Conscription Equals Slavery (p224-p225)

(Setting:  Jefferson debates the Head Honcho about the morality of drafting citizens into service for their country.)

"Why do people hate being forced into military service? Don't they love their country? Why do they lap up the Insurrectionist’s subversive rhetoric and risk their lives to dodge the draft?"

Jefferson smiled coyly. "Perhaps it’s because they understand why Hemingway said, 'the first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war'. In Virginia, the draft was considered the most severe of all oppressions and was the most unpopular thing ever attempted. The evils encompassing the life of man are sufficiently numerous. Why add to these evils by pressing men forcibly to destroy one another?"

"But it's everyone’s duty to defend my country!"

"Protagoras said, 'Man is the measure of all things'. He didn’t mean Man's government was the measure. The first and only duty of every citizen is to protect the life and liberty of himself, his family, and his community. As citizens, we must energetically defend against every hostile agent. When our own government is the hostile agent, resistance is a moral response. If someone threatens to enslave or kill me, what difference does it make if he is a king or a common man, my countryman or my enemy, an individual villain or an army of them? The most grievous hostility is the impressment of citizens through the draft. We must sacrifice our last dollar and drop of blood to shed that badge of slavery."

"How can a state function if it can’t forcibly harness its citizens?" the Honcho challenged. "If they object to being forced to die for the state, perhaps they could substitute a few years of national service toward a more peaceful objective."

"If a state can only function by forcibly impressing its citizens, the question is not how can this state function, but rather, why should it be permitted to function? Nothing will so quickly divest us of liberty as giving the state a perpetual right to our services. This would annihilate the blessings of existence, and contradict the nature of life itself, which was given for happiness and not for wretchedness and subjugation. To substitute mandatory national service for the military draft is tantamount to slavery, and this concept would soon expand to include not only two years of everyone's lives, but their entire existence as well. As Cicero put it, 'slavery is the worst of all evils--to be repelled, if need be, not only by war, but even by death.' Repelling slavery includes resistance to your government’s unholy policies of the draft and national service. The draft evaders are not answerable to your god or your ism, and they should not submit to enslaving themselves or destroying their fellow man at the behest of tyrants in Washington."