It'd be a hard sell. A big part of the reason the military can go out and murder tens of thousands of brown people is that they're an Other that the troops don't really consider people (individual troops may vary), so when you're blowing up a water treatment plant in Bagdad you're not really hurting anyone you think of as human. But it's a whole different thing to strafe a bunch of blue collar workers. I'm not saying it wouldn't happen, I'm sure the military could find some empty eyed psycho to fly the mission, but they'd do immense damage to morale across the whole military. The US Military is pretty widely distributed throughout the population. Soldiers come from all over the country, and mostly from the working class, so they're very likely to empathize with blue collar workers on strike, even if they don't like strikes or labor militancy.
Or it could turn in to another blair mountain, who knows. Maybe the Army could round up enough tanks to kill a bunch of strikers, or even just force them back without shooting. It'd be an interesting standoff.
I think we agree that otherising American white blue collar workers is going to be a lot harder for them than doing it to brown people in a far-away country.
I just think I'm more cynical. Capital has a huge and effective propaganda machine and contrary to the period of labour organising back in the day there is no labour press to present a counter-narrative. If the nice men on TV says that the strikers are dangerous left-wing Antifa terrorists this is going to be the consent that is manufactured.
It'd be a hard sell. A big part of the reason the military can go out and murder tens of thousands of brown people is that they're an Other that the troops don't really consider people (individual troops may vary), so when you're blowing up a water treatment plant in Bagdad you're not really hurting anyone you think of as human. But it's a whole different thing to strafe a bunch of blue collar workers. I'm not saying it wouldn't happen, I'm sure the military could find some empty eyed psycho to fly the mission, but they'd do immense damage to morale across the whole military. The US Military is pretty widely distributed throughout the population. Soldiers come from all over the country, and mostly from the working class, so they're very likely to empathize with blue collar workers on strike, even if they don't like strikes or labor militancy.
Or it could turn in to another blair mountain, who knows. Maybe the Army could round up enough tanks to kill a bunch of strikers, or even just force them back without shooting. It'd be an interesting standoff.
I think we agree that otherising American white blue collar workers is going to be a lot harder for them than doing it to brown people in a far-away country.
I just think I'm more cynical. Capital has a huge and effective propaganda machine and contrary to the period of labour organising back in the day there is no labour press to present a counter-narrative. If the nice men on TV says that the strikers are dangerous left-wing Antifa terrorists this is going to be the consent that is manufactured.