I'm perpetually fascinated by people here who tout ACAB while also twisting themselves into pretzels to excuse soldiers. I guess being complicit in a system that terrorizes the poor, minorities, and marginalized groups while acting as armed forces of capital is bad on US soil, but excusable overseas? Am I understanding this right?

I occasionally see posts from here with army recruiters sending texts to schoolkids and the weird troop worship you have.

If I'd grown up as skint and fucked up as I was in the UK at 16 in the US instead with your lack of healthcare and in a really shit environment I would have taken the first genuine shot of escaping I could.

That would probably have been the army tbh.

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.

we are all victims of our circumstances. if you repent and grow to understand what you did then there's no need to inflict further pain on you.

This video. That's the post

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".

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.

Should we be so accepting of IDF veterans fresh from shooting civvies on the border fence?

I dunno. I guess only if said veteran was fully repentant and acknowledging of the crimes they were part of...and most importantly were now actively agitating against them.

I guess I don't believe in condemning people forever - neither the cop in Baltimore nor the grunt in Mogadishu, if they're on the bottom rungs of such fucked up hierarchies. We need allies and if they've come around, that's better than nothing.

Forgive, never forget.

“The more groups the left alienates the more powerful it becomes” - Carl Marks

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. ~~___~~

The Bolsheviks took power on the backs of soldiers in the imperialist Russian army. Soldiers are not some special section of the working class that gets to decide to just not work, we accept that workers are essentially forced to work for bosses under capitalism, that's why we don't let capitalists get away with the "just get another job if your boss is bad" argument, it is a matter of life and death. These people made a terrible decision just as they got out of high school, they fought or served for the fascist army of the US, regardless of what they did or didn't do they objectively were on the wrong side of any war they fought in. They have to live with that for the rest of their lives but the fact is they're here now, they're in our country and members of our class with the same fundamental interests as us, this isn't even mentioning the overrepresentation of colonized people in the army. We can talk about some moral reckoning where we ask them to wear a dunce cap and self crit after we've actually had a revolution. At the end of the day, we aren't fighting people, we're fighting systems, I don't think we should go out and attack Lee Carter or Spencer Rapone or Mike Prysner just because they joined the army if they acknowledge that imperialism is something we have to struggle against.

I re-read the thing again

If you or someone you love has been war crimed you can yell at the troops

If you are performatively hand-wringing on behalf of an imaginary person you have created in your mind who has been war crimed please shut the fuck up.

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.

Is there any good theory about the morality of imperial soldiers, especially like pre-1900? I know that communists believed soldiers of ww1 were alienated workers, but i wonder if there's any good literature of soldiers in, say, the Congo Free State