Saturday, June 4, 2016

How Muhammed Ali didn't go to prison for draft dodging

5 comments:

Guffaw in AZ said...

Standing up to big government when there was 'the draft' was pretty ballsy. Whether or not you agreed with him.
A a libertarian, I do think the the draft was government coercion, as a minimum.
I would have gone, and volunteered, but my disability prevented me.
One of my best friends was a conscientious objector - I wrote a letter supporting him to his draft board.
Seemed counter-productive to force folks when others wanted to go...

gfa

Comrade Misfit said...

Quibble: Ali was a draft-resistor. He wouldn't go and he was prepared to take the consequences of that refusal.

Draft-dodgers were those who used deferments, political connections and such to avoid going: Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, and so on.

Comrade Misfit said...

Guffaw, I don't recall people flooding the enlistment offices to go serve in Vietnam.

Old NFO said...

I got my draft notice and got the Navy to backdate my paperwork... There was a rush every year when the lottery numbers came out. Anybody with a number lower than 50 was guaranteed to be drafted!

Will said...

Old NFO:

My recollection was it ran up to 150, more-or-less. My high school buddies had single digits. Mine was 300+.

I had been planning on enlisting after leaving school, but by that time I realized that the politicians had screwed things up royally, had no clue what the hell they were doing, but were certain that they were all geniuses in micro-managing a war. By then, I had read my way through most of several libraries, and military histories was one of my areas of interest. I had little interest in fighting for a cause that they had no plan of winning. When they defunded the South Vietnamese 5 years later, that confirmed for me that the Democrats had no intention to ever stop, or harm, any communist/socialist expansion.
Their micro-managing was intended to keep us, and the South VN, from stopping the North.