Politics & Power Quote by Meyer London

Calling conscription “democratic” is the kind of rhetorical laundering politicians love: take a coercive state power, run it through the vocabulary of equality, and hope the shine distracts from the bruise. Meyer London punctures that trick with a single, grim pivot. “Yes; so is a cemetery.” Democracy, in the thin sense of equal treatment, can be achieved by the bluntest instrument imaginable. Everyone ends up in the same place. Equality is not automatically justice; it can be mass, indiscriminate harm.

The line works because it refuses the comforting romance of shared sacrifice. Conscription is often sold as citizenship’s entrance fee: you prove you belong by being equally liable to fight. London replies that equal liability is not a moral alibi. A system can be “fair” in distribution and still be obscene in outcome. The cemetery image is doing double duty: it’s both a literal destination of war and a metaphor for how states flatten individuality when they need bodies more than consent.

Context matters. London was a Socialist congressman and one of the most outspoken antiwar voices during World War I, a period when dissent was treated as treason and the draft was framed as the people’s war made real. His jab isn’t only at militarists; it’s at the liberal habit of mistaking procedure for virtue. If democracy is reduced to everyone being equally disposable, London suggests, then democracy has been hollowed out and refilled with dirt.