This, however, leads to the third and last of the issues we are trying
to explore: the true nature of conscription, of modern war, and of
the conscripting, war-making State—and the attitude which pacifists
consequently should take toward them.
Participation in alternative service is quite often defended on the
ground that our opposition is to war rather than conscription; except
in the matter of war we are as ready to serve the nation as anybody;
therefore, as long as we are not drafted for combat or forced against
our will into the armed services, we are ready to render whatever service
of a civilian character may be imposed upon us.
Is this a sound position? Let me emphasize that it is conscription for
war under the conditions of the second half of the twentieth century that
we are talking about. The question as to whether sometime and under some
circumstances we might accept conscription for some conceivable purpose
not related to war, is not here at stake. It is academic and irrelevant.
The question with which we are dealing is that of conscripting youth in
and for modern war.
As pacifists we are opposed to all war. Even if recruitment were entirely
on a voluntary basis, we would be opposed. It seems to me we might
infer from this that we should be _a fortiori_ opposed to military
conscription, for here in addition to the factor of war itself, the
element of coercion by government enters in, coercion which places young
boys in a military regime where they are deprived of freedom of choice
in virtually all essential matters. They may not have the slightest
interest in the war, yet they are made to kill by order. This is surely a
fundamental violation of the human spirit which must cause the pacifist
to shudder.
The reply is sometimes made that pacifists are _not_ being conscripted
for military purposes and therefore—presumably—_they_ are not faced
with the issue of the nature of military conscription. I shall later
contend that it is not really possible to separate conscription and war,
as I think this argument does. Here I wish to suggest that even if the
question is the conscription of non-pacifist youth, it is a fundamental
mistake for pacifists ever to relent in their opposition to this evil,
ever to devote their energies primarily to securing provisions for COs
in a draft law or to lapse into a feeling that conscription has somehow
become more palatable if such provisions are made by the State. It is
not our own children if we are pacifist parents, our fellow-pacifist
Christians if we are churchmen, about whom we should be most deeply
concerned. In the first place, that is a narrow and perhaps self-centered
attitude. In the second place, pacifist youths have some inner resources
for meeting the issue under discussion. The terrible thing which we
should never lose sight of, to which we should never reconcile our
spirits, is that the great mass of 18-year-olds are drafted for war. They
are given no choice. Few are at the stage of development where they are
capable of making fully rational and responsible choice. Thus the fathers
immolate the sons, the older generation immolates the younger, on the
altar of Moloch. What God centuries ago forbade Abraham to do even to his
own son—“Lay not thy hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything unto
him”—this we do by decree to the entire youth of a nation.
We need to ask ourselves whether such conscription is in any real sense
a lesser evil. As we have already said, the pacifist is opposed to war
and we have all sensed the danger of arguing against conscription _on the
ground that_ the nation could raise all the troops it needed by voluntary
enlistment. Nevertheless, there is a point to an impassioned argument
which George Bernanos makes in the book we mentioned at the outset.
He states that the man created by western or Christian civilization
“disappeared in the day conscription became law ... the principle is a
totalitarian principle if ever there was one—so much so that you could
deduce the whole system from it, as you can deduce the whole of geometry
from the propositions of Euclid.”
To the question as to whether France, the Fatherland, should not be
defended if in peril, he has the Fatherland answer: “I very much doubt
whether my salvation requires such monstrous behavior” as defense by
modern war methods. If men wanted to die on behalf of the Fatherland,
moreover, that would be one thing but “making a clean sweep, with one
scoop of the hand, of an entire male population” is another matter
altogether: “You tell me that, in saving me, they save themselves. Yes,
if they can remain free; no, if they allow you to destroy, by this
unheard of measure, the national covenant. For as soon as you have, by
simple decree, created millions of French soldiers, it will be held as
proven that you have sovereign rights over the persons and the goods of
every Frenchman, that there are no rights higher than yours and where,
then, will your usurpations stop? Won’t you presently presume to decide
what is just and what is unjust, what is Evil and what is Good?”
It is pretty certainly an oversimplification to suggest, as Bernanos
here does, that the entire totalitarian, mechanized “system” under
which men today live or into which they are increasingly drawn even in
countries where a semblance of freedom and spontaneity remains, can be
traced to its source in the military conscription which was instituted
by the French Revolution in the eighteenth century. But what cannot,
it seems to me, be successfully denied is that today totalitarianism,
depersonalization, conscription, war, and the conscripting, war-making
power-state are inextricably linked together. They constitute a whole,
a “system.” It is a disease, a creeping paralysis, which affects
all nations, on both sides of the global conflict. Revolution and
counter-revolution, “peoples’ democracies” and “western democracies,” the
“peace-loving” nations on both sides in the war, are cast in this mold of
conformity, mechanization and violence. This is the Beast which, in the
language of the Apocalypse, is seeking to usurp the place of the Lamb.
We know that “war will stop at nothing” and we are clear that as
pacifists we can have nothing to do with it. But I do not think that it
is possible to distinguish between war and conscription, to say that the
former is and the latter is not an instrument or mark of the Beast.