The Draft

The nature of the draft.

The draft has no constitutional basis whatever, not that anyone cares.

Most will just lie, anyway.

It has never been used in America to repel invasion, defend liberty, defend our national existence, defend the existence of our free government, or the physical liberty, much less the physical existence, of our people.

Americans refusing the draft have never put any of these things at risk.

Draft resistance is typically organized and led by people opposed to the uses to which draft-supported forces will be put.

Like Debs.

Like this.

Or like Daniel Webster, above.

In some cases this has included open or surreptitious involvement by nations or others against whom those forces will be used.

This plays nicely into propaganda for suppression and punishment of resistance, or for condemnation long after all those involved are dead.

But the mass of draft resisters generally just want no part of military service, and certainly not for the ends or in the conflicts contemplated, though they may have no sympathy for the politics of the leaders of resistance or of those against whom forces are arrayed.

I say this from personal experience of the Vietnam years.

PS

Equally unconstitutional, the draft is the more striking a sin against liberty as the servitude involved is stripped of the veneer of military honor.

Think of that when liberals propose to draft the young into foreign or domestic work for the poor, as they do from time to time.

And might this have any bearing on our own time?

ISIS?

"The war on terror"?

Ebola?

PPS

America's response to Pearl Harbor was more extravagant, absurd, vainglorious, and unnecessary, in the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, than its response to 9/11.

We entered World War Two because by December, 1941, Roosevelt and most of the American elites were just itching for it.

Be glad he had the sense to let Russians do most of the dying for a war whose most notable effects were to pass half of Europe into the hands of communism and impose terms on Germany far more draconian than anything Versailles did to that country, or even Clemenceau wanted to do.

Update, 12062014.

Webster's own piece convinced me he is wrong, though it is highly questionable the Founders or the Framers would not have been aghast, had it occurred to them what they had done.

Article I, Section 8, clause 18.

The Founders Constitution

On the other hand, the argument that the draft is slavery and so prohibited by the 13th Amendment would be more convincing if it were not freighted with so much irony.