August 2, 2024 - "A bipartisan group of senators has introduced legislation to end the military draft, calling it an 'outdated' government program that no longer serves a purpose. The bill, introduced Thursday by Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), would repeal the Military Selective Service Act, commonly known as the draft.
"First passed in 1917 to fill the ranks during World War I, the law requires all able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 45 to register for possible military service, but it has not been used since the Vietnam War.
“'It has been over 50 years since the draft was last used,' Paul said in a statement on the bill. 'I’ve long stated that if a war is worth fighting, Congress will vote to declare it and people will volunteer. This outdated government program no longer serves a purpose and should be eliminated permanently.'
"The legislation comes as Congress once again debates the expansion of the draft given the Defense Department opened all combat roles to women in 2015. Senate Democrats this year added language to the annual defense authorization bill to require women to register for the draft.... A measure to compel women to register for potential service has continuously been stripped out of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) year after year, most recently in 2021 and 2022.
"What’s more, the annual cost of the program has steadily inched upward, jumping from a $26 million budget in 2021 to a $33.4 million request for 2025. 'The Selective Service is a long-outdated program that eats up millions of taxpayer dollars and gives us nothing in return,' Wyden said in a statement."
Ukrainian government officials are calling for NATO countries to extradite Ukrainian war refugees eligible for conscription. The Polish government is willing to do so (subject to court approval), but the governments of Czechia, Austria, and Hungary have indicated they will not comply.
September 4, 2023 - "On Sept. 1 David Arachamia, leader of Ukraine’s Servant of the People party, said that Ukrainian law enforcement agencies should demand the extradition of men of military age who had illegally left Ukraine to escape mobilization and prosecute them.
"The Polish news outlet, Rzeczpospolitej reported on data provided by Poland’s Border Guard that 2.87 million Ukrainian adults had crossed into Poland between Feb. 24, 2022 and Aug. 31 this year. It was estimated that around 80,000 men aged 18-60, who were potentially eligible for military service, had entered the country; the whereabouts of whom are currently not known. A spokesperson for the Polish Border Guard, Lt. Anna Michalska, is quoted as saying that it was not known how many actually met the exemption requirements.
"Ukraine shares borders with five countries where Ukrainian men may have entered: Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova. It is feared that the number of those who have fled may run into the tens of thousands. Fedir Venislavsky, a member of Ukraine’s National Security, Defense and Intelligence Committee said the numbers of those who illicitly avoided going to war and took refuge abroad is hugely significant. 'These people could be mobilized and increase the ranks of our armed forces, thereby strengthening our defense and security'....
"Inspector Mariusz Ciarka, a spokesman for the Poland’s Police Headquarters indicated that there had been a number of instances of individuals intercepted trying to cross the border illegally without an exemption.... In the case of those who appeared to have an exemption and crossed apparently legally, the inspector said it ... would be necessary for Ukraine to issue an international arrest warrant for each individual case. The details would be entered into Poland’s National Police Information System (KSIP) and shared with Interpol. If a Ukrainian was stopped for something such as a traffic offence, KSIP would flag the fact and the person would be detained. However, the police could not act on the warrant until a Polish court had approved extradition.
"In July the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) charged the MP Lyudmila Marchenko and her assistant with corruption or demanding a bribe to provide a man with a permit to leave Ukraine as well as registering him on the Shlyakh system, which allows men of military age to leave the country." Read more: https://www.kyivpost.com/post/21242
September 9, 2023 - "Neither the Austrian, nor the Czech government is willing to bow to Ukraine’s demands and extradite Ukrainian men who have fled the war-torn country. 'That would be a massive interference in our sovereignty, we would never do that,' a spokesman for the Austrian Interior Ministry said to Exxpress on September 7th. 'Such a request would likely contravene Czech law, making it impossible to approve it,' the Czech Justice Ministry stated in the Prague Monitor....
"With the war against Russia costing thousands of lives, the Ukrainian leadership is stepping up its efforts to recruit soldiers. But there are more and more reports of men fleeing the country to avoid military service.... The number of Ukrainian men who have successfully avoided mobilisation and sought refuge abroad could be in the tens of thousands, but there are no official statistics. What Eurostat’s statistics do tell us is that 17.7% of the 4 million Ukrainians who have been granted temporary protection in the EU since the start of the war are men aged 18-64....
"According to Exxpress, there are around 14,000 Ukrainian men aged between 18 and 54 who have been registered as refugees in Austria. The government in Vienna has clearly stated it will not deport any of them. Prague has also emphasised that extradition treaties do not apply under Czech law to crimes of a military or political nature. Polish authorities estimate that 80,000 Ukrainian men of military age may have entered Poland since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the German Interior Ministry has registered more than 200,000 men in the same age group since the start of the war. Tareq Alaows of the human rights organisation Pro Asyl, told Deutschlandfunk that evading conscription is a human right, therefore, the German government shouldn’t give in to Ukraine’s demands, if such demands were made.
"While people with disabilities and illnesses are mostly exempt from the draft, Hungarian-language Ukrainian news website, Kárpáti Igaz Szó reports that the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence recently updated its list of illnesses that are no longer considered debilitating enough to stop men from serving in the army. These include clinically cured tuberculosis, viral hepatitis, asymptomatic HIV, mental and neurological disorders that cause only minimal pain and rare physical manifestations." Read more: https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/ukraine-demands-extradition-of-its-draft-age-men/
Germany just told Ukraine to F*CK off, along with 3 other E.U. countries | Redacted News | September 15, 2023:
March 25, 2020 - ""To what extent should the Constitution be violated to fight the coronavirus? Lockdowns, especially ones that apply to people who haven’t tested positive for the virus, are constitutionally questionable. The threat ... to prosecute residents who spread false information about the virus ... could violate the First Amendment. Some people ... have challenged ... city ... authority to force a gun shop to close, citing their right to arm themselves. Perhaps most alarming, the U.S. Department of Justice 'has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies.'
"To assess how Americans weigh the trade-off between preserving civil liberties and halting the spread of the coronavirus, we ... presented a nationally representative sample of 3,000 U.S. residents with eight possible policy responses to the outbreak, all of which may be unconstitutional, including forced quarantine in a government facility, criminal penalties for spreading misinformation, bans against certain people entering the country, and conscription of health-care workers. We also asked our sample to imagine that public-health officials had reviewed the policies and estimated that each would likely save some number of lives, hypothetical figures that we provided.
"A majority of respondents supported all eight of these policies, most by considerable margins. The proposals with the lowest support were seizing businesses and banning all citizens and noncitizens outside the country from entering, but these policies still had 58 and 63 percent support, respectively. The proposals with the highest levels of support were banning noncitizens from entering the country (85 percent) and conscripting health-care professionals to work despite risks to their own health (78 percent). Both policies burden a defined minority of the population, so it’s not surprising that large majorities support them..... About 70 percent of respondents supported restricting people’s ability to say things that may qualify as misinformation. Likewise, 77 percent of respondents support suspending all religious services and gatherings.... And even when we explicitly told half of our sample that the policies may violate the Constitution, the majority supported all eight of them....
"Perhaps the most striking feature of our results is the broad bipartisan endorsement of these liberty-restricting policies. Like other surveys, ours reflected a huge gap between Democrats and Republicans in approval of President Donald Trump’s handling of the pandemic: 34 percent of Democrats expressed approval, while 88 percent of Republicans did. One might have reasonably concluded that different policy preferences were driving these responses....
"But our findings suggest that’s not the case. Democrats and Republicans ... show almost identical levels of support for detaining sick people in government facilities, conscripting people to work, prohibiting the spreading of misinformation, and banning all people (citizens and noncitizens alike) from entering the country. Seventy-four percent of Democrats supported each of the eight proposed policies, while 71 percent of Republicans did....
"Often, efforts to roll back civil liberties face political opposition, but now bipartisan support for rights-restricting COVID-19 responses could smooth the path for constitutional erosion. James Madison predicted as much when he described constitutional rights as 'parchment barriers,' easily transgressed when the majority is so inclined. And indeed, history presents numerous examples of liberty violations made in the face of security threats ... the Alien and Sedition Acts ... Japanese American internment camps during WWII, and the use of torture after 9/11. After the threat has subsided, Americans must recognize any constitutional violations for what they were, lest they become the new normal."
April 17, 2019 - "Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg told Rachel Maddow recently that 'national service will become one of the themes of [my] 2020 campaign'.... [T]he defining element of the plan put forward by the Afghanistan War veteran and mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is its vagueness. In fact, it's not even clear if Buttigieg would make a year's worth of service for high school grads mandatory or not. At one point he says he hopes to 'make it, if not legally obligatory, then a social norm,' which can be read both as wanting to make it mandatory or simply a cultural expectation. There's no mention of a national service plan in his book, Shortest Way Home, and there's no mention of it on his campaign website either....
"Buttigieg invoked the World War II service of John F. Kennedy and George H.W. Bush and his own military service as positive examples of privileged people mixing with people they otherwise would never get to know (he implies that JFK served with African Americans, but the military was segregated during World War II). That sort of service across class, geographical, and racial lines, he argues, is good for America.... Maddow piped up that she has long 'struggled with the civilian-military divide" and "the easy answer is there should be a draft,' even as she acknowledged that the Pentagon is firmly against conscription....
"The libertarian argument against military conscription was best summarized by Milton Friedman, who served on the federal commission that helped end the draft in the early 1970s. After listening to Gen. William Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in Vietnam, inveigh against an all-volunteer army as mere 'mercenaries,' Friedman replied, 'General, would you rather command an army of slaves?' The same logic applies to mandatory non-military national service.
"Buttigieg was emphatic that he's not talking about forcing people to serve only in the military. Again, there were no details, but his national service plan would include having 18-year-old kids sign up for the armed forces or for a wide variety of other public-sector jobs....
"Beyond being deeply illiberal, mandatory national service is profoundly at odds with the American experience. Unlike most European countries, for most of our history, we didn't have conscription unless there was an active war.... More important, citing elements of the total mobilization of American society to fight World War II in order to sell peacetime policy proposals is a category error. Regardless of the lack of 'social cohesion,' we should not be looking for guidance now to a period when food, gas, and more were rationed and the government effectively controlled the economy and virtually all aspects of life....
"In talking with Maddow, Mayor Pete granted that any sort of program would also cost a lot of money, which, along with the sheer vagueness of his plan, works against its odds of becoming a reality. Yet this may be a bad idea whose time is coming, especially as Millennials such as Buttigieg ascend into positions of power.
"The Green New Deal championed by fellow Millennial Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez includes a plan for the government to guarantee everyone a job, which is sort of the kissing cousin of national service and underscores younger Americans' anxiety about finding employment. And a 2017 poll of 18-to-29-year-olds by Harvard's Institute of Politics found 50 percent supporting voluntary national service (the good news: Just 7 percent support mandatory service)."
May 29, 2018 - "In a modern office space in Tbilisi’s trendy Vake district, a scruffy haired teenager is undergoing his initiation into the priesthood.... [He] recites his vows to the seated bishop:
“'I believe that individual human rights are the most important and that personal freedom cannot be restricted,' he pledges. 'Those who believe otherwise are irresponsible bureaucrats, homophobes, xenophobes and other bullies who bully and use violence onto others in accordance with their wicked worldview.' And with that, a handshake, and a document signed by the patriarch, he is a priest in Georgia’s fastest growing 'church,' which ordains about 40 new priests per day.
"The ersatz church is a creation of a libertarian political party, Girchi, and cheekily named the 'Christian, Evangelical, Protestant Biblical Freedom Church of Georgia.' Its goal isn't the spiritual salvation of its followers, but rather saving them from Georgia's dire military conscription system.
"According to Georgian law, all men aged 18 to 27 are subject to a compulsory 12-month military service, with some exceptions made for those with ill health and for only sons.... But another group of men allowed to legally avoid conscription are priests, and Girchi is aiming to use that loophole to help Georgia's young men enjoy the liberty of not joining the military.... So far the church has registered 5,000 people and has opened an additional office in Georgia’s second city, Kutaisi.
"'We’ve cost the government about 10 million lari ($4 million) so far,' MP Zurab Japaridze, Girchi’s charismatic leader, told Eurasianet ... referring to another legal deferment category, with which men under 25 can delay their service by paying a fee of 2,000 lari ($775) per year. In the end, only the poorest Georgians, lacking money and connections, are likely to be conscripted, said Giorgi Noniashvili, a legal expert at the Tolerance and Diversity Institute....
"[P]romises over the years to scrap conscription have come to naught, primarily because conscripts provide cheap labor for the state. Over 6,000 men are conscripted each year.... Only a quarter of those recruits are assigned to the military; the remainder guard government buildings ... Noniashvili said. 'Recruits are still used as free workers and many of them serve as prison guards'....
"Georgia’s government has tried to force the Evangelical, Protestant Biblical Freedom Church of Georgia to close. Last year, officials argued that the church does not meet the legal requirements for a religious organization since it lacks a space for members to hold prayers.... Parliament also approved a draft law which could send young men to prison for avoiding military service. Irakli Sesiashvili, chair of the parliament's Military and Security Committee, said during a session last year that Girchi’s church was abusing Georgian law.
"'They tried to close the loophole but doing so would also take away the Orthodox Church’s privileges, and the Church doesn’t want that,' Japaridze said, as it would force them to debate 'what a "real" religion is.'"
