SCHOLAR ISLAND

"The Romans, who understood and respected the rights of war better than any nation in the world, carried their scruples so far in this respect that no citizen was allowed to serve as a volunteer without enlisting expressly against the enemy, and by name against a certain enemy."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"One of the amusing by-products of war is its pricking of the fundamental democratic delusion. For years Homo boobus stalks the earth vaingloriously, flapping his wings over his God-given rights, his inalienable freedom, his sublime equality to his masters. Then of a sudden he is thrust into a training camp and discovers that he is a slave, after all-that even his life is not his own."

H.L. Mencken

Minority Report

"You receive a mobilization order. An agency, an office that you don't know, writes go here, go there, go to your death, to your ruin, go, so that you lose a leg, so that you get a bullet in your spine. Be careful, my boy, there will be gas, poison gas, mustard gas; swallow some. And you'll soon notice it may cost your head, your leg, your lungs, your life, and no one will ever replace them, since your mother gave all that to you just once. And you've been expecting it for a long time. During peacetime you prepared yourself for it, in the midst of your Kant and Plato. And you-don't question. You don't question, you go, you obey. The agency that issues the orders is more than God. You listen, more than to God....."

(Here is the voice of Alfred Doblin, a German who served in the Kaiser's army in the First World War. He speaks through Becker, a character in his novel A People Betrayed)

"Draft registration is preparation for war. To sign a registration card is to sign a promise-a promise to the United States government that it may take your body at any time, for any war it may see fit."

Draft Resister Russ Ford 

Book: "Ain't Gonna Study War No More" by Milton Meltzer

"The compelling motive for refusing to comply with the draft act is my uncompromising opposition to the principle of conscription of life by the State for any purpose whatever, in time of war or peace. I not only refuse to obey the present conscription law, but I would in future refuse to obey any similar statute which attempts to direct my choice of service and ideals. I regard the principle of conscription of life as a flat contradiction of all our cherished ideas of individual freedom, democratic liberty and Christian teaching. I am the more opposed to the present act because it is for the purpose of conducting war. I am opposed to this and all other wars. I do not believe in the use of physical force as a method of achieving any end, however good."

Roger Baldwin (A speech to the court in 1918 a Harvard Graduate opposed the draft as director of the American Union Against Militarism and then of its successor organization, the National Civil Liberties Bureau. In 1918, twelve days before the armistice that would end the war, he was sentenced to a year in federal prison)

Milton Meltzer

Ain't Gonna Study War No More

"It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.....Law never made men a whit more just; and , by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers....marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart."

                                      Henry David Thoreau

"A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the head of man."

Daniel Webster (speech in the House of Reps Jan 14,1914)

"From this moment until our enemies shall have been driven from the territory of the Republic, all Frenchmen are permanently requisitioned for service in the armies. The young men shall fight; the married men shall forge weapons and transport supplies; the women will make clothes and serve in the hospitals; the children will make up old linen into lint; the old men will have themselves carried into the public squares to rouse the courage of the fighting men, to preach the unity of the Republic and hatred against Kings."

French revolutionary Convention decree Aug 1793

"A recruiting officer, bearing a flag and attended by a band of martial music, paraded the streets, to excite a thirst for glory and a spirit of military ambition. The recruiting officer possessed the qualifications requisite to make the service appear alluring, especially to the young. He was a jovial, good-natured fellow, of ready wit and much broad humor. Crowds followed in his wake when he marched the streets; and he occasionally stopped at the corners to harangue the multitude in order to excite their patriotism and zeal for the cause of liberty. When he espied any large boys among the idle crowd around him, he would attract their attention by singing in a comical manner the following doggerel:

All you that have bad masters,

And cannot get your due;

Come, come, my brave boys,

And join with our ship's crew.

( a report by Ebenezer Fox on the enlistment of youth in Revolutionary America)

"The Rascally Stupidity which now prevails in the Country at large is beyond all description....I despise my Countrymen, I wish I could say I was not born in America. I once gloried in it but am now ashamed of it....I am in Rags, have lain in the Rain on the Ground for 48 hours past, and only a junk of fresh Beef and that without Salt to dine on this day, recd no pay since last December, Constitution complaining, and all this for my Cowardly Countrymen who flinch at the very time when their Exertions are wanted, and hold their Purse Strings as tho' they would Damn the World, rather than part with a Dollar to their Army."

Lt. Col. Ebenezer Huntington (1780)

"In the autumn of 1714 Peter ordered all noblemen between ages of ten and thirty to appear in the course of the winter and register themselves at the Senate. This order was accompanied with the promise that whosoever denounced an absentee would receive all his wealth and estates, even if the informer was the nobleman’s own serf. An ukaze of January 11,1722, goes even further: a defaulter was ‘degraded’ or suffered ‘political death’; he was excluded from the society of honest men and declared an outlaw; he could be robbed, wounded, or killed with impunity. The public executioner affixed his name to the gallows in the market place, to the rolling of drums, so that ‘the public learn that this man disobeyed an ukaze and is traitor’. Whosoever apprehended a defaulter and turned him in was to receive half his possessions, movable and immovable, even if he were the defaulter’s own serf.

These severe measures were unsuccessful. Pososhkov, in an essay on ‘Poverty and Wealth’ written during the last years of Peter’s reign, vividly describes the deceptions and expedients indulged in by the nobility in order to evade service. On the eve of a military campaign both the metropolitan nobility and the courtiers would clutch hold of some ‘trumped-up business’ or insignificant police mission, under cover of which they spent the rest of the war living on their estates. The vast number of new commissaries and high officials helped the nobility in their subterfuges."

Vasili Klyuchevsky

Peter The Great

"What I shall tell you will greatly surprise you. Until quite recently we in Europe could assume that personal war resistance constituted an effective attack on militarism. Today we face an altogether different situation. In the heart of Europe lies a power, Germany, that is obviously pushing towards war with all available means…..Imagine Belgium occupied by present-day Germany! Things would be far worse than in 1914, and they were bad enough even then. Hence I must tell you candidly: were I a Belgian, I should not, in the present circumstances, refuse military service; rather, I should enter such service cheerfully in the belief that I would thereby be helping to save European Civilization. This does not mean that I am surrendering the principle for which I have stood heretofore. I have no greater hope than that the time may not be far off when refusal of military service will once again be an effective method of serving the cause of human progress."

Einstein (letter to a young pacifist 1933)

"One of the Directory’s final legacies had been the Conscription Act of 1798, an act which, in its essentials, remained the basis of the French army’s recruiting until the disasters of 1870. Its chief feature was its combination of volunteering with conscription, now simply an efficient form of crimping. "Every Frenchman is a soldier and owes himself to the defense of the Fatherland," the law began. It then added that no true patriot would hire a substitute. Though the Directors fixed a quota of 200,000 unmarried men between twenty and twenty-one, they never succeeded in procuring more than 37,000. They were afraid to apply the law in the Vendee; desertions, false marriages, and self-mutilation continued in spite of threats and punishments. Though Napoleon was to boast that he could afford to lose 30,000 men a month, he never seems to have procured more than 100,000 men annually within the boundaries of the old French monarchy

As always the burden fell most heavily on the peasants, who had to learn to fight by fighting, in an army which at least now offered them a chance for advancement…..

The Age of the great Captains

"OPERATION FUGITIVE" is what the Russian military prosecutor’s office calls its new effort to track down deserters. It is believed there are more than 5,000 deserters in the North Caucasian Military District alone. Meanwhile, more than 6,000 Army deserters surrendered to authorities in the first half of 1998, under promise of leniency for those who turn themselves in. In the southern Siberian Altai region, 182 deserters gave up, citing brutal treatment and poor conditions as the reasons they bugged out.

 "No one shall be held in slavery or servitude..."

-Article 4, Universal Declaration of Human Rights