This column contains the same sentiments about the draft advocated by Gen. McChrystal, Ricks, and (incessantly) Congressman Rangel. Namely, if everyone, black white rich poor (now) men women, suffered the effects of war together, people would stop fighting them so damned often. (Sirota even uses Dwight Elliott Stone, the last man forced into Vietnam, to cement his case that the draft should menace everyone. Poor Stone apparently grew to embrace this idea years after trying desperately to evade conscription.)
The idea that the draft would stop perpetual war is tempting to consider for a minute. After all, wasn’t it that sword of Damocles hanging over every middle class kid that finally made Americans say enough was enough during Vietnam? Isn’t it worth a try?
No. Because
you don’t end mass-murder by enslaving enough people to maybe, eventually, piss off the masses.
[...]
Experiment. The implication that not enslaving men aged 19-26 is a fluke, tried, and now to be discarded. Never mind Richard Nixon, or the military, or anyone else’s motives in lifting the threat of military service off of the general population in order to make war “an abstraction.” Consider the definition of the draft — the mandate that you serve the government in the most servile fashion. You are more directly the hand of the state than in any other job.
And you may die. In Vietnam, 30 percent of the men killed were drafted (around 17,000 people). Countless men also signed up knowing they were going to be forced into the armed forces, in order to pick the least loathsome choice of branch. To say nothing of 2 million Vietnamese killed during the war, look how many American men were sacrificed and how many — men and women, if Rangel had his way — would it take next time in order to stop the next war?
Ostensibly Sirota’s motivations for wanting a draft are good; the end of the worst thing in the world.
But they’re twisted. Instead of starving the beast of militarism he wants to shove a few thousand people down its throat until it (hopefully) chokes.
Would it work? It’s possible. But it didn’t work during the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, or Vietnam. Or, it didn’t work in time for scores upon scores of thousand of men. What about them? Isn’t preventing their enslavement and slaughter also a part of opposing war?
If people suggesting a return to conscription are serious about ending war and all its miseries, they will stop spinning their wheels on bull$#@! columns like Sirota’s; stop coyly suggesting unpopular plans that make them sound grave and determined; and they will start opposing war, period.
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