Robert Malecki, the American anti-war activist who destroyed tens of thousands of draft cards during the Vietnam War and then spent more than half a century in exile in Sweden, died on September 24, 2024. He was 81.
Malecki was born on October 27, 1942. Between 1968 and 1972, at the height of the American war in Vietnam, he carried out one of the most sustained direct-action campaigns of the draft-resistance movement, destroying what he described as "tens of thousands" of draft cards — the Selective Service records through which young Americans were conscripted into the war. He also took responsibility for the destruction of the international computer network of the Dow Chemical Corporation in Washington, D.C. — the company then infamous as the manufacturer of the napalm being dropped on Vietnam.
After imprisonment and further criminal charges connected to his anti-war activity, Malecki left the United States for Sweden in June 1972 with help from other activists.
He settled in Sweden, where he lived for more than five decades.
Malecki died in Sweden on September 24, 2024, a month short of his eighty-second birthday.
