SENATE BILL: Anti-Conscription Amendment (Failed)

[tpfkaw]

Mass conscription began with the Grande Armée of Napoleon Bonaparte.  It was the logical conclusion of the philosophy, popular with the revolutionaries, of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; that the individual ought to live and die in the service of the State.  This innovation allowed for armies more massive than any Europe had ever seen to be raised, and allowed for the advent of cataclysmic continent or continents-wide wars with casualties in the millions, and, even more horrifically, among people who would not have freely chosen to fight in the first place.  Tyrants from Napoleon to Tsar Nicholas to Hitler to Mao Zedong have used mass conscription as a weapon against their own people, to force a mass mobilization for a conflict domestic or foreign that the population broadly was uninterested in fighting.

Conscription, as a brutal invention of tyranny, has no place in a republic such as our own.  This country was founded on protecting its citizens from tyranny, not the imitation of foreign tyrants.  We ought to believe strongly that, if government has a purpose, it is to serve the interests of its citizens.  The purpose of the citizen is not to serve the interests of the government.  Accordingly, if this country should be attacked, if the government truly serves the interests of its citizens then they will agree voluntarily to help defend it.  If there is so little faith in the government that the citizens will not agree to defend it, then the odds are that the government is not one worth saving, and we, as Senators, have failed to do our duty to ensure that the government serves the people.

More practically, including armed police and other paramilitary forces, this country already has more men under arms than any other, even more when you consider the amount of private gun-owners (as Admiral Yamamoto said, "You cannot invade mainland Atlasia. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.").  We spend more on our military than every other country on Earth combined, and most of the other top spenders are NATO allies.  And all this would only matter if we were right next to a major hostile power, of which there are none, certainly none that would have anything to gain from attacking Atlasia.  As it is there are thousands of miles of ocean between us and all major industrialized powers, such that it would be logistically impossible to mount even a small raid on mainland Atlasia even if our navy did not exceed every other navy in the world by tonnage.  Moreover, if some hypothetical equal military power did exist and somehow had the ability to invade Atlasia, such a conflict would surely turn nuclear instantly and render any discussions of conscription moot.  In this day and age, there is no practical argument for conscription whatsoever, it is merely an outdated and tyrannical institution useful only in forcing people to fight in aggressive wars against their will.

[tpfkaw]

Unfriendly.

[tpfkaw]

Frankly, the requirement that citizens be forced against their will to risk their lives on behalf of their government is the most extreme form of oppression possible short of simply rounding them up and having them tortured or killed.  There is absolutely no significant force anywhere in the world desirous of having Atlasians rounded up and tortured and killed.  There is no country in the world even theoretically capable of invading Atlasia, and there is no country in the world that would want to or have anything to gain from initiating hostilities with Atlasia even if they were evenly matched.  Furthermore, if there were a country both hostile to and evenly matched with Atlasia, such a conflict would immediately go nuclear, rendering conventional forces pointless.  Drafts have no purpose other than misuse, as they always have in Atlasia beginning with their inception in the Civil War.*

It's permitting a truly extreme form of oppression almost unheard of in the broad scheme of human history for a possibility not only remote but in fact non-existent and with no possibility of ever coming to pass in this nuclear age.  It is the very definition of insanity to maintain this as government policy.

*Where the draft was used as a tool of quite literally killing off the opposition; enforced at four times the rate in Democratic New York City as in Republican Massachusetts, while wealthy people could purchase exemptions first for $300 and later by hiring someone else to take their place, and where desertion was punished by death, with at least 50,000 executed for that reason.

[tpfkaw]

Frankly, the requirement that citizens be forced against their will to risk their lives on behalf of their government is the most extreme form of oppression possible short of simply rounding them up and having them tortured or killed.  There is absolutely no significant force anywhere in the world desirous of having Atlasians rounded up and tortured and killed.  There is no country in the world even theoretically capable of invading Atlasia, and there is no country in the world that would want to or have anything to gain from initiating hostilities with Atlasia even if they were evenly matched.  Furthermore, if there were a country both hostile to and evenly matched with Atlasia, such a conflict would immediately go nuclear, rendering conventional forces pointless.  Drafts have no purpose other than misuse, as they always have in Atlasia beginning with their inception in the Civil War.*

It's permitting a truly extreme form of oppression almost unheard of in the broad scheme of human history for a possibility not only remote but in fact non-existent and with no possibility of ever coming to pass in this nuclear age.  It is the very definition of insanity to maintain this as government policy.

*Where the draft was used as a tool of quite literally killing off the opposition; enforced at four times the rate in Democratic New York City as in Republican Massachusetts, while wealthy people could purchase exemptions first for $300 and later by hiring someone else to take their place, and where desertion was punished by death, with at least 50,000 executed for that reason.

I'd appreciate you detailing a scenario in which the government finds it necessary to initiate conscription and gets 3/4 of the Senate to agree...

In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson went on television and outright lied to the Atlasian people in order to have his pointless war of aggression including massive conscription to fight it approved, and it was, by a vote of 416 in favor to 0 opposed in the old House of Representatives.  It's more a question of what wouldn't our sainted elected officials agree to if it were proposed by the presidential administration under the guise of "defending freedom."

[tpfkaw]

And Nay.

[tpfkaw]

The amendment is unfriendly.

[tpfkaw]

Nay.

[tpfkaw]

I would like to introduce an amendment of my own.

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[tpfkaw]

Nay.

I am considering tossing Wormyguy's amendment on grounds that it is functionally impractical and thus frivolous. I will give him a chance to convince me otherwise or alter the text. There is also an objection period to that and I don't have a direct link to the OSPR saved on a handy notepad like I do on the T3302.

My amendment is not frivolous and addresses a genuine concern - that Senators unwilling to risk their own lives will vote to force others to risk theirs.  If there are currently no procedures for joining the Atlasian military or legislation defining what that implies, that's a failure of this body that needs to be corrected, not a flaw in the amendment.

[tpfkaw]

Nay.

[tpfkaw]

Aye.