Yes, you could die. And that's bad but your name is intact and if you survive you can go back to the before times. If you kill your own people, you ain't going home again.
The lines on a map might still be there (if only because the Big GAE will refuse to recognize they lost), but the dirt won't magically turn the new residents Ukrainian.
Your life is effectively over either way. This is basically the situation Solzhenitsyn wrote about in the Gulag Archipelago.
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
" Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?...
"The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
Yeah but then you're a criminal. Are you going to defect afterwards and say goodbye to your life forever?
I mean, getting thrown into the meat-grinder is saying goodbye to your life forever. Might as well be a wrench in the cogs on the way down.
Yes, you could die. And that's bad but your name is intact and if you survive you can go back to the before times. If you kill your own people, you ain't going home again.
Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think that a governing body that is actively malicious towards its own citizens counts as "your people" anymore.
They know it, and that's why Jan 6th is their boogeyman.
Then why were you in the country waiting around to get drafted? Why didn't you just bounce before you could get drafted?
The lines on a map might still be there (if only because the Big GAE will refuse to recognize they lost), but the dirt won't magically turn the new residents Ukrainian.
Are they 'your own people' though? People dragging me off to die in a war I didn't ask for in a war that they provoked seem like enemies to me.
Your life is effectively over either way. This is basically the situation Solzhenitsyn wrote about in the Gulag Archipelago.
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
" Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?...
"The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”