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None of the things you mentioned involve those people having to give up their exceedingly comfortable lives. Caring or doing anything about those issues causes you to lose your job, family and entire social life - and if you have any responsibilities or dependents, that means you aren't going to be doing anything to mess up your ability to put food on the table, nor are you going to spend countless hours researching obscure political stories that are heavily suppressed by major respectable institutions. Throw in the trends towards social alienation, isolation, bowling alone etc
Conscription isn't like that. Conscription actively steps into people's lives and completely destroys the comfortable existences they thought they had. In a healthy society where people have real attachments to the nation, trust in its leaders and an understanding that their loyalty to it will be rewarded, this won't be a big problem. But for vast swathes of modern western populations this just isn't the case. Social trust and cohesion are in the toilet, nobody has kids they want to fight for, huge numbers of men don't even have girlfriends to miss and there's even a growing contingent of men who actively despise women and wouldn't want to fight for them at all. Speaking for myself personally I'd rather frag my commanding officer before I even got out of basic training than go die in the Middle East for Israel or in Ukraine for nothing. I don't think I'm alone, and I believe my life is worth preserving (from my perspective, not universally) - when you look at how many people are miserable, lonely and depressed I really don't see conscription working out at all.
I’m reminded of the red tribe boomers who keep telling me that the next war needs to have a draft- they young men they care about are going anyways, why shouldn’t the others be forced to fight?
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I’m always suspicious of the “yeah I wouldn’t have fallen for it”, take. Okay, yeah, if I was there it wouldn’t have gone down the way it did etc etc.
If the powers that be wanted you to die for Ukraine or Israel you would do so with a smile on your face. The only question is what story to tell and what buttons to push to get you to do it.
No offense.
What an incredibly rude and insulting statement - I actually did take offence. I don't post many details about my personal life here, but I am actually the sort of incredibly contrarian person who wouldn't have fallen for it - which isn't necessarily always a positive thing and has caused me issues in my life before (I have self diagnosed myself with ODD in the past). Besides, the powers that be DO want me to die for Ukraine or Israel - and they haven't succeeded so far. Please don't project your own personal failings and moral weakness onto others.
Well I do apologize (sincerely) for the rudeness, that’s never my intention. But I do think people often feel that propaganda doesn’t work on them even though it would, or even though they don’t notice it already doing so.
Thank you. And you're perfectly right when you say that people often feel that propaganda doesn't work on them, but I think you're overestimating the effectiveness of it by far. Propaganda isn't going to turn someone like me who goes out to protests in support of the Palestinian cause into someone willing to go bleed out in the sand to protect Israel, but it doesn't need to do that to be effective. It has a bigger impact in the way that it shapes the issues that I focus on - I haven't been paying attention to all manner of low-level corruption scandals in my home country even though they ultimately have a larger impact on my life than what's happening in Ukraine or Israel.
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The trick is to be less susceptible to the stories and the buttons than the modal citizen. It's like that parable about running away from the bear.
Russia is more unconstrained than most Western states and it not only allowed a lot of people to flee, its general tactic is to cultivate apathy in large parts of the citizenry.
Yes, there's nowhere to hide from the modern state so you may get a gun shoved in your hand and sent to war. But happy about it? Meh.
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Based on what I've seen on the Internet, the nations that employ conscription despite the lack of people's attachment to the nation typically fight that by shipping you to active combat before they give you weapons.
Any military where the basic troops are only given their weapons for the first time in active combat is so incompetently run that fighting to the death against the conscription officers in my own home would give me better odds. Being shipped to the front line and given your weapon only when you get there is a death sentence in a modern battlefield and if that's the strategy we have already lost.
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