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.

  • Pezevenk [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    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

    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.

    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,

    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.

    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.

    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.