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Title: Registration Author: Alexander Berkman Language: en Topics: anti-militarism Source: Text from The Blast, Vol. 2, #5, 6/1/1917. Online source http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=1233, retrieved on November 18, 2020.
Registration is the first step of conscription.
The war shouters and their prostitute press, bet on snaring you into the
army, tell you that registration has nothing to do with conscription.
They lie.
Without registration, conscription is impossible.
Conscription is the abdication of your rights as a citizen. Conscription
is the cemetery where every vestige of your liberty is to be buried.
Registration is its undertaker.
No man with red blood in his veins can be forced to fight against his
will.
But you cannot successfully oppose conscription if you approve of, or
submit to, registration.
Every beginning is hard. But if the government can induce you to
register, it will have little difficulty in putting over conscription.
By registering, you willfully supply the government with the information
it needs to make conscription effective.
Registration means placing in the hands of the authorities the despotic
power of the machinery of passports which made darkest Russia what it
was before the Revolution.
There are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of young men in this
country who have never voted and who have never paid taxes, and who,
legally speaking, have no official existence. Their registration means
nothing short of suicide, in a majority of cases.
Failure to register is punishable by imprisonment. Refusal to be
conscripted may be punishable by death.
To register is to acknowledge the right of the government to conscript.
The consistent conscientious objector to human slaughter will neither
register nor be conscripted.