The Draft-Nappers Are Back -- and This Time They Want Your Daughter

by William Norman Grigg
Feb. 12, 2016

Roughly a year ago, Nampa, Idaho resident Kenndrick Rose was appointed as a member of the local military enslavement soviet. That is an accurate, rather than official, description of the Canyon County Selective Service Board, which would be activated in the increasingly likely event that the Regime reinstates the odious practice of conscription.

Rose inherited his seat on the long-dormant board from his mother, Conchi Morales, who occupied it for twenty years. He has an academic background in computer science but no exceptional qualifications to rule on the merits of a given application for a draft deferment. Neither does anybody else, of course, since no individual or group of people has the right to compel others to serve in the military.

Although the draft ended in 1973, the apparatus of enslavement was never abolished. Within each of the more than 3,100 counties in the United States lurks a Selective Service Soviet composed of five people who would presume to make decisions regarding life or death, freedom or servitude, for every male 26 or younger residing within that jurisdiction.

Seeking to accelerate our descent into unalloyed tyranny, the Pentagon has endorsed the idea that females should be numbered within the human inventory from which the Regime will draw in its next useless, stupid, pointless war. This naturally appeals to the sort of people who believe that any assault on liberty is justified to the extent that it is indiscriminate.

"It may be unpalatable to many to think of their daughters, wives or partners being mobilized," writes collectivist technocrat Ruth Ben-Ghiat in a sentence that casually assumes that individual human lives are the property of the state to be used as the ruling class sees fit. "In all areas of society, women have embraced the principle that equal rights brings [sic] with it equal duties. In the workplace and beyond, we share responsibilities with men. Selective Service registration should be no different."

That argument makes perfect sense, once it is rotated one hundred and eighty degrees: Since men, as human beings, are owners of their lives and should not be forced to submit to draft registration, neither should women. That principle is unintelligible to collectivists, who define society as an appendage of the state. This is true not only of left-collectivists, but of conservative militarists, as well.

Four decades ago, one of the most insistent arguments offered by opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment was that it would create the legal basis for making women subject to the draft. That prospect inspired horror and outrage during the age of Reagan. When the subject was addressed to Reagan's would-be heirs at the most recent presidential pander-pageant (events of that kind are usually called "debates"), only Senator Ted Cruz expressed disapproval. This was because he considers it to be "immoral" to "draft our daughters to forcibly bring them into the military and put them in close combat" – not because he objects to the practice of military enslavement on principle. Having expressed an intention to conduct carpet-bombing – or perhaps even nuking -- various Middle Eastern countries, Cruz clearly harbors ambitions the fulfillment of which would require an expansion of the military that current recruitment rates would not yield.

Left-collectivists love social engineering; right-collectivists adore the military. Conscripting women would be the natural synthesis of this depraved dialectic.

In July 1863, amid riots that greeted the Lincoln regime's imposition of conscription, the New York Times – ever and always the voice of the ruling class – published a remarkable editorial that offered a commendably candid expression of the evil premises at the heart of the policy.

"It is a national blessing that the conscription has been imposed," decreed the paper's editorial collective. "It is a matter of prime concern that it should now be settled, once and for all, whether this government is or is not strong enough to compel military service in its defense." (Emphasis added.)

The defining deceit of those who support the murderous fiction called "government" is that this institution exists to protect the rights and property of the people. The truth is precisely the reverse: The perspective of those who act in the name of the state is that the people exist to protect the government.

Prior to 1863, continued the Times editorial, "the popular mind had scarcely bethought itself for a moment that the power of an unlimited conscription was … one of the living powers of the government in time of war. The general notion was that conscription was a feature that belonged exclusively to despotic governments."

So alien was the idea of a military draft to the Founders, and those of their generation (Jefferson referred to it as "the last of all oppressions") that Congress refused a proposed conscription bill during the War of 1812 – even after British soldiers had burned the White House and the US Treasury had practically run dry. The proposed draft was among the grievances cited by the Hartford Convention of New England states considering secession from the union.

Lincoln's war to re-conquer the independent Confederate States dispelled the last vestiges of that innately American hostility toward despotic power, as the Times pointed out. The sacred cause of protecting the central government, the paper opined, meant that "not only the property, but the personal military service of every able-bodied citizen is at the command of the national authority, constitutionally exercised."

In this context, the modifier "constitutionally" means, in practice, "exercised by people occupying positions listed in the document, not exercised in a fashion compatible with the provisions contained therein." The printed words in the U.S. Constitution are meaningless; the actual constitution could be best summarized in the Latin phrase, imperii salus, suprema lex, as elaborated by the Times:

"The government is the people's government…. When it is once understood that our national authority has the right under the Constitution to every dollar and every right arm in the country for its protection, and that the great people recognize and stand by that right, thenceforward, for all time to come, the Republic will command a respect, both at home and abroad, far beyond any ever accorded to it before." (Emphasis added.)

Once the Regime establishes the principle that it can steal the lives of its subjects, every purported constitutional guarantee of liberty is nullified.

As America succumbed to the mass psychosis that led to U.S. involvement in World War I, Progressive-era legal scholar John Henry Wigmore, who remains one of the most influential American jurists, explained that in wartime, "all principles of normal internal order may be suspended. As property may be taken and corporal service may be conscripted, so liberty of speech may be limited or suppressed, so far as deemed needful for the successful conduct of the war."

The 1919 Schenk v. United States ruling, which gave birth to the deathless and endlessly harmful clichÃ© that "Shouting `Fire!' in a crowded theater" is not free speech, dealt with a pamphlet that made a constitutional argument against conscription. Dissemination of that document, according to the Feds, constituted a violation of the Espionage Act – and the High Court ratified the prosecution and conviction of the anti-war agitators who had published and circulated it.

"The document in question, upon its first printed side, recited the first section of the Thirteenth Amendment, said that the idea embodied in it was violated by the Conscription Act, and that a conscript is little better than a convict," wrote Justice Holmes, limning the tract's seditious details with obvious disgust. "In impassioned language, it intimated that conscription was despotism in its worst form, and a monstrous wrong against humanity in the interest of Wall Street's chosen few. It said `Do not submit to intimidation,' but in form, at least, confined itself to peaceful measures such as a petition for the repeal of the act."

" The other and later printed side of the sheet was headed `Assert Your Rights,'" continued Holmes. "It stated reasons for alleging that anyone violated the Constitution when he refused to recognize `your right to assert your opposition to the draft' and went on [to say that] `If you do not assert and support your rights, you are helping to deny or disparage rights which it is the solemn duty of all citizens and residents of the United States to retain.'"

Petitioning the government in defense of individual rights is advertised as a core function of the First Amendment, a provision Holmes dismissed with a rhetorical wave of the hand:

"When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right. It seems to be admitted that, if an actual obstruction of the recruiting service were proved, liability for words that produced that effect might be enforced."

Writing on behalf of the Court, Holmes went on to insist that no actual "obstruction" of the draft would be necessary, since publication or public utterance of criticism for the policy is evidence of a "conspiracy to obstruct" the practice of military servitude.

All of this is justified, from the perspective for which Holmes wrote, by wartime necessity. As it happens, the U.S. government is rarely at peace, and has been on a de facto war footing since 1947. Critics of conscription are fed the deceptive assurance that Congress would face insurmountable political resistance. That claim is difficult to sustain in light of the torpid public reaction to the once-unthinkable prospect of conscripting women.

Furthermore, it isn't necessary for the draft to be formally revived in order for resisters to face prosecution. Fifteen young men who refused to register for military slavery have been convicted of that "offense" in federal court since the Selective Service was reactivated in 1980. Nine of them spent time in prison. All of them were branded as felons for the supposed crime of asserting their self-ownership.

The implacably predatory nature of the Selective Service System played a critical role in the transformation of Claude Dallas from a polite, eccentric cowboy into an outlaw.

Dallas, who was raised in Ohio but considered himself both temporally and geographically displaced, was working in a cattle camp in Nevada's Paradise Valley when he was ambushed by two FBI undercover agents and the local sheriff in October 1973. A few months earlier, a federal grand jury had secretly indicted Dallas for the supposed crime of refusing induction into the Armed Services three years earlier.

Both the Vietnam War and the draft had ended nearly a year before Dallas was arrested. This mattered not at all to the officials who conducted a nation-wide manhunt for the fugitive would-be slave, staged an undercover operation to find him, and then delivered him – shackled in leg-irons – to Mt. Gilead, Ohio, where he was thrown into a drunk tank and became the focus of opportunistic abuse by sheriff's deputies.

Dallas wasn't afraid to fight, or unable to do so. His prowess with firearms was well-known to the man-stealers who carefully orchestrated his abduction.

The local magistrate who examined the the federal indictment (which was issued a month after the draft was discontinued) found that the Mt. Gilead Draft Board – yes, those panels are considered to be judicial bodies -- had made some critical procedural errors, and dismissed the case.

As he was stuffed onto a bus to take him back to Nevada, Dallas was informed by one of his abductors that he would never be free.

"I'm gonna get you, Dallas – even if it's just for tax evasion," the FBI agent hissed in the cowboy's ear as his shackles were removed.

Not surprisingly, the experience of being assaulted, abducted, publicly humiliated, caged, and then threatened by the Feds catalyzed a change in Dallas's disposition.

"They wouldn't have took me like this if they hadn't got the drop on me," Dallas told to friends in the Paradise Valley bunkhouse. According to Jack Olsen in his book Give a Boy a Gun, Dallas "was publicly heard to swear that no one would ever outdraw him again – no one. One of his closest friends asked how he felt about the draft and the Vietnam War. He said that he would fight for his country if he were asked in a nice way, but `nobody's gonna order me around.'"

Living under the shadow of a government that sought to put him back into a cage, Dallas became a hermit, and then a poacher. This led, a little more than seven years later, to a confrontation with two game wardens -- – Bill Pogue, a "badge-heavy" former Winnemucca, Nevada police chief, and Conley Elms – who had located Dallas's campsite about three miles on the Idaho side of the Nevada border in Owyhee County.

Pogue and Elms were determined to take Dallas in for possession of illegal hides and venison. Dallas was determined never again to feel handcuffs biting into his wrists. All three of them went for their guns. Dallas was the only one left standing.

"Nobody has the right to come into my camp and violate my rights," Dallas told his friend Jim Stevens, the only eyewitness to the shootout. "In my mind it's justifiable homicide." The Owyhee County jury who later convicted Dallas of manslaughter would have accepted his argument if he had tried to render aid to the fallen officers, rather than "mercy-killing" each of them with a .22 round to the back of the skull.

Claude Dallas is hardly a saintly figure, but he only became a killer after being cornered by gun-wielding government employees who most likely would have found some way to validate the FBI agent's threat: The Federal Government would find some way to "get him" as punishment for avoiding the draft, no matter how trivial the violation may have been.

For killing two armed men who were prepared to kill him, Dallas served twenty-three years in prison. If he had submitted to conscription and wound up killing two dozen Vietnamese, Dallas would have been given a medal. This makes perfect sense to the kind of people who believe that government "authority" can transmute slavery into "service," and murder into heroism.
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William Norman Grigg publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.