The Most Insidious Form of Slavery

There was a "Letter to the Editor" in our local paper today (you know, the paper I have trouble getting delivered to my house) that made another call for the re-institution of the Draft to help reduce the stress being inflicted on our military service members by having a larger pool of recruits for the U.S. government to send to its various wars around the globe. Let's take a moment to examine that issue more closely.

Historically, men have marched off to war for two main reasons: (1) To protect what one holds dear, and (2) to make a profit. The common man, if he truly believes it is necessary, will place himself in harm's way on the battlefield to protect his family, his home, and his way of life. He has a very dear stake in the outcome of any war he chooses to fight in and if he doesn't see himself having a stake in the fight, then he doesn't go to war. To him war is a major disruption in life that can lead to so much sorrow and loss.

The profit-seeking man will not care much who wins any war as the war itself is how he makes his fortune. He loans the capital needed to fund the war machine to both sides to hedge his bets and he even sells the weapons needed to destroy the most property and kill the most people (Eisenhower warned of the "Military-Industrial-Complex). The profit-seeking man and his servants, the politicians, will strive for the support of the common man in their push to war through jingoistic propaganda and appeals to patriotism but if the common man has his eyes open he might notice that there is really nothing that needs protecting and will choose not to support the effort. At times like these the profit-seekers will then fall back on what I call the most insidious form of slavery: Military Conscription.

I consider it insidious (there is no good form of slavery) because instead of forcing people to engage in some form of productive work (i.e. picking cotton) that benefits the slave owner directly and the slave indirectly (it was the profit from selling the cotton that paid for the food and clothes the slaves used), the slaves held in military conscription are forced to kill or be killed. If they refuse to expose themselves to being shot in the chest, they will most assuredly be shot in the back, in one form or another. In other forms of chattel slavery the slave is considered an asset that must be taken care of to ensure that the slave continues to be productive, while in the military the slave is a liability that needs to be trained, armed, and fed and then delivered to the battlefield where he is considered expendable.

Some do not consider military conscription to be slavery since the draftees are paid but pay, or the lack thereof, is not the only defining aspect of slavery (even the slaves on the old plantations were sometimes paid). It is the fact that the conscript cannot freely choose to not participate or to walk away when he decides he has had enough that determines his status as a slave. We can consider that a man who does not walk into a military recruiting office to sign up to have voted with his feet that he chooses not to support the government's war efforts and to force him to fight in a war he does not consider necessary oppresses his right to make this decision. Most people would object to some businessman using the power of the law to force people to work in his factory whether they wanted to or not but they see nothing wrong in the forcing people to serve in the military.

The draft also has a moral hazard for those power-hungry politicians. When they can consider every male (and in some instances, every female, too) of military age to be a potential expendable soldier then the politicians become a little more reckless in what wars they choose for the government and, to a lesser degree, the country to enter into. The Korean and Vietnam wars are good examples of conflicts the U.S. had no real need to be in and would have probably extricated itself from them a lot sooner if there had not been a draft to force our best and brightest to make themselves available to be chewed up and spit out in large quantities.

If people are really set on having a draft then why wait on the government? Let them just grab their baseball bats and pitchforks and start rounding up all the young people they can find and start pushing and shoving those young people towards the nearest recruiting office. Some people will object to doing this because that would be a crime and they are right. But it is no less a crime for them to ask the government to do the pushing and shoving for them. Instead of being the principals they will now be considered accessories before the fact...