Will British "Boots on the Ground" Include Recent Immigrants?
Or will they stay at home while Tommy fights it out with Ivan in Ukraine?
A reader recently asked me if Britain, France, and Germany may consider conscripting recent immigrants to join the fight against Ivan in Ukraine. The question reminded me of the famous aria, “Non più andrai” in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, in which Count Almaviva finds the lustful Cherubino hiding in Susanna’s quarters. On the spot, the Count commissions the boy for military service and sends him packing to a barracks outside of Sevilla. Figaro then mocks Cherubino with the song “Non più andrai”:
You shall go no more, lustful butterfly,
Day and night flitting to and fro;
Disturbing ladies in their repose …Now you shall be among soldiers …
Plenty of honour, little pay!
And instead of dancing the fandango,
A march through the mud.
Feminists like to bellyache about the patriarchy being hard on women. They forget the millions of young men who have been sent abroad to march through the mud and get shot, bayonetted, and blown to smithereens.
With Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, and Ursula von der Leyen talking a big game about sending British and European troops to fight it out with Ivan in the Donbas, will they conscript recent male immigrants to Britain, France, and Germany? Or will they leave those fellows back home to keep the girls company?
After the Germans lost World War I, Hitler complained that the Germans were terrible at propaganda compared to the English and Americans. One notable exception was in the summer of 1917, when a large number of American soldiers were quartered in England for a few months before entering the war on the Continent. Sensing that British soldiers might be a little nervous about what the Yanks were doing when they were on leave in England, the Germans dropped a bunch of leaflets on British trenches with an image of an English girl in bed with an American soldier captioned with the rhetorical question, “Hey Tommy, what’s going on back home?”
During World War II, the Germans played a similar psychological trick on American soldiers with their “Two years is a long time for any girl” and “The girl you left behind” leaflet campaign, proclaiming the girls back home were hanging out with fat cat bankers who were profiting from the boys fighting it out with Jerry in Europe.
During the American Civil War, the U.S. government conscripted recent Irish immigrants shortly after they got off the boat, which resulted in serious draft riots in New York City.
If Keir Starmer puts British boots on the ground in Ukraine and the fighting gets hot, will he conscript recent male immigrants to join the fight?
A third of the Union army during the Civil War were young men volunteers who were not born in the United States. They were not drafted. The riots in New York City were a mob explosion fomented by the Democrats (Secessionists) in response to the initial registration for the draft, not actual inductions. As with the current US Selective Service law, there were two components to the Union draft: registration and induction. No one had been "taken off the boat" yet because the provost marshals were still compiling the registration lists. The "draft" was, in fact, a disguised tax. 207,000 men were drafted into the Union Army, but only around 46,000 actually served. The 161,000 bought themselves an exemption by paying the $300 commutation fee or buying a substitute. The data on fees collected is too sketchy to be trusted entirely, but a reasonable estimate is that the Treasury received $35 million - 11% of the total $319 million in internal taxes (not tariffs) collected by the Treasury from July 1863 (the date of the draft riots) until the end of the war.
If you want to consider a comparison between the American civil war and current events in Europe, you would come much closer to the mark if you used the Confederacy as a measure. The Confederate States of America passed conscription in April 1862, and there was direct enrollment without registration. Total Confederate troops were around 750,000–1,000,000, with conscription providing 20–25%. Total Union troops were 2.2 million, with only 8% (draftees and substitutes) conscripted.
I he's so hot for war he should volunteer for the front line himself and take Macron with him.