SARA Duterte and Bongbong Marcos have made a few statements about mandatory military service / Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), and these proposals were met with some heated discussion.
This article will touch on some of what I know about militia/mandatory service and what it means for the present day.
Some of the earliest examples of militias can be found in China, Greece and Rome. In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, for example, one of the characters, Liu Bei forms a militia to fight rebels.
At its core, the idea of a militia is that of citizen soldiers or a militarized populace. Some people find this idea abhorrent, dismissing it as militarism. In a world of relative peace, militias have become an anachronism for some people, and a potential source of terrorism for others.
The counterpoint against this is that rights, peace and overabundance are interludes of history. The historical average for most humanity is competition and fighting to secure what one has, which is what mandatory military service, ROTC or Militia ultimately amount to. These all amount to the same things: the formation of the citizen-soldier in defense of their nation/state (however you wish to define them).
The idea is very simple. As Filipino citizens, we have certain duties; duties which require us to fight and, If necessary, die. If we cannot or will not fight to protect and serve, the country is weakened, at best, or is conquered at worst. Your rights – any rights – only extend as far as your state’s (and ultimately yours) ability to enforce them. Peace conceals that truth. War and political instability reveal it.
Aside from fighting foreign threats, the militia was also the means by which societies came to ensure their rights from oligarchs, tyrants and foreign occupation. That is the basis of America’s 2nd Amendment. It was meant to arm Americans, so they could protect themselves from all threats – foreign and domestic – by forming militias.
But what good is a militia against nukes, drones and tech weapons?
The answer is that it doesn’t matter. At the core of war is the willingness to fight, and if you disagree, look at the American fiasco in Afghanistan. The Americans spent blood and wealth for several years there, and in the end, power came back to the control of the Taliban.
The only way the Americans could have won that is by exterminating the Afghans and replacing them with a pro-American people.
Militias/Mandatory Service, therefore, represents a nation’s willingness to fight and die for its space, history, progeny and continuation. The question is, is the Philippines still worth fighting for?/PN
