A British general, Sir Richard Sherriff, has said that Britain has so few voluntary soldiers that, in the present situation, it should train and equip a citizen army. A retired colonel said shortly before that a return of conscription might be necessary. I wish them both luck with their schemes: they will need it.
Between medical exemption for psychiatric reasons, conscientious objection and lawsuits for discrimination, I doubt that more than 1 per cent of those conscripted would ever end up in the army, and a good proportion of those few would probably be useless.
What are now commonly called mental health issues would become even more prevalent than they already are, doctors being too pusillanimous to refuse to provide the requisite medical certificates to all those who want them. Besides, who can prove that someone is not mentally unfit for something? In England now, it is not uncommon to hear people claiming that they suffer from mental health, meaning that they have, or claim to have, or behave as if they had, a psychiatric disorder as defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (Fifth Edition), according to which practically all human thought or conduct is pathological—as compared with that of mice or rabbits, perhaps.
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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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