Military Service or Military Slavery

Extract

As much as any other single factor, conscription or enforced military service lies near the root of the military mentality and the atmosphere of war which weigh down on a world the vast majority of whose inhabitants hate the very idea of war. Yet the abolition of conscription has hardly figured at all in the various disarmament proposals, and no serious effort has been made to relegate it to the category of social abuses to which it belongs, serfdom, feudal service, and certain kinds of industrial wage-slaveries.

Before discussing the question of whether and when conscription is ethically justifiable, it will be worth our while to examine the reason for the mischievous part it must play in the modern world. One of the oddest characteristics of the post-war world which still claims to be democratic in spirit if not always in political organisation is the divorce between what political philosophers have called the general will of the people of a State and the actual will of the State as manifested in the policies and activities of its rulers. We may imagine, for example, the average Englishman or the average Frenchman or the average Italian opening his morning paper. He will read of this financial crisis or that, of this political squabble or the other, of the reports of the various countries’ unsympathetic reception of some disarmament proposal. What link, what nexus is there between his mind and these items of news? Practically none, unless we call fear a nexus. He may be afraid for his money, his property, still more afraid of being personally dragged into some disastrous consequence of the mismanagement of the powers that be.