Aswad
Posts: 6619
Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Elisabella
Generally in extreme cases of "If we don't send our men to defend our country, we won't have a country left to defend" I can understand the reasoning behind a draft.
Understanding is not the same as agreeing with.
Disregarding entirely for the moment whether the person drafted might want a different outcome to the war, there is the matter of earning what one gets. BG had a nice point about asking what gives us the right to survive. If the situation is that there will be no country left to defend if one does not send people to defend it, then if there aren't enough volunteers, let there indeed be no country left to defend. It was diseased and broken, anyway. Let someone else put the territory and any remaining population to good use, and let those who would allow themselves to be destroyed be crushed and then be covered by the sands of time. Record their language, salvage their art and literature, pillage what you want from them, and let nature run its course once we have secured our legacy.
That is, assuming you're going to have a democracy, of course. Will of the people. If that will is weak, then so be it.
Cultures that were unfit and accordingly died out are no rarity in the history of this world.
My ancestors raided monastaries along the coastline of the British Isles. They weren't looking to fight fair. They were looking to turn a profit. Nuns were more popular than monks, since nuns were less likely to defend themselves, more likely to provide good sport before going back, and given the culture of the day, quite a few of them had been placed in monastaries against their will anyway, so readily adapted to being kidnapped back here if they happened to catch some hungry eye or had a spirit to amuse someone. That's the other half of my ancestry. Anyway, there would sometimes be non-clergy guards posted at the monastaries, but overall, they were a safe bet to raid, sure to yield a lot of valuables and entertainment for a very limited risk. In short, they weren't very fit to survive in that environment.
And you know what? They had it coming.
The draft is symptomatic of a diseased democracy, s'all.
quote:
That being said, in both of those situations the women were able to do things absolutely vital to the war effort without being on the front lines. And I think it actually might help the morale of the soldiers to know that they're *protecting* their women at home, they're risking their lives to make it safe for the women they love - their wives, mothers, sisters, daughters. And doing that makes them feel like men, whereas doing a 'manly' job next to women doing the same thing kinda changes the perception of it.
Not really. We have women in the army, though on a volunteer basis. At first, the bulk of them were what we euphemistically referred to as "field mattresses," which is to say that they joined to meet a lot of boys with few competitors around. Later, with the advent of role models, those became pretty rare and were replaced by an increasing number of highly competent women. Last I heard, one woman had made it into the special forces (i.e. the branch of the army responsible for oil rig operations, counterterrorism, assassination and asymmetric warfare), and there had been some controversy because she had about two dozen kills that were ordered on what some believe to be political grounds. Highest kill count for a woman in our army is held by one that is still on active duty in the joint ops with the US.
They don't raise any eyebrows, though they do get held to a higher standard by the brass and media.
Not all women are well suited to the army. Most can learn to be. Few need to.
Circa 800, a woman led one of Muhammad's armies. China has a long history of women in the army. Jeanne d'Arc was not indicted until after she'd handled the campaign. Sarmatians, Cumbrians, Scythians, Vikings, Celts, these all featured armies with women. The principal point is that women have traditionally been deployed with respect to abilities, which is to say that you would prefer a man in a phalanx, but you might prefer a woman with a bow, spear or when agility is preferrable to bulk. And you would generally want to equip them with a means to commit suicide, as capture by the enemy invariably means humiliation and rape, sometimes to death, sometimes not. That hasn't dissuaded a surprisingly large number of women from participating in active warfare, though it is correct that it is more common in defensive warfare than in invasions and political warfare.
The matter is cultural, more than anything else, although most women are better suited to other roles than men in the same situation (cf. the question of bows vs swords), a difference that is diminishing due to technology (cf. WASP, Hanna Reitsch, etc.). Meritocracy entails recognizing not only differences between genders, but also differences between individuals, and certainly not all individuals fit the established archetypes.
Just some thoughts...
Health,
al-Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: Are you a good citizen? - 
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