Word: sss
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Criticism directed at the SSS has focussed on three major vulnerable points. First, regulations concerning conscientious objector status are the most clearly anachronistic. It is still virtually impossible for a CO applicant to receive I-O classification with-out belief in a traditional supernatural being and without some affiliation with a formal religious organization. Unless the CO application states complete pacifism based on "verifiable" religious belief, it is almost certain that his local board will feel justified in rejecting his request...
...service altogether (until recently), while the lower classes provided almost all the regular soldiers. By-passing students is, of course, said to be in the national interest, but many contemporary critics have viewed the procedure primarily as a very effective means of forestalling the potentially unified criticism of the SSS by college students--forestalling it until after graduation when unity is gone...
...science students. The conservative logic runs as follows: A particular cultural approach--in this case, technological, specialized, scientific--has led to America's position of political and economic power in the world. In order to maintain and further that position, the same attitude must be enforced by the SSS on this generation to ensure the future of our nation...
...third criticism of the SSS, and in many ways the most crucial, is directed against its overtly military interpretation of "national interest." Again, the encounter with outmoded attitudes reveals that a once necessary, primarily militaristic, stance towards the world has been institutionalized in many arms of the government and the economy...
...SSS has interpreted service in the "national interest" to include only military service and related "defense" endeavors. For example, linemen for civilian telephone companies who work at bonus salary for the benefit of foreign-based military installations are often, thereafter, permanently deferred. The SSS considers their work to have furthered the "national interest." On the other hand, a college student who works on a volunteer economic development program in South America is not considered by the SSS to have performed any service in the national interest...