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Europe turns to conscription as threat of wider war with Russia grows
- mintaka5 2y ago[flagged]
- manuelmoreale 2y agoFirst time I interact with someone online who’s not part of the human race! Where are you from? And who are you precisely?
- mintaka5 2y ago[dead]
- chrisjj 2y agoOur future AI overlords are testing the waters here... :)
- manuelmoreale 2y agoIf it’s just AI I’ll be extremely disappointed. I want aliens!
- chrisjj 2y agoDon't worry. Our AIs will be calling their AIs RSN :)
- nope1000 2y agoYeah let's just lay down and surrender when the Russians invade.. great strategy.
- rightbyte 2y agoI wonder what their plan is. The nation states would be dissolved like half an hour into the war. The elite need a professional army that protects them and force the population to starve to death. Conscripts are a liability. You need the type of person that like violence and self selects for it. This pretending there would be some nice and coozy gentleman's war is lunacy.
- fifilura 2y agoUkraine did not dissolve. In Northen Europe we have seen enough the last couple of years in Izium, Bucha, Kherson, Mariupol to understand that fighting back is preferable to murder, rape and every war crime in the book. And we prefer a stable democracy before living as a Muscovite vassal state with ruling based on power corruption and lies.
- rightbyte 2y agoI don't see the relevance of that war for the scenario. Also, the concept of "fighting back" is silly. Infighting would be the only fighting. There would be no military manouvers and glorious tank battles and nice HD videos of cool ambushes.
- fifilura 2y agoCan you elaborate, I did not understand anything about what you are referring to in your comment. Isn't fighting back what is happening now in Ukraine? Is that silly you mean? And yeah the military manouevers I guess are a bit different than the text book, particularly with the wide use of drones. But they do need people (including conscripts) to fight back.
- egorfine 2y ago> Ukraine did not dissolve Barely. And the country is absolutely drowning in rampant corruption at levels never seen before even in dark ages after the collapse of the USSR. I don't think Ukrainian state will emerge from this war unchanged and unchallenged. Source: am Ukrainian.
- richrichie 2y ago[flagged]
- okr 2y agoIn people's mind. It is just talk of war. People are talked into it. And again i hear this heroic rhetoric about defending one's country. It is pure propaganda. And to defend what exactly? Military, a year of conscription life wasted to make you a potential tool of someone's politics. Forcing civilians with weapons to your will, while looting and raping.
- vetinari 2y ago[flagged]
- petre 2y agoI'll take the domestic corrupt bureaucrats over Russian installed puppets, because they'll do whatever the US Embassy tells them to. The Soviets applied the well known Crimea scenario and won past 1945 without firing a single bullet. Eastern Europe was transformed into into buffer states. This time maybe our countries might not fall under the Russian sphere of influence if we shoot'em dead like the Finns did during the Winter War. I will also gladly vote yes to have US nukes pitched against Russia on my country's soil if I am ever asked to do so. I do hope our politicians will decide to have them anyway as part of being a NATO member and as deterrence all while classifying it, to neuter Russian propaganda. They won't dare to attack if we're armed to the teeth and have nukes pointed against them, even if they're operated by the US. The Kremlin scare talk of "legitimate targets" is just BS to discourage us from doing so. Real deterrence is done with weapons, not talk.
- fifilura 2y agoWhat country are you referring to? Here in Scandinavia the true enemy has unveiled itself in the last couple of years. And don't try to fool me to think that living under Russian oppression is better than "liberal democracy" or what you would call it. Russia may have gained some ground in Ukraine, but it has lost all confidence from all its neighbors for generations to come.
- scotty79 2y agoTalking about conscription before building capacity for providing training to even just volunteers that want to be prepared to defend their country is basically scaring ton of economically valuable people into leaving their country.
- wkat4242 2y agoA land war in Europe is not viable by conventional means anyway. We're not going to fight door to door. Not that again. It's good for the border countries to have a deterrent and we in Western Europe should support them on this. But the nuclear umbrella should be the main deterrent.
- fifilura 2y agoI think states are more and more learning to navigate under the nuclear umbrella. The method is small doses of escalation. Which means that it is never the time to press the button. We have lots of conflicts involving nuclear states (USA, India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Israel Great Britain) but never since 1945 has it been used.
- heneryville 2y agoThere is literally a land war in Europe happening right now. It's happening door to door too.
- wkat4242 2y agoYeah I meant EU/NATO Europe of course. Once Russia gets into the EU or NATO bloc it gets huge obviously. Because of article 5. As for Ukraine I didn't forget Ukraine was still very much aligned with Russia in the early 2000s (and an oligarchy like Russia that attacked the EU with similar tactics like ransomware). They only started repenting in the 2010s. I feel like this is a more complicated issue because of that. They could have joined when the Baltics did but they didn't want to, they were very firmly in the Pro Russia camp. Then they could have had a lot more protection.
- timonoko 2y agoWar is already over. We need lots of occupying forces for the western Russia. China and Mongolia will rule the east.
- egorfine 2y agoI don't get it how conscription is going to be compatible with all the values that EU/the West has been grown to respect and spread across the world: individual freedom, freedom of cooperation, human rights and so on. Conscription goes against every one of them. I can see the problem, it's clearly there and maybe, yes, maybe conscription is the answer. My question still stands: how can a western society be healthy and prosperous with a mandatory service enforced on the population.
- fifilura 2y agoI live in Scandinavia. I never saw a conflict with those values. On the contrary, human rights is one of the values we have to defend. There is also a big chunk of collectivism here. You don't only have rights, you have responsibilities too. Paying tax is one of them, and defending your country is one. But my country had conscription up until 10-20 years ago so it is still in our DNA i guess. I myself did 15 months of (conscripted) military service. Long ago.
- egorfine 2y agoA country is a service organization that is collecting my taxes and spending that money to build roads. If my service organization does a poor job of building roads I can choose to pay taxes to a different organization on a different territory. Now this service org also wants to take a year of my life in my prime years. And it seems I cannot choose to not participate. I'm not sure how that is compatible with freedom. The paradox being that freedom needs defending and only totalitarian russia can afford to purchase soldiers, while free countries are now back of forcing its people to participate in the war mandatory. The irony.
- fifilura 2y ago> If my service organization does a poor job of building roads I can choose to pay taxes to a different organization on a different territory. I can't choose to pay taxes in another country without emigrating. What are you trying to say?