I work in medicine, and one of the hospitals in our system is the VA. I have literally no interest in serving veterans; people who fight in wars for America pretty much stand and act against everything I believe in. It's not necessarily that I think these people don't deserve great healthcare, it's that I don't want to be the one giving it to them. I would much rather spend my time serving people from my community who didn't spend large parts of their lives wrecking other communities.
Sure, some of my patients anywhere are going to be complete assholes. Sure, there are a lot of veterans who weren't involved in combat (but they did directly aid those in combat at least, right?). Idk, is there a perspective I'm not seeing here? Is it wrong for me to be morally opposed to working for the VA?
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There's an important unspoken calculatio here. The
veteranex-war criminal has decided that their own upwards mobility is more important than the lives of the brown people they will help murder.It's not morally justifiable for a poor person to kill other poor people for cash as a hit man, so it's not morally justifiable for a poor person to join an Imperialist military to kill poor people overseas for money.
What would you think of someone who joined a gang for upward mobility, but didn't personally kill anyone? Or hell, what would you think of someone who joined a gang as a minor, did kill someone, but now deeply regrets it, and actively wants to make sure that others aren't sucked into that world?
There's a real contradiction between thinking the way we treat criminals is horrible and writing off veterans as irredeemable.
I appreciate you pointing this comparison out, this gives me a lot of perspective about veterans in general and how I view them.
Good point but also you're assuming they can see through the propaganda when they're signing up. "I get paid to kill bad guys who want us dead" is about as far as it goes
That's a good point. However, in my mind it's not a sufficient excuse on a moral level.
Consider an 18 year old SS soldier in WWII. He would have spent most of his life having Nazi propaganda crammed down his throat. So if he said "Look, I didn't know it was wrong to machine-gun those Jews, they told me Jews were bad people." Would we accept that as sufficient excuse for his crimes?
If someone is gunning down unarmed people, yeah, they should know that's bad regardless of propaganda. But while that does happen, certainly not every vet does it. I want to say a majority don't even see combat.
Idk comrade, that sounds awfully close to the "Clean Wehrmacht" myth where the non-SS parts of the Nazi military tried to rehabilitate their image by pointing out that they were not as directly involved as the SS.
I don't pretend to have all the answers, but not being the one directly doing the killing should not be accepted as a bright line distinction morally.
Well, I didn't suggest that. I'm only suggesting that there's at least some difference between gunning down unarmed people and sweeping floors at some base in Nevada. Both the mass murderer and the floor sweeper may be guilty of something, but they're not guilty to the same degree. We have a whole bunch of crimes and degrees of guilt in our criminal codes for a good reason.
The comparison I made elsewhere in this thread is to members of a gang with different jobs. Say Bob buys guns for the gang and Tim goes around killing people for the gang. Tim very obviously has done horrible things, but Bob? That's not as simple. He benefited from criminal activity that wound up killing people, but he never hurt anyone personally. His job to some extent facilitated people getting killed (although maybe that connection is attenuated -- say, none of the guns Bob bought were used to shoot anyone), but the mere act of buying a gun and giving it to someone is something plenty of people do without any inherent criminality. How should society treat Bob and Tim?
That's actually somewhat of a myth. I'm sure there are cases of it being true, but as a whole modern army recruits come from middle class families.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200819190100if_/https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/04/18/recruits-to-americas-armed-forces-are-not-what-they-used-to-be
Makes sense. A lot of the most poor and underprivileged people will have physical or mental attributes that would disqualify them from being recruited.
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If you're a family of four living on $73K, you may not be poor, but you also are going to need significant loans to pay for college and and you're not going to be able to count on much from the Bank of Mom and Dad.
I mean, we know the "middle class" has been hollowed out for decades now, and "middle class" jobs still leave you one medical issue from bankruptcy. I don't think we can correctly point out all the financial stressors on the "middle class" but then discard all that when it comes to the motivations a 17-year-old might have to join the Army.
That would also apply to all of us. Anyone performing any labor for an American company or actively receiving the benefits of imperialism (cost of products, etc.) are also furthering that, just in a less direct way.
:yes-chad:
Any socialist revolution where the residents of the imperial core get to keep their ill-gotten wealth is no socialist revolution at all.
I wonder what's underneath the settler colonialist self interest of "degrowth will harm the global poor!!!"
I just don't understand why the VA exists honestly. I don't understand why there's an entirely separate hospital specially for war fighting/supporting pieces of shit.
I absolutely agree that there are a lot of people who get into the military because the military preys on poverty and the youth's ignorance... but idk, at some point I feel like there's gotta be a time to say "this is not worth the upward mobility, this is horrendous what we are doing." I realize how privileged and possibly ignorant that statement may sound, but c'mon. I wouldn't cut any slack for a cop who took the job because he felt he had to, why would I do so for a military grunt?
absolutely, but the VA serves people who are out of the military for whatever reason. i met a friend of mine organizing, and he uses the VA hospital since a few years back he got medically discharged* and has no other healthcare. he was only in the corps for a year. it's complicated.
disregarding the VA if you sign up and do four years, but then don't reup because you realize it's fucked up, you're still forever a "vet" right?
i feel like a lot of chapos don't really understand that living in the imperial core is complicated and dynamic and changes over time.
*tw: rape
spoiler
discharged for PTSD after his superior officer raped him (she later got a promotion). therapy is part of his VA care.
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We have the VA for the same reason we have the GI bill, tricare, barracks, etc.
Without the appeal of getting your basic needs taken care of, far less people would enlist. If everyone had access to free healthcare, education, and housing why would people sign up?
You’d only get the patriotic chuds and military families to serve, but the war machine is dependent on having hundreds of thousands of disposable bodies.