Word: war
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) in a statement titled "Support the Moratorium." denounced Nixon's attempts to "buy off the anti-war sentiment in America," and asserted that "the moratorium . . . not only affords us a chance to protest United States policy in Vietnam, but also the chance to examine . . . United States foreign policy in general...
...conspiracy" for what are essentially their anti-government beliefs. The Conspiracy charged by the government was in effect the Resistance itself, and the five figurehead defendants were held responsible for the entire draft-card burning, induction-refusal movement. One assumes that the government could not tolerate the tremendous anti-war moral tide unless it could be boiled down to a conspiracy. That not one of the men knew another any more than in passing made no difference to the charge of conspiracy. Shared beliefs equal conspiracy when the government needs a charge...
...existed, creation of a political defense would have been easier. Several of the defendants had stated in speeches that they were aiding, abetting and counseling non-compliance with the draft laws so that they might force the government to undertake a test case on the issues raised by the war...
They had assumed that such a test case might deal publicly with questions of the illegality of the war under international law, the responsibility under the Nuremburg principles to refuse to comply in what one considers in good conscience to be war crimes, and the idealistic nature of the Resistance movement. But at the very opening of the trial of these essential points were ruled out of order. No arguments on the illegal nature of the war were to be heard (as that would have placed the government on trial). All issues of free speech and conscientious objection were ignored...
...explain why I don't feel as guilty now about chickening out of the H-RSC. Even if I could have mustered up every fibber of my body and put my life together on an airplane down to Washington and burned myself on the steps of the Capitol, the war still would have gone on and on. There is no machinery built into this republic to respond to the anguish of its citizens. There is of course next Wednesday and somehow we again wait and trust...