Conscription Quotes

“Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome.

The better and more realistic test would therefore seem to be: In what cause, or on what principle, would you risk your life?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. The was the "war to end wars." This was the "war to make the world safe for democracy." No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason. No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United State patents. They were just told it was to be a "glorious adventure".

Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month!

All that they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill...and be killed”
― Smedley D. Butler, War Is a Racket

“The principle of compulsory service, embodied in the system of conscription, lias been the means by which modem dictators and military gangs have shackled their people after a coup d'état, and bound them to their own aggressive purposes. In view of the great service that conscription has rendered to tyranny and war, it is fundamentally shortsighted for any liberty-loving and peace-desiring peoples to maintain it as an imagined safeguard, lest they become the victims of the monster they have helped to preserve.”
― B.H. Liddell Hart, The Revolution in Warfare.

“... I, as an anarch, renouncing any bond, any limitation of freedom, also reject compulsory education as nonsense. It was one of the greatest well-springs of misfortune in the world.

Compulsory schooling is essentially a means of curtailing natural strength and exploiting people. The same is true of military conscription, which developed within the same context. The anarch rejects both of them - just like obligatory vaccination and insurance of all kinds. He has reservations when swearing an oath. He is not a deserter, but a conscientious objector.”
― Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil

“In 1870, came the victory of the short-service troops of Prussia over the long-service troops of France, where conscription had but recently been reintroduced in a partial form and as a supplementary measure. That obvious contrast carried more weight into the world than all the other factors which tilted the scales against France. As a result, universal peace-time conscription was adopted by almost all countries as the basis of their military system. This ensured that wars would grow bigger in scale, longer in duration, and worse in effects. While conscription appeared democratic, it provided autocrats, hereditary or revolutionary, with more effective and comprehensive means of imposing their will, both in peace and war. Once the rulp of compulsory service in arms was established for the young men of a nation, it was an obvious and easy transition to the servitude of the whole population. Totalitarian tyranny is the twin of total warfare—which might aptly be termed a reversion to tribal warfare on a larger scale.”
― B.H. Liddell Hart, The Revolution in Warfare.

“It doesn't take an army to change the world, or an average-sized militia group, either. All it takes is one individual to say the word "No". Be it a man refusing to register for the draft, or be it a gun owner refusing to register his weapons in Connecticut, it is the same: defiance in the face of arbitrary authority.”
― Mike Klepper

“Universal peace-time conscription was adopted by almost all countries as the basis of their military system. This ensured that wars would grow bigger in scale, longer in duration, and worse in effects. While conscription appeared democratic, it provided autocrats, hereditary or revolutionary, with more effective and comprehensive means of imposing their will, both in peace and war. Once the rule of compulsory service in arms was established for the young men of a nation, it was an obvious and easy transition to the servitude of the whole population. Totalitarian tyranny is the twin of total warfare —which might aptly be termed a reversion to tribal warfare on a larger scale.”
― Liddell Hart

“A constituição diz que todas as pessoas, homens e mulheres, têm o direito inalienável de prestar o serviço e assumir a cidadania plena... Mas o fato é que está ficando difícil achar algo pra todos os voluntários fazerem que não seja apenas uma forma disfarçada de descascar batatas.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

“If only one country adopts conscription it automatically forces the rest of the world to imitate its practice. The "abyss calls to the abyss." The United States has been so forced, against her best tradition, to adopt conscription and so becomes a victim of circumstances. Yet, though the majority dislike conscription, still the majority recognize it as a grim necessity of these times.”
― Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Menace of The Herd: Or, Procrustes at Large

“Not necessarily conscription but conscription if necessary.”
― William Lyon Mackenize King

“Consider the fact that universal suffrage has always accompanied conscription. All through the days of kingship, it is true that men could not vote, but neither could they be pressed into service. I say to a peasant: You may now govern your fellows and yourself, like the aristocrat of old, but you must therefore also fight, like the aristocrat of old. And before long the deception becomes clear: I allow him to fight and to die, like the aristocrat of old—but he dies wondering whether or not he ever really got to govern himself, much less anyone else.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“What history touches the woman in the rice paddy driving her water buffalo ahead of her plow while her husband is off somewhere, most likely a conscript, carrying a weapon?”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

“A Dmitrist rejects all forms of governance, all forms of taxation and all forms of conscription. He must never fall to these temptations as they spell the doom of all civilized societies who adopt them.”
― Dmitri Brooksfield, The Tenets of Dmitrism

“Conscription has no place in the land of the free.”
― Mike Klepper