Podcast: Congress leaning towards drafting women for next war

Transcript

Eric Klein:
You’re listening to the Courage to Resist Podcast. My name is Eric Klein. On today’s episode, we are joined by Edward Hasbrouck who is a draft resister and author of the website resisters.info. Welcome Edward.

Edward Hasbrouck:
Pleased to be here, Eric.

Eric Klein:
And we’re also on the line with Rivera Sun who is an activist and an author. Rivera, thank you so much for joining us today.

Rivera Sun:
Hey, Eric, it’s great to have this conversation.

Eric Klein:
And we are recording this episode with Edward and Rivera because there’s new information regarding the draft in the United States. Edward Hasbrouck, you are an expert in the draft, maybe you should catch us up and let listeners know A, what is the latest news and B, you should summarize for maybe young people who aren’t familiar with what’s going on with the draft in the United States in this decade, the year 2020, what should people know?

Edward Hasbrouck:
Well, where we stand now with respect to a military draft is that we have as we have had for some decades, the selective service system in the US carrying out ongoing contingency planning and preparations for two different kinds of drafts. One is a draft of healthcare workers, which there’s actually been some interest in lately, naturally.

Edward Hasbrouck:
Many people don’t realize that selective service has a plan. If it were to be implemented to force people in 57 different healthcare occupations into the military and send them wherever the military wanted. This was not designed for civilian national emergencies. This is designed if suddenly war casualties spike out of hand. And I think what we’ve seen is that healthcare workers have stepped up without needing to be conscripted. So it raises many questions, but that’s not where we’re going to talk about mostly today.

Edward Hasbrouck:
The more well known one piece of the selective service system is that it has contingency plans for a general sort of cannon fodder draft based on ongoing registration of young men between ages 18 and 26, you’re supposed to register when you turn 18 and tell the selective service system every time you move until you turn 26. Very few people do.

Edward Hasbrouck:
And there’s been no enforcement for decades, but that’s what the law is. So what has happened and what is happening now is that a national commission that has been studying this issue over the last several years has come back just last month with recommendations and Congress is now considering whether to move in one of two directions. And is going to be making a choice in one of those two directions over the next year or so. Either to finally put an end to the BRAF registration program that we have had for the past decades and put an end to the preparations for forcing people into war. Or on the other hand to double down on it by trying to expand the current draft registration and contingency planning from young men to also include young women. Now why is that happening? Basically because the legal rationale that was accepted by the Supreme Court for requiring men but not women to register for the draft, was that the military only wanted men for combat.

Edward Hasbrouck:
And so basically when five years ago, the president, President Obama as Commander in Chief decided to open up all assignments within the military, including combat to women. It rendered the current male only draft registration program unconstitutional. At least one court has already ruled that and it’s being appealed. But the appeals, I was at the hearing and the court of appeals a month and a half ago and that ruling is likely to stand up and everybody in Congress knows that.

Edward Hasbrouck:
So if Congress does nothing, the present registration system is going to be shut down by the courts as unconstitutional. So Congress is being forced, as I said, to choose. And this is a choice that Congress has been evading for years. The draft registration program essentially was a failure from the start because so many people didn’t comply. And even at the hearings before the national commission last year, the former director of selective service came out of retirement to say, this isn’t working, it’s actually less than useless because people don’t tell you when they move, you wouldn’t actually be able to serve them with induction notices if you wanted to get them into the military.

Edward Hasbrouck:
This isn’t working, you should give up. But the government doesn’t readily admit defeat in the face of popular resistance. So there’s been no face saving way to shut the program down. And it sort of limped on in this limbo, but now the government is either going to have to admit that draft registration has failed and end it. Or again as I said try to expand it to get women as well to register for the draft, which is where this whole question of women in the draft comes in.

Eric Klein:
And Rivera Sun, you’re an activist and author. What is your reaction to this? The notion of expanding the draft to include women?

Rivera Sun:
Well, personally I think it’s outrageous. I think it’s outrageous that anyone is conscripted against their will to fight Wars, that they don’t want to fight. And there is a whole branch of sexism to this conversation and there’s a whole branch of people who don’t want women drafted into the military because they are a sexist. There’s also a whole bunch of women who think that women’s equality can be achieved by drafting women into the military. I personally don’t feel that the draft for men is just, and I don’t feel that drafting women makes that any more just. It’s not really a step in an equal direction to have us exposing our bodies equally to gunfire, PTSD, having to commit war crimes, being involved in an imperial stick military, none of these are feminist goals and forcing women to participate in these operations is not an advancement for women’s equality.

Rivera Sun:
It’s a setback. What is an advancement for women’s equality? Gender equality of all forms is actually abolishing the selective service and name draft registration and ending conscription into the military. That would be a major human rights and civil rights victory all around. And we’re really kind of at this crossroads and I think it’s up to citizens like us to step forward and say to Congress, you can make this choice right now. You really can take this opportunity to end this failure of a system and to go a different direction. As you can see, I feel very strongly about it. I think it’s a travesty to make young women fight in the military for so many reasons.

Eric Klein:
Yeah, I think you should say more because it did not occur to me until one second to go, just how tempting the messaging will be and how they’ll sort of twist things patriotically into like a feminist argument in favor of women’s equality. I could see the propaganda now, how successfully they can sort of demonstrate that that women haven’t been treated equal in the military and here’s a great step in the right direction. Can you talk more about like why that would not be a good message to share?

Rivera Sun:
Right. And in a minute, I want Edward to chime in about the back history of the court case and how we got into this discussion in the first place because there’s a connection here, but I’ll just briefly say that propaganda, you use that word and that is exactly the word for what’s going on right now. We’re seeing it in the Hollywood collusion with the military as we ramp up into more and more stories like Captain Marvel and of course Wonder Woman and we’re being forced fed this whole rhetoric of empowered women are using violence for military purposes. And it’s baloney and we need to call it that and say this is not the only form of women’s empowerment that exists. And in fact, when we, ourselves get our empowerment by oppressing others, we need to question that narrative. We had to question it when it was the Buffalo soldiers, the freed blacks being conscripted and volunteering to fight Indians or natives as we call them now.

Rivera Sun:
It was true when the Irish were told, Oh, you can be white, you can join the great white nation if you perpetrate the racism against the black people. So we’ve been through the story before and this is a really prime moment to recognize what the story is and say we are not going to participate in it any longer. And certainly it is a line of the commission that studied this question and it is going to be part of the way that they tried to put that spoonful of sugar in. Certainly the pro military women definitely are trying to spin this as a feminist advancement and throughout the entire process of the public scoping period, anti-war feminists were left out of the conversation until Edward and the no draft coalition to a child to belong demanded that they listened to our voices.

Rivera Sun:
That we go on public record and be heard as saying, if you have a conversation about feminists and feminism and you’re not talking to anti-war feminist, you’re leaving out a major part of the conversation. We are a very old historic movement that is very strongly objected to war and has constrained the advancements of sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy that had been perpetrated with violent military might. This goes all the way back to the founding fathers and I just want to share with you one little piece of history to show how old this conversation is.

Rivera Sun:
Many people know about Abigail Adams, famous Remember the Lady’s speech or letter as it was to John Adams, where she begged him to remember the ladies and treat them more favorably than his predecessors had as he’s writing the constitution. Well, he writes back and calls her a saucy wench for this and he says that before he surrenders the tyranny of the petticoat, he would rather have general George Washington and all our men put down the women violently. That’s how old this conversation is. And so I feel very strongly as a feminist that we need to speak up against this kind of historic and present patriarchy, that we can’t find our empowerment through the military, but rather by dismantling the military industrial complex.

Rivera Sun:
Who are the very goals of feminism that has to do with nurturing and taking care of people, protecting the environment, making sure our democracy is really just, I could go on with the list of goals, but they include unequivocally waging peace, not war.

Eric Klein:
So Rivera, would it be like… it’s sort of a ludicrous question. So how does it get answered in, that women should not be included in the draft because the draft is so unjust, but how do you open up the conversation so that it doesn’t get framed as if what we’re denying girls and women the opportunities to succeed in this society.

Rivera Sun:
Yeah, so this is a great moment for Edward to share how we got into this because there’s actually a court case before this that has to do, or two court cases I believe that has to do with mandating that all levels of military service be open to women equally to men. Now that you could maybe argue that voluntary advancement is a form of gender equality, but certainly involuntary conscription is neither a form of gender equality nor fair to the men that are being involuntarily conscripted or penalized for resisting being conscripted.

Eric Klein:
Yeah. Well said. Well Edward, fill us in on some of the gory details of this court case that you’ve been following for a very long time.

Edward Hasbrouck:
Well, the first challenge to requiring men but not women to register was in, well that’s actually it was, it went to the Supreme Court in the early 1980s shortly after the present system was put into effect. And in many ways that court case and the debate in Congress in 1980. When draft registration was reinstated, mirrored the debate we’re having today as Rivera has said, it’s an old one. And you had, even then in 1980 there was a proposal from President Carter to include women in draft registration. And there was a split between what I would broadly describe as both radical feminists and even if they weren’t radical feminist, pacifist and anti-war feminists and liberal advocates for women’s equality who saw equality within a system that included militarism as opposed to those who saw militarism as part of the patriarchy.

Edward Hasbrouck:
And there was that split and that divide even then, but the court, the Supreme Court did base its decision on the fact that they were deferring to the military judgment that they only wanted men for combat. And so the lawsuit now that’s challenging the continued registration of only men and not women even after registration has been, I mean even after combat has been opened up to women and all the roles in the military open to women is being framed in the same way as being about equality.

Edward Hasbrouck:
But it misses both because fighting and killing is not some benefit that people want. Being forced to fight and kill is certainly not a benefit. This is a negative, not a positive thing and it assumes, that argument assumes that we all want to be part of the military. And this was a struggle that those of us as Rivera has described who were trying to engage with this national commission had is that the commission phrased or framed the debate as how do we get the military to fight the wars that the government has decided to fight. And these were questions… When I was called as a witness before the commission, they were asking, well what would you do? And they spun this insane scenario for when they would want a draft. This is the chair of the commission asking me these questions. Supposing we were being invaded from Mexico and Canada simultaneously and there weren’t enough volunteers to defend the country.

Edward Hasbrouck:
That’s just such a preposterous hypothetical in the first place. But this is their scenario for when we would have a draft. Well, what would we do if we didn’t have the draft available? That’s their question. Well, if the government says there’s this kind of threat, well, first of all, we should be skeptical. Is this really what’s happening? These are the people who told us that the Vietnamese were a threat to the US and the Tonkin Gulf, which proved to be wrong and led to a war in which millions of people died. And the most honorable thing anybody could say about what they did in that war is that they refused to fight. This is the same government that said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that posed an existential threat to the US which proved to be wrong, but that’s led to 20 years of war almost now.

Edward Hasbrouck:
So we should be skeptical about that. But ultimately it’s up to the people to decide whether they think, whether they believe the claims that there’s something that warrants fighting for and whether they’re willing to fight it. And if the people aren’t willing to fight the war, why are we fighting that war in the first place? There’s this blind belief that the government knows better than us. And I don’t think that the last whatever, however far you want to go back in American history. But American history does not reflect well on the ability of the government to decide which wars we really ought to be fighting, at least in terms of my value system. So that’s some of the history here, but we’ve also seen, and this is why I’m optimistic actually at this moment, we’ve also seen tremendous history of women taking leading roles, not only in the antiwar movement generally, which I certainly have, peace has always been seen as a women’s issue.

Edward Hasbrouck:
It should be a men’s issue too, but whatever. We’re working on that. But it’s been a feminist issue and women have taken leading roles in opposing the draft even when it was only men being drafted. When the government has actually moved to draft women, I can remember back in 1980 when Jimmy Carter proposed and it came out in a state of the union address and said, I’m proposing that both men and women be required to register. And there was like this kind of electricity that went through the dormitory common room. I was in college at the time. Like people tell me like, did he just say that? What? They’re the national resistance committee was founded at a meeting at the women’s building here in San Francisco a couple of weeks later. There was a march of 30,000 people on Washington two months later, which in the pre-social media day mobilizing 30,000 people on two months notice was an astonishing grassroots outburst of opposition.

Edward Hasbrouck:
And most of those people were women. Most of the leaders of that antiwar movement were women. And it was really clear that women have all the same reasons that men have to oppose being drafted plus a lot of reasons of their own related to feminism and the way that the military serves patriarchal violence both internationally and socialize as men and violence, which manifests itself in domestic violence and military families. And the whole range of things that we know about. So I think it is clear, but the national commission sort of framed the debate that the only terms of debate was how do we fight these wars? They refused, put the blinders on and refused to even consider that there might be people who didn’t actually think we should be fighting these endless wars around the world.

Edward Hasbrouck:
And even less did they want to consider their own power, that the power and ability of the government to wage endless wars around the world might actually be constrained by people power, by whether people were willing to carry out their orders. These are military people, the chair of the commission is a Brigadier General in the army reserve.

Edward Hasbrouck:
They’re used to giving orders and having people jump and when the people that are giving orders to start saying no or why, their authority just crumbles. And they really wanted the black… so it’s really important both for Congress and for the public to hear and for people to feel in themselves a recognition that the ultimate decision isn’t going to be made by Congress, isn’t going to be made by politicians.

Edward Hasbrouck:
The ultimate decision about whether we have a draft, whether we go to war, is whether people pick up arms and fight that war. Whether when they get an order saying report for induction, they go along or they tear it up and ignore it or they actually speak up and say no. So this is a real lesson, an object lesson and the failure of draft registration for the last 40 years. The fact that it became unenforceable, that even though it stays on the books and it’s still a crime, nobody’s been prosecuted in decades. That is because of massive popular noncompliance and it’s an object lesson in people power, which I hope now will be passed on to the young women who potentially are going to be the next people on the at the pointy end of the attempt to impose this.

Eric Klein:
To be drafted. And Edward Hasbrouck, you just sort of framed up a very clear like moral choice where if called to fight an unjust war or any war, that people individually have this ability to refuse. And that’s key, but I want to go back a step and ask Rivera to frame for me the moral choice of what you’re suggesting as an activist, what people should do before that moment with this issue. Like you can refuse to fight the war that you’re being sent to, but what do we do today to resist?

Rivera Sun:
Yeah. Well, in so many ways it is really important that people who oppose wars but also oppose fighting in wars. It’s a very funny statistic out there about the millennial generation where a lot of millennials are in favor of the endless wars, but they certainly are not in favor of fighting them themselves. And every person who feels like that plus everybody else should actually go to worldbeyondwar/repeal, worldbeyondwar/repeal and send a letter to your congressperson right now, saying, there’s a bill before you that says let’s expand the draft to women, but there’s also a bill before you that says let’s abolish the draft for all genders. So with a two minute click, you can go on public record and say it’s time to do away with this unjust, unfair system. That’s the choice before Congress right now.

Rivera Sun:
And we can be a part of framing that choice. We can also do other things because many people do not know that you can have the courage to resist as the name of your podcast implies. And they don’t know the history that Edward is speaking about, not just the Vietnam year of resistance but 1980s resistance as well. That those who’ve come before have so much knowledge to share. And I’ve been hanging out with these draft resisters who are men of course because of the sexism, the draft to begin with and have had these direct experiences and they have amazing stories to share. So I really encourage people to reach out, to go to Edward’s website and read more about it’s resisters.info.

Eric Klein:
Rivera Sun, I want to ask you in case that we’re currently recording this in late April of 2020 and it’s difficult to predict just how long the current social distancing that we’re doing because of the coronavirus pandemic and the crisis around it is going to go on. And it makes me want to ask about nonviolent resistance in a time of COVID-19, what do we do when only MAGA people are outside protesting. How do we proceed?

Rivera Sun:
Well, the great thing about nonviolent resistance is that there are over 300 different methods of nonviolent struggle. And the toolbox includes things that you do in the street and things that you can do off of the street. Right now we’re actually all involved in the stay at home, which is a very important tactic to know about. But I think on this particular is to people can remember that there are people organizing on this. We are easy to find online, please reach out and connect with us.

Rivera Sun:
If you don’t agree with my views, I recommend that you connect with your congresspersons and tell them that because that’s how democracy works. But if you are interested in resisting with others, please get ahold of us. There are many tactics we can use and we are seeing that in action. And in fact there’s a great article in The Guardian by Erica Chenoweth on this that’s cataloging over 100 different types of actions that people are taking right now to oppose things like or to try to get prisoners released who are low risk but high risk of COVID-19, to try to get families reunited when the children are at risk in these detention centers, to go on rent strike, to go on work strike, call in sick at businesses that are not respecting the need for health care protections. I could go on, as I said, there’s over a hundred tactics.

Eric Klein:
People can find that article by Googling a Global Pandemic has Spawned New Forms of Activism by Erica Chenoweth. I’m glad that did go around there recently because it’s, yeah, it’s on my mind a lot these days since there are so many things to be concerned about and want to make change regarding the situation and yet you can’t join hands with your neighbor and block a street without spreading the virus. Ed-

Edward Hasbrouck:
Can I add a few suggestions?

Eric Klein:
Please do.

Edward Hasbrouck:
Social distancing is really a misnomer and some people are actually trying to get deliberately away from that term. Physical distancing doesn’t have to mean social distancing.

Eric Klein:
Yeah.

Edward Hasbrouck:
Sure, physical contact is meaningful. I don’t mean to discount that, but there’s a lot that we can do and we’re discovering how much we can do to find society to connect with people at a human level, even if we can’t physically be with them. And on this issue, most people aren’t aware of that this is happening or what the issues in the background are. So while it’s important and it’s going to be important to influence Congress to do things that are public and are personalized, we’re still trying to build a community and a movement here and people can contribute to that by educating yourself, by telling your friends whether that’s just flagging this on social media, Hey, do you know that Congress is debating whether to end draft registration or try to expand it to women and what can we do about that? Connect in all the ways that people are connecting today with their schoolmates, their friends, whatever virtual friends means.

Edward Hasbrouck:
Talk to them about what would you do if you were told you had to sign up for the draft or actually go into the military, what would you do? Clarify your opinions and your beliefs. Bring in guest speakers, people who can provide information and help facilitate that. And people like Rivera and I can can help connect you with people who maybe we couldn’t come to your town to do a workshop but we can come to you and do a virtual workshop for your virtual group of friends and we’d be happy to do that. So there are plenty of opportunities for education and community building and building solidarity and a movement. And it’s interesting because a lot of the kind of the draft resistance movement has been very much a movement of a community in many ways that although it’s been, well those who were actually prosecuted for draft resistance were men, there were many women in the movement.

Edward Hasbrouck:
But a lot of that community and sense of community solidarity and bonding drew on techniques that were developed out of feminist organizing, of consciousness raising and group dynamics and group process. And there’s also a whole larger question beyond this podcast, but there’s a whole set of connections between the dynamics of nonviolent process and decision making and structure and feminist process and decision making and structure. Just as there’s a set of connections between feminism and antiwar ideology and thought. It manifests itself in structure too. So those of us men in the anti-draft movement and the draft resistance movement have learned a lot from women, not only about values and beliefs but also about process and organizing.

Eric Klein:
Yeah. Edward Hasbrouck, you should let us know what is the next step in this political process that people should be aware of. And I’m curious if it’s, what is the current, like has anyone in Congress sort of indicated the path that they’re planning to take with regarding whether or not to end the draft or to expand the draft to include women in the population?

Edward Hasbrouck:
Well, okay. The next step, the national commission which was basically a delaying tactic and a process to provide political cover has completed its work. They’ve made their recommendations, they came down on the side of extend draft registration to women. Legislation has been introduced both a bill to end the draft on the one side and a bill to expand draft registration to women on the other side so it’s now on the table in Congress and could be taken up at any time.

Edward Hasbrouck:
And what we’ve been hearing suggest that may be taken up… there had been hearing scheduled before the pandemic pretty much shut down Congress and unfortunately what that means is that this could be taken up at some future point on fairly short notice with little or no hearings and it could be taken up by trying to shove an amendment into some existing military appropriations or authorization bill.

Edward Hasbrouck:
So I think it’s possible that the next step could be public hearings. I’m not very optimistic about the process and the openness that would actually include our views or it could just, the next thing we could hear would be this is being voted on tomorrow in Congress. So it’s important to get the word out and to get mobilized and to let the public and Congress know your opinions now, because this could move at some unpredictable moment sometime in the next year with very little warning. In terms of where Congress stands-

Rivera Sun:
Can I chime in on some things, Edward?

Eric Klein:
Please do, yeah. Just to let the listeners know that no matter what Congress decides, it’s not the end all be all. We are the end all be all. Whether we register, we don’t register, whether we support each other in not complying with this crazy system or not that right now men must register and men aren’t registering.

Eric Klein:
And so women also have that option no matter what Congress says we, the people actually have the final word and say on this, but this is a great opportunity to break the silence and the propaganda of the military industrial complex and our militarized culture and make sure that this perspective that we’re articulating here today gets heard loud and clear because right now the assumption of everyone involved in Congress persons are particularly good examples of this is that, Oh yes, we should just expand the draft to women because there really is no other option. We can’t imagine doing away with the selective service really, but that’s not true. We could, we could end the selective service tomorrow. The former director of the selective service said that we should do that and we have to say that we believe that this is possible and we demand that this be done.

Edward Hasbrouck:
Amen.

Eric Klein:
Yeah, well said.

Edward Hasbrouck:
Back in 1980, when I was supposed to register, there were some older and more moderate anti-draft people who were saying, no, no, you shouldn’t actually refuse to register. That will just alienate Congress and the people we have to persuade. It was not, we didn’t choose from a menu of options that we were given in choosing to render the draft unenforceable. We created possibilities for ourselves through direct action and certainly people, including young women, if they try to expand draft registration, will be able to create those options for themselves also. And I think this goes back to the question you were posing about where does Congress stand on this?

Edward Hasbrouck:
The debate is being framed as being one of, well the only way to achieve equality is to expand draft registration to women, the idea of ending it, even though there’s a bill in Congress, it has only a small number of sponsors and that’s seen as pretty marginal. So I think in the absence of any upsurge of visible expressions of public sentiment, I think Congress probably will decide to try to expand draft registration to women.

Edward Hasbrouck:
That’s the default if we don’t get our act together and do something about it. Now, doing something about it is going to be a matter both of necessarily agitation but also of direct action. And I think that if Congress is persuaded to end draft registration, it’s not going to be because they’ve given up their desire for war and their desire to make war whenever they feel like it, they’re going to give it up if and only they give it up because they are effectively non-violently compelled to do it. By realizing that like it or not, it’s just not feasible because people won’t submit. That’s going to be what will decide their verdict.

Eric Klein:
Edward Hasbrouck, you maintain the website resisters.info, where I imagined people can get the latest updates on this, on the story of where draft registration for women is headed. Since to my knowledge, it’s not being promoted to the front page of most news organizations, websites. I learned about everything I know about it from talking to you. And Rivera Sun, where can people find you online?

Rivera Sun:
People can find me at riverasun.com, that’s S-U-N like the sun overhead.

Eric Klein:
Great. Rivera Sun, thank you so much for joining us on Courage to Resist today.

Rivera Sun:
Thank you.

Eric Klein:
And Edward Hasbrouck, Thank you as well.

Edward Hasbrouck:
Thanks a lot, Eric.