- cross-posted to:
- slop@hexbear.net
- cross-posted to:
- slop@hexbear.net
The topic was why it took the shitlibs and Hasanabi-watching leftists (lol) a fucking tattoo to denounce Graham Platner, an Iraq veteran who did 4 trips to the war zone and then joined the Blackwater mercenary company to kill even more people.
Well this Graham Planter guy seems to be a piece of shit indeed, but the general sentiment of the post you printed I’m in agreement with, the US military uses poverty to fill its ranks, so it is made of proletariat people, and there is benefit to disputing their hearts and minds, but it is a rough struggle to do so since they’re surrounded by strong ideological training, but does not mean it’s a useless struggle
It’s an active choice. I grew up in some pretty terrible conditions but I never volunteered to become a baby-killing veteran. It’s really that simple. People who do make that active choice; poverty or not; should be shamed and treated as war-criminals like they are. It’s really simple.
No, it’s not that simple.
You’re ignoring the role of pro-military culture, militaristic propaganda, higher ed incentives, medical coverage incentives, housing incentives, peer pressure, hero worship, etc.
It is a choice, yes. People should be judged for making it, yes. But it’s not simple in the slightest. Good proles join the military because they think the military is good because they’ve been taught the military is good. That is a sad fact but a fact nevertheless.
The goal should be to educate them on why it isn’t good.
It’s pretty simple when the party I’m a part of and in my circle I don’t tolerate genocidal jackboots. I have no use for them and nor does the rest of the party I am in. Most guerilla tactics will put you a league ahead of most jackboots who sat in diapers in Afghanistan.
I’m not because ignorance is never an excuse for ANYTHING. I KNEW the risks and grew up in worse environments than most “soldiers” because there is literal evidence that the “soldiertariat” is a complete fucking myth and that most soldiers are from middle-class/upper-middle class backgrounds. It isn’t their “class” that makes them disgusting but the fact that they HAVE the chance to learn more, talk to vets and understand the risks before joining the military and MANY still choose to do so, regardless if they understand that propaganda is just propaganda. You’re acting like propaganda is an excuse.
Does Nazi propaganda excuse Wehrmacht soldiers? Fuck no. They deserve the wall at best.
There is no “middle class”.
It’s clear you’re thinking about this from an emotional standpoint and not a scientific one.
I never made excuses for anyone’s behavior; I explained the nuance behind the how and why they were able to do these things.
Propaganda isn’t an excuse. I never said otherwise. But it still works and that needs to be acknowledged.
It’s obvious I’m looking at this from an emotional standpoint because most soldiers come from privilege. I won’t deny there’s an emotional angle, because it’s also unfair to assume people have a survival instinct that automatically means they go sign up for the military when MOST soldiers come from privilege. So what was that about the scientific angle, again?
I’m gonna go ahead and block you now. Absolutely absurd.
edit: Do me a HUGE favor and anyone who agrees with this can block me or respond and say something absurd so I can block them too.
Can you give me some sources to disprove the “Soldiertariet” myth?
https://archive.ph/2x19K
Damn, after reading this, now I understand your position better. This part is absolutely true:
This is very similar to what I think of the armed forces of the Mexican state that repressed students, activists and guerrilla members. For a revolution to actually work, we need to shed this part of the state that represents the fascists and the rich.
Thanks, comrade! This should be required reading!
You’re behaving like a child throwing a tantrum because someone disagrees with your analysis and doubling down on idealism throughout. Sad behavior to see, I thought better of you. But I guess you are yet another victim of “westerner who hasn’t actually embodied a successful revolution looking at the world and being smug about how much better they are at morals than other people.”
The kind of attitude you’re pulling here is cut from the same cloth as when people call AES states revisionist for not doing a full communism immediately. It comes from the same general error in thinking, of viewing the world as a composite of individual moral choices and viewing those moral choices as coming from individual will faced with the possibility to be corrupt in a very obvious way and choosing not to do the obviously wrong thing.
It’s a highly erroneous worldview, which assumes that the world is broken up into good and evil, that everyone has the same lens and information, and that the evil people are just choosing to be evil in spite of good being an obvious option.
You don’t need to have any personal sympathy for people who commit atrocities in order to understand the dynamics of the world. You don’t need to want to personally forgive or work with people who commit atrocities in order to understand the dynamics of the world. I could go on.
But as usual, AES states show us what real practicing communism looks like. They show us that there are times to war and there are times to persuade and negotiate, and it’s not always immediately clear which is more effective and in what way. Perhaps most importantly, they show us what you can do with actual organized power and how useless and divisive it is when we get caught up in imaginings of what we could or should or would hypothetically do in situations that haven’t occurred instead of actually formulating outcomes in the world. That last one is part self-crit.
“You see! Not wanting to be with soldiers who have directly contributed to the death of family abroad and the family of friends abroad is a childish tantrum doubling on idealism, despite the fact that multiple people agreed with the Myth of The Soldiertariat post you made, more people understanding the point you made, etc”
I don’t give a fuck what you think about me. Especially when you think it’s over a disagreement with my “analysis” when it’s actually a lack of basic fuckin’ principles. Especially from someone who even comes along the same angle as the dipshits that I’ve been arguing with before. In order to have a revolution, you need to shed the fascist parts of the state and encourage the soldiers in it to engage in class suicide. That is not happening in the Imperial Core until it collapses. When it collapses, maybe I can consider working with a few soldiers who literally lost anything and everything that made them loyal to their class. Until then? There is going to be plenty who will give everything up to crush your skull underneath their boot, and I’m “emotional” because I don’t want to work with them? Fuck you.
I never have to forgive anyone. Remember that. Forgiveness is never free.
What does me saying I don’t want or need to work with baby-killers involves any of this? I didn’t say anything about “AES” states. In the periphery, soldiers can absolutely have different class interests than their colonist occupiers. This is purely America, here and it’s in relation to Platner.
In this world, I can gladly judge people for the decisions they make in the past. I never said it was “good and evil” I simply said that people are fully capable of looking past propaganda, even when their starving and in the most critical conditions and that there are plenty of people able to do that. Maybe it’s because one of the things that separates us from rabid curr is that we have principles and dogs don’t. I did it and I can gladly judge those in the military; especially when most come from “non-lumpenprole” backgrounds if you don’t consider the existence of a middle class. So the whole “good and evil” about “military propaganda” is pure clean USMC theory bullshit. Want citations? Again, fuck you.
You’re still throwing a tantrum and missing the point continuously because of that fact. It’s very tiresome. I’ve put up with far too much adult child behavior in my life. Not taking it from you. Grow up or shut up.
By those same dynamics that you are referencing, we need to accept the fact that, using as a reference the current material conditions, the US military personnel are class enemies due to their settler colonial nature and other reasons as previously discussed by 6-6-6. This is very different to what an AES military personnel or even the Global South military are. This was eloquently explained in this post -> https://archive.ph/2x19K
It is not idealism to accept this knowing all of the material conditions that push veterans and soldiers to defend and murder for the empire. From what I have investigated, better prepared people have tried rallying the abandoned veterans but this has been proven futile according to the article above and the low membership numbers exposed in there. This is my honest observation here with the information exposed so far.
Now, let’s try to go with hypotheticals and explore the possibility to persuade or negotiate with the veterans or active military personnel. The only way that I currently see for a US military soldier to go against their capitalist collaborator incentives is for the following to happen:
There could be more options but just this three conditions are close to impossible for the majority. You can correct me if you have a different perspective though. However, I see easier for comrades to spend time agitating the liberals in the No Kings protests rather than agitating the veterans or the good proles that are active in the military. People like Aaron Bushnel or Mike Prysner had to go through at least one of the conditions for them to come around but I don’t see their experiences as something that could be replicated unless there is an existential crisis hitting them all. Actually, those two examples are important because they prove that people can choose to overcome the lies and supremacy suggested by the empire. I could even add more names like Monica Erst or Michael Gloss.
Hope that you can convince me otherwise. As of now, -6-6-6- holds a better explanation on the lack of existence of the “soldiertariet”.
Ok, have some time to try to go through this in more direct detail now, focusing on the discussion about “soldiertariat [myth]” with personal conflicts between people on here aside.
First, I want to emphasize that if the data shows that USian military is largely not exploited poor people, I see no reason to deny or downplay that. However, if some percentage of it is exploited poor people, that is still a certain number of people existing in that realm of it. If the majority comes from a class that is higher class and more just directly benefits from imperialism, no question about it, that obviously doesn’t bode well for the revolutionary potential of such people overall. Exceptions may exist, but in that case probably the expectation would be that most are a hard nut to crack in that regard and energy is better spent elsewhere.
Going through your breakdown:
One distinction I want to focus on here is active members vs. veterans. Although veterans might have a degree of “prestige” in the sense of people who say stuff like “thank you for your service” or whatever, my understanding is some of them are disabled and struggle to get proper help for it. Those kind of people I don’t think are quite in the same category as others.
I do agree what you outline is a possible vector for people changing their allegiance to some degree. It is still a question in my mind with people like that whether they will be sympathetic to a more socialist-like cause or if they will just be “blue maga” for lack of a better term.
There may not be that much privilege for those who exist in the sphere of disabled, but for others, sure, I see how there would have to be a certain degree of… how do I put it, “long term over short term.” Understanding that they can be part of something better even than what they have, but that it requires a significant shift in the structure of things.
Here I do see it more as something like I emphasized before in another thread, the idea of “they may be helpful with supervision.” I don’t see them as likely to be reliable people who are leading anything, but some may still be able to help with advice or training under the right circumstances. I’m trying to remember a parallel I’m thinking of, maybe it was in the context of China’s revolutionary efforts? How there was something about those who would change sides and the liberation forces would accept their help, but keep them more at a distance in terms of proximity to the power structure. This may be the way it has to be with those who are too close to enforcement of empire in actual execution of it.
So as you may see, I’m not trying to make a case for major focus on recruiting from imperial core service members. Never have intended to be doing so. But it has, from how it looks to me, been made out like myself and perhaps some others are saying that simply because we don’t agree that 100% of them are a lost cause of conscious baby-killers no matter what.
By this same reasoning, civilians in the imperial core are enemies of imperialized countries. Which isn’t necessarily a misguided way of looking at it for people who live in imperialized countries and are contending with empire in their territory, but accomplishes nothing other than hair-shirt-ism (pointless guilt and self destructive obsessive with moral purity) for people living in the imperial core.
Obviously people who go to another country and commit atrocities are a step worse from the rest of us living in the imperial core, but what about those who know capitalism is exploitative and still go about their day buying whatever product? At what point are we complicit? What about service members who don’t directly participate in war crimes, but only operate logistics (desk job, etc.)? What level of complicit is that?
What I’m taking issue with is largely binary thinking obsession that fixates on imperial core veterans as an oversimplified group, while implying that anyone who doesn’t agree with this is a person who wants to work with and support “baby-killers.” I went over this kind of subject with another poster recently too. My point then was much the same as it is now. Consider all of the factors involved, rather than considering it as a binary thing of either work with them without reservations or treat them like pariahs who couldn’t possibly ever contribute anything positive.
I’m not in favor of chasing after imperial core veterans as some kind of liberating saviors of the west, if that’s what some people are thinking. But the way some talk, you’d think that’s what I was saying and that it’s either that or they’re all demons.
The idealism part is the obsession with moral personal choices. You are not doing that. You’re looking at the conditions veterans face, the incentives, and so on. The other person in question was telling people to block them, telling them to “fuck off”, etc., because they weren’t on the same page about veterans. They were further going on about it as if it is some kind of “you’re with me or against me” thing and if you even accidentally hint at any sympathy for veterans in the process of discussing their conditions, you are essentially taking the side of “baby-killers.” They further went on to drag it into general discussion in a back-biting way.
Had they approached it as you have, I would consider it unfair of me to say the least, to have accused them of throwing a tantrum. I want to be especially clear on this because the discussion of the “soldiertariat” is a reasonable one in itself and I would have quite a problem with myself if I thought I was trying to leverage accusations of misbehavior in order to dismiss a valid point about material conditions. It’s why I tried to focus more broadly and not factor that into things when I said what I did.
I will try to say more on your specific points later. Bit distracted at the moment and wanted to get out some thoughts on the other angle.
That’s fine. It’s clear you’re too irrational for an intelligence conversation anyway. Cool off.
Civility policing of people that are angry at mass murderers?
Condescending and arrogant and wrong
There are indeed middle classes.
There are more than two classes, yes.
There is no “middle class” however. That is a myth tied to the lie of the ‘American Dream’; the fiction that the average person is wealthy and prosperous.
It appears your “uneducated” veteran was already educated on the pre and post world war American colonial wars and wanted to participate in them. He wanted to volunteer in Vietnam if he could. He thinks small wars are pretty enjoyable because heavy artillery takes the fun away from fighting and Iraq and Afghanistan were indeed ‘small wars’.
He also worked at Abu Graib prison even after the torture and warcrimes were exposed in the media.
No decent human being would want to fight the Philipines in the 1920 for the US, that was a flatout genocide.
Bold of you to assume a US veteran who did 4 trips and joined a mercenary group is a decent human.
Never once brought up Platner. Didn’t mention him, didn’t allude to him, wasn’t thinking about him when I wrote that post.
Exactly. Quoting the internationale:
“No more deluded by reaction On tyrants only we’ll make war The soldiers too will take strike action They’ll break ranks and fight no more”
Proletarians often join the military because they’re sick fucks who want to kill, but many also join as a result of either necessity or militaristic imperialist propaganda e.g. Red Scare, Islam = Terrorism, etc.
No clean USMC theory here.
I haven’t once denied the crimes of the USMC nor did I make excuses for them. Fuck off.
Was just about to echo a similar sentiment. Thank you
My friend who is literally sitting next to me right now upon reading this:
“Hey, I’m about to become homeless, if someone offered me a military contract/ice contract personally I’d removed them.”
Seems like you can still have principles in desperation.
Good for them.
Not everyone is able to suppress their natural survival instinct, however.
Literally withering and shriveling away unless I give my recruitment form to the chud behind a stall in the library
Well put. People can get caught up in moralizing more so than doing analysis of material conditions. Such analysis doesn’t mean we excuse atrocities, but it does mean we don’t lose sight of methodology for creating a better world in favor of waxing on about how morally inferior some group of people is. I’m sure we’d all love to think we’d never be “the baddies”, but scientific socialist framework would indicate that some of us who aren’t would be under different conditions; the alternative is believing that it all boils down to a moral choice and overcoming personal corruption, and that’s a form of idealism.
When I was still a liberal there was a time that I was deeply patriotic and wanted to serve. It wasn’t because I glorified killing or thought other cultures were inferior to mine but because I genuinely believed that the USA was better than the alternative, that we were the lesser evil keeping the greater evil in check around the world. My perception of the US Mil was one of a liberator and protector, as fucked up as that may sound. That’s how I was taught to see the world and it stuck with me for a long time.
I was fortunate enough to learn over time that this wasn’t the case and as a consequence my opinion of the military diminished slowly but surely and my position on war in general shifted dramatically. This development began long before I was even a socialist and continued well after until now where I can firmly state that I am both anti-war and anti-military in nearly all circumstances save for a handful of extreme ones.
I don’t cry when a marine steps on a land mine and gets his leg blown off, but I do hope he survives and learns from his experiences serving that he isn’t the good guy and he’s on the wrong side. I do this in part because I know many people in uniform have been outright tricked or bribed into participating in something they probably wouldn’t have had they been better informed like I was.
I also can’t help but imagine: “What if I hadn’t learned what I learned, continued down that path, and I was the one who ended up stepping on that land mine?”
Cops and soldiers might be the enforcers of empire but it’s important to remember that they’re just the attack dogs of the capitalist class and just like any other attack dog they are that way because they’ve been trained to be; some working class person was fed a mouthful of lies and shut out from the truth until they believed up was down and right was wrong. Then they were sent to kill people like them, watch their friends die for nothing, and then come up broken and disfigured - if they come home at all.
Every soldier and cop created by the capitalist state is one more doctor, one more musician, one more engineer taken away from the world and turned into a willing accomplice for evil. They are still perpetrators and wrongdoers but they are also victims and have had wrong done to them. Whether they deserve forgiveness or not is debatable but I can at the very least call ‘comrade’ any veteran who was able to see through the veil and join the right side of history in the end. Better late than never.
Not from me and not from the leagues of people in the Third World they have slaughtered, even if they were Red Alert 2 Yuri mind-controlled by post-2001 slop-propaganda in American high-school library recruiter stalls. I don’t think it’s debatable, I think it’s an active choice some comrades will make and most of the people who put up with baby-killers will have to accept it one way or another. It’s a difference of principles, in my opinion.
Now imagine how many people they have taken away from us. I’m less interested in the brains of cops, soldiers and jackboots then the brains splattered by them.
No war but total war on the American empire
I don’t put the lives of the imperial soldiers above those of the people whose lives they’ve taken or ruined, despite your obvious misgivings on my position.
If the choice comes down to it they’ll get the wall and I won’t object.
I agree with some parts of what you say, but this:
Feels like whitewashing criminals. Yes the guys may not have had the resources nor the wake up call before joining but so what? does that excuse any of them from going half a world away to participate in a genocide? or more recently does any of that excuse them from killing innocent fishermen in the coasts of Venezuela/Colombia? fuck no.
I wasn’t excusing anything; I was explaining the nuance behind people willingly joining the military. Writing them all off as simply being racist psychopaths who want to kill people is a knee-jerk, moralistic argument fueled by misplaced passion and devoid of material analysis. It’s a vibes-based way of understanding phenomena and has no place in Marxism.
That is my sole critique, not that US soldiers are ‘UwU smol beans’ or whatever.
As a citizen of the Global South, I was impressed on knowing that people from the military like Aaron Bushnell or Mike Prysner exist. However, it will take time as you have mentioned to destroy that American Exceptionalism installed in the military and to plant the seed of empathy and humanization of the oppressed.
All I know is that there is certainly a great number of abandoned veterans by the US and I am not sure if it helps to agitate them. However, I wish you all the best of success.
It appears your “uneducated” veteran was already educated on the pre and post world war American colonial wars and wanted to participate in them. He wanted to volunteer in Vietnam if he could. He thinks small wars are pretty enjoyable because heavy artillery takes the fun away from fighting and Iraq and Afghanistan were indeed ‘small wars’.
He also worked at Abu Graib prison even after the torture and warcrimes were exposed in the media.
I never once mentioned Platner. My post wasn’t about him specifically.
my “I never once mentioned Platner.” shirt for babykillers in a Platner thread has a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.
I wasn’t talking about Platner and you can’t prove otherwise. Drop the strawman.
I ain’t reading all’at. Marg bar Amreeka.
You and others are the ones ignoring this. You can’t pretend that soldiers are blameless victims of a machine while acknowledging they participated voluntarily and received payment and credit for doing so. This is what makes them morally culpable.
If I work in a factory that makes bombs that kill people, I have an ethical responsibility to strike or quit. How is this same dynamic gone for people who drop them?
You’re arguing against a position I don’t hold. I didn’t excuse anyone or justify anything. Not once. That was not the purpose of my response.
I didn’t mean to imply you held beliefs you didn’t. You’re just losing me on the point about education. They didn’t join because of deception or disinformation, they joined because they wanted what the military offered them. This is not someone you can “educate” into different behaviors, right? What would you even tell them?
The bribes are effective in part because many don’t understand what they sign up for. A good chunk of Americans don’t know about the war crimes our military commits or the toxic, fascistic culture within it and at worst only oppose our overseas adventures because they think it’s a waste of money and don’t like our soldiers dying in wars they think were unjust.
I can’t count how many times I’ve heard people tell me - even people who’ve actually served - that the US military is completely/mostly clean. In their minds war crimes are something other countries do, not ours. There’s also a disconnect from those who think along the lines of “Oh, well, I just worked in the Motor Pool! I didn’t kill anybody!” who are obviously in denial about their role in the imperial machine and how they contributed to the barbarism even if they didn’t directly partake.
The Average American soldier is indeed a fascist and a serial killer.
How can you extrapolate from this that the average is like that plus I’m quite sure it varies state by state, and even if there is a huge number of radicalized soldier that for me is all the more reason to direct action and attention to try to sway their opinions before they get that bad
We can “sway their opinions” on the battlefield. 1 dead soldier = 1 less enemy.