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?

  • ABigguhPizzahPieh [none/use name,any]
    3·
    4 years ago

    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

    • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
      1·
      4 years ago

      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?

      • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
        1·
        4 years ago

        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.

        • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          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.

          • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
            1·
            4 years ago

            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?