(North) America needs a conscience. This need is a duty we all share, and we each must do our part, calling out despotism and evil in its many disguises.
Patriotic Dissent: How A Working-Class Soldier Turned Against "Forever Wars" https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/patriotic-dissent-how-working-class-soldier-turned-against-forever-wars Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon via Counterpunch.org, https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/24/patriotic-dissent-how-a-working-class-soldier-turned-against-forever-wars/ .. Not many on the left favor a return to conscription. But Sjursen makes it clear there’s been a downside to the U.S. replacing “citizen soldiering” with “a tiny professional warrior caste,” created in response to draft-driven dissent against the Vietnam War, inside and outside the military. As he observes: “Nothing so motivates a young adult to follow foreign policy, to weigh the advisability or morality of an ongoing war as the possibility of having to put ‘skin in the game.’ Without at least the potential requirement to serve in the military and in one of America’s now countless wars, an entire generation—or really two, since President Nixon ended the draft in 1973–has had the luxury of ignoring the ills of U.S. foreign policy, to distance themselves from its reality.” ...
