Put beer into drop tanks on Spitfires
https://planehistoria.com/flying-pubs-spitfires-flew-beer-to...
Oh god. Yeah just follow the path of the 9 x 16" gun salvos from Rodney blowing big-ass holes in the ground, you can't miss it. LOL. Now those are some directions!
"Alpine Lake Keg Drop".
It is called forced labour or slavery.
Conscription is as old as society itself.
Being paid some amount of money doesn't magically make it not slavery. Obvious counterpoint: what if a plantation owner "paid" each slave a single modern-day penny a year, would that make it okay?
> and could be expected to be discharged at the cessation of hostilities
Being let go when you're no longer needed doesn't stop it being slavery either. Would you no longer be a slave if the plantation owner released you after the harvest season? You'd just be re-captured for the next harvest, of course - either by the same owner or a different one.
> Conscription is as old as society itself.
So is slavery. That doesn't make it okay.
Definitions of forced labour, like the ILO Forced Labour Convention of 1930 for example, have to explicitly include "by the way, it's totally okay if it is done as part of mandatory military service" clauses for a reason.
There are obviously differences between traditional slavery and conscription, but conscription is still way closer to forced labour than it is to consensual service. Just look at what happens when you try to leave, for one!
I think it's important to acknowledge that conscription is a violation of human rights, and absolutely a violation of human autonomy and dignity.
The reason it exists is because historically, the primary source of military power has been the number of armed humans you can put on the battlefield. That's much less true now, but even in WWII the technology wasn't yet up to that point.
And while the US did not end up being materially at risk in WWII (aside from some very small exceptions like Pearl Harbor), that was not a guarantee going in. The Nazis were hellbent on wiping out all opposition to them, and the fear that, if Europe was lost, they would cross the ocean to attack us was not at all crazy. Furthermore, our allies absolutely were under existential threat—and in such a situation, it's frankly irresponsible of a nation not to use conscription if that's actually likely to make a difference.
Either saying "conscription is slavery, therefore it is never justifiable" or "conscription is nothing like slavery, soldiers get treated well" ignores enough of the truth that they're misleading at best. Sometimes you really do have to deal with nuance.
Germany introduced law, your are required to notify ministry and get permission, of you leave country for couple of weeks.
Ukraine closed border for men in like 10 seconds.
Desertion has, historically, been a capital crime. Trying to paint conscription as not being a kind of captivity because "you're not legally obligated to stay in your country" is at best wildly disingenuous, and at worst just flat-out wrong.
I think you might need to take quite a bit more time to consider this issue, lest you prove your username much truer than you probably want.
And it remained so for the US in WW2, although the sentence was carried out just once.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Slovik
Major General Norman "Dutch" Cota, who was at the execution, called it "the toughest 15 minutes of his life". For context, Cota was also present at the bloodbath on Omaha Beach, where he famously rallied troops.
Sorry for the edits confusing things. I can see earlier how you thought I meant desertion as opposed to emigration.
Dismissing the loss of freedom inherent in conscription by saying you can avoid it by abandoning your entire life, leaving your country, your job, probably your family behind...even if you do have both the money and a legal path to immigrate somewhere else, which, again, most people do not, that's hardly a reasonable alternative.
In war, people who tolerate military conscription and discipline will conquer those who're slaves to pigheaded "you're not the boss of ME!" individualism.
It'd be nice if humans would voluntarily abandon war someday. But a corollary of the First Commandment is to face facts.
Sure, right up until it leads to fragging. During the Vietnam War about a thousand superiors were killed by their subjects. You can't give someone weapons, try to force them into a suicidal mission, and not expect them to use it to stop the mission. Give someone only a hammer and everything looks like a nail...
Most of this sub thread people who are unwilling to say "yeah it's forced labor and that's fine considering the details" doing mental gymnastics to make it not forced.
Many historians now concede that there is little to no meaningful difference between various forms of feudal servitude and slavery.
Slaves in the later Roman Empire also had certain rights, including the right to buy their own freedom in many cases. That doesn’t mean they weren’t slaves.
A draft is by definition forced labor and a form of slavery. If you are drafted, you are being forced to do something you did not volunteer for.
If enough people volunteered there would be no need for a draft in the first place.
People can argue whether they think its "correct" or not all day, its still forced labor.
A draft is by definition forced labor either way - because if enough people volunteered there would be no need for a draft in the first place.
But usually it doesn't matter either way. Either the people believe in their own government/territory and see it as worth defending, or alternatively they don't believe in it, but their government is authoritarian and will force you at risk of punishment or death into being drafted.
In both cases a draft is still forced labor for those who did not volunteer to participate.
That's a pretty binary view of the situation. It's not enough for something to be worth defending: People have to recognize that it's worth defending — and that might not happen instantaneously, because "people" come to appreciate things at very different rates.
Thinking you can defend a country just via volunteers is like thinking you can pay for a country just via charity, we vote to tax everyone for a reason. And people do that voluntarily afterwards, they are fine paying taxes as long as everyone is required to pay, same with defending the country.
Today’s average Western nation-state tends to be a rathole that spits into the faces of its citizens every single day, until the moment the state is under attack, at which point everyone is told that they owe their lives to their sacred motherland that has done so much for them.