No, I still won’t watch streams, this guy is a great poster though
https://twitter.com/badempanada/status/1657263485397483524?s=46&t=DBqOmL5V_w7cid09gQz_FQ
No, I still won’t watch streams, this guy is a great poster though
https://twitter.com/badempanada/status/1657263485397483524?s=46&t=DBqOmL5V_w7cid09gQz_FQ
Hot take: If we think housing, healthcare and a guaranteed dignified standard of living are human rights then they also apply to veterans of imperialism. Maybe he belongs in a reeducation community or even in a pit but nobody belongs on the streets.
Other hot take: Schadenfreude towards low-level grunts is a less efficient tool of organising and education than using stories like these as cautionary examples of how the bourgeois state is conning impressionable youths and shouldn’t be trusted.
For me that first of all depends on their stance towards the revolution. If you actualy join the correct side and fight alongside us, and I mean real fight not just social posturing like e.g German Nazis that survived the war and then spent their life going on apology tours or something.
Then yeah, we need all the help we can get and if they’re willing to put a bullet on a billionaire/capitalist head I will give them a second chance. We need actual people that are willing and capable of fighting whether we like this reality or not.
But as I said my standard is anything less than literally to join the revolutionary army like today and its not worth bothering with them.
I mean, I think we need to make a difference between cons here.
This young man seems to take most issue with the reimbursement for his service, he doesnt get dental, he still needs a second job, VA arent helping. But an unpaid hitman wasnt conned into killing someone, they were just conned into doing it for free.
And if they were instead tricked into doing it for some reason of idealism and the way the war was presented to them, you gotta consider when the bubble burst. If it burst while still deployed, did they stick their head in the sand for the sake of avoiding repercussions or securing their own future? That doesnt seem very valuable to a revolution, for example.
Edit: This essay is mainly about the idea of “brainwashing” or other state influence upon the civilian population, but I think a lot can apply to being “brainwashed” or otherwise influenced into military service, particularly the parts about the implicit understanding of personal gain that drives acceptance of propaganda.
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Both “tricked” and “conned” definitely should be read with the same quotation marks as “brainwashed” there(and I should have written them with those to begin with) cause all three basically have the same meaning.
As someone from a global south country that these yankee fucks have destroyed, their homelessness, high suicide rates, and PTSD is literally the only small amount of Justice we have. If a revolution ever does come to the imperial core, youre free to send all your vets and generals here to properly face justice for their countless crimes.
yes because their homelessness, high suicide rates, and PTSD in the first world will magically undo and mitigate all of the damage the elites have done in the third world by unfucking the environment, unfucking the economy, and undoing all the intergenerational trauma. Justice is done by the people, either of their country or the country they fucked (because at least it helps undo the last fuckening, maybe the first if you craft their drops into bonemeal), not by the same inhuman system that sent them to go kill and die 9000 km away. That is not justice.
There is basically zero chance any current American troops will ever face justice, so in the absence of that I prefer vengeance over nothing.
this is literally worse than “nothing” because its celebrating the very genocidal system that sent the fuckhead to murder babies cannibalizing him as a side effect to keep the wheels running 0.0001x more efficiently to continue the extraction. And all the while the real powers that be who are fundamentally responsible for all of this just get richer and richer from blood money. Vengeance on the other hand would be getting mauled to death by wildlife, self-deletion in a hunting accident, or getting pwned by a fellow corpsman like how chris kyle went to hell. Something that uniquely effects these meathead toilet scumfucks because of their violent murder cult and never the common man.
Absolutely. They should be held accountable for what they did. We’ll probably send you our generals and presidents and pundits first though if that’s okay?
if i had a plane and i could trick kissinger into getting on it
:sicko-wistful:
Disclaimer: I dont think unrepetant military hogs are worth saving.
Yeah I personally cant hang around here when military comes up. My close friend was in Afghanistan and literally never saw a thing, they just walked around and stayed at forts. He now is a single father with two kids with autism. He’s also throughly and unmovably a socialist. We grew up poor, his father was murdered due to gang activity and his mom was selling drugs up until very recently, she’s very mentally unstable.
But he should be on the street because some lefty who grew up in the whitest, most safest, lacrosse-team havingest area read a book once.
I get such a major disconnect because it seems like some people don’t understand what growing up in some places is like. Selling drugs is not a better alternative to joining the military, being in gangs and that life is scary but also fucking pathetic and miserable. You’re a detriment to your family and only incur more trauma to everyone you know.
Like think about it too, somehow we can propagandize a good portion of the nation to believe in capitalist class dynamics, the duopoly and a lot of the other idiotic hog shit but tricking people to fight bad guy is something you have to somehow be above. But I mean why not? I, rich white kid with options knew better, why can’t the rest of society?
For a bunch of people who try to explain things materially the veteran criticism always stinks of the inability to put oneself in anothers shoes.
The most virulently “fuck the troops” people in this community are non-USians and you know this. This is demonstrated in this very post with OP who’s not from the US.
I’ve rubbed shoulders with vets before, and when you did deep into why they’ve enlisted, it’s never just “I joined the military because I’m dirt poor.” If you dig deep enough, there’s always “I want a sense of adventure,” “I want to prove myself as a man,” “I found school too boring and wanted something more exciting,” and other bullshit. I also knew people who enlisted to get US citizenship, which I think is at least more sympathetic than just repeatedly harping about people joining for purely economic reasons.
One thing people seem to always ignore is that you have a choice of what branch you want to enlist in. Even if we buy them being completely brainwashed and don’t understand the military’s direct role in furthering US imperialism, then my question is “why did you enlist in the Marines or the Air Force instead of the Navy or the Coast Guard?” Even by the standards of being brainwashed by US propaganda, surely they would understand that you shoot people in the Army and Marines and bomb people in the Air Force. Meanwhile, you’re just stuck on a boat in the Navy and don’t even leave the country in the Coast Guard (not true, but we’re going off by US propaganda). It’s common US pop culture knowledge that the Marines are the toughest branch, so someone’s who doing the bare minimum in order to get their GI Bill wouldn’t even think of enlisting in the Marines. People join the Marines because they want to “be a man” and “fuck shit up” (ie commit war crimes). Otherwise, they would simply join the Navy or the Coast Guard or the Army or even the Air Force.
Noticing a distinct lack of non-american shoes present in this comment.
Just because its not present doesnt mean I dont have thoughts about it as well. How could I possibly make such a comment and also not have sympathetic views towards the people affected by US imperialism?
It’s still a choice to leave them unmentioned except for referencing their status as official “bad guys” and describing military deployment there like guarding pillow forts and taking a dog on walks.
Sympathy isn’t a on/off switch, plus “sympathetic views” is very vague, I’m pretty sure only outright genocidal fash would lack any sympathy for victims of US imperialism.