The Cavalier daily :: Tuesday, October 13, 1970 :: University of Virginia Library

Most people in this country (including
a lot of people on Capitol
Hill) have finally realized that Selective
Service and all manifestations
of compulsory service, are alien to
the American tradition. At this
point in the history of Selective
Service (SS) there is developing a
race (of the non-competitive sort)
between the Resistance and Repeal
efforts to be the first to dance on
the pyre of SS. What matters is not
who claims the victory, but that
co-operation develops between all
parties working to end the draft to
create and expand pressure from all
directions (precluding those which
might involve injuring persons).

Resistance was the first viable
political and educational challenge
of the power of the state to conscript,
once the foes of conscription
had failed to prevent its ratification
by the Federal Legislature. Those
early opponents, to challenge in the
courts and if necessary in the prisons,
the legitimacy of the SS system.

Since the first world war (but
principally in the last two years)
Resistance has expanded from a
movement of highly moral and often
overly self righteous groups and
persons to a widely spread movement
of people determined not to
let SS conscript them or their
brothers, and to end SS operational
capacities. (The qualitative
change between the older and new
resistance efforts revolves around
the massive refusal of the present
generation to comply with SS's
dependence on fear and ignorance
of the system in such a as to
disrupt and disable the system-rather
than solely revolving
around the refusal of induction as
moral witness; which in the past
ultimately isolated and neutralized
resisters.)

Frenzy And Chaos

How well, or poorly, is the SS
system presently operating? Nationally
the system is somewhere between
a state of frenzy and one of
chaos as groups and individuals
increase their pressure on it.

Any man who decides that he
doesn't want to be drafted has a
number of avenues open to him-all
of which add to the ultimate breakdown
of the system. Conscientious
Objector Status is generally up for
gab-the criteria are so ambiguous
that many boards don't understand
how to apply the recent rulings;
many others simply refuse to. If
(that is with a potential
court case) boards will often grant
C.O. status rather than litigate. Every
registrant with enough investigation,
can find sufficient procedural
error in the handling of his case
to prevent his induction, tie up the
board with paperwork, and potentially
k out another classification
(this is especially true in poor areas
where clerks are notably negligent
in obeying the SS act). Finally
collective counseling and resistance
efforts are confusing many communities'
boards and jamming judicial
structures.

These efforts have created the
following conditions in the SS bureaucracy.
Most major cities' boards
are closing to the public one, two,
or three days a week to catch up on
back paperwork; shortening the office
hours is, however, increasing
the paperwork and the likelihood of
procedural error. Technical and
procedural challenges are causing
boards to stop all activity to purge
their commonplace-and illegal-procedures.
(Witness the Minnesota
and Federal District Court
which reversed 55 indictments for
induction refusal because the State
Appeals Board was spending an
average of 49 seconds per case and
basing their decision on summaries
of men's files. The court ruled this
denial of due process, thus illegitimatizing
a common practice of all
State Boards.)

Courts Overloaded

Court cases dealing with SS are
backing up most Federal Courts to
the point where they cannot deal
with the caseload. SS is short of
staff by some 200 people (some
board members, some clerical)-they
can't replace them because
the job is so unpleasant, and
they can't operate efficiently without
them.

Finally and perhaps most significant
is the limitation of draft calls
to 163,000 and the lottery ceiling
of 195. This decision (and the State
Department decision to fight future
Vietnams with National Guard and
Reservists) is partly due to the
efforts of the Resistance-Counseling
groups; SS couldn't find enough
men to draft and couldn't go into
the high lottery numbers without
losing public support. This manpower
drain exists because 10 percent
of the men called refuse induction,
because I-Y and IV-F claims
are up 40 per cent in the last year,
and because C.O. applicants have
increased 186 per cent in the last
year. Some rural boards are drafting
beyond 195, but in a test case, Tarr
and the Army have ordered the
discharge of men thus inducted.

With these conditions extant, it
is important that we all gear our
efforts to destroy SS before the
legislators repeal it. Why? Simply
because there are rumors of Compulsory
National Service, and the
citizens of this country must demonstrate
to the government that
compulsory service will not be tolerated,
and if instituted, will be
resisted. Together, citizens in local
communities can add to the pressure,
cited above, which is being
levied by local resistance-counseling-repeal
groups. Generally it is
only necessary to learn the procedures
of local boards and challenge
them, point by point, in the
courts and in the streets - always
stressing the alien nature of compulsory
service and the failure of
the present SS system to even
operate according to the laws which
initiated and defined its powers,
depending instead on the fear and
ignorance of the registrants.