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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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What do you suggest doing when your home is invaded by people who want to erase your culture?
Lives are not property of the State.
Ukrainian should defend itself by violence. But human beings are not tools or weapons.
War robots to the rescue!
Indeed
It's also the home of people being drafted (even more so than for political elite of the country). If some of them want to get the fuck out (yes, from their home) then those thay have elected shouldn't have the right to force them to stay and die.
It's a little more complicated than that (and the original post is a ridiculous oversimplifications with the intellectual level of a 5-year-old, if that much).
It's down to how much do each of us owe to the Society we grew up in and the Society we live in (if not the same) and thus how much do we have a moral duty to pay it back when called upon it to protect said Society.
Different people will decide differently on those things and thus determine in their own minds what they think their "duty" is.
Then of course, on top of this there's also the whole "protecting my family", "fight alonside my friends", plain old "warrior spirit" and such motivations on one side, as well as "having to stay to work to feed my family" and such on the other, but that's not really to do with "duty" and "moral".
In this specific case there is also the HUGE moral element that they're paying to avoid the draft, and those doing so actually have money, so they're likelly bigger beneficiaries from Society than those who can't afford to make such payments, which brings in a massive element of injustice (one might make the case that the richer the person the more they have a duty towards the Society that made the and kept them thus).
Ultimatelly the draft itself should include some elements to make it fairer (and it does, up to a point, thinks like not drafting poor people with lots of kids - who need to earn a living for their family - or people who don't have the local citizenship - who likely owe much less to local society than the locals) but in this specific case it absolutelly make sense to throw the book at those who are local citizens who have more money than most and yet use it to evade a duty to Society which is likely higher than that of most other people.
As corrupt and shitty the Ukrainian state is, very few people owe their life to it. Draftdodging is morally defensible in almost all wars.
Society is not the State.
Only certain political subcultures in the United States and most absolute dictatorships (like China and Russia) think the State is Society.
States are just one form of organisation that naturally emerges in Societies to manage certain aspects of it. They're not Society, just as Legal is not the same as Moral (i.e. sometimes what's lawfull is imoral and what's moral is illegal).
In fact I agree that people have no duty to the State.
And in Russia that does mean that they have no duty to obey the draft, because it was the Russian State that made the war and it's not being done for the good of Society.
However in Ukraine people would be fighting for Society, not the State and in fact they would be fighting against the State: the Russian State, which is trying take over their land, their things and even control their lives and impose their will on them.
On the Ukranian side this is very much a fight for Freedom from a State which does not operate for the good of people and doesn't even want them to be free.
In fact it even makes sense for some Ukranians to be against the Ukranian State as it operates and still join to fight because the Russian State would be even worse - they're fighting for their families, their friends, their neighbours, even themselves, not for the Ukranian State.
I'm surprised so many people read your post without holding the simple truth that Society (all of us) is not the State (just a few people, sometimes not even elected and when elected, often only through lies and rules that mathematically rig the voting systems). I suppose there are a lot of politicans that want people to confuse such things as Nationalism and Patriotism, hence people who are constantly fed that political spin also end up confusing related elements such as the State, the Nation and Society.
(Also most actual Political Thinking has been killed in the last 4 decades and replaced by techniques from Marketing, so it's unsurprising that most people haven't really pondered by themselves on these things which were all the rage for ideologies back in the first half or the XX century, especially in the US where politics has long ceased to be about grand visions for the future of society).
Draftdoging an economic or offensive war is much different than draftdoging a defensive war.
So society owes us nothing, but we owe society our lives? Why? I'm not sure I agree with that. I would risk my life protecting myself and my loved ones, but asking me to protect strangers and to die for them is a tall ask IMO.
Society is the return for contributing.
Those people happily enjoyed the benefits of their society, and now try to get around the contribution part - by spending money they got trough their position in this very society.
Everyone is free to dislike this deal, but then you should find yourself a country which doesn't have a draft. It's as simple as that. But they didn't. They lived in their comfort zone and now try to get around the rules.
Last, this discussion should be about the officials who took the bribes.
That's not at all what I said.
That you can read and write, have Internet and are alive past (I assume) the ripe old age of 20, is because of Society: anything that you cannot do with your own hands only exists because people have organised to achieve more than single individuals can by themselves and to protect what they achieved from other individuals that would take it by force.
Being outside Society would basically mean having the same rights as a wild animal: you can be killed at will by anybody, enslaved, own nothing that you cannot yourself protect, will be left to die if hurt, will likely be run over and/or killed if you enter communal spaces (such as road, parks). Forget about more complex rights than that such as the rights that come from citizenship: wild animals are not citizens.
It would be immenselly educational for people who parrot this kind of libertarian crap if there was indeed a way for them to be free of all duty to Society and Society free of all duty to them.
As there isn't, if you want a (even partially so) place where people have little or no duty to Society, I suggest you move to a place like Somalia, though I expect that if you take such an extreme "I have no duty to the group" take as you wrote here you would be dead pretty quickly (or maybe just enslaved, who knows): even in a place like that which is pretty much an Anarchy when it comes to the power of the State, people still group up in large groups with a mutual duty of protection (a Society of tribes), and funnilly enough that is same kind of mutual duty of protection you want to evade in the "tribe" you are part of currently whilst enjoying all the benefits only made possible by that very thing you do not want to fight to protect.
Even cavemen had Societies, just very small and called tribes, only back then those who didn't want to contribute to the defense of the group were pushed out and generally died.
I mean, to be fair, slavery is slavery whether there's a "good reason" or not
You generally don't get paid for being a slave, nor recover your freedom after the crisis has passed.
Forced labour and servitude generally fall under the umbrella of slavery, according to the USIDHR at least
Recover your freedom? So you're not free and are forced to work? Sounds like textbook slavery, to me. Indentured servitude is still slavery
Nor will you if you're dead.
Encouraging people to enlist, not forcing them.
Of course, it would be best if they did it willingly. But if they don't, you just accept being invaded and erased?
I would rather do that instead of indirectly killing a bunch of unwilling people, yeah.
Even if you think that the invader will kill and destroy more than you would by preventing its invasion?
If you only care about your own life, there's indeed no reason to.
It's not just land, land is intimately related to culture. Also millions moving to a neighbor country will generally create a political and humanitarian crisis, it's not a magical solution with no negative consequences.
One of the foundation of culture is transforming the land, starting from agriculture. The way the natural land was shaped by the people living on is a first marker of culture. Then comes the art and the buildings, in Europe we have a very dense network of historical remains spanning thousands of years, from cave paintings to modern art museums. If you have ever seen with your own eyes or touched with your own hands a famous remain of your place, you know the emotion is not quite the same as seeing it on the internet. It creates a feeling of belonging to a line of people who have created things bigger than them, and you reach a better understanding of how everything that allows your life today was progressively developed. It makes you want to protect this inheritance for others to access the same knowledge and emotions, and it may motivate you to produce something that could reach a similar value.
Land inspire artists and creators in general. The most evident example is how Mount Fuji inspired the creation of an insane quantity of art in Japan, such as the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji by Hokusai. The famous Great Wave off Kanagawa from this series, which is actually about the Mount Fuji, had a massive impact on the world culture.
Similarly, post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne painted multiple views of mount Sainte-Victoire https://drawpaintacademy.com/mont-sainte-victoire/
The end of 19th century classical guitar piece Recuerdos de la Alhambra written by Spanish composer Francisco Tárrega is an interesting example. It was inspired by the Alhambra palace in Spain, which was built during the 13th century by the Emirates who conquered Spain during the previous centuries. Nonetheless, it became part of the Spanish culture and inspired new art pieces.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjX-m4LkYk
To get back to the mountains, but with a historical scientific experiment this time (science is part of culture). Blaise Pascal did a historical experiment in 1648 at the Puy-de-Dôme (volcanic mountain in the middle of France) in order to test the "weight of air" that later led to the understanding of atmospheric pressure (immortalized by the Pascal unit of measurement). This would not have been possible in Holland. https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/11/blaise-pascal-florin-p-and-puy-de-d.html
There are countless examples of how ancient Greece and Rome inspired arts and architecture at different centuries: 16th century St. Peter's basilica, 17th century Versailles palace or Neoclassicism art in the 18th and 19th centuries.
There are many other examples about rivers, lakes, seas, cities etc...
That is to say, the land and how it is transformed and built are major sources of culture. If you take the same people but magically modify their history, so they lived on a different land, you will have a different culture. Probably not worse nor better, but different, because the land inspires the culture.
If your people are not living on its history soaked land anymore, you lose those major culture nutriments. I'm not saying people cannot carry part of their culture with them, nor that culture cannot reinvent itself and be inspired by different origins, but you have more chances to dilute or lose culturally important works of the past if they are not set in stone. Stones that you can access.
It may even get physically destroyed and erased, like what ISIL terrorists did of the ancient temples in Iraq and Syria. To be fair, it also happens from "democratic" movements, such as how the French Revolution destroyed many pieces of arts because it represented the Nobility and the Church. https://www.nytimes.com/1977/05/04/archives/notre-dame-statuary-lost-in-1793-unearthed-in-paris.html
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/04/12/video-islamic-state-nimrud/25667399/
Given that Putin negates Ukrainian's history and culture as a justification to invade it, we can expect that he would continue on his pathway of destruction to erase any reminder of it.
https://theconversation.com/we-should-all-be-concerned-that-putin-is-trying-to-destroy-ukrainian-culture-179351
So that's a couple of elements about why defending your land is important for your culture.
This comment was specifically about why land is essential to culture.
About drafting, In other comments, I explained how I think that you have the responsibility to defend the culture that raised you. It's like paying taxes in a social-democracy, you may have become self-sufficient and don't need the social system anymore, but you have the moral responsibility to contribute back (at least through taxes), so the next underprivileged group can benefit from what allowed you to reach this point: public education, medicine, culture, research, other public infrastructure and services, etc.
So defending your people/culture/land is an extension of this thought.
Of course, I wish people would enlist out of free will, but not everyone has high moral standards (imperfect education perhaps), so you need constrains, that's also why laws and enforcement are needed.
To be honest, I had a pacifist period where I would have preferred to run away from any military conflict. But now, I think we can't deal in absolute, we have to work with compromises, in this case, supporting the lesser evil that will reduce the amount of deaths and destruction. I think getting drafted people killed to stop Putin's imperialism is a lesser evil than letting it destroy a democracy and its culture. I believe he will not stop until he has done the same to all the ex-USSR countries, and that stopping him in Ukraine should reduce the amount of destruction.