A Journal for Western Man-- Issue IX
G. Stolyarov II
The draft does imbue the populace with a certain hesitancy to fight, but this is a hesitancy to retaliate against murder and crime. It took a year following the sinking of the Lusitania for the United States to declare war on the Kaiser�s Reich. Two years of Axis troops overrunning Europe and Asia had passed before the United States responded, only once the conflict had arrived at its own doorstep. In Vietnam, the hesitancy was never dispelled at all, as troops were prohibited from retaliating against the Viet Minh to their full capacity, instructed but to defend and not exterminate the source of the Communist menace, their jungle strongholds in the north. Given such hesitation and given the draft, any use of military force, even an entirely justified one, a plethora of which reasons permeated United States involvements in nearly all of its historical conflicts, potentially places all young men�s lives on the line. And those not specifically conditioned to soldiering are well aware that they will not escape the struggle unscathed and intact. So they oppose the war effort and create a substantial political force, similar to the hippie movements of the 1960s. The retaliation stalls, and every two-bit dictator, every mullah with half-trained bodyguards, every commissar with a century-old printing press emerge from their trembling hibernation and realize that their raids, their acts of sabotage, their hostage takings and hijackings and massacres of intellectuals will pass without resistance, for years on end at least. The threat to national security magnifies, and the enemy is fueled to a status of an army to be reckoned with, instead of a gang of petty criminals to be hunted down by small, elite commando groups. The probability of genuine, large-scale war soars to heights which would not have been imaginable absent the draft! And eventually all people, even the most blundering and least conscious of the venom that the enemy pumps into the veins of their country, can bear it no more. No more can politically correct shrouds conceal the impending doom before them unless they respond with a war. Only this war will demolish countless lives and national infrastructure, as opposed to a mild regional conflict which could have been flawlessly remedied with a concentrated, coordinated offensive some months or years earlier. Delaying a war renders it only more grievous in the end, as the strength of the aggressor is fortified. Perhaps what advocates of the draft imply by their argument is that one day their conscription will yield a clash of such colossal proportions that it will exterminate all mankind, and then, only then, shall there be no war. That is the only means by which a draft can deter military engagements.
If we are to have a shred of hope in defeating Saddam and terrorism, we must defeat an equally ruinous menace at home, which shall condemn a free and prosperous nation to the same misery and slavery that Saddam and the fundamentalists would inflict in their wildest dreams. All the specious conscription laudations must be refuted, and circulation of articles such as this is the most efficient means of doing so. Military professionals at the Pentagon, persons who know well the optimal conditions for practicing their trade, have rejected the draft proposal. You can as well.
But temporarily holding back men like Rangel is not a lingering remedy to the malignancy of totalitarianism. So long as the means exists to implement the draft, the next Carter will fortify the process and the next Roosevelt will enact it. Therefore it is necessary to undertake a step which had already once been aspired to and obstinately rejected by Democratic reactionaries, the abolition of all draft registration requirements. This the Pentagon has not yet consented to, yet this is what may preserve the efficacy and integrity of America�s armed forces in a hypothetical future conflict. The draft is not a fallback resort, even if there exists a manifest shortage of troops, for conscription, in its material and more profound philosophical consequences, inevitably serves to augment the miseries of any land that plunges the best and brightest of its denizens into a damp, fetid battlefield grave.
G. Stolyarov II is a science fiction novelist, independent philosophical essayist, poet, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator. He is also a writer for Objective Medicine, a philosophical forum for advocating the right of physicians to freely practice their trade, at http://www.objectivemedicine.org. Mr. Stolyarov can be contacted at [email protected].