Conscription then and now

Work in Progress by Ivan Morgan

One of my favourite political quotes of all time came from Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, when, during the Second World War, he was trying to hold the country together in the face of another of our nation’s endless crises. This time it was over conscription.

We were fighting the Germans in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific. We needed to send more troops. There was a movement afoot to force – by law – young men “of fighting age” into soldiering overseas. French Canada was having none of it. Just ahead of a national vote on the issue, King, trying to please everyone (a Mackenzie King trait) explained his conscription policy to an angry Parliament as “not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary.”

I challenge you to find a more Canadian quote.

Conscription has been on my mind lately as we learned Vladmir Putin has invoked it in Russia, calling up young men to fight in his invasion of the Ukraine. Many young people are resisting it.

The Russian army has not done well. Putin is determined to take (or in his mind take back) the Ukraine. The Ukrainians are fiercely resisting. The war is particularly unpopular among young Russians.

NATO recently said more men have fled Russia since Putin’s conscription policy than were in the original invasion force.

Why have I been thinking about conscription?

Like most folks, I like to relax by watching TV. Some watch sports, some movies, some game shows.  I watch people building log cabins in the woods on YouTube. You might think this weird, and you would probably be right. But, as they say, “Whatever floats your boat.”

What’s this got to do with conscription?

For over a year I have been watching some young Russian men (just lads, really) build a log cabin deep in the Siberian woods. They seem to be fine young fellows who like nothing more than to hang out, build their cabin, cook and eat huge meals, chop firewood, and film themselves doing it for their YouTube channel (there’s subtitles). They themselves say they built the cabin to “be away from people.”

Siberian winters are brutally cold, and they look pretty cozy sitting at their supper table by their woodstove in their homemade cabin eating, drinking and laughing. I know a little about that.

Now they face the very real possibility of being rounded up by Putin’s thugs (I hesitate to call them a government) and being forced to fight far away in a war they didn’t start and probably care very little about. Far from getting away from people, they will be put in close contact with people and told to kill them before they themselves are killed.

Odd as it may sound, I worry about them.

This is the power of social media. Although they live far away, I feel I have come to know them. War gets a lot more real if you know the people who are at risk of dying violently. I have never met them, never communicated with them.  My only Russian are a few words and phrases taught to me by my babushka (grandmother) when I was five or six years old. Yet I feel connected to them.

They are young men happily enjoying their own company deep in the frozen Siberian woods (not all that different from our Canadian woods).  I suspect in time they will all meet someone, settle down and lose interest in each other and the cabin. Such is the trajectory of young men’s lives.

If they get the chance.