There is no number of foreigners that is unacceptable to sacrifice for a middle class livelihood. Anti-cop because they can imagine a scenario where a cop inconveniences them. These principles don’t apply to the Waffen SS because they can’t imagine a soldier personally inconveniencing them and, of course, foreigners aren’t really humans.
This ties in to the way USians (westerners broadly, even) will often talk about designated “bad” countries in terms of what they do to “their own people”, always implying that if they just turned the bulk of their aggression outward towards other nations like we do, it would be somehow appreciably better.
And then they disapprove of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Hot take that shouldn’t be that hot, but killing people of other countries is worse than killing people of your own country
“I had no choice” no the choice you had was to remain poor like the people you murdered who didn’t happen to have a Nazi jobs program they could sign up for.
“Sorry Afghan civilian, my free college is worth more than your life.”
Drone operators when they see a child in the strike zone
Weighing how much fun I’ll have at frat parties later vs how sad that kids parents will be picking up their body parts. Oh well click the button.
95 upbears
169 comments
:lmayo: :yea:
This is useless moralising. If you want to overthrow this system, you’ll need to recruit soldiers and even some officers, and if you would have to let them escape cognitive dissonance via thinking of themselves as victims, so be it. Cops are mostly useless, so fuck them.
lmao whats an American soldier gonna do to help overthrow the system? Our enemies arent gonna be small kids and women and they’re not gonna be able to hide in a bunker and call in an airstrike.
Is ACAB also “useless moralising”?
On the notion of “but the propaganda!”
There is far, far more copaganda in the US than military propaganda. Almost all of the top ten shows in the US at any given time for decades have been cop shows.
If “but the propaganda” elides guilt for the military, why not cops? Is it because cops affect you and the military doesn’t? I’m open to alternative explanations.
I’d argue that the military propaganda is more effective than the copaganda, even though you’re right that there’s more copaganda. But I think your reasoning is the answer to that too: Copaganda isn’t as effective because it’s disproven every time you actually have to interact with a cop in real life. But since Americans don’t get harassed (or murdered) by soldiers like they do by cops, the reputation of soldiers doesn’t fall in the same way.
tbf you do need at least some of them on our side to do a revolution. czechoslovakia famously had communists infiltrate the police from the top down and purge reactionaries and used this for leverage for a quick and painless socialist revolution, though afaik we were the only country that did it that way and the liberal government was extremely weak after ww2. partisans were able to quickly join police departments as the government reformed and had a ton of leverage.
with russia, they formed soldiers councils among sympathetic soldiers and used their experience to train workers in combat. in china vast swathes of the nationalist military defected to the communist cause. at one point, the communists had 10k socialists vs around 3 million soldiers, tables flipped pretty quickly as it went on. russia certainly had an imperialist military, and so did east germany (remnants of imperialists, more like) and their example would be more applicable to america’s situation.
The funny thing is, I don’t even think that joining the military is morally irredeemable. I just hate this “Look, I’m just as much of a victim as the children I killed” attitude. Mike Prysner is an ex member of the Waffen SS and he’s dedicated his life to defeating American Imperialism.
The only good American vets are the ones who acknowledge their sins and seek redemption through actions and not defend their time in the military and don’t get pissy when POC/foreigners are understandably wary of them as if they’re entitled to automatic forgiveness.
There is very little that is irredeemable. Maybe it’s my Christian upbringing showing but if you repent whatever you did and commit yourself to the revolution, you should be forgiven. I’m not taking about being opportunistic here like Hans Landa, I’m taking about a genuine change of heart. If you’re reading this and you’re in the military or the FBI or the police forces, it’s never too late to do the right thing. Being a bastard is a role people choose to play, it is not the essence of their being.
Even the last emperor of China had a good life after the revolution. Not everything needs to end in blood and death.
Weren’t soldiers conscripts back then in Tsarist Russia? Quite a difference when compared to US volunteers.
a good number were volunteers too, usually like 50-100k at any time. like 2/3rds of american forces were conscripted for vietnam, russian regular army was like 4 mill prior to collapse. do the math i guess
though most conscripts would just be sitting in border outposts in the russian empire and not doing anything crazy. became a big issue during ww1 and the war with japan
like 2/3rds of american forces were conscripted for vietnam
1/3, but I doubt they’ll do that again because even with a minority being draftees there was a lot of rebellion.
All troops are bastards
“I didn’t know what I was signing up for!”
:bruh-moment:
What do you think we did in Afghanistan? What about Iraq?
What about every country we’ve bombed and left a trail of death behind us?
This information isn’t hidden. The people signing up in the 10-20 years lived through it! People can regret signing up all they want, but they don’t get to downplay their support of Amerikkkan imperialism. They can move on, do better things with their lives, but they’re still culpable for their choice
i knew one based anarchist who had fucked up and joined the military. they admitted they fucked up, it was a stupid childish decision and they were desperate to get the hell away from their family, and they regretted not finding a decent way to do it. i never once saw that fucker sober. they said when they were leaving, they looked for data to leak, but didn’t have access to anything good.
i never once saw that fucker sober.
This is what gets to me. I’ve seen footage of pilots who flew the planes that took Northern Korea back to the stone age. They looked completely haunted by what they’d done once they realized it was wrong. How is it that these men who were almost certainly not Communists show more regret and contrition than some “Socialists”
I mean, among “baby leftists” who know about what the US did but still can’t grasp the theory, the conditioning is hard to shake. A veteran, the same guy who did the :communism-will-win: stunt at West Point and now has a podcast, mentioned that he had hopes to “reform” the military from within as a junior officer, only to have that expectation slam him in the face like a rotating door. Which is why he hoped to be discharged with a bang.
Not to infantilize them, of course, just weighing it in.
If you’re a (imperialist)soldier or a cop you’re a bastard. Simple as. You may have been propagandized into it to a massive degree or you may have few other economic options. Still a bastard.
It seems obvious. If someone walks up to me and says hey “I’ll give you 1 million Dollars to go kill that mom, dad, and kid over there just hanging out in the park” and I accept that is an evil action. Even if I’m dirt poor and dang a million dollars would let me escape poverty that’s an evil action.
Choosing to join the military is the same thing except Americans have been told it’s good their whole life. Plus it pays way less than my example so it probably won’t even let you escape poverty.
Now I won’t say soldiers or even cops are irredeemable of course. If you get out and realize your evil and spend your time now atoning one way or another then good job you are no longer so evil. Obviously expect no forgiveness from those you hurt but if you’re truly atoning you wouldn’t. This is where many people seem to go wrong. Like oh damn I joined the military and I know/knew it was bad but please feel bad for me now cause I feel sad about it. No you go do something to make up for your sins if you feel bad about it.
Of course individuals making evil decisions in a huge system that requires them is not the biggest issue. I won’t spend all my energy on individual soldiers. They are bastards but the bigger problem is and the focus must be on the machine that told them to be.
This is where many people seem to go wrong. Like oh damn I joined the military and I know/knew it was bad but please feel bad for me now cause I feel sad about it. No you go do something to make up for your sins if you feel bad about it.
Sometimes redemption is a lonely road. It will likely not always stay that way if you continue to be authentic, but it will start that way. If you rather be a fascist because it’s easier than doing good things for the sake of being a good person, then you’re just a fascist :eric-andre:
Like bro, you were willing to endure 6 months of a sweaty meathead yelling at you and killing random families at your commander’s order but you can’t handle when someone doesn’t look you in the eye and forgive you? Lol. A bit narcissistic
Basically ya. If you truly understand what you did was evil you wouldn’t ever demand someone forgive you. You do good things as much as possible and if someone decides to forgive you you thank them and keep doing good.
And yes redemption is likely lonely especially at first but I don’t know probably shouldn’t have signed up for the murder machine if you wanted people to think you were a good person and want to be around you. Of course I support outreach to people trying to redeem themselves. Organizing good things for them to do is of course a solid plan.
I know Roderic Day has been writing a bunch about how he wants to reframe propaganda from brainwashing and this is a good example of why, it removes agency in a way that serves to essentially exonerate people for making deals for blood money made from the lives of foreign peoples.
Moreso he prefers to push the idea of going along with propaganda as a rational choice, conscious or subconscious, wether it be for direct material gain or in a way that helps cope with the reality they live in, if china bad then america less bad, and thats somewhat easier to mentally handle, for example. You could still argue within this framework over how acceptable or unacceptable the choice to take blood money is, but it makes it a real choice that someone is deciding rather than a thing they simply cannot helps as a cog in the machine.
This is his full essay on the subject but I havent read it all yet.
Absolutely. I immediately thought of his essay. These people are not misled fools who are brainwashed by propaganda into hating China or joining the military or whatever. They are imperial subjects who knowingly seek out imperial deals and simply find the terms acceptable.
I can’t emphasize enough how the only way I can feel any amount of redemption for being in the military (fortunately doing little to no harm in mostly a time of peace and waltzing out right after 9-11) is I’ve talked at least 5 kids out of joining. And I have regular discussions with my veteran family members who are grappling with what they did, and what Uncle Sam did to them.
I’ve gotten my Iraq Vet cousin to begin understanding how the military used him, and now he grasps some of the basic tenets of left thinking.
Do I think vets are absolved? No. None of us are. I’m not. But I will say this: cops know they’re getting into the game of beating down people in the name of class arrogance, racism, and hatred for fellow man; in my opinion they are deplorable and unredeemable. Many vets however are often tricked into thinking they’re doing some amount of good in the world, only to find out we were or are tools of imperialistic policing abroad. I think some of us can be redeemed.
That’s more or less how I see it. Leaving with a full understanding that war is a racket, the empire is irredeemably evil, and that anyone who joins is probably setting themselves up for something terrible. It’s a point of commonality I can use as a weapon against flag-fuckers and little big men to undermine both their nationalism and masculinity. My skillset as a combat medic is practical elsewhere and I can teach really specialised concepts to comrades in left militias. If someone says they’re considering joining I start with a conversation about my old patients’ medical records. The environmental poisoning and the dysfunction of the VA after you’re exposed to XX carcinogens the military will lie about until most of the victims are dead. Then it’s the statistics for SA and suicide. Then it’s the reality of those statistics and how corrupt NCIS and Big Navy are. I finish it with detailing how threadbare it is, how incapable it is as a result of that, and how it can’t hope to win a war in any kind of meaningful way. There are countless veterans watching the retreats from their wheelchairs and they all have to ask if it was worth their injuries to hand over Afghanistan to the Taliban as if nothing happened.
Absolution doesn’t exist. You’ve done a hell of a lot more than most of the people here who can only pretend to have moral purity because they do nearly nothing at all. You’ve actually helped the world and many people in your life in what for them was likely to be a life-defining way.
I know I’ll never talk you out of your guilt, but I think you should feel proud.
Vets who were earnestly misled and now hate, HATE the US military, and who make working against the US military somewhere at the top of their personal identity: Those ones can be alright. I can support those troops. Straight up war criminals can die though.
yea, but when it comes to western ‘leftists’ all you need is a podcast and you’re absolved. There are honestly only two US soldiers in the past 2 decades I can think of that actually managed to tangibly damage the imperialistic army, Chelsea Manning and Nidal Hasan.
He’s the other half of the Left Flank Vets pod with the communism will win guy.
i like him
