As someone who does suffer from PTSD I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone apart from troops.
Look this is gonna be a hot take
I simultaneously do not think those soliders should have been there and morally i think they made A Bad Choice AND the i think the idea of punishing people based on their past actions is not actually going to be productive unless you're actually preventing them from doing more bad things, which having PTSD will likely not do :C
Anyway i get it, just a bit, no one's gonna see it etc. just like, idk i actually read those prison abolitionist texts and i'd really we just rehab people if we can, and try breadpill them on the uselessness of the amerikkkan gov/what they felt they were forced to do.
Like if we're gonna go the punishment route let's at least hope for some fucking ghosts of the people they killed haunt them that force them to stand on a war trial (where the community harmed takes justice) rather than using mental illness as punishment.
Ok yea that's it, that's my spicy take. Sorry for being too nice to war criminals. I still think they should go to trial and their victims' families get a say in whatever kind of retribution they want, but even then inflicting what is essentially a mental illness onto someone is tantamount to psychological torture and more war crimes sooo...
I simultaneously do not think those soliders should have been there and morally i think they made A Bad Choice AND the i think the idea of punishing people based on their past actions is not actually going to be productive unless you’re actually preventing them from doing more bad things, which having PTSD will likely not do :C
This kind of makes it sound like someone's going to go out there and actively spook troops into having PTSD.
Nobody is inflicting a punishment onto the troops (even though, as you said, they should face trial). They're just suffering the natural consequences of their own shitty and immoral decision.
Especially when you consider what traumatized men robbed of emotional skills by their culture bring home to their communities.
I really wish more people here read as much Angela Davis as they read Lenin.
Yeah but troops getting PTSD gives me future clients in my line of work and then I can try and radicalize them
All fun and games until the PTSD-ridden soldiers return home to establish the new American friekorps :agony-deep:
Collapse of America is imminent
Establishment hands power to SocDem wing of DSA
Bernie picks up the phone and calls armed wings of Proud Boys and Patriot Front, ranks swelling with veterans, to deal with "extremists" rising up in cities
MFW: :rosa:
Our Rosa is :brace-cowboy:. Times become... interesting.
Enjoy pissing yourselves every fourth of July, I’m sure uncle Sam won’t immediately forget about you once you’re home.
I hope all soldiers returning from Afghanistan have a very pleasant Finding Out Your Partner Has Cheated On You And Will Continue To Do So
depends on if the soldier had a real material choice to enlist or not. some definitely deserve it, but many are as powerless as you and me
When you say "real material choice" you must be more specific. Even for the big majority of people of low income backgrounds that enlist (which is noticably less of a % than a lot of people think) the choice isnt between enlisting to the most genocidal and destructive org in modern history(not saying the already knew it or should) or starvation,asbolute poverty and homelessness. It usualy is between a sucky ,struggling to make ends meet life with no upwards social mobility that is still better than what billions of people experience or enlisting. So it depends if you consider this "not having a real material choice" and if you expect a non american or third worlder to think of it as such . Also thinking about how this can be applied to other jobs that offer safe and stable income and have a similar % of poor people joining in like lets say cops and in context of how that "understanding" could be applied in many other cases through modern history
I've said it before, the only reason I joined the military is cause I was homeless, so those people do exist. On top of that most people don't sign up cause they actually want to fight, its just a well paying job. America has crazy amounts of military and anti "terrorism" propaganda, most people really don't have any idea of the horrors our military commits. And even if they end up realizing it after they join (I didn't even see any of it till I was about a year in) you can't get out, getting out of a military contract is damn near impossible and if you go AWOL you go to jail for a long time.
"They say that the next soldier to murder one of our family members will be from an underserved community and just wanted healthcare. Really makes you feel like you're part of history".
https://anti-imperialism.org/2016/12/08/legionnaires-defeating-the-soldiertariat-myth/
This has been documented by the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation in their study on the recruitment demographics of the united $tates military, which found that only about 10-11% of the united $tates military recruits come from the poorest quintile
aha ok, it's only a tenth, then fuck them
my point is that both groups exist
The only notably overrepresented group among recruits are Indigenous people
I know, I basically just use any opportunity to spread that article around to disabuse people (not you, just other readers) of the notion that soldiery is necessarily proletarian or that soldiers as a class have revolutionary potential. It has been a very popular framing, especially in the Bush years (which shaped the political minds of the generation currently vomiting their shit takes all over the pages of every paper of record).
only about 10-11% of the united $tates military recruits come from the poorest quintile (defined as making less than $33,000 annually), with a fourth of the military coming from areas whose median income is more than $65,000 annually.
If 25% come from an area (not a household) with a median income of over $65K annually, doesn't that mean that 75% -- an overwhelming majority -- come from areas that make less than that?
We can't simultaneously say "the middle class has been hollowed out/the costs of a college education have skyrocketed/even once-professional jobs are being proletarianized" but then turn around and say that if your family makes more than $33K you can't really claim to have been roped in to the military by your material conditions. Sure, the military isn't primarily made up of the poorest among us. But we can't say it's mostly middle class either, because if you're raising a family on $50K, you aren't middle class in much of the country.
The other important point here is that a lot of troops are recruited as children, after being fed wall-to-wall lies about what the military actually does, all at the behest of the most pervasive propaganda machine ever created.
They're not the poorest among us because they're not homeless or part of the apartheid labor underclass of undocumented immigrants - or at least the vast majority are not.
But sure, on the scale within the imperial core, the military pulls from poorer families. However, this does not justify the murder of others, let alone doing so to advance the interests of capital exporters. Propaganda plays a very heavy role here and it's one that makes them violent chauvinists, it's how they get recruited, it's how they justify their crimes, it's how they rationalize themselves as a special class of "civilians" later, it's why vets become cops and chuds so ridiculously often. Finally, materialists will understand that classes and other groupings of people are the product of their conditions. All of the classes and groupings. Academics, thieves, volunteers, Nazis. But it's very important to separate an understanding of the genesis of these groups of people and sympathizing with them, or reminding oneself to do so for a heinous enemy group in particular.
Unrepentant vets must be treated like cops; you can only consider them assets for socialism if they reject the systems they supported as well as their part in doing so. And they are not ripe for the picking by default; they have a lot more shit to work through to end up a socialist than the average imperial core citizen.
Great points all around. Whatever someone's background or the lies they're exposed to growing up, there's no justification or excuse for playing a role in the imperial death machine. However, these might be mitigating factors, and almost everyone should have a path back to society, even if they commit serious crimes. We really need to iron out the contradiction in how we talk about people who commit violence in a criminal context and people who commit violence in an imperial context. Assuming similar individual acts, I don't think there's a big difference between someone who joins a gang at 17 and someone who joins the Army at 17. So we can't talk about rehabilitation and decarceration on one hand and then turn around and use "law and order" rhetoric on troops.
Unrepentant vets must be treated like cops; you can only consider them assets for socialism if they reject the systems they supported as well as their part in doing so. And they are not ripe for the picking by default; they have a lot more shit to work through to end up a socialist than the average imperial core citizen.
Also great points, although I'd add one thing to your last sentence (and least with respect to non-chud troops). They may have more of certain types of shit to work through to become a socialist, but a lot of them don't glamorize the military the way even a lot of left-leaning libs do. They've seen the business end of imperialism, or are at least close enough to it to know the propaganda is bullshit. That can be useful, as can the narrow but vibrant tradition of "my buddies are alright, but everyone above us is corrupt/callous/out to lunch/ignorant." This stuff isn't a step directly towards socialism, but it's a step outside political orthodoxy, which is at least headed in the right direction.
Most troops don't, either. Most don't even see combat. I'm all for holding troops responsible at an individual level, for acts they personally carried out, but the contradiction I see is that "fuck all troops forever" is the exact same rhetoric as "lock up every criminal and throw away the key." It doesn't make any sense to talk about prison abolition for a civilian who assaulted their partner but then talk about gulags for a troop who has a desk job at some base in Kansas.
Because literal act itself is not what we charge troops with. Its serving a war machine which irradiates cities. Those desk jobs serve the immiseration of the global south, they are not just harming their community, they are destroying other people's communities. Also i didn't even say throw em in gulags ever last one, I said gangs don't irradiate cities.
The point of comparison is moot, they are not comprable. Soldiers participating in an international crime and a crime against humanity are not the same as a domestic abuser. I don't give a damn where you come down on what to do with them, my objection is to the conflation of gangs with the US military. Helping a gang wont make you on some level responsible for Fallujah
There is a stubborn faction of the left which still seeks to redeem and organize members of the amerikkkan military (...)
Instant bookmark, lol
oh, you're not celebrating 4th of July because the sparkly fireworks remind you of the horrors you unleashed on children from your helicopter or artillery position?
unamerican cuck, love it or leave it yeehaw
As someone with PTSD, I don't wish it on anyone else either, except for the troops.
Most of those soldiers grew up being bombarded with movies and shows glorifying war and convincing them US soldiers were heroes. A lot of them were high school students unsure of their future and saw service as the only way they'd even have one. Every single movie about war in the US romanticizes being a soldier. Most of them signed up thinking they'd be doing good and making the world a better place. I don't think we should wish PTSD on anyone. Especially not people who joined the military before they were legally allowed to drink alcohol and made that choice even before that. They were kids with a hope to make the world a better place and they can still want/do that as adults. They can right their wrongs. They can change and grow. We shouldn't make fun of people for a decision they made in high school.
Again, from childhood, people are bombarded with propaganda that soldiers/cops are good and do no wrong, and the ones that do face justice. I'm not going to wish someone has permanent mental health issues or wish them death because it was a career they decided they wanted when they were in middle school after watching a movie about how cool it was. People can change and work to right their wrongs. Blowing off people with mental health issues is antithetical to leftism, no matter who that person is or what they've done. Movies and TV shows are designed to glorify the military and police and Americans consume too much of it.
Victims of police brutality deserve justice and the police responsible deserve to face that justice. I'd agree with you if you said to abolish the police. I'm not saying these institutions are a good thing, but I'm saying individual cops and soldiers are overwhelmingly good natured people that have been lied to and manipulated since early childhood to do what they do.
Yes. The problem with police is an institutional problem that needs addressing. The police serve capitalism and state first and the people second. I'm not against reforming, de-funding or even abolishing the police. What I'm saying that these institutions lead good intentioned people to do bad, while bombarding them with the idea that what they are doing is actually good. I do not agree with the idea that laughing at soldiers getting PTSD, or cops getting killed is in any way helpful, but it instead does nothing but give capitalists ammo to use against leftists and that it actively hurts left wing movements in the west.
Not to mention living in abject poverty, but I guess other than that they were totally similar to westerners volunteering to murder people much poorer than themselves to be able to go to college without debt like the rest of you suckers.
