Think Again

There’s a season for it–the thinkpieces, the brave suggestions, the crawling out to the edge of the limb and saying, yes, I have the answer, we should force America’s youth to come together and serve in some collective cause.

In spite of the right’s fondness for military service and such pageantry, it’s usually the left or the more accurately, the muddy, authoritarian center that suggest this kind of thing. Progressives worry over wars, but they don’t worry enough over the civilian casualties in other countries, or the blowback in America. Sometimes they become overly concerned, instead about how poor people join the military, and rich, privileged people don’t. Sometimes they even pull up an extra deep argument, dust the dirt off of it, and say, gee, maybe the draft can stop wars! Charlie Rangel spent decades in congress trying to bring back conscription for that very reason.--LS

Rather than make it mandatory that every young person in the country be subjected to service in order to perpetuate Empire and fight the ruling classes' wars, I'd rather those same youths join the struggle to destroy oligarchy and the perpetual wars it thrives on.

They won't, but neither would many accept the service mandate with the joy and acquiescence people imagine.

The notion that America's wars of aggression would come to a screeching halt if everybody had to serve is an example of the muddled thinking that gave us Trump and Clinton in the first place--a pair of neocons hell bent on imperial expansion and regime change wherever their puppet masters deem it necessary.

That one of these pols is deemed more reckless than the other in our shallow discourse is hardly the point. The road to catastrophe is well-marked, and the two-way power struggle at the top between corporate Democrats and Republican fools is the truly frightening reality.

The method of ruination employed by the two-headed monster is merely a sideshow--a fast versus a slower burn, with the current head of state, Trump, the leading arsonist.

One guarantee of mandatory service would emerge sooner than not, however.  The jails the U.S. oversees at home and throughout the world would be bulging with newly minted "traitors" and "seditionists" in a new and improved description of  "terrorism" (meaning against corporate interests).

If you are skeptical that such would happen rather than a sudden breakout of war resistance, think again while you still have ability to do so.


TS