Draft Dodgers: Traitors?

[Victor Galis]

"Victor my lad, you'd best read my whole post, and try to understand it, instead of cutting it up."

-Why? An argument built up with faulty parts may look sound, but it crumbles quickly when given a light push in the right places.

"There may come a time (fairly soon, it seems) when NOWHERE will be safe."

-Really?

"I've been working for over 20 years and spent 6 years at the university. What do you base your opinion on?"

-The type of person I am. Personal prefference.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Victor Galis
"I've been working for over 20 years and spent 6 years at the university. What do you base your opinion on?"

-The type of person I am. Personal prefference.

Well, alrighty then.

[Victor Galis]

Yeah, being a more academic type myself.

[Shi Huangdi]

Depends on the reason. If you dodge because you are morally opposed to the war, fine. If you dodge because there is pressing stuff to attend to at home, like needing to work to care for a sick relative, fine. If you dodge because you are a wuss, that isn't fine.

[Chris 62]

Vic, remember what I said at FFZ?

Cutting and pasting is a waste, people will beleve what you say or not, taking out of context kills nothing.

Also what I said both times is sound, take it or leave it.

[SlowwHand]

Originally posted by MasterBob The Elder
Some of those cowards that you would shoot, however, finance your war by donating millions, you could shoot them, but then you would have to fight without adequate supplies.

That's the first silly thing I remember seeing you post.

[SlowwHand]

Originally posted by Sikander


I've been working for over 20 years and spent 6 years at the university. What do you base your opinion on?

Six years at the University? Well hell, forget it. We have the authority here.

[Victor Galis]

"Cutting and pasting is a waste, people will beleve what you say or not, taking out of context kills nothing."

-There is no taking out of context when you take independent paragraphs, and refute them individually. You can't use shaky blocks to build a sound argument, it doesn't work that way.

"Also what I said both times is sound, take it or leave it."

-Then, I'll leave it.

[David Floyd]

I certainly wouldn't fight. I'm not a concientious objector, and I don't believe that concientious objection is any better reason for dodging the draft than anything else. It disgusts me that what under any other situation people call "freedom" is mentioned by those same people as "cowardice" when it comes to the draft.

I would dodge a draft.
I won't volunteer.

Suck it.

I like your style my friend

And the draft is, as was already pointed out but not really addressed, slavery, pure and simple.

I'd like one of you pro-draft people, who go on and on about "defending America" and "defending our freedoms" to point to ONE SINGLE TIME where the United States of America used a draft to defend it's own territory or the freedom of those residing within it. I don't think you can.

First Draft: US Civil War.
However, the United States was not threatened. The draft was used in order to forcibly conquer the Confederate States of America. Sure, the CSA used the draft as well - it was a slightly different situation, but also many governors in the South opposed the draft, and even suspended it in their state at various time, such as Mississippi and North Carolina.

Second Draft: World War 1.
Again, no threat to the United States. The draft was used to save France and the UK from having a negative peace dictated to them by the Germans. Ultimately, the use of the draft by the USA won the war for the Triple Entente and friends, and as a result caused World War 2, and rather than a strong Germany on the Continent opposing Bolshevism and a strong Britain on the British Isles controlling the seas, with several weaker powers scattered around Europe, we had, instead, an artificial Great Power in France, and artificial insignificant power in Germany, a Communist Russia, and Socialism running rampant across Europe, with the culmination of all this being World War 2, Nazism, and eventually the Cold War.

Third Draft: World War 2.
Minor threat to outlying US possessions from Japan. No threat to the US from Germany - sorry guys, Germany never had a big atomic bomb project going on, no matter what you want to believe, and they could never have invaded Britain or held down the USSR in any case, it's a matter of logistics. In Japan's case, they were simply not strong enough to threaten the US in a major way, and all the US really had to do was to build up a navy, concentrate totally on Japan, and a totally volunteer military would have been able to secure all American possessions and force a peace among equals, instead of US troops dying in places like Okinawa, Japanese cities getting nuked and firebombed, and, with the lack of a Japanese counterbalance in Eastern Asia, the rise of Communist China and no power in Asia to counter the USSR.

The draft then continued until the Mid-70s. The two major wars fought in this time, Korea and Vietnam, were not even declared wars, and in any case North Korea and North Vietnam were of no threat to the US.

The argument, then, is that the use of the draft in the United States, while a contributing reason to the huge victories in the two world wars and the conquest of the CSA, was in the long term a negative thing when looked at in a non-military perspective, because it destroyed existing and potential strategic balances of power all over the world, leading to nuclear stalemate and things such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the creation of the State of Israel, and dozens of little wars ranging from Korea and Vietnam to Grenada, Haiti, and Kosovo, none of which should have been fought.

That is one huge reason I would never support a draft, or report for one. The consequences of the draft are morally indefensible, as well as the draft itself being a mechanism to remove basic civil liberties and human rights from all it touches, and is, in any case, totally unsupported by the Constitution of the United States.

[Alexander's Horse]

Re: Draft Dodgers: Traitors?

Originally posted by David Floyd

A little food for thought: In the Civil War, almost 300,000 New Yorkers were drafted. Under 6000 of those actually drafted ended up serving. 40,000 didn't report, and most of the rest either bought or obtained exemptions.

Smart people - do something positive with your life - don't go to war if you can avoid it.

[Sikander]

David,

I'm not for the draft, but I don't agree that the strategic consequences of having one can be extrapolated to being either positive or negative in the way that your last post suggests. The balance of power structure changing after a war and another war happening later proves nothing but that history marches on.

[SlowwHand]

You surely waste a lot of time and space saying you're selfish, scared, and self centered, David.
Work on that, will you ?

[David Floyd]

Sure thing Slowwhand, no problem at all. I'll work on that problem just as soon as you show some progress on your quest NOT to be a ****head to people who disagree with you, and start trying to logically refute their points.

In other words, when hell freezes over.

Sikander, thanks for the relevant post, my response would be that the draft allowed massive US intervention in WW1 (as an example), which allowed a Entente victory, which ensured WW2 and the Holocaust and the rise of communism, all of which helped ensure the Cold War and the current Middle Eastern troubles.

Without a draft, the US couldn't have massively intervened in WW1, and thus Germany would have won the war in the Spring or Summer of 1918 with the success of Operation Hagen, after their four or five initial "probing" attacks went off without a hitch and they were NOT defeated at places such as Belleau Wood and 2nd Marne.

[Zylka]

What type of war are we talking here? Given a massive do or die situation with my own friends and family at high risk, I wouldn't think twice to join up - we're talking world war next door. Yet if we're talking the usual foreign clusterf*ck; ie.) Vietnam, Gulf War, Afghanistan - there is no way in hell I would ever do something so reckless and stupid. Sorry, but my future is worth much more than a faceless beaurecrats' international agenda. There are plenty out there that gladly swallow hot loads of propoganda in the name of "courage" and "valour". Save the dirty-work for some grease monkey high school drop out who doesn't care for the concept of the afterlife.

Death is death. It gets worse when the dying individual has issues with salvation, etc. Given such eternal consequences, how could you ever justify forcing someone to fight in some two-bit conflict which does not directly threaten that individual?

[David Floyd]

to Zylka...he brought up another issue...the draft, from a Christian perspective, causes the death of non-Christians and sends them to hell, hence is also immoral from the perspective.

If you believe in that anyway, as most politicians claim to in the US.