Distributists and the Draft

Every now and then some politician makes a few waves by bringing up the oft-proposed suggestion of reinstating an active draft. I’ve often thought about this topic, and for a long time I was in favor of the draft. Two to four years of service required of every able-bodied man for the defense of his country. Who could object to such a benign proposal? Who could possibly oppose serving one’s country?

You see, as I think I’ve mentioned before, I come from a long, long line of military folk. Longer than history records, most likely. The earliest military man in my family that I’m familiar with (my grandfather has it back to Hastings) is Edward “Redsleeves” Goodman, who fought with Henry VII at Bosworth Field, and received a beautiful coat of arms for his valor and service. My people have fought in every single declared American war, and few others besides. One of my ancestors was killed at the battle at Hayes Station in our American revolution (after the battle, actually, cruelly and quite illegally executed by a British officer, by the sword). Another fought in the war of 1812; another fought in that cruel war in which Texas was stolen from the Mexicans. My great-great grandfather, Samuel Goodman, served in the Texas cavalry during the American civil war. My great-grandfather, Charles Goodman, served as a medic in World War I, bravely saving many lives, even to the point of swallowing some of the dreaded mustard gas, which caused him health problems for the rest of his days. My father’s father served bravely through the Korean and Vietnam conflicts (he did twenty-one years and was in his last year of service in Vietnam; I’m not that young), even being slightly wounded while attempted to assist another wounded soldier. (He did not request a purple heart, as he felt this was not really a battle wound.) My mother’s father had a scholarship to go to college in 1940; instead, knowing that war was coming, he joined what was then the U.S. Army Air Corps and flew countless missions over Europe. Three times he was shot down; twice he was shot down over water; one of those times he was the only member of his crew to be pulled from the Channel alive. The third time was over France; he managed to find the French underground, which successfully smuggled him back to England, where he hopped directly back into a plane and started flying missions again. My own brother has served in Iraq with the Marines.

So my people are intimately acquainted with the duties and responsibilities of military service in defense of their country. Few families could be more so. And we know that it is hell.

William Tecumseh Sherman, of course, who has the negative distinction of being one of the more brutal generals of our history, uttered those famous words:

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.

Coming from a man like Sherman, this means a lot. War is terrible, a horrible curse on a country. War takes the bravest, the youngest, the strongest, and throws them into a literal meat-grinder. It leaves homes empty, fields untended, shops unkept, wives without husbands, and children fatherless. Even those who return are scarred forever. War is the destroyer of worlds.

And here I refer only to a just war, and one in which the laws of civilized warfare are obeyed. Such wars are rarely fought in our sad times. In these enlightened days, wars kill not only brave men, who put their frail bodies between their homes and the war’s desolation; it kills our women and children, destroys our fields and our factories, and wreaks havoc on everything throughout the land. Even the just war, about whose permissibility there can be no legitimate question, is a monumental tragedy, a scourge upon any land; the unjust war is unspeakably terrible, a horror which defies mortal description. War is, truly and without ambiguity, the destroyer of worlds.

Mars always rode into battle on a chariot pulled by Timor (Phobos) and Metus (Deimos). Few images could be more terrifying, more suitable for the inhuman bloodbath that is even the most just of wars: terrible, bloody War, riding to the slaughter pulled by Fear and Dread. The people that forgets this, that trivializes the horror that is war, will brutalize their country and ultimately lose their humanity. That’s what happened to Europe in the early twentieth century; that’s what’s happened in America before; God help us, it may yet happen here again.

The draft is a means of keeping a large standing army for purposes of warfare. We’ve used it many times in America; both North and South had a draft in our civil war, and we had a draft in World War I. Starting in 1940, however, we had the first-ever peacetime draft, which lasted through peace and war until 1975, and then from 1980 to the present day, though no one has actually been forcibly inducted into the military since 1975. Our Supreme Court has declared it constitutional. But is the draft moral, in peace and in war? What is a distributist to think of this idea?

War in general is even more harmful for the distributist society than for a capitalist one. In a distributist society, most citizens are owners of their own productive property, and themselves care for their own property. Fields and shops require constant care and maintenance; leaving them for any extended period is an extremely important decision that will not be made lightly. The farmer will not leave his fields for anything other than the direst causes; the well-being of his property, and thus of his family which depends upon it, is at stake.

For example, among the most distributist societies in modern history, the Vendée in France, began its revolt against the French Revolution precisely because Paris had passed a universal conscription program. The Vendéens couldn’t send their young men to the army; they needed their young men at home, in the fields and the shops. Spreading the revolution was not worth leaving their property; but to defend their right to remain at their property until they determined the cause was dire enough, they would (and did) fight to the death.

Universal conscription requires that every young man (and, by most proposals in our degraded times, young women as well) to leave their homes and their property for two to four years to serve in the military. This will probably, given our current quagmires and all the proposed future ones, involve serving in war. The distributist should not support this.

First, as discussed above, war is terrible. Universal conscription serves only one purpose: keeping a large army ready to make it easier to fight wars. The easier it is to fight them, the more often they will be fought. While Switzerland, wealthy and cuddled by the forbidding Alps, has remained peaceful, history shows that nations with universal conscription are nations with frequent and larger wars. Wars in Europe, for example, only became universally destructive after universal conscription made them so. Given how destructive war is by nature, and how even more destructive it is to a civilized society, any policy which makes wars easier to fight ought to be opposed.

Second, the distributist wants families to be economically self-sufficient and spiritually strong; universal conscription makes that impossible. Economic self-sufficiency depends upon the head of the household being available to care for the family’s productive property, and often it depends on the assistance of the head of household’s older children, particularly his sons. Conscription will take away the head of household when he is young and most needed to establish his property; it will then take his sons when he is older and most needs them to help prepare that property to be passed down to their care. Then again, conscription takes the head of household when he is young, and his wife most needs his support, and his children, if he yet has any, are young and need their father as an example of just and loving rule; it then takes his sons when they are just coming into manhood, just starting families of their own, when they most need to be close to their father, who can show them the way. Universal conscription thus strikes at the very heart of the distributist agenda: it renders the self-sufficient and spiritually strong family exponentially more difficult to achieve. The distributist should not support it for this reason.

Should the distributist oppose all conscription? Certainly not. It is every man’s honor and duty to defend his homeland when it is under threat, and conscription is an easy and effective way to ensure that, when needed, citizens can be brought together for that defense. If I believed that America were under an imminent threat, I’d race you to the recruitment office, and I have a wife and children I could easily use as an excuse to stay home if I wanted. Despite all of war’s horror, there is honor and good in killing and dying in defense of hearth and home; distributism is most emphatically not pacifism. But it is not every man’s duty to abandon his home, his family, and his property when his service is not needed for a just war.

But in today’s modern wars, citizens simply aren’t prepared to fight without training, and without peacetime conscription how can that training be provided? Imminent threats seldom leave time for extensive military training, after all. There are many ways, however, to prepare citizens for that sad necessity, the most reasonable being the weekend method. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, for example, the heyday of the Anglo-Welsh longbow, English law required all able-bodied Englishmen and Welshmen to practice with the longbow for two hours every Sunday after Mass, to ensure a citizenry prepared for war should they be required. Such longbowmen proved to be the most effective military units in Europe.

Longbows are, of course, weapons of the past, but the principle holds true. Young men, upon reaching a certain age, are trained in the weapons and equipment of warfare near their own homes. Such methods provide a citizenry trained in the weapons of war, ready to fight should their fighting be needed, but does not tear young men away from their family and friends during some of their most formative years. It better respects the principle of subsidiarity, providing more localized training for more localized units, familiar with the tactics and weapons which are appropriate for those particular areas. And finally, it trains soldiers to fight knowing that they are fighting only for what is nearest and dearest to them: their homes, their families, and their property. A distributist solution, indeed.

As distributists, I suggest we all oppose efforts at universal conscription, and instead support a “national guard” on this model. Going hand-in-hand with our opposition to all wars which do not unambiguously meet the requirements of Catholic just war theory, distributists can offer something true and practical to our society on this point as on so many others.

Praise be to Christ the King!