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.
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.
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.
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.