The Draft
by Robert Reich
September 28, 2022
Introduction:
(Eurasia Review) Last Wednesday, Vladimir Putin announced that Russian civilians would be drafted to bolster forces in his unpopular war in Ukraine. Almost immediately, the Kremlin faced widespread opposition, including demonstrations. On Friday, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that “citizens with higher education” would be exempt from the draft, especially those in telecommunications, information technology, banking and “systematically important” media companies.
When I heard this news I flashed back to 1968. Tens of thousands of us then graduating from college were subject to being drafted and very possibly going to Vietnam.
College students were deferred but local draft boards decided whether to continue deferments for graduate school. Many of us were not only afraid of being killed, but also thought the war insane and unjust. We demonstrated against it. Some burnt our draft cards. We did not want to be complicit in the immoral war. But what to do? Draft resistance meant going to prison or to Canada.
The handful of us who had been awarded Rhodes Scholarships for study at Oxford negotiated with our draft boards.
Bill Clinton got his extended deferment by signing a letter of intent to join the Reserve Officers Training Corps after Oxford.
Read more here:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/28092022 ... aft-oped/
caltrek’s comment: By the time I would have been eligible for the draft, it had ended. They were still assigning priority numbers in case they decided to re-institute the draft. They did this bingo style. Each birthday was in this way arbitrarily assigned a number, the lower the number the quicker you would be called up. I remember a discussion in school with a friend. He announced that his number was so low that my number could not be lower. I asked him what his number was, and he replied something like “7.” I then explained to him that the number matched to my birthday was “1”.
I do think there are a lot of such parallel experiences between Russia of today, and the United States in the Vietnam War era. So, I can also relate to what many Russian men are now going through. To be placed in a position of being (potentially) drafted to fight in an unjust war.
Don't mourn, organize.
-Joe Hill