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Same thing with profiteering, entrepreneurism, “the need for growth” etc, basically all the bullshit our education system forced on us to justify capitalism and making the rich richer.
Like, no, definitely when I grew up I would somehow understand that its OK to screw people over and hoard resources for one stinky asshole while millions of people starve and die of curable diseases? Loooool nope obvious lie is obvious. I’m here now and I feel old and tired, choosing to fuck people over is still wrong and trashy.
I’d be less bitter about it if so many other people hadn’t bought into it…
What’s even more wild is to ask a religious leader for a religion that says “don’t kill people” about how killing people in a war isn’t a sin. I was only a child when I saw one of my peers ask a priest this. The mental gymnastics the priest was trying to pull was blatantly obvious to me, even as a kid.
I was once asked why I joined the military and my answer was ‘l needed money’. This seemed to shock my companion who was astounded that I was willing to potentially kill people over money. My response was that it was a far better reason than for imaginary friends or the colour of their skin.
Still a terrible reason and it makes you an awful person to be a mercenary for imperialism to kill innocents for bourgeois profits.
Never denied I was an awful person. Also, not in the American military.
Canada isn’t any better.
Yeah well I think because they have some sense of (perverted) morals behind it, while you were doing it just for profit.
Joining a military that aggresses other nations? Yeah, spot on. Joining a military to defend your line on the ground against people you see as fellow earthlings? Still a fair take. Joining a military to defend against people who want you dead because of how you were born? That’s where this starts to unravel. That kind of stuff sadly exists in this world.
So many absurd things that I was told “you’ll understand/agree when you’re older” that turned out to just be boomer copium.
No, I don’t hate taxes (the opposite). No, I’m not more conservative (the opposite).
One thing I’ve noticed about boomers is the constant TV on in the background. Very commonly FOX news, or newsmax these days, cnn, etc. Their world view is absolutely shaped by their media diet.
Meanwhile, our generation has always had the Internet. We view the world through that lens, which has a bit more of an expanded view, especially since people from those “scary” countries can come on places like reddit and post. Which is why I think the push for AI has been so strong. Now the Epstein class have some sort of means to taint what we read online, slowly moving our own worldview to the one the boomers have had from their own propaganda. It used to take owning the news stations to push their agenda, but now they had to pivot to now posting via bots to get their messages in.
All this to say, I think we had a nice gap where a kinder worldview emerged for some generations, but I worry that the generation growing up with the internet how it is becoming is going to slip back into the boomer thinking if it continues this way.
Their strategy for corrupting the youth has been promoting a vapid hyper capitalist hustle culture and signal boosting influencers who embody that depravity. However, unlike the boomers of yore, the economy we face is terrible and only getting worse, with none of us having any personal wealth left to protect. They’re going hard into fascism in an effort to redirect the anger, but even that has a limited half life. Eventually they’re gonna need to start cannibalizing each other in mass movements against other elites, because we need somebody to pay and they need to make it not them. I forsee war in some form as an inevitability.
As someone pointed out, this is understandable if you’re from the USA.
Otherwise, I see it like this:
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Every country has an army.
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Their own, or the one of another country.
The baseline is that going to war is bad, having a defensive army is absolutely not (and will prevent deaths as russia won’t dare attack you).
Having a formidable army has clearly not deterred global superpowers from attacking you, especially if they get too cocky like in Iran and Ukraine
Neither Ukraine nor Iran had a “formidable” army when they were attacked.
Russia was supposedly the second army in the world too.
Sometimes, but do you let your neighbor waltz in and subjugate you?
I have a standing subjugation appointment with my neighbor every Thursday in fact. Don’t knock it til you try it.
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And suprise, suprise, House always wins.
Stop murdering each other. Agreed. It is possible to stop aggressors without systematically murdering people. We have invested so much resources throughout history into perfectioning murder. But so little to explore ways of war without murder.
I’m not gonna fault an american for an opinion like that, but if you’re involved with european leftists who are too busy virtue signalling to adopt any pragmatic defense policy positions, you get a real appreciation for the nuance.
This applies as well to the french, polish or British armies no debate.
I’m all for artistic prose, emphatic amd impactful prose, but so many people think impact is more important than accuracy and coherence.
We can assume they mean (or would accept the substitution of) “the military industrial complex” instead of the concept of “maintaining a military”, but the symmetry required them to be less accurate.
Killing people is bad and war is bad and the military is evil and the only way to stop it is to use the military to do a war and kill people.
It’s not though.
What about defensive wars, though? Occupations are often quite brutal, as well.
Even when a war is necessary to prevent a worse outcome, it is still bad
Well yeah, but if that’s the only kind of war that a military is planning on fighting, IMO it’s a bit much to call it “evil”.
As militaries are a tool of states to protect their sovereign power: That’s not what militaries do, though.
I don’t want to die for a state. Even if that state is being challenged in it’s sovereignity.
Of course depending on a defensive war, but often times you’re not fighting for the state, but your loved ones. Like on a smaller scale nearly everyone would defend the people close to them from harm, for example trying to stop a rapist from abusing your wife/sister/daughter of course not limited to women. Rape can be used against men as well.
In a defensive war the goal of states sovereignty and you defending your loved ones can align.
but often times you’re not fighting for the state, but your loved ones.
If I’m part of a state’s army, I’m fighting for the militaristic goals of that state. That state only has an interest in my “loved ones” insofar as it’s the population they require to achieve their political aims. My loved ones aren’t benefactors of the state. That’s just state propagana.
Your rape example has little in common from militaristic conflict that it’s simply a non-sequitur.
In a defensive war the goal of states sovereignty and you defending your loved ones can align.
I think you misunderstand what wars are to a state: In war, two or more states fight for their interest by destroying an opponents people and resources by destroying their own people an resources. I’m not a resource that’s willing to be used up.
What if the state attacking is doing so for the purpose of murdering you and your family and everyone who remotely looks like you or shares your culture?
That still doesn’t mean that I’d be ready to die for another state.
So you prefer to roll over and get genocided?
Not what I said.
I’d flee or if there’s any reasonable chance to survive, I’d join some self-defense militia. But I wouldn’t die for a state.
Still very far from ideal to kill soliders of the invading army, cuz they’re also people with lives and aren’t always willing in their choice, or worse case, indoctorinated. There truly are monsters whom love wars and killing and enter the army exactly because, but those are almost certainly a minority
Sure it’s not ideal but I won’t cry for any dead Russian soldiers. You walked across that border, you deserve to die.
I wouldn’t phrase it as ‘deserve’, but yeah, obviously. Pacifism is as bad of a failure when it doesn’t prevent those whom bring harm from doing so. I have no issue with them dying since it did come to that point. But I still, personally, believe that I can get to grieve for them nonetheless. It’s not contradictory as I see it.
(I’m more than open to a discussion and even invite for someone to correct me if I’m wrong, not in the sense of “I challange” as much as “I want to improve”)
You’re right, all war is bad. War sucks and it should never have to happen. Even wars fought for good reasons are still terrible and it would be a better world if they never had to be fought at all.
The part you’re missing is that war is not the military. They’re different things. Militaries fight wars, that doesn’t mean that wars will magically stop happening to everyone who gets rid of their military. It would be wonderful to live in a world where militaries aren’t needed, but instead we live in a world where many countries live under the constant threat of invasion.
The Canadian military maintains a constant presence in Latvia, because if we didn’t, Russia would walk in there tomorrow and take over. My wife just finished a tour. The Latvians don’t resent the presence of our military, they love us. Everywhere she went, barring some very specific exceptions, people were glad to see them. They felt happy, reassured by their visible presence. People from the other side of the world who had upended their lives to spend six months away from family and loved ones defending their tiny little country from the threat of brutal autocratic rule.
No one wants these things to be necessary, but they are, whether we like it or not. We would not be living in a better world right now if, in 1939, the whole world had just rolled over and let the Nazis walk in without a fight, would we?
I think every army that had to defend their home country would have preferred doing other things, and until 2022 i honestly tought that invasions were a thing of the past, at least in Europe. Russia showed otherwise, now i think that being capable of defending yourself is important. You dont have to have a ginormous army like the US but you have to be enough of a threat that somebody would think twice before attacking.
Defensive wars? Like insurrections against invading armies and mercenaries?
Oftentimes governments make use of that and try to indoctrinate their governments into thinking a war is defensive when it isn’t. False flags, clamping down on freedom of speech, large-scale censorship, promoting authoritarian and totalitarian tenets, violence against independent journalists, and so on.
That said, billionnaires and power-tripping CEOs are the source of far-right ideologies, and those should be combatted. When someone claims antifascism is an issue, they have practically admitted to being a fascist. And the only good fascist…
If a fighting force assembles when its home country is attacked and disbands once they’re no longer being invaded, it hardly feels like “the military” at that point. That’s not how it works these days, at least in most places.
That’s a little naïve, isn’t it? Your fighting force isn’t trained, doesn’t have any equipment and so on, more people will die because of this.
Switzerland has conscription for men and voluntary service for women over 19. They receive military training and are issued a service weapon. They then return to civilian life, with the idea being the population is now an armed militia in the case of invasion.
It seems to have worked out for them so far, surviving being right in the middle of 2 world wars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland#Government_and_politics scroll down from there to Military
It seems to have worked out for them so far, surviving being right in the middle of 2 world wars.
Their conscription system is only a part of the story. Switzerland was not invaded in WW2 because:
A. it is geographically difficult to invade, has a lot of bunkers and armed people.
B. because the Nazis used it to exchange gold and currency to Swiss Francs and get free access to trade with neutral countries. Switzerland was more useful to Germany as a “banker” and middleman during trade embargoes than it could have ever been as occupied territory.
scroll down from there to Military
So it is a military then?
I know about Switzerland, they have a military with conscription. Lots of countries in Europe are currently considering reintroducing conscription, but that’s not some random fighting force that assembles out of nowhere in times of need, it’s still a military.
They are defending a made-up line on a map full of made-up lines and names. I don’t care about the make-believe show.
But what if the people on the other side of the line think you don’t deserve to live because of your world view, your sexuality, your skin colour?
I can’t think of a war that happened because of this. Please don’t say WW2 because even the history books don’t claim it was to stop the atrocities.
That’s a very weirdly specific take that’s very dishonest.
There are a huge number of wars that resulted in the genocide, or at least mass death of the losing party.
Many people have defended themselves specifically because the attacking side wanted to kill them all.
I was asking because I don’t know of any. I recognize I don’t know everything and would be happy to learn more history.
I’m not saying genocides don’t happen. Of the ones I can think of, the victims were not able to form militaries to fight back. Genocide requires a power imbalance.
Are organized rebellions (like the Hutu in 1959) military? I would argue they are not because they were not the state. I think that’s an important distinction. Being the state sanctioned group which remains at least somewhat assembled during peace carries special weight.
Maybe you could say Hamas et al cause wars in response to genocide but again I don’t think they strictly fall into a state military.
I don’t even need history.
Ukraine is literally defending itself right now against a state that is committing genocide on its occupied territory.
But, looking at history, there are wars specifically started to cause state-sponsored genocide in another state. And I’ll avoid anything Israeli.
There’s the first Congo war, which specially killed everyone in now-Congo to make room for the Hutu Rwandans. They started killing Tutsi in their own country, but specifically attacked another state to keep the genocide going.
There’s the Bosnian Genocide, though that wasn’t technically started to do genocide, it was kept going in order to commit more genocide.
Indonesia invaded East Timor for the express purpose of “pacifying” the sovereign state, killing a third of all people there.
After Bangladesh gained independence from Pakistan, Pakistan launched a war specifically to get rid of the Bengal people who initiated their independence.
And of course, you already mentioned WW2, a war started with the explicit goal of creating more living room for the German people.
There are significantly more genocides where there’s a larger gap between conquering an area and genociding the original inhabitants though. If you annex a place first, and then genocide it, it falls outside your specific examples. Granted, I’m skirting those a bit, since Russia sees the Donbass as Russian, and them not being at war with Ukraine…
I think it’s also important to note here that the previous poster is creating an unrealistic standard by insisting that genocide even be in the picture.
Any war of aggression is a bad thing that people should be able to defend themselves from. And that means having a military. And defending other people from wars of aggression means having a military.
We don’t have to be talking about genocide. Whether or not Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine (they are certainly engaged in ethnic cleansing, regardless of any other definitions) is actually irrelevant. The people of Ukraine should not have their future determined by the fact that Putin has men with guns and the willingness to use them. It’s as simple as that. And as long as people like Putin exist in the world, having a military will often be the only way to prevent stuff like that from happening.
I am genuinely curious to know who is framing the war between Russia and Ukraine as genocide. My understanding is Ukraine views it as imperialism and Russia views it as liberating people who are Russian from Ukrainian rule (if we are talking about Crimea/Donbas) or stopping Ukraine from doing some sort of evil, I’m not totally clear on this one.
First Congo War is debatable but before I expand on that I want to make sure you understand the war happened after the 1994 genocide? You are referring to a second genocide? (Not debating if the mass killing during the war counted as genocide, just wanting to make sure we are talking about the same thing).
Bosnia genocide I don’t think I need to reply further because I agree it wasn’t started to do genocide.
East Timor: disagree. There was a civil war because of how the colonial power left (one could say by design) and Indonesia saw it as an annexation opportunity. It wasn’t a war between two established states in response to intention to commit genocide.
Bangladesh: I don’t think I know who the military who opposed Pakistan was?
WWII: My point has been no allied power cared about liebestraum until it threatened their own borders/colonial interests. If we go back to the comment I was replying to, the person was talking about one country defending itself against another because they thought they didn’t deserve to live because of their world view, sexuality or colour of skin. I suppose if you stretch world view into believing they should be allowed to live their life in peace then sure that applies. I can’t argue with that one.
There’s no such thing as a perfectly moral war. But would the world be better off today if everyone had just rolled over and let the Nazis do what they want?
Would the world be better off today if people fought the Nazis earlier and not only when it threatened their imperialism and no one used it to further their imperialism? Yes. But that wasn’t what we were discussing.
All you’re doing here is dodging the question.
No, I answered your question.
Edit: I can be more clear.
Is it good someone stopped the Nazis from genocide? Yes.
Did armed resistance to the Nazis from state military start because of the genocide? No.
Living inside any of those lines doesn’t seem to guarantee that. ‘People on the other side’ is a story the powerful have been telling us for years. What if they start a war and nobody attends?
This is the real world, you don’t get guarantees, you get what you have and you have to work with that.
Refusing to engage with any system that doesn’t meet your definition of perfect is - and I hate to use this word but there’s no other way to describe it - childish.
Sometimes stubborn grandmas have to go sit in front of tanks if change is to happen in this real world full of real men and their real weapons.
Childish is that you believe you have to be stuck forever in the reality that presents itself to you. Direct action means saying ‘No’ to what you don’t want directly.
A refusal to engage is engagement as well.
You work to change the reality, but you still live in the reality you have now.
I want to end capitalism, but I still buy food and pay rent, because I currently live in capitalism. You don’t get to opt out of reality.
I live in the reality I have now following my convictions - that means if that kills me it does. That’s what convictions are.
You seem so desperately wanting to deny me my opting out of reality, telling me I don’t get to opt out. Who are you to tell me what I get to opt out of? Or to tell me what reality is in the first place? I only engage with what I want to engage with. And if it knocks on my door with guns? Well shoot me, if that’s what humanity has to offer I don’t want my place in it anyways. It probably would help non-humans a lot if we all perished. I assure you I’m not that gloomy in real life.
Disclaimer: I try to survive in this stupid timeline just like the next person, painfully aware that currently we are all complicit in genocide and murder for the sake of our comfort and our habits, not just in Gaza (which is just one of many ghosts in Capitalism’s haunted house). The last bit of moral ground I feel I have is that I can loudly proclaim that I will not be sent to war.
Kind of answering to both your answers here. Capitalism sucks, but at least don’t let them send you off to kill and get killed.
I really like this response.
Sorry, I don’t think I should buy into myths about how the regular people in enemy countries want to eat babies or whatever so that rich people can have more 🤷♀️
So if one day that made up line shifted and now you were in the territory of a government that believes you don’t deserve human rights for whatever reason, you’d be totally cool with that.
I’m not cool with being inside any made-up lines. Fighting for any of those mental constructs perpetuates the problem, even though it might be tempting.
I think, in their example, the person would be literally fighting for survival, not for made up lines.
OK? I’m not cool with living under capitalism, but I’ll still die if I don’t get a job. At some point we have to live with the fact that social and political conditions are going to happen to us regardless of how we feel about them. You don’t get to opt out of concentration camps.
… And about the camps: if you are in any country backing Israel or the US you are currently supporting concentation camps. So don’t tell me radical pacifism is worse than what everybody is doing already by their non-revolt.
This is just whataboutism. You’re not actually making a point, just deflecting.
I would actually 100% support a UN peacekeeping mission in Gaza. I think that the people of Palestine should be defended from Isreal’s genocide, and if it takes tanks and guns to do that, I believe that’s what we should do.
Doesn’t mean I like it. The world I want is one where Isreal isn’t engaged in a genocide in the first place. But that’s not the world we have. You’re not making anyone’s life better by sticking your head in the sand.
In your other reply you suggested that I should just refuse to eat and simply die because I want capitalism to end. Who does that help? That’s a serious question, and I actually want you to answer it; if I kill myself rather than engage with capitalism, what have I done to bring about its end? Whose life have I improved?
And as long as you keep working under capitalism it will keep existing.
Yes, I understand that sometimes the other option is to die. And the personal line I draw is that I’d rather die than be sent to war. Of course, if the real situation actually arrives my self-preservation instinct will probably kick in and I’ll end up dying anyways, just in some trench. But I do wish I had the mental fortitude to tell them to fuck off. In practice it’s unlikely to occur at all, I’m too old and a woman.
I always had a deep puzzlement with the military as an institution. It’s basically an organization designed to take young people and teach them to run toward a firing machine gun when told to do so. It defies all logic at the individual level, and it scares me.
But… It’s not?
You seem to have developed an understanding of the military based entirely around a small slice of WW2 movies and video games, and then assumed that has any bearing on the real world.
The way you actually learn to deal with a machine gun (and this was true even in WW2) is find cover, set up suppressing fires, use smoke and terrain for concealment as you advance, and eventually get someone into a position where they can flank and take out the machine gun nest, probably with a grenade so they don’t expose themselves. Most importantly, everything I just described above involves teamwork. You protect each other, you trust each other, you rely on each other.
Safety is paramount. No one is teaching you to run screaming at a machine gun nest with no regard for your own life. That shit barely even happens in movies anymore.
A huge amount of what you learn as a soldier is basically how to keep yourself safe in extremely dangerous situations. Yes, you still have to have a willingness to put yourself in extremely dangerous situations in the first place, but the whole point of learning to do this stuff well is learning how to be the person who can survive those extremely dangerous situations.
I think you are missing the forest for the trees here.
You’re claiming “forests” (“militaries treat young, enlisted lives as expendable for unnecessary wars”) exist and then pointing at a cardboard standee of a tree you brought as evidence.
Yeah, you’re right, but you can admit when your attempt at artistry fails your point.
You’re claiming “forests” (“militaries treat young, enlisted lives as expendable for unnecessary wars”)
Read my comment again. You are reading things that are not there.
Sorry, I was trying to think of a more reasonable alternative than your literal statement that didn’t make sense.
Can you please explain what you meant by
It’s basically an organization designed to take young people and teach them to run toward a firing machine gun when told to do so.
Such that you think someone who explained that the statement is false is missing the forest?
Sorry for the uncalled advice but it’s usually a waste of time to discuss with people who go out of their way to treat a figure of speech as literal, and vomit a huge “ackshyually” about it. Or that lie / assume / bullshit about your emotional state. (Cue to “what is it that disturbs you?”)
Because, like, it’s plain obvious your “run toward a firing machine gun” is a figure of speech.
Because, like, it’s plain obvious your “run toward a firing machine gun” is a figure of speech.
I’m curious what you think OP meant by their statement seeing as they claim my interpretation was reading something that wasn’t there. You’re saying it’s not literal and they’re saying it’s not the idea that war wastes lives carelessly. So how should someone read the statement that the military teaches people to run into machine gun fire? It reads as a critique, although I suppose that could be the start of the misunderstanding.
OK. So elaborate. What is it that disturbs you?
it teaches them that the cause is more important than their individual life.
the cause is usually some politician getting more power… so yeah, lots of brainwashing needed
The rich need cannon fodder.
When we talk about voluntary enlistments they typically rely on mythology of noble and valiant warriors and honorable deaths, or the military represents a path out of poverty.
It’s really eye opening to read accounts of civil war and WW1 soldiers who found out how brutal war actually was.
Not to worry - eventually the industrialization of war will be such that invaders only need to use unmanned craft to decimate their opposition’s home population on their 9-5 shift and then get drinks afterwards. (/s)
Everyone in this thread is forgetting about the evil✋ALIENS🤚that may or may not exist.
I watched the X-Files, I know military isn’t on our side
As a teen I talked to people from all around the world, usually connected by our shared fandoms. I remember talking to a girl in California who said she wanted to join the military when she grew up. Apparently she came from a military family, and couldn’t understand why I was appalled at the idea of choosing such a path. We discussed it civilly, and eventually agreed to disagree. I can’t help but wonder if she went through with it and, if so, how she feels about it today.
You shouldn’t agree to disagree with people who want to oppress and kill millions of innocents.
She was probably conservative enough to not regret it
