Word: cp
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...Communist Party Boston Youth Club (CP) sent the CRIMSON a letter on January 27 presenting its views on the draft. We have strong disgareements with the CP's program, indeed with its approach to building a movement. We will try, in this answer, to rebut the most important arguments the CP uses and put forward some ideas...
Instead of discussing how people can fight against the war, the CP presents lists of nice-sounding wishes. People should not be drafted for unjust wars, the CP says, just as the unemployed should have jobs. If they are drafted, they should not have to fight. Apprentices ought to be exempt, VISTA workers ought to be exempt. Peace Corpsmen shouldn't have to go. The CP program sounds like an appeal for special interest groups...
...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...