aelf
Ashen One
If that's your view then you should never pretend to be a patriot.
Yes!
Compulsory National Service Back on the Table in the US
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If that's your view then you should never pretend to be a patriot.
Yes!
GhostWriter16
Deity
I'm not really but my statement is pretty non-controversial to anyone that's paying attention.
One can be a patriot - by which is meant having a sense of pride and cultural attachment to one's homeland - without supporting compulsory national service: I have voluntarily served my country and risked my life for it, but would be totally against the idea of forcing anybody to do the same, because I believe that one's right to autonomy must be balanced against the authority of the state to act in its own defence. Although I would prefer temporary authoritarian rule in wartime to indefinite authoritarian rule under occupation, which means that there are circumstances in which I would support a levée en masse, I believe that this can only be used to excuse conscription when there is a real threat that to respect the rights of the people will lead to occupation and tyranny.
aelf
Ashen One
You don't have to support compulsory national service, but if you're a patriot, you wouldn't refuse if the country called you to serve. Otherwise, you really have no business claiming to be a patriot. Armchair patriots are no patriots at all, in my book.
You might refuse out of principle: you can love your country while having no love for those who govern it. For example, many patriots would refuse to serve were conscription declared in order to put down a popular uprising, since the government would be waging war against the country that they love.
aelf
Ashen One
Yes, but did you notice that that's not what we're talking about? We're talking about a programme with a civilian option, and the posters I've been responding to have stated their opposition in no uncertain terms.
The obvious principled objection would be that they love their country but have no love for its government; national service of this sort would primarily serve the interests of the state rather than the people, since the market will better tell where resources should be distributed to meet demand, and so a true patriot has no business being complicit with the state's attempts to fatten itself at the expense of the country that he so loves. Or simply that the orders of the state, without democratic mandate (ie, without inclusion in a government's manifesto) are not backed by the authority of the people, who make up the nation that he loves so well, and so the patriot has no obligation to treat them as his country's call.
aelf
Ashen One
That could be an anarchist speaking. Can anarchists be patriots? I don't think so. Not in the way most people would mean when they use the term anyway ('love of the people' is not what patriotism usually means - and the civilian option, moreover, seems beneficial to the very people you love). Just ask the conservatives.
I am editing this post to make my point more fully.
That's actually a liberal point of view: the liberal believes that the state does have legitimacy, which is derived from the consent and the mandate of the people, and authority provided that it does not overstep that mandate. In a modern democracy, this mandate is the manifesto of the governing party, plus the generally-given right of initative in unforseen circumstances. Beyond that, the liberal believes that any state action - that is, action for which the government has nothing to say that it is channelling the wishes of its electorate, and instead must concede that it is acting from its own motivations - is unjustified and an example of tyranny. This is in contrast to an anarchist, who believes that the state in a representative democracy can never have legitimacy and so never has authority, because the individual citizen is not given the opportunity to consent to its commands, and the anarchist believes that no body has the right to use force to compel an individual to act against his own will.
Indeed, one of the things that seperates a patriot from the nastier breed of nationalist is that the patriot admits the concept of 'patriotic dissent' - for the nationalist, the good and the wishes of the nation come before all other loyalties, so once the will of the nation is established, there is only the 'loyal' and the 'traitorous' course of action. By contrast, a patriotic non-nationalist is able to see that his countrymen are fallible when they express their wishes, and that his right to autonomy and the exercise of his own common sense mean that he does not necessarily need to follow their wishes in order to love his country. In the same way, one can love his father without obeying him unquestioningly (or even at all), and so one can love his country without claiming to 'do as it says'.
That's actually a liberal point of view: the liberal believes that the state does have legitimacy, which is derived from the consent and the mandate of the people, and authority provided that it does not overstep that mandate. In a modern democracy, this mandate is the manifesto of the governing party, plus the generally-given right of initative in unforseen circumstances. Beyond that, the liberal believes that any state action - that is, action for which the government has nothing to say that it is channelling the wishes of its electorate, and instead must concede that it is acting from its own motivations - is unjustified and an example of tyranny. This is in contrast to an anarchist, who believes that the state in a representative democracy can never have legitimacy and so never has authority, because the individual citizen is not given the opportunity to consent to its commands, and the anarchist believes that no body has the right to use force to compel an individual to act against his own will.
Indeed, one of the things that seperates a patriot from the nastier breed of nationalist is that the patriot admits the concept of 'patriotic dissent' - for the nationalist, the good and the wishes of the nation come before all other loyalties, so once the will of the nation is established, there is only the 'loyal' and the 'traitorous' course of action. By contrast, a patriotic non-nationalist is able to see that his countrymen are fallible when they express their wishes, and that his right to autonomy and the exercise of his own common sense mean that he does not necessarily need to follow their wishes in order to love his country. In the same way, one can love his father without obeying him unquestioningly (or even at all), and so one can love his country without claiming to 'do as it says'.
aelf
Ashen One
Are these actual definitions that are conventionally used or are you just making a personal distinction between patiots and nationalists?
aelf
Ashen One
Let's think about it this way: A (democratic) government deciding to wage a war of aggression versus one that decides that from now on every young able-bodied citizen is to dedicate a few years of their lives to perform a service, whether in a military or civilian capacity. Are these two decisions morally equivalent? If you refuse to serve in the latter case, is it the same as refusing to serve in the former case?
See my edit above: in both cases, if there is democratic mandate for the decision - that is, it appears in the government's most recent manifesto, since neither of those should be allowed under the general power of initiative - then a liberal patriot ought to serve; if there is not, he ought to refuse, or is at least morally entitled to do so according to his beliefs.
GhostWriter16
Deity
I'm not a utilitarian and so I would say such temporary authoritarianism is still unjustifiable, but I could at least understand it in that rare case. However, even then, it would require actually having a foreign power trying to take you over. I don't know about the UK but in the US none of the wars in which we have had mass suspencion of Civil Liberties have really been in that dire of a situation. In WWII we were attacked yes, but were not in immediate danger of being conquered (Allied Europe, of course, had much more risk of this), and both the Civil War and WWI could have been fairly easily avoided. Nobody was actually trying to conquer the country in either case.
I would always disagree with compulsory service as it is forced labor, but I would only refuse to serve if legally required to do so if it violated my conscience. So I wouldn't fight in a war if it wasn't a war of self-defense, I would either leave the country or accept the legal consequences if I were drafted to fight in such a war. I would not, however, do the same in a situation where I was being drafted to do some kind of work that I didn't necessarily want to do, but would not be violating my conscience to do. If it didn't violate my conscience I'd do it rather than break the law.
cav scout
The Continuum
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Here in North America we define classes a bit differently. The usual categories are upper, middle and lower. Some of the usual indicators of the middle class are enough income for home ownership, health insurance (paid for with premiums vs. safety net programs like medicaid) and investments/retirement plans. So many folks you would call working class (plumbers, truck drivers, etc.) are considered solidly in the middle class. We don't really use the term working class so much, instead we say blue collar or white collar to describe the type of work.
Statistically most private soldiers in the U.S. come from middle class homes.
