Because he had the most to lose, took the largest risk and in so doing made things easier for the rest of them. A mechanism that should have been abolished somewhere between Fat Man and the USS Missouri instead limped along until the early '70s, and probably wasn't even considered for abolition until Ali's stand and the Court's favorable decision.
All points addressed before me. Sending 20 yr old kids to go fight some meaningless bull**** and die in putrid conditions isn't something to advocate. Nixon's "Silent majority" soundbite comes to mind with your statement. The rich have no problem starting the wars, but when it comes to fighting in them its a whole nother story. Soldiers that go out and die for their country are heros, but they shouldn't have to die at all...especially for something so meaningless. I can't decide which was dumber, the Iraqi invasion or Vietnam. The saddest part of all however is that people who protest such wars are labeled as unpatriotic when they are taking the most ethical approach.
Thanks for serving. There's been shortages in volunteers before. I like to think our history on the draft is a big incentive why we don't do it now. That and the "wanting to be there" reason.
Not a fan of how Ali turned the black community against Frazier and called him and anyone who cheered for him an Uncle Tom. He even had the people in Frazier's hometown hating him. Smart guy, but he's no hero. Sounds like Charles Barkley to me.
Actually he had the most to gain by avoiding the draft and not getting killed. Not meaningless, it was resisting Soviet expansion (Truman doctrine) Not really, war protesters are lionized by the media. And of course, Vietnam protests largely disappeared when the draft ended.
He wouldn't have been sent to combat. He had more to lose than most, and unlike others with a lot to lose, he took a different route (going to jail) than folks like Dick "Other Priorities" Cheney and party-boy George W. Bush. Anyway, i guess in your universe being sentecned to a five year prison term is less risky than getting a doctor's note about your "trick knee" - not in reality, of course. But you don't live there as we know.
No. They willingly went, and should be commended for their heroism. They had the same options available to everyone else. They could have elected to go to jail. Or they could have gone to another country. What Ali did was not heroic whatsoever. The man who went in his place is the true hero.
D&D topic here. What's with the libertarians/Ron Paul supporters in this thread being okay with getting drafted? You'd think they'd laud Ali's stand against state coercion. Knowing how venal most politicians are and knowing how none of them send their families into the fray, how can they serve gladly? World War I was the last time when the aristocracy shared the burden of serving in the military... Strangely, I see lots of fascists who claim to be Tea Party supporters. When discussions like this come up, you see who they really are. I don't buy their patriotic argument. There's a difference between serving in the military against a legitimate threat. It's courageous when you're volunteering while your fellow countrymen sit at home. On the other hand, it would be suicidal, idiotic, and Darwinian to obey the orders of eggheads in the Pentagon and intelligence community, and war hawks in Congress obsessed with binary thinking of if-not-with-us-then-they-must-be-Communist. South Vietnam was a corrupt place. They would have freely elected HCM. As a 'democracy', we opposed elections. We radicalized the population by refusing to honor the post-WW2 agreements.
As Baudelaire said (popularized in The Usual Suspects): "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist." It is possibly the greatest tragedy of the 20th century that the notion of communism as a serious threat to the well-being of mankind has turned into little more than a punch line. There are reasons for this, and every one of them should turn your stomach. The Nazis were a pretty foul lot, right? We don't downplay the Holocaust, or treat the nazis like they were just some kind of punch line, right? Quick question for all the people who sneeringly deride the legitimate responses to the threat and spread of communism: Who killed more people in the 20th century - nazis, or communists? Anyway, Ali was a decent man who did what he thought was right, and he can't really be faulted for that. However, he was essentially just a signpost of the times, and a very visible one at that, but he was by no means alone.
