What is conscription? A "fun" way to waste a year of your life doing unpaid labor in some camp. Oh, sorry, it's not "unpaid", the wage is 8 euros.
"What's the big deal?" you say. "8 euros sounds decent for a guaranteed job for 1 year in a place with very low living costs compared to the US. That's about the minimum wage here". And that would be true, if it was 8 euros per hour. Except it is 8 euros PER MONTH. It's almost a joke, like I have no clue what you're supposed to do with 8 euros. But I guess they give you shitty food and a shitty bunker bed to sleep? Awesome. Oh wait they're now saying they're gonna increase the wage to 30 euros. Impressive. Except they're probably doing it because they want to make conscription last longer than a year, whoo!!
Basically it's a great place where a bunch of weirdos with anger issues scream at you while you're mopping floors and you just have to ignore them every day for a year, if you don't have anything left to do in there you can leave for a while but you have to be back by midnight, and you can only take leaves for a total of 18 days throughout the whole year. Dumbasses tend to become fashy in there too. What an amazing institution, I'm so fucking happy the state doesn't want to pay people to work in camps so they just have us do it for free. It's really wild how much you can get away with if you promote it as patriotic.
That's not what I said.
Yes, that's the military in general.
Yes it is. The only leftists I've seen saying this kind of weird nonsense is confused online people, usually from countries which don't even have conscription.
Yeah I'm sure the US military really got owned that they had tons of additional soldiers because a few of them deserted. That's why they drafted people, to sabotage their own war.
Dude you clearly have no clue what mandatory service is like so please don't say nonsense about it. You know there's still a professional army right? You know that it's solely professionals who have any kind of influence in the army and not random conscripts who will be gone in a year, right? The idea that you can somehow influence the military from beneath via conscription is just stupid. Turkey has conscription too. Btw Turkey is fighting a bunch of wars. Do you think they're sending the conscripts? No, they're mostly sending a bunch of Syrian mercenaries and the conscripts can't do shit about it. The conscripts don't even have to be armed if the military doesn't want them to be at some specific time. I'm so done with this galaxy brain nonsense, "uhhh what if doing unpaid labor for this highly nationalistic and extremely reactionary instrument that forces young people into its ranks so that a bunch of nazis and divorced weirdos can shout at them and teach them "discipline" is good akshually? YOU LEARN VALUABLE SKILLS FOR THE REVOLUTION MOPPING THE FLOORS, STOP BEING A LIB!". Ugh.
I am from a nation that have conscription. I don’t know what military service entails in your country, but here it’s not simply mopping floors and getting yelled at. I went to conscription as an 18 year old and was denied service due to my leftists and antifascist political activism. I was a bit of a shit then and was happy about it but i have comrades who tried hard to get in to more specialized arms of the service and was sussed out by the Security service. One close friend was denied training with the engineering corps on the day he was supposed to report for duty. The state knows the danger of socialists in the military, one would expect you as a socialist to do the same.
The US was forced to use conscription to fight the kind of war they wanted to fight in Vietnam, but that opened them up for the kind of influence that I’m talking about. I think you would be hard pressed to find an historian that would deny that the pressure and dissatisfaction from the draftees wasn’t an important part in ending the Vietnam war. As I tried to explain in my previous post; conscription is not a garantee against state control, but it is an opening to oppose and challenge it, and giving it up seems like a really poor move for a movement that someday aims to replace it with the rule of the people.
Lmao so you literally know that the state will simply ban you from the military if push comes to shove, why the fuck are you even making that argument then.
I got lot of friend that made their military service and are committed socialist today. They don’t regret the few years the spent in the woods learning to shoot.
I’m engaging with you, giving you historical and personal examples and trying to argue this thing in somewhat good faith. Maybe try to do the same?
I don't really care much about arguing "in good faith" about discussing the benefits of unpaid labor for hypernationalistic chud factories from a """leftist""" perspective, especially with a person who apparently thinks it is "liberalism" to criticize it. I'm gonna show this to people here btw, it's pretty funny.
Please do. Just make sure to show your weak ass arguments about not wanting to mop floors and getting screamed at too. Oh and re-read those arguments after you spent a decade or so working for a living in this garbage system of ours, and you’ll see how fucking hollow ”someone forced me to do something against my will and yelled at me” rings.
Literally no one wants to do that.
YOU LITERALLY GET PAID TO WORK. YOU LITERALLY DON'T GET PAID TO WORK IN THE ARMY. And you can at least, you know, leave after 8 hours, and live in your own house.
Dude stop being so embarrassing, please lol
"Wow imagine not wanting to do forced unpaid labor for nationalists whose entire purpose is trying to 'break' people into discipline, what a weak ass argument. Yeah, I'm totally a socialist."
What do you mean? conscript armies do pay their soldiers. It’s certainly the norm where I live. And if you think you will “break” from doing military service for a year or two and come out a fucking SS-goon or something on the other side, then I don’t know what to tell you, maybe your not really built for this world.
Did you even read the post?
It doesn't matter if I or anyone else in specific does so. It is their job description. And it does work on many 18 year olds.
Ok, let’s try this again cause we’re both just fucking screaming into the void right now, insulting each other and getting nowhere. And believe it or not, if you are here then your probably a comrade and I’m interested in hearing where you are coming from.
Here’s my argument for a conscript army
• If recruitment is something everyone has to endure then it works as a calming effect on War Hawks and warmongering. When everyone (or at least all soldier age males) got some skin in the game it makes it harder to sell a war, especially if it’s an offensive one and not one of defense. I think this is the reason why a lot of western imperialist states moved away from conscription in the late 1900s. I’m certain it’s a big reason of why the US did after Vietnam.
• conscription gives working class kids some military training which could certainly come in use of the world keeps going to shit.
If I understand you correctly you oppose conscription because its an extreme form of state control and a propaganda mill to turn out well behaved and ideologically conformist citizens. I see your point and understand the unwillingness to get forced to carry weapons I the name of a system and state that I hate. I also understand your argument that on a personal level you would rather do anything else than spending a year taking order from assholes in uniform , also a fair point and one I would have sympathized with when I was of recruitment age. But I would argue that the propaganda angle is even worse in a professional army that gets more time to work their fascist ideology and more willing recruits to turn into foot soldiers for capital. Though I would concide that a conscript system gives the state a wider net of young men to try to influence.
Have I missed something in what you are trying to argue? And if neither of us got anything else to add, then let’s just fucking agree to disagree.
The arguments that it makes a difference with war hawks etc don't work. They don't send the conscripts unless they really really have to. Again, Turkey has conscription and it is also involved in a bunch of wars, but the ordinary conscripts don't take part in any of that, because they ALSO have a professional army, a lot of whom aren't even Turkish citizens. All the conscripts do is take care of the necessities that the "real" army is too busy fighting to take care of. If a major war happens, then any "ordinary" country will draft people anyways regardless of whether they have peacetime conscription or not.
The US never had peacetime conscription in its modern history, it didn't "move away" from it. They only used the draft in the Vietnam war because it was larger than what the professional army could manage on its own. They could have conscripts now and it wouldn't make a difference, they'd just have them sit around never leaving American soil while the professionals are bombing people elsewhere.
All "training" that you might receive in there is stuff that you could have learned in 15 days. It's not high quality training or whatever. You barely even learn how to shoot.
There is also a professional army anyways. That doesn't go away. Except the professional army is a small percentage of the population, not literally every man in the country.
I don’t think any modern western army is completely conscript or professional, but the US army had conscription in one form or another in all the major wars of the the twentieth century up to Vietnam and a system of conscription in peacetime to boot. Of course the Turkish state is able to wage war even though they keep a conscript system. My point is not that a conscript system is a guarantee against militarism and aggressive warfare but that it is a system that gives more openings for influence from a strong socialist movement, and makes waging unpopular wars, or military action against your own population, harder than if the military is made up of a fully professional army. The US had to deploy conscripted troops In Vietnam, and the dissatisfaction of these troops did help shorten the war. I’m sure the training conscript armies receives varies widely form nation to nation. But the people around me that completed their conscription learned quite a bit. So Let’s agree to disagree. I see your points and get what you’re trying to say. If you’re up for conscription in then I hope you’re able to dodge it.
Yes multiple countries have a completely professional country and no conscripts in the army. No, the US only had conscription for Vietnam, the Korean war, and the two world wars, it didn't have it before or after, and even then there was never ever universal mandatory service, except I believe for WWII and shortly after. For most of its modern history the US has mostly used primarily volunteers and definitely didn't have universal mandatory service during peacetime.
It's the military. In sufficiently advanced and robust states and militaries it is a complete pipe dream to believe you're gonna influence it via conscripts. It's designed in such a way that conscripts can't do shit to influence it, and if they ever start influencing it somehow (or at the very least sabotage some shit) or simply if the state becomes concerned enough, the state simply starts weeding out certain people which is very easy as you clearly know (and it's happened again in Greece). It's not like people haven't tried and aren't still trying. Again, conscription applies to everyone and it's hard to dodge forever so you're kinda forced to "try", you don't have anything else to do. But nothing anyone ever tried had any meaningful results because it's made that way so that it will be the single hardest institution to ever influence.
Again, no, because it's not the conscripts who do that. They have the professional army to do that. That was the whole point about Turkey. The conscripts don't do shit. They've got a bunch of ex-ISIL mercenaries to do that. They're not completely stupid. They know how to deal with this. Examples involving emergency drafts are not relevant because they don't have anything to do with peacetime universal mandatory service, which any country can institute whenever they like and will institute if necessary regardless of whether or not they have peacetime universal mandatory service.