Leftists caring about foreign policy is purely a spectator sport. Like a guy from Cincinnati caring about LeBron James. Care all you want. You have no power here.
Modern imperial states have now completely finished even pretending opinion shapes political policies; when the Iraq war 2 was ramping up in Britain, the country was rocked by the largest ever protest movement against sending British troops. The protests were violently crushed, media opposition was ignored or sidelined, and politics coalesced around nu-Labour authoritarianism, surveillance statism, and interventionism. They don't need to pretend to care anymore, they can just kill and arrest anyone who dissents, and they know they can get away with it because the other politicians are worse, and because there is no experience in creation of a political dual-power alternative.
Real answer? The US (or "NATO" or "the UN" or whatever, but let's be real) decided that targeting ISIS was a bigger PR win than Assad. "No boots on the ground" is also a pretty charitable interpretation of UK involvement in Syria given stuff like this and all the Special Forces psychos running around.
Despite an ample body of evidence proving the war is, was, and always had been a sham, with Newsnight even at the time pointing out how it was a farce and then unceremoniously getting brushed under the carpet with the whistleblower suicided under mysterious circumstances. Despite this, the war went ahead, with millions of dead Iraqis and the UK 100% complicit. Nu-Labour was briefly rejected with the nomination of Corbyn as Labour leader, and after nearly five years of systematic media demonzation he was purged under a nu-Labourite leadership contest. Nu-Labour is back with a vengeance, ready to win the electorate of mid 1990's Britain with soft Thatcherism once more.
I won't belabor the point much more, but when the government was willing to completely ignore the electorate and public opinion as a whole to go ahead and murder a million Iraqis then the government has lost, in my view, any claim to legitmacy. I don't care how much Blair was apparently loathed, because he's not faced any consequences for it; he's on track to get a knighthood, he's still widely revered as the man who "saved" Britain from Thatcher, and, crucially, he wasn't tried at the Hague.
I won't lay the blame on the British public for not doing more, because they'd exhausted all legal and semi-legal pathways to stop the war and Blair ignored every single one. At that point the only path to stopping the war would have ventured into sabotage, revolutionary defeatism, and protracted people's war, which, let's be honest, nobody was willing to carry out because there was no precedent for it.
This is incorrect. The level at which you're trying to approach foreign policy is wrong. The way you take on the State Department, Pentagon, etc. is by making them unable to wage their imperial campaigns.
In the US you could be distributing information to discouragement military enlistment. Even for "apolitical" people, learning about all the lies and manipulation recruiters engage in can be insightful.
You could also be helping and encouraging those currently in the military gain conscientious objector status: https://centeronconscience.org/guide-for-co-military/
Discouraging enlistment and helping enlisted soldiers get kicked out seems like it would be pretty useful and important work, but is ignored more often than not for some reason.
It's not easy to discourage enlistment unless you're actually in high school. Even teachers are probably looking at discipline or termination if they try it. Can't imagine a lot of high schools in the US are gonna let my late 30s ass onto campus and start talking to students about why the military is evil.
Can’t imagine a lot of high schools in the US are gonna let my late 30s ass onto campus and start talking to students about why the military is evil.
This is true, but it's also not too difficult to reach those kids on social media, which a lot of military recruiters are also using. It might be possible to influence at least some high school students, who could then in turn influence their friends and classmates and push them against joining. Might also help to encourage political organizing among high school students themselves against recruitment efforts, wherever possible.
In the US you could be distributing information to discouragement military enlistment.
The US hasn't hit an enlistment target since 2016, and that was after drastically cutting their standards over the previous decade.
You could also be helping and encouraging those currently in the military gain conscientious objector status
The bare handful of people I know who are still in the national guard are some of the most red-pilled chuds I still associate with.
And while I'll never have a kind word to say about enlisting, much less going for officer training, there's really not much I can tell to my friend who joined the marines (to spent most of his career guarding embassies) entirely to get the education, housing, and health care benefits. He's better off, economically, than a number of my other friends who just got chewed up and spit out by the service sector.
Leftists caring about foreign policy is purely a spectator sport. Like a guy from Cincinnati caring about LeBron James. Care all you want. You have no power here.
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Modern imperial states have now completely finished even pretending opinion shapes political policies; when the Iraq war 2 was ramping up in Britain, the country was rocked by the largest ever protest movement against sending British troops. The protests were violently crushed, media opposition was ignored or sidelined, and politics coalesced around nu-Labour authoritarianism, surveillance statism, and interventionism. They don't need to pretend to care anymore, they can just kill and arrest anyone who dissents, and they know they can get away with it because the other politicians are worse, and because there is no experience in creation of a political dual-power alternative.
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The problem is that the material effect is that the wars happened, anyway, and now people hate Blair instead of all of them.
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*except for all those air strikes starting in 2015
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Meme answer? :who-must-go:
Real answer? The US (or "NATO" or "the UN" or whatever, but let's be real) decided that targeting ISIS was a bigger PR win than Assad. "No boots on the ground" is also a pretty charitable interpretation of UK involvement in Syria given stuff like this and all the Special Forces psychos running around.
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Despite an ample body of evidence proving the war is, was, and always had been a sham, with Newsnight even at the time pointing out how it was a farce and then unceremoniously getting brushed under the carpet with the whistleblower suicided under mysterious circumstances. Despite this, the war went ahead, with millions of dead Iraqis and the UK 100% complicit. Nu-Labour was briefly rejected with the nomination of Corbyn as Labour leader, and after nearly five years of systematic media demonzation he was purged under a nu-Labourite leadership contest. Nu-Labour is back with a vengeance, ready to win the electorate of mid 1990's Britain with soft Thatcherism once more.
I won't belabor the point much more, but when the government was willing to completely ignore the electorate and public opinion as a whole to go ahead and murder a million Iraqis then the government has lost, in my view, any claim to legitmacy. I don't care how much Blair was apparently loathed, because he's not faced any consequences for it; he's on track to get a knighthood, he's still widely revered as the man who "saved" Britain from Thatcher, and, crucially, he wasn't tried at the Hague.
I won't lay the blame on the British public for not doing more, because they'd exhausted all legal and semi-legal pathways to stop the war and Blair ignored every single one. At that point the only path to stopping the war would have ventured into sabotage, revolutionary defeatism, and protracted people's war, which, let's be honest, nobody was willing to carry out because there was no precedent for it.
https://amp.ft.com/content/1e030bbb-a074-4fbd-94c5-94fe579a9a8a
This is incorrect. The level at which you're trying to approach foreign policy is wrong. The way you take on the State Department, Pentagon, etc. is by making them unable to wage their imperial campaigns.
In the US you could be distributing information to discouragement military enlistment. Even for "apolitical" people, learning about all the lies and manipulation recruiters engage in can be insightful.
You could also be helping and encouraging those currently in the military gain conscientious objector status: https://centeronconscience.org/guide-for-co-military/
Discouraging enlistment and helping enlisted soldiers get kicked out seems like it would be pretty useful and important work, but is ignored more often than not for some reason.
It's not easy to discourage enlistment unless you're actually in high school. Even teachers are probably looking at discipline or termination if they try it. Can't imagine a lot of high schools in the US are gonna let my late 30s ass onto campus and start talking to students about why the military is evil.
This is true, but it's also not too difficult to reach those kids on social media, which a lot of military recruiters are also using. It might be possible to influence at least some high school students, who could then in turn influence their friends and classmates and push them against joining. Might also help to encourage political organizing among high school students themselves against recruitment efforts, wherever possible.
The US hasn't hit an enlistment target since 2016, and that was after drastically cutting their standards over the previous decade.
The bare handful of people I know who are still in the national guard are some of the most red-pilled chuds I still associate with.
And while I'll never have a kind word to say about enlisting, much less going for officer training, there's really not much I can tell to my friend who joined the marines (to spent most of his career guarding embassies) entirely to get the education, housing, and health care benefits. He's better off, economically, than a number of my other friends who just got chewed up and spit out by the service sector.