War Party Bullshit in a boring news lull

Steve M

There are two strands in the piece quoted from the LA Times that are regularly brought forward as excuses for a military draft, a strand of unshared sacrifice and a strand of multigenerationalism.

If multigenerationalism is a problem in the military why is it not also a problem among office holders (Clintons, Bushes, Kennedys, Tafts, Rockefellers, and so on), among the police and other forces of order, in the fire departments, in the medical and legal professions, among high iron workers, coal miners, the cod fishermen of New England, auto workers, and so on?

And in any case wherever it really is a problem the obvious solution is simply to prohibit it, refusing to accept service from those with too many ancestors or family members who were or are in service.

But that is a solution no one has ever suggested, or ever will suggest.

If unshared sacrifice is a problem at all why is it not so among policemen and the forces of order, fire department workers, park rangers and others who cope with massive forest and brush fires, high iron workers, coal miners, and many others in dangerous occupations?

But in any case is it a problem we must solve by rejecting willing volunteers who want the job and aspire to do it well, staffing these vocations instead with resentful forced labor not much interested in the work and perhaps little more than minimally capable of it?

And how, exactly, is military servitude less constitutionally, morally, politically, or otherwise objectionable than forced labor of any other sort, even including chattel slavery?

And in any case the claim that a massive military, notably bigger than the current forces and easily expanded quite quickly, would bring about a less bellicose and interventionist foreign policy than reliance on volunteer forces as small as we can make them is a laughable, cynical, barefaced imposture.

This is all just part of the glut of regularly scheduled propaganda to which the nation is subjected to keep us all suitably softened up for outrages by government, like the claim that earned benefits programs are an increasingly insupportable and unfair burden on the backs of the ordinary young working people of America.

Ballocks.

Yeh’s shocking, parade-ground horseshit, obviously modeled on Hitler’s decades of yelling to the German people that they had been stabbed in the back by civilians in 1918, is so outrageous he must have been kidding, unless he was on drugs or is literally insane.

Blah.

Streiff’s remarks are just stupid and mean.

Some liberals sometimes quote such garbage as Streiff’s and Yeh’s as part of another argument for the draft that reliance on volunteer forces, and then actually making those volunteers do what they volunteered for, turns the volunteer military into a cesspool of lunacy prohibitively dangerous to democracy.

Just more bullshit.