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.
Another claim often made is that the military provides an easy path to financial stability that people, particularly those who are racialized, have a difficult time finding elsewhere. Putting specifics aside for now, it’s worth considering the thinly veiled implications of this argument: being part of an institution responsible for maintaining Western domination abroad, largely through terrorizing populations in the Global South, is justified or excusable if it provides some benefit for a resident of the Imperial Core. This is the logic of colonialism as marketed to the masses: sure, you’ll never reap the real rewards of the plunder and terror, but the activities abroad will bring some benefit to you. It’s not a sign of “privilege” to argue that personal benefit shouldn’t justify becoming part of the military or serve as an excuse from critique
It’s not a sign of “privilege” to argue that personal benefit shouldn’t justify becoming part of the military or serve as an excuse from critique
i love being called privileged by some jackboot who comes from a family considerably richer than mine lmao
That's basically been the societal contact in western countries and their vassal states post WW2. It's how the world economy operates. The sooner more people consciously catch on to this, the better.
yeah by this logic would you for example say that it is privileged to turn your nose up at Edward Colston and his charitable work to alleviate the poverty in Bristol
People defending volunteer soliders is just some of the craziest shit I've ever seen. Imagine if you applied any of this logic to cops, because that's what NATO troops are overseas. Going ACAB but defending volunteer soliders is straight up incoherent from an ideological perspective. They're not even conscripts. And the class character of the US volunteer army is wealthier than the average American. I'd imagine the same is true for most NATO volunteer armies.
"Um I NEEDED to kill that family for my college money, you stupid moral purist elitist. I'm the REAL victim here. "
The absolute state of western leftism.
This is an amerikan website. Shit takes from chauvinists are to be expected.
I just don't understand it. I'm pretty sure no one on here is going to go defend old apartheid South African troops or the modern apartheid Israeli troops (and that's good, no one should defend them), yet those groups actually have more of an excuse than volunteer soliders as they're conscripts and were/are forcefully drafted.
It's actually really easy to not enlist in the military. I'm not in the military every single day. You don't even have to think about it, you can just wake up in the morning and poof, you're not in the military.
It’s not that easy for everyone buddy. Last week I accidentally drove to the recruiting office and accidentally signed my name on the dotted line and accidentally drone striked a wedding
The western left is such a complete and utter farce, can't even agree that serving an imperialist army is bad, actually. Any one of these defensive comments could be applied just as well to cops, but these are the international cops that don't affect me, so fuck their victims, I guess.
It's so fucking sad that even on this site we can't get people to actually view Iraqis and Afghans as human beings.
Very reminiscent of the "all lives matter" backlash every time a cop murders a minority
The comment I made applies just as much to former cops, skinheads, coyotes, jihadists, you name it. Moralism is an idealist trap.
Serving an imperialist army is bad, actually, and it remains bad no matter what you do afterwards. You are at the very least complicit in genocidal American policy.
You don’t get a free pass just because you’re “former” whatever. Former serial killers still get convicted, former rapists still get convicted, former concentration camp guards still get convicted. You’re not entitled to absolution just because you’re “former”. You’re even less entitled to make it about yourself and how you’re the real victim.
It’s never, ever anyone’s fault. They were always tricked, they didn’t know, the higher ups made them do it, or whatever the latest excuse is.
I was just clearing out my inbox after the site migration and came across this exact struggle session from a year ago, the one that led to seven deadly sins getting kicked out. Kind of surreal to see it play out again.
I think these circular arguments happening over and over is a reflection of our powerlessness. There's no organized revolutionary party, there's no party discipline, there's no political education. So we can just fight over hypotheticals that don't have any bearing on anything.
There's no substantial left in the Imperial Core in large part due to propaganda and cooperation between the media class and the state, but mostly because people in the Imperial Core generally get a good deal from Empire. These questions can become relevant when more than just the very bottom (usually racialized) strata of our societies experience revolutionary conditions. Fortunately, that's coming.
We had the exact same argument three years ago when I first joined hexbear lol. The needle has moved zero since then
Purge. Purge. Purge. Purge. Purge.
And where did that bring you? Back to me.
100+ comments in a thread about an article title "Soldiers Aren't Victims, And They Deserve Contempt"
Burgerländer moment
American "leftists" when faced with any sort of criticism at all:
🎶 television rules the nation🎶
so glad to see people on this website aren't completely insane, I feel comfortable telling you guys that I'm a Jewish American who volunteered for the IDF after my birthright. it's okay guys, the IDF gave me money and benefits for joining, and before joining my parent's income was $1 less than the mean income where this sort of thing is ok.
Let's take a quick overview of the twists and turns of the troop apologia pretzel:
Did I miss anything?
Reminds me of when Stalin joked about killing all the Nazi troops and Churchill got incredibly, incredibly mad.
Blaming everyone and everything other than themselves and refusing to face any consequences for their actions. I didn't know I was in postwar Germany.
Did I miss anything?
You forgot the most classic ones
the 2nd one doesn't apply to amerikkka, which makes it worse since it means basically everyone volunteers for that shit.
I never understood the difference between a soldier killing someone and a murder
One has the backing of a shit ton of other murderers, and they get a bunch of expensive hardware to murder with.
The state has a monopoly on violence, so as long as you do violence in the service of the state it is acceptable.
The two acts are equivalent. You would agree that someone committing murder doesn't preclude them from ever in the future being able ally, right?
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?
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.
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.
Da Troops that don't regret what they did will be the ones shoving you and your family in a van.
You know, you really have to wonder when anyone can ever face any consequences for anything. After all, consequences are moralism and the victims are just uppity.
Where was the person yesterday that said Hexbear has shit takes and it makes them feel like shit? You don't have to go find me one I found it, it's right here.
I have a number of comrades in my area who used to be soldiers. They were sold a lie and didn't feel like they had another choice. All of them, and I do mean all of them, were victims of the US military industrial complex. All of my ex soldier comrades are on a road to healing from that and it's a difficult one.
This is like saying that people who work at WalMart deserve contempt because WalMart destroys towns, and by working for WalMart, they also destroyed those towns. It's ridiculous. It makes no distinction between career soldiers and people who join the military to be killers, and people who fall for the propganda and fall into the military because they feel like they don't have any other option. It completely and utterly ignores the material conditions that cause people to join the military in the first place, and that's why it's a garbage take. Just like people who work at WalMart as greeters and stockers and cashiers because they don't have any choice are different than people who live and breathe WalMart and make careers out of it.
Anyway I'll go tell the trans ex soldier comrade sleeping in my guest room right now since they're between homes at the moment that some idiot online thinks they deserve contempt, even though they've spent well over a decade doing mutual aid in queer and trans communities in an attempt to heal themselves and others from the trauma they experienced at the hands of the US military industrial complex. I'm sure they'll take that well. Jk, I'll protect them with my life from idiots who want to hurt them. They've suffered more than enough.
Hexbears learn the words restorative justice challenge: IMPOSSIBLE
I regret making this post for one reason only: It reminds me why I left Hexbear in the first place. Just chock full of ultras who have never left their cozy lil burb, have never done any organizing whatsoever, have never confronted a single real world contradiction. How can you possibly hope to overcome capitalism, a system built from the ground up on contradictions that must be resolved, if you can't even see that working class exploitation exists outside of factory floors? The world is nuanced. Confront that nuance, tackle that nuance, work through that nuance. Real organizers are, it's what separates us from the terminally online.
I've got a number of "comrades" in my area that used to be soldiers too! They've been almost universally been domineering, used their past as a badge of expertise and victimhood, and unknowingly reproduce reactionary tendencies while being very hostile to any criticism. And since being a soldier can be a path to financial stability, esp if you're not queer like most military members, a few have had a charming tendency to overestimate everyone else's financial means, while always making organizing suggestions that would require capital that only they have access to. (leftist gun organizing, not even once)
It sounds like your friends have been very hurt by the military industrial complex, and I do believe in rehabilitation for former soldiers just like I believe it's fully possible for someone who was a cop to become a comrade. But, I also think there's a real problem with how low our standards have become on this. Soldiers get victimized sure, but like cops they are also inextricably victimizers.
From what I've heard, part of why cops are so violent is because they're essentially traumatized by their training into being afraid anyone might shoot them at any moment. Apparently the hypervigilance and paranoia can really stick with someone after they leave, but we don't start acting like that excuses what they were complicit in, or like being hurt by their time in policing grants them an automatic right to solidarity.
The only difference is that the military's victims aren't our neighbors. I assume we all know someone who's been victimized by police, but we're much less likely to know someone targeted by the military personally, which makes it really easy lose sight of who the MIC hurt the most. If a veteran's entire criticism centers them, how much they were hurt, treated unfairly, tricked, whatever, they're no comrade of mine.
Also soldiers are like walmart workers? seriously?
The fact that you don't see the difference between most soldiers who sign up for a 4 year contract so that they can escape a hole that society purposely put them in so that they sign up for that 4 year contract, and cops who choose to do that knowing it's a full career commitment speaks volumes about how you look at the world. That is to say, you apparently don't.
It's pretty disgusting that a comment comparing walmart greeters to people who have murdered poor people for the empire, and then has the gall to talk about restorative justice, has so many upvotes here.
What an absolute joke. Wehrmacht apologia with a new coat of paint. Many, many Wehrmacht soldiers came home broken and traumatized. I don’t give a fuck.
Whining about imperialist footsoldiers not being given enough of a second chance is the apex of first world entitlement. Tell that to the orphans in Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or Yemen. Or Laos. Or Syria. Or or or
Maybe this is stupid but I think soldiers can be victims, "deserve" contempt (in the sense that people who contempt them are valid and logical in doing so), and now be good people
If somebody used to be an Iraq war veteran but is currently a positive force for the working class, that's great
But I'm not gonna lie and say I don't hate them for what they've done in the past. Though I obviously would hide this irl for social unity
I know a leftie who was in the army who brags all the time how they did absolutely nothing and was an active detriment to their unit. I don't listen to people on the internet when it comes to case-by-case stuff, especially if they're brushing broadly. I agree the military is bad and a lot of the people are in the military are bad but the broad-strokes don't work for me since the best leftist I know were former military. Also, if we're gonna be like this, I can hate all rich and upper middle class people regardless of their politics which applies to many people here.
I don't think saying people deserve things is a practical or compassionate means of deciding what should happen after all the only people who need forgiveness don't deserve it by definition
that said a stigma against soldiers isn't unwarrented. I think soldiers are victims of circumstance in many ways but also I consider someone who grew up in the Albanian civil war and is now a murderer for money a victim of circumstance
Stigma as a heuristic for personal safety is okay if it is directed correctly and not pushed too far, but as you note that is different from "deserving".
Umm actually if we dont incraase military budget PUTLER will literally invade and take over the world!!!
help me out, how many successful left wing revolutions happened without the aid or use of a military in the last 100 years ? my history is rusty.
how many of those revolutions were aided by a fully volunteer army who's entire job was being the international cops of empire?
you got me , my history isn't as goood as yours so can tell me : which left wing revolutions intent on establishing left wing communism didn't use the military at any point ? i get that most Western militaries are right wing by intent & design, but do they have to be ? why can the average solidier never be a revlutionary subject? because i rememeber very few left wing national projects suceeding without the enthusiastic approval of their military?
Those were conscript armies. The class character between conscript armies and modern volunteer armies in NATO countries is vastly different.
"we must ignore the excesses of the military arm of the american empire's vassal states because they will be useful in a hypothetical revolution some time in the future"
i didn't say that, i'm just actually unaware of how successfull revolutions happen with out miltita that has at one point been controlled by the state ? if so, how? Cause if we can swerve away from generation kill : the dodge charger, coloniser adventure duck hunt edition , i'm for it . but my understanding is that these things require guns , and its best to be friends with the dudes with the sizeable ability to project force.
You're supposed to build the revolutionary military from the ground up, not suck up to vets coming from a reactionary army lmao
Does the IRA count? Because I think that's more likely to be the style of conflict that emerges rather than the conventional warfare of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, and I don't think they were particularly concerned about saying mean things about the Black and Tans.
For anyone who remembers how I was the last time there was a thread like this though, I'm less of an idiot about it :)
But I'm also not getting into the weeds this time.
Interesting thread and perspectives.
I don't think veterans in need are any more or less deserving of food or shelter than anyone else who might be struggling. Whether they are victims or not is immaterial. I wouldn't be quick to judge ex-soldiers when their entire contract took place before the age when many of us were free of our societal conditioning.
In terms of revolutionary action, they're more likely to be counter-revolutionary and their skills won't necessarily be very useful.
So either the population of the USA is the most propagandized people or not, which is it?
You dont exucse someone fir being a racist just because their family taught them to be racist
Have you read this short essay before? It offers a materialist analysis on Americans and Westerners being propagandized
Calling Americans "the most propagandized people on Earth" excuses their actions by deferring blame onto some "brainwashing" force. The reality is that propaganda cannot hypnotize or brainwash people. When people believe lies told by the media, they often do so not because they are hypnotized but because the lies are flattering to their own worldview. People will not "wake up" from this "hypnosis" by being coddled and told that it isn't their fault that they benefit from the empire.
well this is a canadian paper
Americans when they read a news headline from "The MAPLE" posted to /c/Canada lol
is
Soldiers aren't victims
Ontology be like
Deserve
Did the Bolsheviks have contempt for soldiers?
Yeah who cares about winning when we can just feel smug and morally superior instead.
Go and try to convince anybody to believe you want what's best for them with takes like these
go and try to convince any marginalized person that you won't immediately throw them under the bus if their oppressors should prove more useful to you