Should the UK Reinstate a form of Mandatory National Service?
I believe and think this is a big issue and one that I feel strongly about because I believe no one should be forced into to do something they don’t want to do. In places like Norway and Russia, conscription is mandatory where people are called in to serve for military services. Norway’s conscription is a weaker version of it where 63,841 men and women are called in for examination but only 9265 were conscription in 2012.
Meanwhile in places like Lithuania, they have only recently reinstated mandatory military service because of the tension in Ukraine rising last year in late February. My stance on this is that despite having a lot of young men now have to be required to serve for their country, what is the point when their resources are simply not there. Mandatory National Service shouldn’t be a thing because it expects young people to drop everything they’re doing, their life, their family and their jobs to serve and fight for something they might not want to.
The only thing which comes from this is lose of jobs for people who don’t deserve to lose, a lose of lives with something goes arise and the pain of having to leave everything because they are forced into something they don’t want to do.
From a personal standpoint, someone I knew was going to be made to do mandatory military service in Lithuania and dodged being recruited completely because his livelihood was online, entertaining people and being out for 9 months would destroy his job and the audience he has built up. He dodged having to sign up for the mandatory service by leaving the country to Latvia where he wouldn’t be called back as his residence was no longer in Lithuania. Everything thing was fine and he wasn’t called or brought back to his country to serve as a militant because of his fleeing to a different country.
His thoughts when first receiving a piece of mail about having to be called in for examination was that he had to escape. He didn’t want to fight and didn’t feel it was right he should drop everything he was doing to serve the country he was born in. Admittedly, this doesn’t seem very patriotic but at the same time, you can love your country and not fight I think. A lot of Americans make the assumption of not being willing to fight makes you a coward and you should be shunned for that, that is partially true for somewhere like America, where patriotism is embraced and people are proud to be American but from somewhere like Lithuania, I’d consider that completely unacceptable as the country itself at the time didn’t even have the resources it’d need to go to war, they would just have soldiers.
Because of the way my friend felt and what it actually caused him to do, leaving his country behind, I think the UK should not reinstate any form of mandatory national service as it robs people from their lives for months, takes them away from their family and in extreme cases like my friend, caused him to leave the entire country all together.
If something is making you want to leave your birth place, your country of origin and own home, it is clearly wrong and shouldn’t be a part of your country and society. Countries considering adding mandatory national service should take places like Lithuania as an example where in a Lithuanian article its stated that only 8% of the people who received letters to be on the list of those taking part in the mandatory service showed up to the health inspection. This means that 33,000 people didn’t even want to go to war and didn’t attend the health inspection at all. The full article can be found here, written in Lithuanian – http://www.delfi.lt/news/daily/lithuania/svarbi-diena-sauktiniams-dabar-tai-klius.d?id=68214538
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