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Germany votes to bring in voluntary military service programme for 18-year-olds

bbc.com

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Re: Germany votes to bring in voluntary military service programme for 18-year-olds

#61

Post by m000 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #31
m000 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here that this probably is only part of a larger society militarization plan. The guaranteed next step is to offer the volunteers a long term paid contract at the end of their term. This would probably be well above what they would be paid elsewhere (young men with no university degree, desperate enough to volunteer in the first place). Run the scheme for a few years, and you will have a large number of,…

> Run the scheme for a few years, and you will have a large number of, young, high-school-level educated people that are financially dependent on the army. Thus, a militarized society Finland, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Thailand each have active conscription [1]. The slippery slop you describe is far from inevitable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription

You probably have no idea what you're talking about. Mandatory conscription (which I have personally served) is for a fixed term, so your livelihood is not tied to the army paying your salary. It's more of a semi-unpleasant mandatory intermission in your life plans.

Also, if you have decades of mandatory conscription then there is no slope to slip. Germany on the other hand is now on a slope, since they regress from a fully professional army back to conscription. How much down they will slip, remains to be seen.

Re: Germany votes to bring in voluntary military service programme for 18-year-olds

#62

Post by JumpCrisscross »

m000 wrote: post #61
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Run the scheme for a few years, and you will have a large number of, young, high-school-level educated people that are financially dependent on the army. Thus, a militarized society Finland, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Thailand each have active conscription [1]. The slippery slop you describe is far from inevitable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription

You probably have no idea what you're talking about. Mandatory conscription (which I have personally served) is for a fixed term, so your livelihood is not tied to the army paying your salary. It's more of a semi-unpleasant mandatory intermission in your life plans. Also, if you have decades of mandatory conscription then there is no slope to slip. Germany on the other hand is now on a slope, since they regress from…

> Mandatory conscription

Active != mandatory.

> Mandatory conscription (which I have personally served) is for a fixed term, so your livelihood is not tied to the army paying your salary

You're seriously arguing that countries with mandatory conscription are less militarised than those with active (but not mandatory) conscription?

Re: Germany votes to bring in voluntary military service programme for 18-year-olds

#63

Post by anonym29 »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #58
anonym29 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, I'll go sign up to die in a ditch for a war I oppose to avoid being forced to die in a ditch for a war I oppose.

It sounds like you believe life in western democracy is exactly the same as life in modern imperial Russia, like if you could choose, you would have no preference whatsoever?

[flagged]

Re: Germany votes to bring in voluntary military service programme for 18-year-olds

#64

Post by alistairSH »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #29
alistairSH wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They only recently (2011?) ended mandatory conscription so this is a pretty big about-face.

Compulsory military service (or alternative national service) never ended in Germany; in 2011 it was only suspended .

I don’t know the details… does the suspension make the current state in Germany similar to the Selective Service requirement in the US? Or is it “easy” for the German government to establish a draft?

Re: Germany votes to bring in voluntary military service programme for 18-year-olds

#65

Post by wkat4242 »

venturecruelty wrote: post #37
appreciatorBus wrote: post #17

> "We don't want to spend half a year of our lives locked up in barracks, being trained in drill and obedience and learning to kill," the organisers of the protests wrote in a statement posted on social media. "War offers no prospects for the future and destroys our livelihoods." Is the idea that it’s better for your livelihood to just start learning how speak Russian now?

I think a lot of young people look at all of the wars waged post-WWII and are rightfully opposed to fighting for their governments. Would you want to die for nothing in Vietnam? Probably not, and a lot of other people didn't want to as well. Some of them did anyway, and it was all for nothing. So please have some grace if today's kids have looked back at our miserable history and have decided that they'd rather not d…

Exactly. Even after Vietnam, in this century. Iraq war 2 was all false pretenses. And the resulting power vacuum created ISIS. Afghanistan accomplished absolutely nothing, things are back to the way it was and all the deaths were for nothing.

The only fairly recent war that the west was involved in that was slightly justified was the first gulf war. But even that wasn't really any of America's business. It wasn't that they actually cared about the Kuwaiti people. Just the oil.

Re: Germany votes to bring in voluntary military service programme for 18-year-olds

#66

Post by m000 »

hopelite wrote: post #52
appreciatorBus wrote: post #17

> "We don't want to spend half a year of our lives locked up in barracks, being trained in drill and obedience and learning to kill," the organisers of the protests wrote in a statement posted on social media. "War offers no prospects for the future and destroys our livelihoods." Is the idea that it’s better for your livelihood to just start learning how speak Russian now?

[flagged]

> If things are as the governments claim

Leaving aside your xenophobic ramblings, that's a VERY BIG "if".

Re: Germany votes to bring in voluntary military service programme for 18-year-olds

#67

Post by hopelite »

poplarsol wrote: post #51
appreciatorBus wrote: post #17

> "We don't want to spend half a year of our lives locked up in barracks, being trained in drill and obedience and learning to kill," the organisers of the protests wrote in a statement posted on social media. "War offers no prospects for the future and destroys our livelihoods." Is the idea that it’s better for your livelihood to just start learning how speak Russian now?

The German government will be the first ones to tell you that the German language and ancestry is totally unrelated to the idea of who gets to be German.

[flagged]

Re: Germany votes to bring in voluntary military service programme for 18-year-olds

#68

Post by Angostura »

throw310822 wrote: post #25
Angostura wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone wondering just over 84% of the German population is ethnically German, so the commenter above was probably spectacularly unlucky. They are right though in that it is an aging population with only around 13% under 16.

It is probable though that the younger generations are much more ethnically diverse than that 84% would suggest. That is, a lot more than 16% of the youth is from immigrant background.

Or it could have been like that time I was in Harlem in the 80s and concluded that America was almost entirely black

Re: Germany votes to bring in voluntary military service programme for 18-year-olds

#69

Post by sunshine-o »

This got to be the final scream of a dying regime.

Not so long ago we were told a serious army has now to be a professional and highly trained army. Everything else was useless.

But they seem to plan to just draft young people and fight some sort WWI a bit like the nightmare in Ukraine.

But today Western Europe countries are not Ukraine. If they would engage in a war they would collapse into total chaos very quickly. Those are old, very divided and absolutely not resilient societies.

Just cutting the electricity for a week would collapse the cities. Starting with people putting the buildings on fire because they do not know how dangerous candles are.

"Training" young people for 6 months wouldn't change that.

This is a bit like what happened in WWII when Germany attacked country like Belgium or France. They went right through it because there were a dissymmetry between the German who had it really tough for 20 years and the Belgian or Frenchman at the time.

But the current head of NATO is a former HR at Unilever, so I guess he knows better.

Re: Germany votes to bring in voluntary military service programme for 18-year-olds

#70

Post by jltsiren »

hopelite wrote: post #52
appreciatorBus wrote: post #17

> "We don't want to spend half a year of our lives locked up in barracks, being trained in drill and obedience and learning to kill," the organisers of the protests wrote in a statement posted on social media. "War offers no prospects for the future and destroys our livelihoods." Is the idea that it’s better for your livelihood to just start learning how speak Russian now?

[flagged]

That's the traditional recipe for military coups. When the ones with the weapons, training, and combat experience have no particular loyalty to the regime, they often start thinking that they would be more qualified to rule.
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