Further to my abrupt dismissal of Prince Harry’s call for the reintroduction of national service, Yiannis Baboulias explains far more eloquently than I did just why it is such a terrible idea.
Let’s admit there might be some positives to a spell in the army in Britain, Greece or wherever; it can be an educational experience, especially for people growing up in rough environments and who lack the self-discipline required to succeed in education or work. But mandatory service won’t provide this, especially for those who, unlike Prince Harry, don’t enjoy “running around with a rifle” and jumping in ditches. If anything, it will do the exact opposite.
Precisely – and getting shot at and killed in some foreign shit-hole where the conflict is bugger all to do with us isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs either. The armed forces must be made up of volunteers, not conscripts. Quite apart from anything else, enforced servitude is morally wrong. The state has no ethical right to take our lives and destroy them. Yes, sure, some people liked their time in the army. For others, though, it was awful. One can make any number of arguments about the perceived benefits and there may well have a point to make, but it is starting from a position of using force, and that is wrong. Period.
At worst, for those unsuited to military service, it may provide lasting trauma. At best, it can be hugely disruptive. In Greece, if you have been granted a 10-year deferment to go on to higher education, you could be 28 by the time you’re called back to serve in the army. For most, that’s when your professional career is entering its first meaningful phase. Many friends of mine have had to abandon jobs and sometimes serious relationships in order to serve nine meaningless months in the army.
That’s Greece, of course. In the UK, my father’s service was deferred while he completed his apprenticeship – a couple of years, I believe. How dare the state presume to disrupt people’s lives like this! How dare it presume that our lives are there for the taking!
Oh, sure, some will say that it need not be in the armed forces, that service will be good whatever form it takes. Er, no, it won’t. For there will always be those, like me, who will rebel. Who, rightly, regard sovereignty over our lives is not for the state to sequester and will actively oppose such a scheme.
The other option is to get your military service over with when you are 18. But is this a good idea? Appealing as it may sound to those who despair of today’s feckless youth, does any nation really want thousands of unenthusiastic conscripted teenagers into its army?
Go on, ask the army what it would like… Highly trained, motivated professional volunteers or a bunch of unwilling conscripts. Tough choice.
There are currently two kinds of countries enforcing conscription. Those with a culture of militarism justified by a constant fear of war (like Israel) and those using it to mask other issues – high unemployment, for instance – like Greece. With a Tory government in place that literally has nothing in its manifesto to appeal to young people, who are faced with terrible odds when it comes to jobs, housing and stability, bringing back National Service would be a loud admission that, as a country, “we have no idea what to do with the young”.
Fair point. No, national service is not a solution to youth unemployment. It merely masks the underlying problem. And what do you do with those conscripts when they leave the army? Now that you have trained them as killers? Or caused them lasting trauma?
But in the end, the most potent argument against such practices is one of culture: do we really want a society in which National Service, and therefore the military, plays such an integral part in young people’s lives? Would it make anyone feel more comfortable if we sent young men off to train how to fight or kill?
In a word; no.
I think you pretty much nailed it in your earlier post, and I’m in total agreement with that post and this post.
Seconded.
There’s also the question that with National Service there is an element of “getting one’s army on the cheap,” at least to an extent, or, ditto, any other form of “community work” which might be substituted for national military service. Bearing in mind that we already fork out large taxes to fund our military (or other) services, I for one would rather that they spent the money better on the professional soldiers/sailors/airmen that we’ve already got than tried to cut a few meaningless corners by shoving unwilling teenagers into a service that they’ve got no interest in, on the basis that, OK yes, they might end up with a handful of newly-converted enthusiastic personnel who stay on and make a good career in the military, but only at the cost of carrying along for nine months the vast majority of unwilling, reluctant ones who can’t wait for it all to be over, and who will have no more of an idea what they want to do when they get out as they did when they went in.
Most of the arguments both for and against assume that this time spent serving our nation is in the armed forces. Not necessarily so. There must be many non military secondments which you could call to mind. Should you wish. The Libertarian argument has some traction even though maintenance of that liberty befalls us all. If we don’t volunteer in sufficient numbers to to protect that we may survive, I would rather ‘ordinary Joes’ be dragooned than a narrow segment of the nation. Anyway, it’s an idea which needs looking at carefully, from all angles.
This is irrelevant. It is the enforced servitude that is wrong. Always wrong.
Nope.
Says it all.