Freedom

The United States government was established by a people fighting for civil rights and freedom. The forefathers of the country wrote the Constitution based on personal freedoms and rights the constituents of the newly formed United States had been denied in their homeland of England. As citizens of the United States, the people of this country take their civil rights very seriously. Freedom of choice is one of the rights that the citizens of the United States live their lives by. I believe that compelling a person to work for the state is involuntary servitude and thus I argue against conscription.

According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights published by the United Nations, Article 4 states “No one shall be held in (…) servitude (…)”.Conscription can be viewed as a form of slavery because people are being held in servitude. Conscription requires mandatory military service which is in turn servitude. The declaration also allows that people be able to move from state to state and country to country. With conscription in effect people who leave their countries are referred to as deserters. This clearly does not comply to the universal declaration.

In 1930Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and Thomas Mann in Against Conscription and the Military Training of Youth stated “Conscription subjects individual personalities to militarism. It is a form of servitude. That nations routinely tolerate it, is just one more proof of its debilitating influence”. Some of the most brilliant minds that the world has ever known agree that conscription is equivalent to slavery. These individuals are stating that the government has no right to put its interest ahead of those individuals it protects. Involuntary servitude unfairly asks certain individuals to give up their liberty in order to protect the sometimes selfish economic gains of a few individuals.

In other countries it is very evident that this involuntary