I am personally against mandatory conscription and find that our National Service policies are not beneficial to the average Singaporean.
I just want to share a letter from 1917 from someone who was also against the plans to make National Service mandatory in the US back then. How relevant do you think his opinions are 95 years later?
The full letter can be viewed here but here are some relevant extracts:
Is It Democratic?
Most boys at the age of military service are working for their families and helping to support families. Is it as hard on rich men’s sons? It certainly is not.
Is it democratic to force men who opposed this war, and who do not believe in war, to go out and fight?
Conscription will forcibly drive into the trenches boys of unformed minds, boys too young to vote, or draw a will, but yet presumed by this bill to be old enough to decide the awful questions of life and death and international ethics.
Is It Physically Beneficial?
The flower of our young men will be taken, and those who are not killed and maimed will be in no need of physical training.
Is It Necessary?
Ninety-eight percent of the men in the Union Army, during our Civil War, were volunteers. There were more volunteers for the Spanish American war than we could use.
England raised an army of more than 3 million volunteers, and could have raised a million more. Conscription was a political trick — not a military necessity
Canada has repeatedly rejected conscription, although in the third year of the war.
Australia has rejected conscription, the Australian soldiers in the trenches overwhelmingly against it.
What Conscription Does.
Conscription not only drills men’s bodies, but their minds. It makes them obedient to authority, whether right or wrong; takes away their power to think originally; makes them expert with guns, and therefore, eager to use them; and gives them a hatred of independent thought and contempt for human life.
….
Conscription accustoms a whole nation to the thought of war. Men who have had their military training carry the belligerent impulse and the blind respect for authority back to their homes, until the whole nation is permeated with it. It is not only in military affairs that this psychology is fostered, but also in politics, in industry — even in education, as we so clearly see in the social organization of Prussia.
Mike
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