Excited to find the western chauvinists in this community.
Edit: Wow apparently the only people on chapo dot chat are whitees unaffected by and benefiting from their imperialism confidently declaring how the perpetrators are to be treated.
Y'all have some nerve
Edit 2:
ITT If you shoot a black kid in the back in downtown Baltimore I want nothing to do with you. If you perfarate an entire back family in Mogadischu or Baghdad that's ok, you did growth and spaces.
agreed. ACAB is also juvenile. cops have training, they know about guns, many of them just want stable pay and benefits
So American cops that police American civilians are bastards, but American cops who police nonAmerican civilians are not bastards? Is that the correct position?
Ok I'm not trying to make a point one way or the other but the hypothetical veteran in the tweet does hold their anti-military beliefs for "socialist anti-war sentiment." The OP explicitly called them a leftist.
Did the majority of Russians hate WW1 because it was a war of capitalists and international financial implications? Or did they hate it because their brothers and sons and neighbors were dying in a war that didn't effect them? It's okay to oppose something for the wrong reasons.
huge amount
That's a bullshit claim.
If the majority of vets disapprove of enlistment then the majority of recruits won't be coming from families with a vet in 'em.
“Cops are part of a system obviously exploiting people. Good cops can and should quit”
“Woah woah woah, lets not be TOO radical here”
You can quit being a cop at any time.
You can't quit being in the Army without being hunted down like a dog.
i was a cop. i only shot 5 black men in my time. now i'm sorry and have joined the DSA. stop splitting the left
Communism is when you declare individual moral culpability for their role as cogs in an oppressive machine and the more you declare it the more communister it is. In fact, Marxism is 100% about the moral veracity of individual actions. That's why Engels was an evil counterrevolutionary for continuing to manage a factory his father owned despite claiming to be a """Communist""" and Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were reactionaries since they are products of the exploitative Chinese landowning class.
Mao should have been completely fine with the peasants canceling him and calling him a vampiric leech for the value his family sucked out of the peasantry and his role in accepting comforts off the backs of the exploited masses. Joining the Communist revolutionaries doesn't erase his previous sins. He should never have been allowed to lead, it should've been an illiterate landless peasant that had no idea what they were doing because then it would've been m o r a l l y p u r e
He should never have been allowed to lead, it should’ve been an illiterate landless peasant that had no idea what they were doing because then it would’ve been m o r a l l y p u r e.
Real Khmer Rouge hours 👓
You dumb fuck. Can you read? Where is the talk of "counterrevolutionary" or "reactionaries". Engels, Mao and Enlai wouldn't fly into mad rage like you if someone insulted them for being landlords or capitalist. They'd probably join in.
Lol literally all of my comments have been sarcastic, why do you think I'm raging? I'm not a troop, never have been one and never will be one and I've even cucked troops on more than one occasion lol. I just think it's funny as fuck that people on twitter dot com love stirring the pot and think making moral judgements is praxis.
Answer my question, what is the goal of a left wing movement in your mind?
I never know if I'm gonna get cancelled or get a ton of upvotes when I get serious but this one payed off
Answer my question, what is the goal of a left wing movement in your mind?
I'm not taking the bait. If you have something to say say it.
I mean I can't respond to you unless you tell me what the goal of a left wing movement is, and how you think it can be achieved. Otherwise I can only assume you don't care about the end result and only the moral purity of the movement itself
The achievement of the "left's" goals will not depend on the feelings of people who apparently are so mentally deficient as to not be able to engage in any demanding activity while stroking their dick up and down. Your view of veterans is much more of an impediment than any insult hurled at them for their service. They are either big boys and will get over it or they are not and you wouldn't want them near any kind of firearm.
I mean I only care about people's feelings insofar as they affect material results. I don't think there will be a revolution any time soon but the obsession with moral atonement like """"""leftism"""""" is a religion is entirely counterproductive. The demand for self-flagellation among former troops is part of a broader trend on the western left, which in it's impotence has latched onto moralizing as it's primary focus. I don't think that spending years investing time in disparaging and admonishing troops is going to end well when the time comes. We don't live in a place and time where angry masses with semi auto rifles can take on the largest and most technologically advanced military in the world. It wouldn't be like Vietnam or Afghanistan, it would be a conflict of life and death for the Imperialist forces and they would treat it as such. Revolution in the imperial core would necessitate major defections from Imperialist security forces, most likely from those that are colonized people themselves.
the obsession with moral atonement like “”“”““leftism””“”“” is a religion is entirely counterproductive. The demand for self-flagellation among former troops is part of a broader trend on the western left, which in it’s impotence has latched onto moralizing as it’s primary focus.
Yeah I thought about this article when typing that but couldn't remember the title/publication.
man people ITT are projecting so much and responding to arguments that no one made. It'd be hilarious if it wasn't so sad.
So what exactly are you arguing then? This whole thread is just you responding to posts giving actual material reasons for accepting veterans in the movement, and you saying "lol you're not even understanding what I said"
I don't think anyone here thinks the US military or imperialism is good or making excuses. They're saying veterans are a net benefit to the movement towards our goals. Is your argument that everyone should insult them? Is it that being able to insult them is more important than having them in the movement?
Is your argument that everyone should insult them?
The tweet says that western leftists' opinions are irrelevant. The implication is that victims of the US military are the ones who can shit and insult them.
Rightfully so, they carried out acts of US imperialism against them.
It seems the thread has turned into does that mean US leftists need to adopt this take or is it acceptable to welcome them in the movement for their knowledge and skills despite their past?
I know. USAmericans will turn everything on its head and make it about themselves.
My argument is for troops to have the same standards applied to them as men who got #metoo'd. If you're not ready to accept reformed #metoo'd men then you should do the same for troops. If you're ready to accept them but with caveats then troops have to have caveats too. My argument is for you to be consistent with your principals.
I'm not absolving troops of the part they play in the imperial war machine, but they are fundamentally different than #metoo'd men. The vast majority of those being #metoo'd were in a high position of power with the choice to be a piece of trash repeatedly, those in the military can face a wide variety of punishments up to being killed by their own allies for putting up too much of a fuss. This isn't an excuse for continuing to commit atrocities, but it is much different than choosing to violate and assault people in 'exchange' for a better job.
The military is also filled with victims of capitalism looking for a way out of bad conditions and may have been fed propaganda their whole life thinking this is good. Once out, many veterans feel negativity towards the military. Again, this doesn't fix what they have done, but asking US leftists to disallow or heavily discourage veterans from joining the movement is effectively extending the amount of time the US war machine can keep doing what it does best.
I don't disagree with the tweet in that those who have been on the receiving end of US imperialism absolutely have the right to fling insults and take as much time and hoops to jump through to forgive them if at all.
Lemmie dunk on any leftist who joined the army when there was virtually no left in america and it can be argued there’s still no left now.
Left Twitter is so bad right now. Bernie was the only thing uniting us.
Certain segments of left Twitter was too okay with bipolars and other people with mental and emotional issues dictate the conversation. No offence to those dealing with such shit but their emotional volitility and blatant uncoolness prevents anyone from seeing the far left as anything besides a pack of diseased LARPers crying about their lack of popularity inbetween the 80th party split that day
Bad post. You don't have to have mental issues to be an asshole. And many people with mental issues aren't assholes. Saying "no offense" doesn't excuse stuff that is needlessly offensive.
True, but there's a very specific hyper-online pack of people on twitter to whom politics is something you do on the internet and nowhere else who I cannot imagine actually living in society with other people and those hyper exclusionary types like that aussie bitch with the glasses and such SCREAM bpd at me
I mean you definitely have no credibility with me going forward and I wouldn't want to knowingly associate with someone that has such low opinions of those struggling with mental health issues.
Well I aint never meeting you irl, and actually actionable political actions are never done online so that's also an effectively meaningless thing.
Yeah, interact with them- not let them spill all their personal hang-ups all over the movement.
Rn there's a shitload of morons on twitter coming at Lee Carter for having been a vet. This is despite Lee being an elected official who has done more than any catgurl twitch dweller who leaves the house twice a week and gets more texts from postmates than from other human beings has done to help advance the cause of working people in this country
You're literally being the toxic type of person you're trying to complain about right now. Chill.
Kinda not great to armchair diagnose people based on their social media activity. Maybe don't.
Hi I'm bipolar fuck Yooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooou
bigotry against people with mental health issues by accusing everyone whose takes you don't like of being mentally ill is good and helpful and will advance the cause of bringing justice to the world.
It's not that, it's just everyone has a different idea where to go now.
It doesn't take an armed labour party to know that killing people for profit is not good.
You don't need an organized revolutionary movement to do the right thing. OP thinks that the lack of an American left somehow exonerates people who participated in imperial violence.
The tweet isn't even about building a movement though, it's about leftist vets and the need to reconcile the inherent contradiction of their ideology and former status as imperialist beating sticks. Not to mention that the poster even says it's not up to us American Leftists to make that moral judgement, it's up to the victims of empire.
I mean sure, but again that's not the point of the tweet.
If our fellow chapos were able to rationalize the tweet like that we wouldn't even be in this thread, so we can't really call anyone else radlibs when we're pretty much doing the same thing lol
it’s about leftist vets and the need to reconcile the inherent contradiction of their ideology and former status as imperialist beating sticks.
Imagine thinking that this matters in the grand scheme of things.
Actually, you don't care about the oppressed unless you use them as a prop to shame the impure and reject potential members for anti-imperialist movements
People forget that one of original lines of the Internationale were "Our bullets are for our own generals"
EDIT: You know what, no, that's not the post. Does anyone remember who the most effective activists against the Vietnam War. The Vietnam Veterans Against War. The conservatives literally had to concoct a mythology that anti-war activists fucking hated the troops to the point that they spit on returning veterans.
Bourgeois professional militaries literally have their own inherent class divide in officers vs enlisted.
The entire reason historical wars became so unpopular was because of drafts and conscription, which is inherently polarizing due to affecting different segments of society unequally based on class. Conscripted armies are literally a means of socialization and consciousness-forming for the working class in the exact same way concentrated industrial enterprises are. Conscript armies become pressure cookers for class-based social unrest and dissent. This is precisely the reason they abolished the draft after Vietnam and will never actually reinstitute it. Just like police, professional volunteer-only militaries inevitably become hotbeds of reaction and hubs for reactionary indoctrination, pitting the professional soldiers and professional cops against cowardly, soft "civilians".
Definitely, but internal contradictions in the US, harnessed by the American anti-war movement, made the Viet Cong's attritional warfare tactics actually effective. The whole point wasn't to beat the US army in open combat, we saw the Tet offensive, that was a tactical defeat for the NVA but it was a strategic victory because it drastically lowered morale and empowered the anti-war movement at home. But for that strategy to work that anti-war movement had to exist and the contradictions of an overconfident and overextended US empire had to exist as well.
In some ways it’s different under a “volunteer army,” i.e. one populated by the domestically immiserated, looking for and wooed by the benefits of service.
I’m open for this discussion, but I find it unwise and unexamined to either fully absolve or cancel poor imperial core kids largely raised to be ignorant of their country’s atrocities.
Something of a thesis I've been working on in my head lately is that the United States has replaced a traditional welfare state with its imperial military Keynesianism and the military-industrial complex.
- American military bases and other facilities often render total economic dependence on the surrounding community or region. They offer employment for locals and station personnel act as consumers for the local economy
- The US grants effectively unlimited subsidies to defense contractors, almost always guaranteeing a profit to the companies in question no matter the eventual cost overrides. These companies and their production facilities also frequently engender economic dependence for the surrounding community, employing tens of thousands of people and more. In fact government largesse in this regard played a massive role in the development of the modern conservative movement, as southern California, particularly the LA suburbs, became a huge hub for the aeronautics industries from the 1950s onward. This region also happened to be a historical hub of anti-union sentiment, so the suburbs with high property values that grew like a fungus around LA became inhabited by industrial workers who were effectively bribed with high wages and good benefits not to unionize. The modern conservative movement as we know it developed here in particular in the late 50s/early 60s, as this booming economy and middle class adopted a reactionary homesteader rugged individualism ideology, because the middleman of private defense corporations obscure the fact that the origin of their material prosperity was not due to their own sweat and grit as "pioneering frontiersmen" who earned everything from hard work but through massive amounts of government largesse.
- The US government slashes social programs and cuts taxes for the rich, and produces massively expensive private sector health care and higher education, and subjects the newest generation to debt slavery, all in order to entice them into joining up with the volunteer-only military. The phrase "the military is the most socialist organization in the United States" is in large part correct, as it offers extremely extensive and robust 18yo-to-grave welfare benefits that can even be passed down to offspring; and also concentrates people from disparate geographical regions, races, and creeds into single locations, forces them onto a disciplined and heavily time-structured regimen that includes exhaustive physical training, and force them to act as a cohesive, collective unit that should in theory at least trust each other implicitly.
- You literally can't lose an election by being too pro-military and voting to further fatten the enormous defense budget every time. It's practically the only method that is completely devoid of electoral negatives. It's the sacred cow issue of American electoral politics where politicians don't dare suggest ever cutting the defense budget, in the same way welfare state programs are the sacred cow of the ex-social democracies of Europe.
This is amazing, thank you for writing that. The military industrial complex is a distillation of the domestic working capitalistic exploitation and imperalism's global south resource plunder. Add on top of that the neoliberal/globalist manufacturing and finance systems ensuring the class divide and restricting mobility except for the one channel that is the military.
Greenwashing and pinkwashing the military will complete the merge between neoliberal systems and the military industrial thesis you wrote.
Thanks again
If you haven’t, you should read American theocracy, which complements this. It’s an interesting read because a) it predicted the 2008 market crash and b) it was written by Nixon’s architect of the southern strategy.
I don't know if it is a great strategy to antagonize everyone with actual military training, for the sake of "not forgiving" them.
Sorry sweaty L E F T I S M is about guilt and innocence, not about achieving material goals
“The more groups the left alienates the more powerful it becomes” - Carl Marks
It's very true, from cradle to grave all forms of media & other forms of cultural & societal pressure.
I taught pre school and had to actively remove pro cop/troop decorations, books, song, toy, etc from rooms for aged 1 to 6 y.o. As well as find ways to redirect and educate older children who were pretending to be cops/troops pretending to shoot its insidious.
Its crazy how much children shows hero worship pigs. I've had to remove so much of my daughter's seemingly benign books and movies because they circle jerk cops.
I completely agree but also "defect of your American protestant upbringing" is about as tactful as kicking someone in the balls.
American Protestantism is much, much less tactful than a kick in the balls. Ugh. Will god not rid me of these fucking protestants?
My favorite interpretation of Christianity is that God felt so guilty about creating mankind that he came down to earth to do a suicide by crucifixion and has been dead ever since.
Calling something someone does on this forum a WASP or American activity is, like, the most powerful and disarming insult and you gotta use it before the other uses it on you. Partly why the discourse sometimes gets really dumb, it's all white people accusing other white people for being too white or something.
I'd be willing to forgive people if they were actually repentant but they're not. Look at this thread. Nothing but excuse-making and going "WOW I GUESS ALL YOU CARE ABOUT IS PURITY HUH" Not a single person can give an actual rebuttal to the comparison of cops and soldiers, the only reason people hate cops but not soldiers is because they view foreigners as subhuman.
In conclusion, death to American and death to every American.
I was actually coming into this thread with a relatively soft position on vets and their role but the mental gymnastics and apologism is absolutely disgusting. Utterly convinced that Americans are irredeemable and should be wiped from the face of the Earth.
Not directly about this particular struggle session, but just throwing this out there because it's relevant:
There are various groups that help soldiers leave the military by offering legal or other counseling (like mental health), and by sometimes offering legal representation. This is a big deal, since it allows troops to leave the service usually without getting screwed by their command and getting a negative discharge that will negatively effect them throughout the rest of their lives. I know some veterans anti-war groups do things like this, and the GI Rights Hotline also offers a lot of resources for general navigation of the military legal system.
If the left really organized behind this in some form, they could remove soldiers from the ranks by helping them get themselves kicked out, while also providing a pipeline to bring them leftward. Not a whole lot of people are aware of this kind of thing, so I thought it was worth mentioning as potential praxis.
Lenin famously took over russia by giving a big speech condemning the russian military and making them beg him for forgiveness in war crimes
First have a functioning communist party instead of feeder orgs for the Democrats before an American brings up what Lenin did or did not do.
So I'll throw my 2 cents in here at the risk of exposing myself to some potential animosity.
I'm a vet so I feel like I have some insight into this world.
First off, for some context, I'd like to say that I never really liked or had an affinity for the military even when I was in high school. I remember a recruiter calling me one day and asking me if I was interested in joining and I straight up told him "No thanks. I don't feel like dying halfway across the world." At the same time, I had almost always been completely surrounded by a support structure that thought extremely highly of the US Military, so I didn't have a negative opinion either.
When the opportunity presented itself to join an MOS that allowed me to play music and also guaranteed that I wouldn't be deployed, I said "what the hey" and signed up. The benefits of education, housing benefits, etc were just too alluring to pass up. This was all waaay before my political awakening. I say all this because (1) fuck the military and (2) based on my experience I think directing our anger at young veterans is a mistake.
The military targets vulnerable teenagers that are sometimes as young as 15 or 16 years old. Recruiters will straight up lie to their recruits and the family of these kids are often extremely liberal patriotic types who believe their children are doing something extremely honorable and brave(fuck them for not knowing better but that's the reality). High school kids really have no way to even understand the context of US Imperialism, they're just doing what they've been told the right thing to do is.
But you know what happens after they join? The vast majority of them fucking hate it. They're treated like shit and told that they need to lose their identity to become a weapon of the US Flag. They're told if they fuck up they will be court martialed and will never be able to gain employment again. These kids experience verbal, physical, and sexual abuse by their superiors. That abuse is often swept under the rug. They suffer tremendoulsy from depression and other mental illnesses and have a suicide rate significantly higher than that of the civilian population. When their contract expires or they break the rules, the government wipes their hands clean and forgets about them.
When they get out the last thing we should be doing as leftists is saying "fuck you." If they're looking for a space, we should welcome them. They have first hand knowledge about how fucked the military industrial complex is. They have first hand knowledge seeing that when people have power over others, they abuse it. They are prime for radicalization and also....they're just fucking people trying to navigate their way in the world so we shouldn't root for them to blow their brains out.
I know it's fun to be an edgelord around here, but this is kinda why I have a problem with the crabs when a 20 yo Marine dies in Afghanistan.
He's just as much a victim of capitalism and the US War Machine as anyone else.He was just a kid and he wouldn't be dead if the US didn't have a material interest in invading other countries for profit.That being said......fuck Chris Kyle and everyone like him. That mother fucker had it coming.
___Unless you are hoping they kill themselves, I am having a hard time figuring out why this is important.
