We are currently witnessing a shift to the right in many areas of social life and, with it, a step backwards to the supposed “good old days.” This begins with migration and asylum policy, right-wing debates about “cityscapes” and belonging, gender issues, the debate about abortion, and the question of what a family should look like, and is now reaching its preliminary climax in the new debate about compulsory military service. Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Currently, the government is “only” talking about compulsory military service in the event that not enough soldiers (especially male soldiers) volunteer, but even this has a number of consequences.

The backward roll in patriotism and national pride:

In order to increase the chances of more people voluntarily signing up for service in the German Armed Forces, old images are being brought back into the spotlight. Numerous posters in public spaces are currently advertising service in the German Armed Forces, appealing to or evoking patriotic feelings. The same applies to memes on social media and the dissemination of numerous videos. At the same time, an adventurous character of the service is being constructed, in which male protagonists are primarily featured in the imagery – at least when it comes to technology and weapons; female protagonists mainly act in a supportive, medical context. All these posters conceal the brutal reality of war, such as death, violence, suffering in various forms, displacement, and destruction. Despite all the romanticizing, the military ultimately serves to harm and kill the enemy. To justify this, there is a renewed reliance on mental images of homeland, nation, and now also democracy, which must be defended, or which apparently can only flourish and exist through the protection of the military.

Finally, it is proclaimed that “Germany must be fit for war.” This paves the way for the mental militarization of society, the expenditure of large sums of money on the arms industry, and the normalization of the military presence in the form of public pledges and nationalistic oaths of allegiance for a large part of society. But we ask: What about the capacity for peace, what about diplomacy and understanding? Are these not the actual cornerstones – even of bourgeois democracies?

The colorful images of the German Armed Forces

With these colorful propaganda images, both real and imagined, the German Armed Forces are conducting a large-scale campaign in schools, promoting this machine of violence and death as a normal job and an average future prospect. At the same time, students are to be encouraged to think about all possible future scenarios, including war, in class and to share this content with their families, thereby contributing to the militarization of society. With regard to training in the german armed forces, even if the deadly and destructive purpose of the military is not always immediately apparent, it is nevertheless part of this context and makes the army's mission possible in the first place. Ultimately, the purpose of training to become a soldier is to eliminate the enemy in war – in other words, to kill them. This goes hand in hand with trivializations such as saying that a soldier has “fallen.” Only in this case, the person does not get up again. They were simply killed – and no amount of euphemistic language can sugarcoat that. Here, a life was abruptly and brutally ended, personal dreams and hopes destroyed, family, children, and friends left behind in mourning. A gap has been torn in their lives that cannot be filled.

One might ask why the vivid propaganda images, both real and imagined, do not actually show the misery of trenches, battlefields, “fallen soldiers,” grieving families, and destroyed landscapes.

Your body belongs to the state

With the introduction of questionnaires on military service and the reintroduction of conscription, the state is laying claim to the bodies of young people. By making it compulsory to answer questionnaires on military readiness, the state is already hinting that it wants to know what is going on in this area and is forcing young people to deal with the issue of the military, while at the same time threatening to introduce compulsory military service, at least for biological males, if there is a shortage of volunteers.

We also know from past experience that a physical examination is by no means a pleasant experience, but rather an extremely humiliating one, and will most likely remain so. This is intentional. At the latest when the state unabashedly reaches into the private parts of the examinee, who is usually completely naked, it shows that it literally has the person in question by the balls.

During military service, your life is completely controlled by others. You live in barracks and have hardly any personal freedom. In the past, at least, the pay for military service was nowhere near the minimum wage (if such a thing had existed at the time), and it is doubtful that this would change.

In return, you have to put up with being yelled at and bossed around by your superiors, you can't go where you want, and you have to be trained to kill and expect to be called upon to do just that. The otherwise valid, or at least feigned, state guarantee of physical integrity is officially suspended here. The body of the soldier (at this point, in terms of conscription, exclusively male) serves the state as an instrument of killing and destruction. It is accepted that this instrument may be wounded, captured, or killed. The soldier is largely deprived of his civil rights.

Some parties justify the impending conscription exclusively for biological males on the grounds that biological females contribute to society primarily by continuing to perform unpaid care work, having children, and allowing the state to control their bodies through legal regulations on abortion. But instead of combating existing constraints and injustices, new constraints are simply being (re)introduced elsewhere. We therefore oppose compulsory service of any kind, the unfair distribution of care work, and the abolition of repressive abortion laws!

All legal requirements regarding self-determination with regard to gender self-determination are de facto invalid at this point. The state assumes at this point that the potential conscript is merely pretending to have a different identity in order to avoid compulsory service.

At this point, the reactionary role is being reversed in several ways. On the one hand, not only are the social advances made so far in gender issues being rolled back, but there is also a return to a purely binary gender model consisting of men and women. This goes hand in hand with traditional ideas according to which only men are conscripted into the military, while women are not subject to compulsory military service in this conservative view. We can all imagine for ourselves what further conservative ideas this will lead to....

The issue of military service and conscientious objection

Where compulsory military service is introduced, there will also be a return to so-called civilian service. There will certainly no longer be the unequal duration that existed for a long time between military and civilian service (for a long time, civilian service was significantly longer than military service, and those performing civilian service were effectively punished for their refusal to perform military service by having to serve for a longer period) (there are court rulings from the early 2000s on this subject), In the event of an emergency, it is not as civilian as it initially appears. Although those performing civilian service will not have to fight as soldiers on the front line, they will be called upon to perform services that are intended to support the army and the state in their functions in the event of war. This may well mean that these services are performed very close to the war zone and also pose a risk to life and limb, which the state is likely to be relatively indifferent to in the course of this compulsory service. The sole purpose here is to support and maintain the function of the state and the military – nothing else. Thus, even if they have served in important social fields during peacetime, those performing civilian service ultimately cannot escape the military. At least they can escape barracks life during peacetime, but ultimately they should not be under any illusions....

This raises the question of applying for alternative military service. In the past, applicants had to write an essay in which they had to explain their conscience in detail and justify why it was not possible for them to carry a weapon and shoot at others, while taking care not to appear too hostile or contemptuous of the military. A written balancing act, in other words. Regardless of whether this will continue to be the case in the future (it remains to be seen whether district military recruitment offices will really want to read masses of such applications created with the help of ChatGPT), this shows how much the state turns life upside down in the context of war. After all, it is completely nonsensical to have to submit an application stating that you do not want to kill or be violent. It should actually be the other way around, and detailed reasons should have to be given as to why someone wants to take up arms...

This shows that the logic of the military is both violent and hostile to life!

In summary and conclusion, we can only state:

The military and thus the German Armed Forces

– serve to protect the state and capital,

– are fundamentally violent, hostile to life, and undemocratic

– do not care about the individual

– stand for conservative gender roles

– consume social resources that are urgently needed in other areas of civil society

– threaten us with death and destruction

– fuel confrontation between military alliances, leading to permanent threats and crises, which in turn block social progress

We, the FAU Hamburg, hereby declare our solidarity with the school strike against compulsory military service and the education strike against compulsory military service and demand

NO COMPULSORY SERVICE,

NO MILITARY SERVICE OBLIGATION,

STOP THE MILITARIZATION OF SOCIETY!!!