Soldiers Aren’t Victims, And They Deserve Contempt | The Maple
There’s never an excuse to join the army, despite the justifications some so-called progressives try to make.
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Anyone talking about someone "deserving" opposition is necessarily arguing from a non-materialist standpoint. I don't give a shit what stipulated moral ledgers say about people I don't know, that information is useless to me. We should be concerned with whether someone is a useful (or detrimental) ally, not what they "deserve."
In my experience, most vets aren't any more useful relative to your civilian worker, which means they do not need to be specifically catered to. Relative to the general population, they are more physically fit for their age (not physically fit in general since most 40 year old vets are going to be flabby just less flabby than 40 year old civilians) but also suffer from a host of other physical disabilities like tinnitus and busted knees. Many of them also suffer from PTSD as well. And all for what? So they can brag about how they served in some base in Germany as a glorified truck driver and mechanic? Why should we cater to this specific group of truck drivers and not the millions of other truck drivers throughout the country?
Obviously if you need a construction worker, a vet is a middling pick, but if you need a guerilla, a vet is toward the top so long as they have retained their limbs and senses.
I don't see this point particularly substantiated as US military doctrine relies on air superiority and having a massive tech and logistic advantage over your opponents. How would this transfer to having the skills of waging asymmetric guerilla warfare? Vets also aren't able to slip seamlessly in crowds, partially because they have a long paper trail (deployment date, records of visits to the VA) and partially because they won't stfu about being a vet (vet licenses, Semper Fi tattoos, "is there a veteran discount"). If the guerilla can't swim among the people like fish swim among the sea like Mao said, then the guerilla is useless.
well clearly we need to start appealing to special forces war crime oper8ers from the left so they can teach us silly impractical lefties how to do guerilla warfare.
We need to radicalize CIA case officers so we know how to produce effective propaganda and coup governments.
Tacticool Communism could be an aesthetic though. Imagine it. We need to grab it before the dipshit Patsocks do.
ppl have definitely tried to make tacticool communism happen but there's a very reddit tendency to insist liking the military aesthetic of any socialist state is cringe so it ends up looking like american troop with a plate carrier and nvgs but heckin based and antiauthoritarian
You can justify all sorts of shit with that logic, like silencing and attacking victims if the abuser is a more useful ally in the movement than them.
People use those arguments (I saw them do that with Biden) but the thing about it is that that's usually false. A predator is a liability, especially when you don't have history's most powerful media empire on your side, and people are usually much more replaceable than our stories about them might lead us to believe. There is no reason to not to put the predator in re-education unless what you have is a bureaucracy rather than a democratic vanguard.
Marxism is war strategy, and I support victims because, as is the cote of Marxism, solidarity is the best strategy for all involved.
Morality is real.
Anything that helps establish the dictatorship of the proletariat is moral. Anything that gets in the way is immoral.
Really...? You really can't think of any scenario where pushing the communism dial 0.00001 couldn't be outweighed by any other kind of immorality?
👏 More 👏 leftist 👏 (cw) r*pists! 👏 More 👏 leftist 👏 murderers!
(Apologies if your comment was sarcastic. I hope it was.)
This is based on a myopic view of utility. If it actually benefitted the world, the answer is obviously yes, but it nearly never could because an active serial rapist or murderer is a liability to any institution other than a trafficking ring.
From watching how "abandon morality" gets used here and elsewhere in the US left I don't know that it is terribly useful because it gets used for almost anything. Or if it is going to be useful people need to agree on what it actually means. Seems like playing with fire to me unless you are positive all the people reading it are going to understand what you mean. Just an observation.
I'm not saying abandon personal morality, I am saying abandon moralism, i.e. ideology based on moral tenets rather than consequences. The fact that others say bad shit and use similar words means no more to me than the fact that the US describes itself as "liberating" places while we all are (I assume) genuine liberationists.
Wasn't a shot at you and I'm not enough of a nerd to have an opinion about what is right or wrong regarding theory, just something I noticed. It seems to mean different things to everyone.
Sure, I just wanted to explain myself a little in case I wasn't clear.
Pretty much this. The ends justify the means, but that's useless without the caveat that the means should actually be something that helps you achieve your ends.
As to the topic of the OP, I agree with your point but I don't have enough knowledge on the topic to know how useful vets are. The few comments I've seen that deal with peoples' concrete organizing experience as opposed to moral handwringing make it seem that they're more often liabilities than they are assets.
Sure, I have not much of a stance on exactly what proportion of vets can be rehabilitated prior to revolution, my main argument is that their military training is a major plus in some cases as well as their relative fitness, but injuries (physical and mental) and personal chauvinism and myopia are minuses to how useful they are. I'm not saying we need every single one of them or to accept all who apply, just that they have uses that should be seriously considered (and weighed against the detriments!). Vets need vetting, we could say.
"Nearly never could." That's why you're arguing that it's a-ok to court countless actual murderers (imperial troops) for the cause. Because their utility to the imminent revolution that's about to happen any second in the west outweighs the fact that they've been content so far to kill brown farmers in the global south. Got it.
I never said anything about an imminent revolution, but there are other practices like community defense where the necessity is already upon us. If they tell you that it was cool to slaughter brown farmers, you probably don't want them around, but if they want to participate in a party aimed at the destruction of the state that they used to serve, they probably had a change of heart at some point.
I wasn't sarcastic, but for the record I find the people pearl clutching over people being mean to boots a lot more annoying than people pearl clutching about not squeezing boots for everything they're worth (usually nothing).
We talk about what people deserve all the time, that's what the whole
thing is. If we take the accepted idea on here that the United States commits genocide in the global south and Nazi soldiers deserved the pit for their part in the genocide, what is the differentiating factor between a Nazi who signed up for the Wehrmacht and an American who signed up for the army?Believe it or not, I know what social context is. I don't really make the comments you allude to, but I shrug at them because the people making them are not asserting serious arguments for the direction of a socialist movement, they are expressing an emotional reaction. If they are viciously reactionary (particularly if they are anti-democratic) I do push back and encourage you to as well, but we should not mistake picking our battles for endorsing things that aren't worth attacking.
The point of the article is that these things are worth attacking because the only difference between cops and military is the physical location of where they commit oppression. Attacking these institutions is crucial to saving the lives of oppressed people at home and in the global south
I agree that troops are a type of cop (albeit the training is much different). My stance on cops is the same.
There's one other difference, which is that in some cases you can make them fight each other, and that's pretty neat.
Fucking thank you.
I appreciate the support in this deluge of, well, you see it.
I always just think about what it would mean to have a fuctioning national party that spent any significant part of its capabilities to enact and convey excommunication for huge swaths of the population (whichever set you like). It's just utterly without strategy or thought for the consequences.
To expand:
What is gained by resolving that soldiers are permanently stained as people?
What does that mean in practice?
What is the result if this practice is undertaken?
Is this result conducive or not to making a better world, (hopefully one where there aren't so many soldiers)?
What are the consequences of not resolving so, from not undertaking this practice, or from undertaking a different one?
These are the kind of questions we need to discuss to have any kind of useful turning over of the subject, otherwise we're all just jerking off over whether soldiers are good or bad, how bad, and if they can ever be good.
What is gained by condemning soldiers is the same as what's gained by condemning cops, and everything you've said here could be said just as easily about cops. What's gained is that a clear and unequivocal condemnation helps establish a message that is absolutely vital to any leftist movement - that we will condemn and oppose injustice, and stick up for the poor and vulnerable, even when it is costly to do so. Even when the expected gain is less than the expected cost.
Lots of people under capitalism feel alienated and are skeptical of any organization that it will actually come to their aid when the chips are down. Minority groups understand that they will be thrown under the bus the moment it becomes politically convenient, because they are, well, a minority. The "rational self-interested" thing for a political party to do is to serve the people with the most money and power, while paying lip service to the poor and desperate, on the assumption that they will accept empty promises and pocket change because they have no better options.
It behooves any leftist organization or party, therefore, to establish that they are not careerists and that they serve an actual ideological agenda that will benefit everyone - yes, even you. And to do that, it is vital to consider the concerns of people who are regarded as subhuman, to give voice to the voiceless. And the voiceless, in this case, are the victims of imperialist wars of aggression in the Middle East and elsewhere.
If we're not going to do that, then what the fuck are we doing here? Just become a self-serving political careerist, call up an oil company and promise to do whatever they say if they fund your campaign, tell the poor "we see you, we hear you, we offer you our thoughts and prayers" and call it a day. If you're going to pursue a politically self-interested strategy, you can't half-ass it or the sociopaths who are willing to play the game will play it better and beat you. The only way a leftist project succeeds is by leaving the rich and powerful to the careerists and building solidarity and trust with a mass movement of the poor and vulnerable. And that means calling the people who murder the poor and vulnerable for money what they are.
gained is by condemning soldiers is the same as what's gained by condemning cops,
By my ledger, the observed gain is merely in internet points.
Da Troops that don't regret what they did will be the ones shoving you and your family in a van.