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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26566 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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That's probably it, but it could be a lack of national cohesion/patriotism resulting in recruitment failures.

Moving to a non-volunteer armed forces is a bad move. I can see if they'd like to give young people a taste of the military in the reserves for a year, hopefully encouraging them to enlist formally in the regulars, but still.

Also the way this national service was formulated allows children of the rich conscientious objectors the opportunity to do non-military civil service instead which kind of defeats the purpose (except for red meat for the boomers like you say). Also it seems the civil service option seems to be only one weekend a month for the year, while the military option is a year full time? Great incentives there.

The Finnish non-military civil service option is pretty rare (about 7 % of males in each age-class choose it, another 20 % get deferments or are released from service due to health issues) and not particularly oriented towards the children of the rich, if anything there's probably fair amount of pressure in traditional bourg families to go to the military and not be an unmanly hippie. Then again, due to history, conscription is a part of Finnish culture in ways that would be unlikely to be achieved in UK even if there were decades of conscription.

Finland is one of the few western countries that maintains a functional conscription system. That said, I would venture that they aren't multicultural in the way that the UK is and that national cohesion is probably higher due to less diversity.

Phrased another way, I don't think fresh immigrants are as willing to fight for the defense of a nation. It's 'military as a job for the state' vs 'defending the homeland'. This isn't a clear cut divide, because clearly most people (including legacy citizens) join the military for the paycheck, but I can't see many recent migrants hanging around if there was a Battle of Britain 2. On top of that, many UK immigrants come from backgrounds where the military is a low status, working class career.

One of the precise arguments for conscription locally is that the option is, indeed, "military as a job for the state". In Finnish that's referred to as "palkka-armeija" ("wage army"), with a strong undertone of a "mercenary army".

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