Now we shall take off, aim the Russkie between the eyes...
Here
on television and movie theaters, you can often see advertisements that
encourage young people to join the Canadian Forces, where the daily
life is apparently an exciting montage of nonstop action set to rock
music. Even though I rarely get to see their ads here up north, I would
imagine that the American youth is enticed to join the service in a
similar fashion. (Damn it, one day I really should purchase a
subscription to Fox News, just to see the ads that are calculated to
appeal to the typical Fox News viewers.) These rousing ads are quite a
striking contrast to the drab monotone reality that men in the less
enlightened nations come to learn about the obligatory military service.
Since Canada and USA tend to respect the individual rights and freedoms of their people a bit more than European countries (and as a result of this, their working class gets to enjoy the same material standard of living as the European upper middle class), they have also long ago given up the barbarous relic of obligatory military service. Which, of course, has always really been obligatory only for males instead of being truly universal. But for some reason, this is not considered unjust even in the circles that are can usually trusted to be the noisiest about treating both sexes equally. In Finland and many other nations, young men are forced to spend a year of their lives as de facto chattel slaves, and are given perhaps some ridiculously small token compensation for this. Things are slowly changing in Europe so that countries are giving up conscription one by one or making it easy to get out of, but Finland still remains a backward society in this respect.
It's actually pretty funny how quickly feminists tend to find the virtues of traditional manhood when it comes to the obligatory military service for men. Whenever some uppity male has the tenacity to point out that Finnish women don't have to do any kind of civil or military service, the inevitable reply from women, including and especially the feminists, is that women get pregnant and give birth to children, so this should be considered an equivalent sacrifice so that women should stay home. I assure you that I am not making this up: this really is the gist of the standard Finnish feminist argument why the military service should be compulsory only for men. That, and the whole idea that a "real man" doesn't complain but readily sacrifices himself for the greater good and protection of women, and only "little boys" whine and complain that this is "unfair". Ah, the little cultural differences between the Atlantic...
A professional military really has to be efficient and rewarding and completely reject the bottom third of the population for the capable people to continue to want to join its ranks, whereas a military that can automatically rely on obligatory conscription to fill its ranks has no such incentive, especially if it has been able to enjoy decades of undisturbed peacetime. The result is pretty much the same difference that we can observe between the capitalist and socialist economic systems in other areas of life. Once you are entitled to a completely unaccountable use of what is essentially slave labour so that all information that market prices normally convey in the Hayekian sense is completely lost, there is no limit to absurdities and inefficiencies that can be reached. As for the bottom line, I don't even want to imagine what would happen if you took, say, a brigade of freshly-minted soldiers of the USMC and had them fight against a ten times larger force that consists of conscripts of the Finnish military. The only way that the latter group could possibly win is if they somehow managed kill their opponents with laughter.
To be fair, the compulsory military service has one well-known real world benefit in that it vividly teaches the future elites the real meaning of the word average. This is one lesson that many American elites would do well in receiving, based on what I have read. In addition, obligatory military service can provide the bottom quarter of the Bell Curve at least some sense of order and accomplishment, one last high point in their lives before the real world mercilessly puts them in their place. This is the last time when the world really works the same way as it did for you in the junior high, boys, so I suggest that you enjoy your free lunch as long as it lasts. The military service with its simple and straightforward requirements and its total lack of freedom also help the bottom quarter remain clean and at least try to integrate them to society.
My own stint in the military service lasted only a few days before I was fortunately reclassified as a 4-F and sent home. So I didn't really get to personally experience the validity of the above often-repeated statements, nor to participate in the well-known hearty marching songs about invading and pillaging Sweden and Russia, and at the same time back on the home front, getting rid of certain undesirable minorities (having no easily-offended women around does indeed make certain things more free), but I do believe that they are quite true. Even so, I can't say that I would regret very much not having the basic freedoms to live, go, do, speak and think as I please. These days I take so much freedom basically for granted, so I shudder to even think that I would essentially be back in a junior high that was organized like a prison, and that the worst people there had been placed to rule over me and given the absolute freedom to do with me anything they want. A society designed for the needs of the bottom half is a society that only the bottom half would want to inhabit, as it would be for all practical purposes essentially a prison.
In addition, now that I am sitting in my comfortable chair inside my air-conditioned penthouse apartment, the whole idea of running around some mosquito-infested forest with a pretend gun and yelling "A shot! A shot!" whenever you pretend to "shoot" at something (the Finnish military has a notoriously low budget for ammunition) and then returning to the barracks to participate in the classic Finnish military life that basically consists of farting contests and games of ookie cookie doesn't really appeal to me that much. (Here's a fun tip for my North American readers: if you ever meet an annoying Finnish man who you'd want to take down a notch, ask him if he enjoyed the taste of "standard issue" SA-INT cookies. Caught offguard like this, he might look surprised and try to pretend that he doesn't know what you are talking about. In that case, you can just nudge him on the arm and wink, and say that there is no shame in it, you were in a fraternity too.)
As an aside, I have often wondered why the Finnish military shut out gays for so long, since you'd think that Finnish-style military basic training would be a dream come true for a homosexual! Some American judge once opined that prison is not really that big a punishment for a homosexual so therefore a longer sentence is justified, and I remember when read about that, I realized how totally true that is when you think about it, and how it would equally apply to military service too. Lots of straight guys out there would probably pay money to get to live in an environment that is full of young women who have been completely separated from the outside world. And if these chicks are wearing military uniforms, hey, that would only make it hotter!
Because military service and especially the reserve officer's training gives you extra points when you apply to certain postsecondary schools, Finnish women and feminists can often be heard to complain that men get an unfair extra edge because of their compulsory military service. Since the young Finnish women can now actually join the military service if they so desire and this way get these exact same minor benefits, you'd think that this would have silenced these complaints, but you have to remember that we are talking about feminists here. (I think that I shall let my readers now imagine how certain people argue that this change has made men and women perfectly equal with respect to the obligatory military service. Just take the most idiotic argument you can come up with, and I guarantee it has been widely used in public to defend this claim.)
So of course the fair and equal solution would be to automatically grant these extra points for all women. Duh! This despite the fact that in Finland, the vast majority of university students are already women. Most of the academically-minded men lose one year of their lives (even worse, two years if they are unlucky enough to be called to start their service in January instead of July) before they begin to apply to universities, whereas women get to apply and enter colleges and universities straight out of high school with the teachings there still in their memory for the entrance exams. And the Finnish women still have the sheer nerve to claim that the Finnish educational system is somehow rigged against them. At times like this I am beginning to think that the Third World really is culturally superior to us, just like the leftists proclaim.
Now, it is probably true that in general women would be mostly useless in a military, except perhaps as REMF paper pushers or mess hall workers. Since women tend to be net drains on society anyway in every modern welfare state, one solution that I could think of, if the compulsory military service absolutely has to be maintained "because Finland is such a scarcely populated country" (as the official standard argument goes), would be to collect a special tax from all women, and use this money to pay the men doing the military service a reasonable compensation, perhaps a thousand euros a month. Any woman who thinks that this is somehow unfair could freely join the army herself to get this money.
Another solution more in the spirit of free market that I once thought of would be that every three months of service would give you a one year freedom from income taxes. This way, the time of each conscript would be compensated for its actual value so that productive people would get back a lot whereas the unproductives would get essentially nothing. As would be just and fair. Of course, since most Finnish men go to postsecondary schools after the military service and thus are unlikely to earn enough to pay taxes straight out of army, a fair solution might be that you get to choose when you want to use these tax-free years at any time within ten years after being discharged. This would especially benefit the students in engineering, medicine and other reality-based fields who also tend to graduate quickly and then go on to do productive, well-paid and useful work, whereas the typical male students of humanities tend to be overall net drains on society as their "studies" mostly consist of drinking cheap red wine for ten years with taxpayer money as they try to slowly think of a thesis topic (as astonishing as this may sound for my North American readers, I assure you that this was not a joke but that I am dead serious) would not similarly benefit from this.
Since Canada and USA tend to respect the individual rights and freedoms of their people a bit more than European countries (and as a result of this, their working class gets to enjoy the same material standard of living as the European upper middle class), they have also long ago given up the barbarous relic of obligatory military service. Which, of course, has always really been obligatory only for males instead of being truly universal. But for some reason, this is not considered unjust even in the circles that are can usually trusted to be the noisiest about treating both sexes equally. In Finland and many other nations, young men are forced to spend a year of their lives as de facto chattel slaves, and are given perhaps some ridiculously small token compensation for this. Things are slowly changing in Europe so that countries are giving up conscription one by one or making it easy to get out of, but Finland still remains a backward society in this respect.
It's actually pretty funny how quickly feminists tend to find the virtues of traditional manhood when it comes to the obligatory military service for men. Whenever some uppity male has the tenacity to point out that Finnish women don't have to do any kind of civil or military service, the inevitable reply from women, including and especially the feminists, is that women get pregnant and give birth to children, so this should be considered an equivalent sacrifice so that women should stay home. I assure you that I am not making this up: this really is the gist of the standard Finnish feminist argument why the military service should be compulsory only for men. That, and the whole idea that a "real man" doesn't complain but readily sacrifices himself for the greater good and protection of women, and only "little boys" whine and complain that this is "unfair". Ah, the little cultural differences between the Atlantic...
A professional military really has to be efficient and rewarding and completely reject the bottom third of the population for the capable people to continue to want to join its ranks, whereas a military that can automatically rely on obligatory conscription to fill its ranks has no such incentive, especially if it has been able to enjoy decades of undisturbed peacetime. The result is pretty much the same difference that we can observe between the capitalist and socialist economic systems in other areas of life. Once you are entitled to a completely unaccountable use of what is essentially slave labour so that all information that market prices normally convey in the Hayekian sense is completely lost, there is no limit to absurdities and inefficiencies that can be reached. As for the bottom line, I don't even want to imagine what would happen if you took, say, a brigade of freshly-minted soldiers of the USMC and had them fight against a ten times larger force that consists of conscripts of the Finnish military. The only way that the latter group could possibly win is if they somehow managed kill their opponents with laughter.
To be fair, the compulsory military service has one well-known real world benefit in that it vividly teaches the future elites the real meaning of the word average. This is one lesson that many American elites would do well in receiving, based on what I have read. In addition, obligatory military service can provide the bottom quarter of the Bell Curve at least some sense of order and accomplishment, one last high point in their lives before the real world mercilessly puts them in their place. This is the last time when the world really works the same way as it did for you in the junior high, boys, so I suggest that you enjoy your free lunch as long as it lasts. The military service with its simple and straightforward requirements and its total lack of freedom also help the bottom quarter remain clean and at least try to integrate them to society.
My own stint in the military service lasted only a few days before I was fortunately reclassified as a 4-F and sent home. So I didn't really get to personally experience the validity of the above often-repeated statements, nor to participate in the well-known hearty marching songs about invading and pillaging Sweden and Russia, and at the same time back on the home front, getting rid of certain undesirable minorities (having no easily-offended women around does indeed make certain things more free), but I do believe that they are quite true. Even so, I can't say that I would regret very much not having the basic freedoms to live, go, do, speak and think as I please. These days I take so much freedom basically for granted, so I shudder to even think that I would essentially be back in a junior high that was organized like a prison, and that the worst people there had been placed to rule over me and given the absolute freedom to do with me anything they want. A society designed for the needs of the bottom half is a society that only the bottom half would want to inhabit, as it would be for all practical purposes essentially a prison.
In addition, now that I am sitting in my comfortable chair inside my air-conditioned penthouse apartment, the whole idea of running around some mosquito-infested forest with a pretend gun and yelling "A shot! A shot!" whenever you pretend to "shoot" at something (the Finnish military has a notoriously low budget for ammunition) and then returning to the barracks to participate in the classic Finnish military life that basically consists of farting contests and games of ookie cookie doesn't really appeal to me that much. (Here's a fun tip for my North American readers: if you ever meet an annoying Finnish man who you'd want to take down a notch, ask him if he enjoyed the taste of "standard issue" SA-INT cookies. Caught offguard like this, he might look surprised and try to pretend that he doesn't know what you are talking about. In that case, you can just nudge him on the arm and wink, and say that there is no shame in it, you were in a fraternity too.)
As an aside, I have often wondered why the Finnish military shut out gays for so long, since you'd think that Finnish-style military basic training would be a dream come true for a homosexual! Some American judge once opined that prison is not really that big a punishment for a homosexual so therefore a longer sentence is justified, and I remember when read about that, I realized how totally true that is when you think about it, and how it would equally apply to military service too. Lots of straight guys out there would probably pay money to get to live in an environment that is full of young women who have been completely separated from the outside world. And if these chicks are wearing military uniforms, hey, that would only make it hotter!
Because military service and especially the reserve officer's training gives you extra points when you apply to certain postsecondary schools, Finnish women and feminists can often be heard to complain that men get an unfair extra edge because of their compulsory military service. Since the young Finnish women can now actually join the military service if they so desire and this way get these exact same minor benefits, you'd think that this would have silenced these complaints, but you have to remember that we are talking about feminists here. (I think that I shall let my readers now imagine how certain people argue that this change has made men and women perfectly equal with respect to the obligatory military service. Just take the most idiotic argument you can come up with, and I guarantee it has been widely used in public to defend this claim.)
So of course the fair and equal solution would be to automatically grant these extra points for all women. Duh! This despite the fact that in Finland, the vast majority of university students are already women. Most of the academically-minded men lose one year of their lives (even worse, two years if they are unlucky enough to be called to start their service in January instead of July) before they begin to apply to universities, whereas women get to apply and enter colleges and universities straight out of high school with the teachings there still in their memory for the entrance exams. And the Finnish women still have the sheer nerve to claim that the Finnish educational system is somehow rigged against them. At times like this I am beginning to think that the Third World really is culturally superior to us, just like the leftists proclaim.
Now, it is probably true that in general women would be mostly useless in a military, except perhaps as REMF paper pushers or mess hall workers. Since women tend to be net drains on society anyway in every modern welfare state, one solution that I could think of, if the compulsory military service absolutely has to be maintained "because Finland is such a scarcely populated country" (as the official standard argument goes), would be to collect a special tax from all women, and use this money to pay the men doing the military service a reasonable compensation, perhaps a thousand euros a month. Any woman who thinks that this is somehow unfair could freely join the army herself to get this money.
Another solution more in the spirit of free market that I once thought of would be that every three months of service would give you a one year freedom from income taxes. This way, the time of each conscript would be compensated for its actual value so that productive people would get back a lot whereas the unproductives would get essentially nothing. As would be just and fair. Of course, since most Finnish men go to postsecondary schools after the military service and thus are unlikely to earn enough to pay taxes straight out of army, a fair solution might be that you get to choose when you want to use these tax-free years at any time within ten years after being discharged. This would especially benefit the students in engineering, medicine and other reality-based fields who also tend to graduate quickly and then go on to do productive, well-paid and useful work, whereas the typical male students of humanities tend to be overall net drains on society as their "studies" mostly consist of drinking cheap red wine for ten years with taxpayer money as they try to slowly think of a thesis topic (as astonishing as this may sound for my North American readers, I assure you that this was not a joke but that I am dead serious) would not similarly benefit from this.
"Another solution more in the spirit of free market that I once thought of would be that every three months of service would give you a one year freedom from income taxes."
That is an excellent idea! You should write a mail to the "biggest" Finnish politicians.
Poliitikot eivät muutoin koskaan tule ajatelleeksi asiaan noin viisaasti. Valtio säästäisi saman summan sosiaalimenoissaan, ja armeijan käyminen olisi sotilaallekin motivoivampaa kuin nykyisin. Orjatyöhön ei kenenkään pidä alistua.
äiti
Posted by Anonymous | 12:40 PM
From what I hear the Finnish army is quite respected among the professionals who use to evaluate such things. I wouldn't be too hasty to make comments on the basis of a few days' military career. It is a defending army and built as such, _and_ the real dreg is nowadays really meticulously kept out. The bottom rung is nowhere seen anymore in its whole nakedness.
Let us remember that at the moment _two_ of the worlds most proficient armies of PlayStation warfare are _both_ seriously stuck.
Posted by Catilina | 12:48 PM
..they have also long ago given up the barbarous relic of obligatory military service.
Wikipedia: Today, the Selective Service System remains in place as a contingency; young men are required to register so that a draft can be more readily resumed. The U.S. armed forces are now designated as "all-volunteer", although, in 2004 as well as during the 1991 Gulf war, some enlisted personnel were involuntarily kept in the Military after their initial voluntary enlistment commitments had expired.
Posted by Jari | 2:16 PM
Temporarily extending service isn't quite the same thing as a draft. And, Jari, evidently that Wikipedia article didn't inform you that Selective Service is purely nominal. Quoting the passage as you do does not make you look well-informed.
Catalina, perhaps the concept of a Finnish Army (one must restrain a titter here) is meant to make up for the "Finlandization" phenomenon during the Cold War.
Posted by Anonymous | 2:53 PM
Probably the biggest strength in Finnish Army is that they have access to all parts of the population. Whereas professional army tends to be overpopulated with lower half of the bell curve, the finnish army can use all of it. And it really shows. Finnish soldiers in reserve are actually quite good.
Posted by Anonymous | 2:59 PM
Hmmm... I don't know about that but I remind you that e.g. the IDF is still a draft army, and compulsory even to the women. I wonder why they don't see the value of a small professional force.
Mostly I just wonder how a dismissal after a few days in the army would make one a great military expert of a high level.
Posted by Catilina | 3:03 PM
Your musings on the attractiveness of the military to gays does not seem to mesh well with the one Steve Sailer gave.
Prison is much worse though. Gays that wind up in there generally seek special protection from the administrators because of what the other prisoners will do to them.
Posted by tggp | 3:19 PM
a brigade of freshly-minted soldiers of the USMC and had them fight against a ten times larger force that consists of conscripts of the Finnish military.
I can think of very few situations where the marines would win. Do you think that the US armed forces recruit only elite athletes with Mensa memberships and then give them unparalleled training and equipment? That may be true for the special units, but the normal cannon fodder doesn't really differ that much.
pretend gun
Nope. We always had real guns. We usually had live or blank rounds. I can think of only a couple of special circumstances when we had no rounds at all.
to participate in the well-known hearty marching songs about invading and pillaging Sweden and Russia, and at the same time back on the home front, getting rid of certain undesirable minorities
We seldom sang anything. We sang hearty marching songs, but not about Sweden, Russia or minorities.
participate in the classic Finnish military life that basically consists of farting contests and games of ookie cookie
Even if you fantasize about those kinds of things, they don't really happen.
4-F
That explains it all. You didn't want to be in the army and the army didn't want you. The whole picture you have of the service in the Finnish army is quite wrong.
Posted by Anonymous | 3:21 PM
Anonymous:
Temporarily extending service isn't quite the same thing as a draft.
Yes, but it is still coercion.
Wikipedia article didn't inform you that Selective Service is purely nominal.
Yes, at the moment. Though, according to the article it is obligatory for all male citizens and permanent residents. It has been in use and could still be reinstated in the future.
I rely solely on information found on Wikipedia concerning this matter, so actually I am not well-informed. Please correct me.
Posted by Jari | 3:24 PM
I think our renowned expert on all fields has now a bit overextended himself :)
Posted by Catilina | 3:37 PM
> We seldom sang anything. We sang hearty marching > songs, but not about Sweden, Russia or minorities.
I remember very well we sang march songs in military about killing men with long hair ect.
Often I think that when there will be enough organization among Finnish males in Finland, so there could be real opression agains conscription. Just some random guy going to prison then and then doesn't make much effect. I think there should be lot of people going to prison at the same time.
Or my favourite fantasy, people going to do the service, but then having organized sabotace there, like burning the place or something like that. After all, those guys managed to burn some places in Helsinki, why not soon in military?
Posted by Anonymous | 4:28 PM
I've understood that you have wanted to have more comments about your posts for a quite long time. I am surprised that this topic gets picked so late. Criticizing the Finnish Army or the way it is set up always causes a largish reaction in Finns.
I would like to point out that the academic feminist ideologues often _do not_ support conscription, and as far as I know they see military as a construction of the patriarchy or something equally generic feminist jargon. Opposing conscription in more or less sound arguments is also a long tradition of the Western Left (not Eastern ha-ha). The attitudes you describe are more often met among the common folk, which usually pretends to be egalitarian but in truth is far from it.
I am a conscientious objector, view male-only conscription as a serious problem in gender equality and wars as a case of broken window. I say my choice every time someone asks where (or whether) I served. You wouldn't believe the amount of shit I have gotten from Finnish women about it. In the urban area that I have the pleasure of living and working in even my current, very blue collar male work mates are perfectly ok with my choice. Sometimes I am a target of nasty but no doubt friendly jokes, and that's fine because if I wanted to avoid them, I'd just keep my mouth shut about my opinions. Women on the other hand do not always take my treason to country and traditional masculinity so lightly.
The issue of conscription and the hypocrisy around it are one of the things that I most despise about the Finnish convervative Right.
Posted by Anonymous | 4:49 PM
"""I am a conscientious objector, view male-only conscription as a serious problem in gender equality and wars as a case of broken window."""
Can you elaborate on that war-as-broken-window part?
Posted by Anonymous | 6:01 PM
Well I am a bit shy about using this comment page as my soap box, but I guess I'll do it anyway.
Lives and resources wasted on us killing each other for some short-term profit are analogous to replacing the window that the nasty boys broke, except for that the individual lives can't be replaced. The resources spent on fighting and rebuilding would do more good elsewhere. I do not want to take part in breaking any windows.
Risking the only window you have with sometimes terrible odds and little to gain is also completely absurd from an individual's point of view. I don't think any rational person would like to do that. Sometimes people make irrational choices, and unfortunately everyone has to adapt to that. But even then not by adopting slavery or making people inequal in the face of the law.
Posted by Anonymous | 7:58 PM
Finnish army is just clever:
"There are two types of men in this world..."
One type is suitable to fight against feminist and other leftist schoolgirls. Other type is suitable to fight against men. Do not mix them and you have two good armies for two completely different fronts.
Posted by Huckleberry Finn | 8:48 PM
I guess army experiences vary depending on where you served and when and even what kind of individuals you had to live with in the same room. My first room mates in the army were all somewhat sane (I got into reserve officer training later) but I heard that there were a bunch of guys in the same company who had some kind of masturbation contests etc.
Songs and other traditions also vary. Some are official, some unofficial. For example the song about marching to Sweden is clearly unofficial. Conscript leaders may order other conscripts to sing songs like that (well, I didn't) but usually only when there are no regular soldiers around.
Anyway, Utti Jaeger Regiment (which trains professional Special Jaegers and conscript Rangers) has recruitment videos that may be similar to those Ilkka was writing about.
anonymous: Finnish soldiers in reserve are actually quite good.
They would be if they were in good physical condition and if the army had money to organize enough war-games and other practice for reservists. Well, at least we haven't decided that no one will attack here for next ten years and nearly shut down the whole military training like Sweden.
Posted by Rebyk | 4:33 AM
On response from women: "real men go to the army and shut up and don't complain, and women should not have to because they have babies" is a common response from women in Finland, but not a very common response from feminists - feminists tend to oppose the conscript army. Feminists use similar arguments on certain other issues, though.
"To be fair, the compulsory military service has one well-known real world benefit in that it vividly teaches the future elites the real meaning of the word average."
I thought most people got enough of that in the elementary school.
What is 4-F and why did you go to the army in the first place (as opposed to getting some kind of papers exempting you from it)?
Posted by Vera | 6:20 AM
I thought most people got enough of that in the elementary school.
I can assure you that sharing a room with about ten other young men takes the lesson to another level. You can go home from school at the end of the day, but in the army, you have to spend over 20 hours a day (they have some time off in the evening) with the same guys.
Another difference is that sometimes your room mates may be from another part of the country. Cities have their own elementary schools and rural areas their own, but in the army, a guy from Helsinki may end up spending days and nights with a guy from Suomussalmi. For example, people may have different ideas about a sufficient level of personal hygiene.
Posted by Rebyk | 8:30 AM
http://www.hameensanomat.fi/telegram.jsp?article=39447
Posted by Anonymous | 12:26 PM