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It’s unclear to me whether this is true or not. The popular perception in America about the Vietnam War is that there was a very significant movement among young men to resist conscription, whether through open defiance (burning draft cards, etc.), fleeing the country, or the pursuit of various educational and/or medical exemptions. There was also, famously, a significant issue of fragging of officers, which would strongly suggest a considerable anti-war or anti-conscription sentiment within certain parts of the military.
That being said, only a third of the military personnel during the war were conscripted — the other two-thirds were volunteers. (This is pretty much the mirror image of WW2, in which approximately two-thirds of American men who served were drafted and only one-third volunteered.) So, clearly the instruments of social control and propaganda available to the American government were strong enough at the time to drum up significant interest in military service. There’s probably a very substantial portion of the young male population of nearly any country who are very easy to convince to go to war.
However, it seems like the question here is: how effective would a 21st-century first-world regime be at convincing the recalcitrant portion of the male population to willingly comply with conscription? By definition, the men who are conscripted are the ones who were not enthusiastic enough to volunteer.
In Vietnam, despite all of the huge cultural concerns at the time about the draft, in the end only about 12% of the men who didn’t enlist ended up being drafted; the number in WW2 seems to be closer to 27%. Yet the level of resistance to the draft among eligible men seems to have been considerably higher in the Vietnam era, even as the actual likelihood of getting called up for service was considerably lower. (Maybe there was actually a massive effort to resist conscription during WW2 and I’m just not aware of it; I’m aware of the significant anti-draft movement during WW1 and of the Wilson administration’s heavy-handed efforts to suppress and persecute it, but I’m not aware of anything similar during WW2.)
So then the question is: are the tools available to first-world governments today more effective or less effective than the tools available to the American government in the 1960’s and 70’s? Naïvely I would expect they are less effective; in the Vietnam era, media was still far more centralized and there was no internet to be censored. Do you believe that the brainwashing capacity of the internet is stronger than its ability to provide access to anti-war content? That essentially the whole of the internet could be mobilized in favor of social control and propaganda by regimes attempting to conscript men who would otherwise be ambivalent or hostile to military service?
You don’t need to mobilize the whole of the internet. Most internet media consumption is on a handful of sites / platforms, all of which (except for TikTok, and that may soon change) are owned by major American corporations.
Yes, but would those corporations all actually coordinate in suppressing all anti-war or anti-conscription content? Im not sure that they would. I suppose in theory it depends on the war. If the U.S. declared war on Iran, for example, in order to protect Israel, I cannot imagine platforms like Reddit and TikTok all getting into lockstep and suppressing all content skeptical of the legitimacy of that war. These platforms are currently full of content hostile to Israel and to American adventurism in the Middle East; it would represent a very abrupt 180-degree turn if they suddenly started censoring such content.
Now, your original claim was about the likelihood that the British government could get young men to comply with a draft to fight Russia. You probably have a much stronger argument in favor of that narrow and specific claim; the extent to which media platforms have been able to gin up jingoistic hatred of Russia has been very eye-opening to me, and it didn’t even require lockstep, heavy-handed, coordinated suppression of contrary viewpoints. Do you believe that these same platforms could just as easily inculcate the same level of jingoism and bellicosity toward another non-Russia country such as China, though?
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