I definitely have a dog in this race, on the "don't automatically assume that all troops are bad" side. But even though that's the outcome I want, I know for a fact that the sob story we often tell about troops being poor kids trying to find their way in America is just wrong.
Most troops are middle class suburban and rural kids, and the reason is that a lot of recruitment criteria is designed to weed out kids from lower income and urban environments. Recruits will be rejected if they have priors, gang affiliation, lack a high school education, not have perfect health, have a history of drug use, etc - and all of those track with income level in the United States. Now there's a waiver for everything of course, and if Uncle Sam needs bodies then he'll lower the requirements and get more poor people in uniform, but for the majority of troops in the majority of years it's something that they went into clearheaded about exactly what they were going to be doing and exactly who they were going to be doing it to, and their decision to support the Empire is frankly a logical one when you consider their labor aristocracy/petite bourgeois class position.
So I think the stance towards lefty troops should be the same as towards any agent of imperialism that wants to "defect". Like if a cop or a landlord or a boss became a class traitor and quit their former life to be a socialist. We know they're rare, we know that they come to the left with a lot of brain worms that need to be excised, we know that some on the left have been harmed in terrible ways by them and will not be willing to entertain them. We also know that every successful socialist movement has had its share of class traitors who committed to the cause wholeheartedly, and that if the tiny leftist movement that exists in any given western country were to bloom into a true mass movement that had the potential to upend capitalism it would involve caucusing with a lot of people who have all of those problems in spades.
So if they're going around asking for forgiveness or whatever, tell them that that's fucking cringe and to earn it by putting the work in, and if they claim to be lefty but they're not putting the work in then they're indistinguishable from every other radlib.
idk man
I definitely have a dog in this race, on the "don't automatically assume that all troops are bad" side. But even though that's the outcome I want, I know for a fact that the sob story we often tell about troops being poor kids trying to find their way in America is just wrong.
Most troops are middle class suburban and rural kids, and the reason is that a lot of recruitment criteria is designed to weed out kids from lower income and urban environments. Recruits will be rejected if they have priors, gang affiliation, lack a high school education, not have perfect health, have a history of drug use, etc - and all of those track with income level in the United States. Now there's a waiver for everything of course, and if Uncle Sam needs bodies then he'll lower the requirements and get more poor people in uniform, but for the majority of troops in the majority of years it's something that they went into clearheaded about exactly what they were going to be doing and exactly who they were going to be doing it to, and their decision to support the Empire is frankly a logical one when you consider their labor aristocracy/petite bourgeois class position.
So I think the stance towards lefty troops should be the same as towards any agent of imperialism that wants to "defect". Like if a cop or a landlord or a boss became a class traitor and quit their former life to be a socialist. We know they're rare, we know that they come to the left with a lot of brain worms that need to be excised, we know that some on the left have been harmed in terrible ways by them and will not be willing to entertain them. We also know that every successful socialist movement has had its share of class traitors who committed to the cause wholeheartedly, and that if the tiny leftist movement that exists in any given western country were to bloom into a true mass movement that had the potential to upend capitalism it would involve caucusing with a lot of people who have all of those problems in spades.
So if they're going around asking for forgiveness or whatever, tell them that that's fucking cringe and to earn it by putting the work in, and if they claim to be lefty but they're not putting the work in then they're indistinguishable from every other radlib.