Frank Chodorov Quotes

All able bodied male citizens … are hereby declared to be the National Forces.

Conscription would amount to the sacrifice of nine-tenths of our moral case in this war. It would not only amount to an admission—wholly unjustified—that the heart of the country is not in the war…. It will change the basis of our participation. It will no longer be the war of the British people; it will be the war of the British governing classes.

I have never had a problem with national service. I am not sure the draft is the way to go about it, but I am positive that you live in a society and you take from this society, which every citizen here does. You owe something back to this country, and that should be paid back in some form of national service.

The government has the right to the military service of all its able-bodied citizens.

Conscription may have been good for the country, but it damned near killed the country.

... we might better reexamine the reasons for entering the war than abolish volunteers and substitute for them men dragged into the ranks by draft.

They talk about conscription as being a democratic institution. Yes; so is a cemetery.

In America, conscription is unknown; men are enlisted for payment. Compulsory recruitment is so alien to the ideas and so foreign to the customs of the people of the United States that I doubt whether they would ever dare to introduce it into their law.

Resistance to conscription [in WWI] was quite strong. By the end of the war, the ranks of noncooperators were stunningly large. Roughly 3 million eligible men never registered, in violation of the law — compared with the 24 million who did. And some 338,000 who did register either failed to obey an induction notice or deserted after they joined the ranks .... Altogether, a higher percentage of American men successfully resisted conscription during World War I than during the Vietnam War half a century later.

With no draft, the only people who went to war were those who wanted to, or at least those who wanted to join the military.

We may need to change the way we think. As in Israel, I think there should be a mandatory draft, where you go away for the service of your country for three years.

As Bill Clinton said so eloquently at the convention, during Vietnam there was a chance to serve; there was a chance not to serve.

Since January 2003, at the height of the debate on the possible unilateral strike against Iraq, I have advocated for a reinstatement of the military draft to ensure a more equitable representation of people making sacrifices in wars in which the United States is engaged.

I hated the draft, but at the same time, it's something that made every American take war seriously.

I don't have any respect at all for the scum-bags who went to Canada to avoid the draft or to avoid doing their fair share.

I was drafted during the Korean War. None of us wanted to go... It was only a couple of years after World War II had ended. We said, 'Wait a second? Didn't we just get through with that?'

I regard the principle of conscription of life as a flat contradiction of all our cherished ideals of individual freedom, democratic liberty and Christian teaching.

The weeping voices rise straight up and strike the clouds. A passer-by at the roadside asks a conscript why, The conscript answers only that drafting happens often.

Since far fewer people are recruited to serve in a voluntary military, the connection between America and its military is increasingly tenuous and less personal.

By requiring all 30 million Americans age 18 to 25 to perform two years of national service, in the military or civilian life, we will be asking for a shared sacrifice from all American citizens.

I don't want to sound like Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, but I do think there should be some sort of national service for young men.

Since we replaced the compulsory military draft with an all-volunteer force in 1973, our nation has been making decisions about wars without worry over who fights them. I sincerely believe that reinstating the draft would compel the American public to have a stake in the wars we fight as a nation.

I have always that there ought to be some kind of mandatory national service, not necessarily in the military but to show everybody that freedom isn't free, that everybody has an obligation to the nation as a community.

But although Australia was also involved in the Vietnam conflict, I can remember my dad telling us that if we were in Australia, we wouldn't be drafted until we were 20.

If we're going to ask our kids at age 18 to go off to war and die for their country, I don't see any problem with asking them at age 16 to think about what that might mean.