Word: cp
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...anti-war movement needs a program to organize people to defeat the government's war. The CP meets the situation passively with the notion of disengagement from the "military industrial complex" (i.e., American society)--a clear impossibility for the vast majority of Americans, including students. Reduced to its essence, the CP's argument runs: if everyone were exempt, there would be no soldiers to fight the war. There is a Yiddish retort to such wishful thinking. It goes: "And if your grandmother were a trolley car...." And the question still remains: how do we unite Americans from different classes...
...CP's exemption list disguised as a program is not without point. The CP calls for these deferments to justify its main contention: that 2-S is really a good thing, that students shouldn't oppose, shouldn't renounce but rather hold onto their deferments. And students needn't feel guilty--the CP wants exemption for everyone. In addition, the CP justifies 2-S directly on two grounds...
...government will need students to provide some of the manpower for such a war. The CP thinks they will all be technicians, with "safe" jobs. We think some will be technicians, some foot soldiers. In any case, no draftees, whether technicians or infantrymen, will be safe. For people's war, revolutionary guerrilla war, is not like trench warfare. There is no defined front. The whole country, farmland and city, is the battlefield. All the local people are possible enemy fighters. Since there is no defined front, there is no safe rear. This is true for the U.S. army...
...granting deferments. It will draft students to the extent that it needs the manpower as the war expands. In the long run, there will be no way for millions of students to get out. By defending 2-S, by arguing that it offers students a real way out, the CP strengthens the false sense of security which the deferment produces. And this false hope diverts people from anti-war activity into a personal attempt to avoid...
...CP letter is a program which would weaken the anti-war movement. Aside from this, the letter's approach to people is plain rotten. Students won't like you if you argue against their (illusion of) security. Students are "spoon fed with the delusions and placebos of this system" all their lives. In other words, if a man has a class privilege (in this case one that is quite shaky) don't struggle with him to give it up. Play up to it. Uphold the narrowest, in fact short-sighted, selfishness against the collective good. It sounds like Ayan Rand...