very young columnist

I believe that Johann Hari got a young colunnist of the year award a couple of years back, at which point an exasperated Indy reader wrote in saying that he should really have got the prize for the very young columnist of the year. And here’s a classic of juvenile reasoning:

What if the Army was made up of a genuine cross-section of classes and professions? Picture it. Would enough MPs have walked through the lobbies to back the war if they had known their kids would end up on the streets of Mosul facing a slew of suicide-bombers? Would I have (stupidly) supported the war if there was a chance I would have ended up patrolling Basra with a machine-gun? Honestly? Professor Charles Moskos, a former draftee, takes this further, arguing: "I suggest we start drafting at the top of the social ladder. Who better to serve a short term for their country than those benefitting most from living here? When the children of our nation's elite perform military service for their country, our national interests will be taken much more seriously."

OK, wars and counter-insurgencies fought by postwar Britain under conscription: Korea, Suez, Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya: None of these was either prevented by public opposition or brought to an end by it. So it’s nonsense on its face. A conscript army is a large one, and that leads to the temptation to use it more frequently. Johann tells us that Nixon proposed an all volunteer army to cripple any future antiwar movement. But that was after half a million conscripts had already been sent over to Vietnam.

Anyway, Johann says that this is the liberal case for conscription, to which all I can say is that if liberalism involves taking people’s children hostage to produce desired policy outcomes, then liberalism isn’t what it was when I were a lad. It doesn’t seem to have much to do with the wishy washy sorta-social democrat position of people like the Lib Dems, either. Positions like this imply a vast sense of entitlement to control the lives of others simply because you have a bright idea and want a particular thing to happen. What I detect here is progressivism.

Comments

[Chris Baldwin]

I believe that when the French scrapped National Service in 2000 or thereabouts one of the main reasons was that the army felt it was incompatible with the nature of soldiering in the 21st century, which rather suggests that conscription is unlikely to come back unless we have another (non-nuclear) world war.

[Tom]

A friend of mine was at university with Johann Hari. Apparently he was (and I quote) "an insufferable tosser" then as well.