Makonnen Tesfaye, 27 June 2026
“Military service is a great equalizer, stripping away privilege and forging a shared national identity among disparate citizens.” — General Charles de Gaulle
“Conscription rests upon the duty of every citizen to defend his country.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt
“A citizen’s finest hour and highest privilege is to confer his whole self to his country.” — John F. Kennedy
“Conscription is the most unpopular and impracticable thing that could be attempted; our people had learnt to consider it as the last of all oppressions.” — Thomas Jefferson
“Compulsory military service is inconsistent with the concept of individual liberty. I can conceive of no more direct and dangerous assault on the freedom of the individual than to compel him to serve in the military forces against his will, under threat of imprisonment” — Barry Goldwater
“Under genocide, military preparedness ceases to be a matter of individual choice and becomes a sacred, collective moral obligation to the dead and to generations unborn. To fail to prepare is to be complicit in the next atrocity.” — M.T.
To read the full article please clcik the link Duty in The Shadow of Genocide and A Nation Under Siege A Critical Analysis of Conscription in Tigray