CHANCE AND NECESSITY IN VIETNAM AND THE U.S. DRAFT
[The rather sardonic Parisian columnist Robert Escarpit took as his subject in the March 8 issue of Le Monde Johnson's recent proposals on revising the draft system in the United States. Escarpit's comments, under the title of "The Judgment of God," were as follows as translated by World. Outlook. ]
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President Johnson has just reinvented the system of conscription by drawing lots, well known to our grandparents, and, if you can believe the folklore, one for which they had little taste.
What is new is that President Johnson praises the system as the most equitable and by far the most impartial. Perhaps that is giving too much credit to chance and disregarding a little cavalierly all the efforts made by moralists, jurists and legislators through the ages precisely to correct what is cruel, unjust and absurd in chance.
Unless President Johnson, betraying here his real thought, merely intends to refer things to what was once called God's will. If this is so, one can better appreciate his policy in Vietnam. There's no martyred people, no scorched earth, no errors in bombing, no useless deaths; there's just culprits whom divine chance designates by striking them down.
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