Vietnam. Decent enough government and standard of living, and they whooped America’s ass so bad that it’d be political suicide to go back there. I mean, what kind of timeline would we have to be on for someone to be stupid enough to… hmm.

Considering that fucking Greenland is caught up in it now, idk that anywhere is safe.

Not a yes or a no.

There is no “solidarity” to be had with people who kill or severely harm members of the working class. If you pull others down to get ahead, you are not my comrade.

Every time a person chooses that path, they create even more desperate situations for other working class people. The people who join the military to “escape poverty” force others into poverty in the process, and they force them into situations worse than poverty. How many people became mujahideen because all they had to put food on the table was a gun? And how many people are growing up not only in poverty, but also as orphans, because of the troops’ actions?

This is complete insanity. If we can excuse the actions of the troops, then we can excuse the actions of anyone. Maybe Jeffery Epstein just did the things he did because of how he was raised, or because of his brain chemistry, or because of this or because of that. Regardless, he still needs to be condemned and failure to condemn him is a disservice to his victims, and alienates people who could actually be valuable allies.

Everyone understands this when it comes to other “professions” like the ones I mentioned, that pull others down to get ahead. But when it comes to troops, troop worship is so ingrained, the propaganda so deep, that even when people consciously reject it, they still want to justify and make excuses for them. Rationally speaking, if you accept that we should condemn those other professions, and you accept that troops are just as bad if not worse, then you should condemn them in just as strong terms.

The same is true of selling crack but I’ll criticize that too.

Nobody forced them to sign up.

The big issue I have with your statements, and those of the OP are that they are extremist.

Of course they’re “extremist.” Putting the lives of Afghans and Iraqis on the same level as Americans is an extreme position. That’s just the world we live in. But just because it’s “extreme” relative to generally accepted discourse in the West doesn’t make it any less correct.

Not every cop has shot an innocent person. But people still have no problem saying All Cops Are Bastards. Because even those who aren’t directly involved support and cover for those who do. Likewise, not a single troop at Abu Ghraib blew the whistle on what was happening there. If you’re fine with ACAB, you should also be fine with ATAB, and the only reason I can see why someone wouldn’t is that they value the cops’ victims more than those of the troops.

That’s just contradiction. An argument’s a collective series of statements to establish a definite proposition. Contradiction’s just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.

You spend your whole life doing exercises and hauling supplies, but you massacre one village and suddenly everyone hates you.

Replace every instance of “joining the military” with “becoming a police officer,” or “selling crack,” or “scamming the elderly,” or “scabbing on striking workers.” Do the same arguments apply? Yes or no.

Do you apply the same perspective to people who escape poverty by selling crack or scamming the elderly? Do I need to refrain from criticizing such people because otherwise I’m “dividing the working class?” Absurd. The only difference between those people and the troops are the proximity of their victims. Defending drug dealers and scammers is what divides the working class by alienating their victims. And in the same way, defending the child murdering troops divides the working class by alienating their victims.

You lecture me on “privilege” while completely writing off all the people who are vastly less privileged than either of us, the people who are orders of magnitude poorer and less privileged, who face terror and brutality beyond what either of us, or any US troop, can expect to face. Every troop had the option to spend their days as I have, working at places like Amazon, with a roof over their head, three square meals a day, and no worry about bombs falling on their house. Relatively speaking, that is a privilege, compared to the conditions that Iraqis and Afghans have experienced.

Working class solidarity means international solidarity, and international solidarity means not only considering the needs of the global poor, but prioritizing them. If you claim to be a leftist, if you claim to care about privilge, and if you condemn Americans who screw over other Americans to get ahead, then you should even more vehmantly condemn Americans who screw over people from poorer countries to get ahead. You are just a chauvanist, the reason you defend the troops is because you view their victims as subhuman, unworthy of consideration.

This “working class solidarity” that somehow includes troops that murder working class people in other countries, does it also include cops who murder working class people in their own country? Or are they not included because you can actually recognize their victims as human beings? Surely “working class solidarity” cannot include working class people who actively oppress and harm other working class people, like cops, troops, con artists, etc.

what profession grants you the authority to condemn others for circumstances largely outside their control?

You keep bringing up this point and it’s entirely ad hominem and also makes bizarre, unfounded assumptions about what everyone else does.

I’m an unemployed warehouse worker with a BS in physics, I could’ve joined the military as an officer and made several times what I’ve made instead, but I didn’t. But no doubt, no matter what my story was, you’d find a way to dismiss my perspective. Perhaps the fact that I had enough support from my family to afford college in the first place, even though my degree was never useful and I left burdened with loans.

But it doesn’t fucking matter because regardless of my experiences, how about the experiences of people living in the countries we’ve invaded and bombed? You don’t hear shit from those people, do you? Isn’t their perspective just as valid? Have you sought out their perspectives, or even tried to consider what they might be? It’s so fucking stupid to dismiss critiques of the troops just because the person saying it doesn’t meet your standards of moral purity, it is, again, literally a textbook example of ad hominem. The truth is still the truth regardless of who says it. And the truth is that the troops suck.

Nobody was “forced” to go to Iraq.

For some reason, people think it’s ok to pull others down to get ahead but only in the context of the military. There are other ways to escape poverty, like selling crack or scamming the elderly. I wonder if you condone those approaches as well because “they didn’t have another choice if they wanted to escape poverty.” I doubt it. But if the victims aren’t people in our own neighborhoods who you can actually see, if it’s dead children on another continent who the news doesn’t talk about, then somehow it’s perfectly fine.

Everyone in that position who chooses to work at McDonald’s or Walmart or Amazon instead of signing up to murder foreigners is a better person than every troop, they are braver, more ethical, more heroic, and more enlightened. The cowards who pull others down to get ahead deserve no respect and no sympathy.

Unironically yes to all of that except the fascists.

Abu Ghraib was done by individual soldiers. At least as far as we know, they were not explicitly ordered to do all the things that they did, and when it came to light, several were charged with crimes over it. Furthermore, not a single person at the base blew the whistle on it, it was only because of independent journalists that it came to light.

If we cite war crimes carried out on the initiative of ordinary soldiers, then of course you could claim that it was just those individual soldiers who were responsible. If we cite things that were carried out on a systematic level, then you’ll say it was the leaders who were responsible, not the soldiers. So I have to ask, is there anything that could, theoretically happen that would make it ok to say, “fuck the troops?” What would that have to look like?

should be executed for being forced to serve as a cook in the military?

Sorry, which user was it exactly who said, “Kill every troop?”

Scientists and engineers who developed chemical weapons and nuclear bombs made conscious choices about their work, yet they rarely face the same scrutiny as soldiers who carry out orders.

They should face the same scrutiny. As a matter of fact, it played a part in me personally giving up on my persuit of physics, even if it meant doing menial labor instead. I used to think that developing new technology would uplift everyone and advance all humanity together, but the more I looked at the world, the more I saw ways in which technology was used irresponsibly, or for the benefit one group at the expense of another. Specifically with climate change, it became apparent to me that we already have the technological means to confront it, the problem is the way our society is structured, and as long as it’s structured that way, no new technology is going to fix anything, and the idea that it might only serves to make people hesitant to confront power and change structures in the ways that are desperately needed. Technological development without social development only creates more advanced forms of oppression.

Heinz Guderian was the developer of Blitzkrieg doctrine and maintained in trials and works afterwards that he had no interest in the Nazis’ “politics,” and that he was “just doing his job.” There’s a good chance he was lying to cover his own ass, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume he was telling the truth. Is developing military theory for Hitler fundamentally different from developing theories of physics for Hitler, which would allow him to construct new weapons and bombs? I say no. There may have been people in Nazi Germany who ignored what was going on in the world and simply focused their attention, as many scientifically minded people do, on the interesting problems of their field, just solving problems without regard for whose problems they are or what they’re going to do with the solutions. If such people existed, they are undeniably culpable - just because you find it more “stimulating” to work on the technical mechanics of a gas chamber than to think about whether the gas chamber should exist does not give you license to design it.

I cannot fully fault everyone involved in the nuclear program in the US, because the US was on the right side of the war and potentially the bomb might have been needed. Nevertheless, a weapon of mass destruction was handed over to the politicians, to use however they see fit. Many of the scientists involved petitioned Truman not to use it (though others, like Oppenheimer, said the opposite), and many high ranking military officials considered it unnecessary. The fact is that there were multiple ways that Truman could’ve ended the war without the bomb, either through better cooperation with the Soviets at Potsdam (but then he’d have to share the spotlight), or by accepting surrender with the sole condition of sparing the emperor (which he planned to do anyway, but he wanted the newspapers to say, “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!”). Once in the hands of politicians, the decisions on whether and how to use it came down to political concerns, things like, “we need to use it to justify all the money we spent on it,” not ethical or even strategic ones.

Anyone involved in weapons development in the US today is certainly culpable in how the US decides to use them. And the US is an aggressive rogue state that has declared jurisdiction over the entire world, that it can and will drone strike wherever it pleases, regardless of soverignty, it routinely invades and oppresses soverign countries, and of all the many, many conflicts it’s been involved in, the last time it was really justified in a conflict was 80 years ago. Anyone involved in weapons development in the US is a monster, and the only reason these sorts of people have been spared of blame historically is that the winning side found their expertise too useful to punish them.

The arguments that you make in no way wash soldiers hands clean of the atrocities they directly commit, it only shows that other people have blood on their hands as well.

If @LegitTayUpdates can do it, so can you

I have a question for you. If they made it a crime to leave the police until you finished a set term, would that make you object to anyone saying “ACAB?”

The predicted Allied casualties for a mainland invasion of Japan were so high

Those estimates were made after the fact, in response to criticism. In reality, a mainland invasion was never in the cards at all. It’s a myth. There’s nothing about it in any of the letters or journals of the people making the decisions. There were two actual alternatives to the bomb:

1. Cooperating more with the Soviets. The Japanese refused to surrender in part because they were holding out a desperate hope that the USSR would intercede as a neutral third party in peace negotiations, when in fact they were just stalling for time while they redeployed their troops from Europe to Asia. The US and USSR had planned to issue a joint declaration calling for Japan to surrender at Potsdam, but Truman pulled out at the last minute when he heard that the bomb had been tested successfully. The soviet declaration of war was only days apart from the dropping of the bombs and the Japanese surrender.

2. Accepting conditional, rather than unconditional surrender. The Japanese had already offered to surrender on the sole condition that the emperor not be tried for war crimes. The US had every intention of doing that, and it’s what they actually did after the war. However, Truman had promised “unconditional surrender” and he wanted the newspapers to call it that.

The decision was all about prestige and politics and not sharing the spotlight. It wasn’t necessary.

This is a very long video about it but it’s very informative and well sourced.

I don’t think any cops have been drafted into police service.

The US (which is what this meme is focusing on) has an all-volunteer force.

They also don’t go to jail if they quit their job. And I haven’t heard of police recruiters using predatory tactics and targeting disadvantaged groups. The military does, or has done, all of those things to recruit troops.

There’s plenty of pro-cop propaganda and plenty of people who join the police thinking they’re going to do good. I’m sorry but at some point people have to be held accountable for their actions. Any troop that’s not a bastard and who’s actively trying to leave should understand why I call troops bastards. It was bastards who recruited them, after all, and it’s bastards keeping them there.

In any case, people make way too many excuses for these people, and all it does is reinforce the idea that it’s ok, which leads to more people falling for that propaganda and those predatory tactics.