objective perspective, at all, of any part of the War on Terror.
However, the one idea that I liked overall about the book, was its quasi-hidden message of karma. Marcus Luttrell, as a Christian, took the last vote of letting some (innocent, or not so innocent?) Afghan men go, which, in the end, signed his team's doom. But the idea was that because he made the final decision to let those men go, God spared his life.
I think I read the book over two years ago, and I thought it was a great story, but I have always wondered, since I read it, how very subjective the narration was to begin with?
By the way, I don't know if there truly was a message of karma, in the book, and put there by Luttrell, in letting those men go. That's why I called it a quasi- hidden message of karma. I just felt that perhaps that was put there in the book deliberately. Albeit, I could be wrong.
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