Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)

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Later this year, the public will have online access to an extensive digitized collection of materials documenting the history of grassroots anti-militarism organizing by the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (originally named San Diego CARD). The collection consists of materials from 10 scrapbooks covering the late 1970s through 1987, plus every issue of our newsletter, Draft Notices, from 1980 through 2021.

The digitized materials are being hosted online by the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Digitization was done manually by COMD, with help from Project YANO, and took a year to complete. Approximately 4,000 pages were scanned to create 1,064 PDF files.

The types of documents in the collection will include such items as fliers, memos, news releases and clippings, meeting agendas, brochures and photographs. All the documents will be accessible to Internet search engines.

When the collection is fully uploaded and annotated at UMass, COMD will share its online link. It’s worth noting that the COMD collection will be in the company of the papers of such notable individuals as W.E.B. Du Bois and Daniel Ellsberg.

This article is from Draft NOtices, the newsletter of the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (http://www.comdsd.org/index.php/draft-notices).

 

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From Draft NOtices, January-March 2022

The Israeli “Refusers”

 — Paula Hoffman-Villanueva
 When Israeli children play with toy soldiers, it’s not just a game, a fantasy or an aspiration. It is a fact of life that they will serve in the military, usually right after high school. When children hear stories from family members about their time in the military, it is not just from a father or one aunt or cousin. Nearly all (male and female) adult family members have stories to tell about their time in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). There are exemptions for Orthodox Jews, the mentally or physically unqualified, young mothers, Arab Israelis, and a few others, but it is rare for a citizen to be deemed a conscientious objector. To seek CO status in Israeli society is considered the ultimate betrayal and a process that will bring certain suffering to the individual.

 The IDF is commonly referred to as “The People’s Army.” It is required service, a rite of passage, one’s patriotic duty. For a young person to question this obligation is truly an act of courage, and with it comes the knowledge that s/he will be shunned by family, peers and society. The typical labels are used: coward, traitor, extremist, deviant, gibush (someone who doesn’t pull their weight). When a family member is an identified refuser or refusenik (savarim in Hebrew), the entire family suffers community scorn.

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From Draft NOtices, January-March 2022

 Ethnic Studies Take 2: The Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum

— Isidro Ortiz, PHD
The Covid-19 pandemic has exacted a heavy toll on education and posed many unprecedented challenges to educators at all levels. As reported by Emma Dorn and her colleagues in “COVID-19 and education: The lingering effects of unfinished learning,” during the 2020-21 academic year, “the impact of the pandemic on k-12 student learning was significant.” Moreover, “the pandemic widened preexisting opportunity and achievement gaps, hitting historically disadvantaged students hardest.” Students in high schools became more likely to drop out of school, and “high school seniors, especially those from lowincome families, are less likely to go on to post-secondary education.” At the same time, the Defense Department has announced a new STEM strategic plan that would further militarize the nation’s schools. The plan would focus on student populations regarded as “underserved and underrepresented in STEM,” including military children, racial minorities and female students.

While these developments do not bode well for anti-militarism struggles, all hope is not lost. They have been accompanied by the rise of a counterhegemonic movement that has catalyzed the development of a new curriculum, the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (LESMC), that has significant potential to develop two essentials for future action against militarism: critical agency and self-efficacy.

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Ninth CIRCUIT COURT RULING: CONFRONTING MILITARISM BY USING EQUAL ACCESS TO HIGH SCHOOLS

When the military comes to your local high school, you have a legal right to give students an opposing view. This has been the position taken by federal district courts in Florida, Pennsylvania and Illinois and two federal appellate courts. The most broadly-worded decision came from a case that COMD took to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the 1980s. Here is the background:

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