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Joining a military that aggresses other nations? Yeah, spot on. Joining a military to defend your line on the ground against people you see as fellow earthlings? Still a fair take. Joining a military to defend against people who want you dead because of how you were born? That’s where this starts to unravel. That kind of stuff sadly exists in this world.
I’m not gonna fault an american for an opinion like that, but if you’re involved with european leftists who are too busy virtue signalling to adopt any pragmatic defense policy positions, you get a real appreciation for the nuance.
I’m all for artistic prose, emphatic amd impactful prose, but so many people think impact is more important than accuracy and coherence.
We can assume they mean (or would accept the substitution of) “the military industrial complex” instead of the concept of “maintaining a military”, but the symmetry required them to be less accurate.
This applies as well to the french, polish or British armies no debate.
So many absurd things that I was told “you’ll understand/agree when you’re older” that turned out to just be boomer copium.
No, I don’t hate taxes (the opposite). No, I’m not more conservative (the opposite).
One thing I’ve noticed about boomers is the constant TV on in the background. Very commonly FOX news, or newsmax these days, cnn, etc. Their world view is absolutely shaped by their media diet.
Meanwhile, our generation has always had the Internet. We view the world through that lens, which has a bit more of an expanded view, especially since people from those “scary” countries can come on places like reddit and post. Which is why I think the push for AI has been so strong. Now the Epstein class have some sort of means to taint what we read online, slowly moving our own worldview to the one the boomers have had from their own propaganda. It used to take owning the news stations to push their agenda, but now they had to pivot to now posting via bots to get their messages in.
All this to say, I think we had a nice gap where a kinder worldview emerged for some generations, but I worry that the generation growing up with the internet how it is becoming is going to slip back into the boomer thinking if it continues this way.
Their strategy for corrupting the youth has been promoting a vapid hyper capitalist hustle culture and signal boosting influencers who embody that depravity. However, unlike the boomers of yore, the economy we face is terrible and only getting worse, with none of us having any personal wealth left to protect. They’re going hard into fascism in an effort to redirect the anger, but even that has a limited half life. Eventually they’re gonna need to start cannibalizing each other in mass movements against other elites, because we need somebody to pay and they need to make it not them. I forsee war in some form as an inevitability.
Meanwhile, our generation has always had the Internet.
Not true for me.
I mean self-defense is not bad. US is just not defending itself from anyone.
Self-defense from a self inflicted problem though?
If only we had countless examples from history of people successfully defending themselves without a military…
Do we?
Haiti’s independence war, the October revolution, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Irish independence movement, the French revolution, India’s independence guerillas, Indonesia’s independence guerillas, women’s rights movements (including suffragette terrorism), the Black Panthers, Christians in the Roman empire, Al Qaeda fighting off NATO, …
I’m not suggesting pacifism, I’m suggesting decentralized violence that isn’t at the command of a state.
Ah, bespoke artisanal violence. That’s the difference
Unironically, yes. Shape the tools of violence for the situation, keep them in the hands of those they are meant to defend, and suddenly it’s a lot less evil.
It’s the same way your grandma knitting you a scarf is less evil than a sweatshop knitting you one.
That only works for internal resistance I believe? Like, Ukrainians can’t defend against the Kremlin with a sitting strike
However, we definitely need more sitting strikes nowadays. We’ve grown complacent in exchange for small pleasantries
Sure. Let yourself become “internal” and then assassinate and terror-bomb and sabotage them. I wasn’t suggesting pacifism, I was suggesting not outsourcing your “self-defense” to a state.
Militaries can never give you self-defense, they can only give self-defense to themselves, more specifically military high command. Or the military-industrial complex if you’re feeling fancy. You are a source of taxes, morale, and manpower.
One thing to remember is that the alternative to a military is being able to spend all the money and resources and labor and life that was going to the military on other projects. Even spending it all on self-defense if need be.
We have only grown complacent because they have everyone starved on the edge of poverty and no one can afford to risk it.
The complacency came from being overfed on chemically engineered, heartily poisoned garbage, sportsball, video games, television, alcohol, drugs, and algorithms.
What’s even more wild is to ask a religious leader for a religion that says “don’t kill people” about how killing people in a war isn’t a sin. I was only a child when I saw one of my peers ask a priest this. The mental gymnastics the priest was trying to pull was blatantly obvious to me, even as a kid.
It all makes perfect sense when you realize that the “don’t kill people” part only meant “don’t kill fellow tribesmen”. Non-tribesmen were 100% fair game. The God of that religion commanded multiple genocides against other tribes.
You run into the same problems with said religion and slavery. The whole “it was different and more indentured servitude than chattel slavery” was only for inside the tribe. Chattel slavery was explicitly allowed for the non-tribesman.
Modern religious leaders may be uncomfortable with this and have to perform some Olympic level mental gymnastics, but that is just because ethics and values have changed slightly in 2000 or so years.
Some people genuinely deserve it. So here is the best-intent version in all its escalating absurdity:
The problem is who gets to crown themselves the judge of who deserves to die, which is why judicial systems exist, but who assigns the judges? So then you need an external mandate or a consensus mechanism in place, long story short, you get a ruler with a divine mandate, a parliament/jury consensus system, or an AI swarm convergence mechanism depending on the era you’re currently crossing.
But then you can’t trial the chief of another tribe/country/swarm for crimes they committed which aren’t wrong at all according to their values, like say, a Muslim marrying a first cousin wouldn’t be doing something wrong according to their moral system, but it would be a big taboo in the USA and the west. So if you’re say, a pious chieftain, and you wanted to take the stuff from the next tribe over, just start thinking smart, think of the letter not the spirit. You got all you need.
And now you know why an army is a national survival necessity, and why even religions themselves aren’t safe from a politician, whom they sometimes have to kill.
As someone pointed out, this is understandable if you’re from the USA.
Otherwise, I see it like this:
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Every country has an army.
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Their own, or the one of another country.
The baseline is that going to war is bad, having a defensive army is absolutely not (and will prevent deaths as russia won’t dare attack you).
Having a formidable army has clearly not deterred global superpowers from attacking you, especially if they get too cocky like in Iran and Ukraine
Neither Ukraine nor Iran had a “formidable” army when they were attacked.
Russia was supposedly the second army in the world too.
Iran has long possessed the ability to survive decapitation and respond to an existential threat by closing the strait. It’s why no US President tried it before now. Ukraine was more of a surprise than Iran, but Russia not realizing that their own neighbor wouldn’t be a pushover the second time was still a danger that they could’ve foreseen. In both cases, deterrence didn’t work because the invaders were greedy and irrationally confident.
And?
Still didn’t have “formidable” armies.
And sincerely your “being cocky” smells like kremlin apology sauce, you sincerely don’t think Ukraine is at fault in any kind of way for the 2014 invasion or the 2022 full scale invasion?
I don’t know why you think I was saying Ukraine was at fault for once again being the target of Russian imperialism. If anything, I’m giving them more credit than you are
No you don’t, because you have no idea how much credit I give the Ukrainian people, which if you wonder is around astronomical.
You can also just accept and say “ah yeah they didn’t have formidable armies. I was thinking about how it went after the invasions.” But that’s too hard for some people I guess.
this reads like satire
Sometimes, but do you let your neighbor waltz in and subjugate you?
I have a standing subjugation appointment with my neighbor every Thursday in fact. Don’t knock it til you try it.
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When I was young people around me told me that the further west on the map country is, the wealthiest and more free people live there without any conflict bothering them. With USA (the west-most country on map) as a shiny utopia with everyone peacefully living there being rich and free.
When I was a teen and my country joined EU I saw countless young adults emigrate west, seeking wealth and freedom beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Terrorists and oppressive regimes waged war in the eastern lands.
When I am an adult, the supposed peacekeeper of the world is waging wars to protect pedophiles. Former empire where sun never sets is trying to outlaw being young and sell their citizens data to highest bidder. And EU is bi-yearly trying to pass universal invigilation act.
I feel like my moral compass never really changed, it’s just the world around me that changed beyond recognition. I worry how it will be when I get old, if I even get to live to old age.
Hang in there, buddy, it’s rough but we are all in this together.
I was once asked why I joined the military and my answer was ‘l needed money’. This seemed to shock my companion who was astounded that I was willing to potentially kill people over money. My response was that it was a far better reason than for imaginary friends or the colour of their skin.
Still a terrible reason and it makes you an awful person to be a mercenary for imperialism to kill innocents for bourgeois profits.
Never denied I was an awful person. Also, not in the American military.
Canada isn’t any better. Edit: Why is this being down voted when the comment under is being upvoted I looked at their profile they are candadian they say this multiple times.
They also didn’t say Canada
Like Albania’s any improvement.
Looked at their profile they live in Canada say they are Canadian that’s why I said that.
Honestly I always had more respect for mercenaries for not spreading bullshit about imagined values and just admitting why they joined lol
On some level I have more sympathy for someone who at least believes they’re doing the right thing
I always had a deep puzzlement with the military as an institution. It’s basically an organization designed to take young people and teach them to run toward a firing machine gun when told to do so. It defies all logic at the individual level, and it scares me.
But… It’s not?
You seem to have developed an understanding of the military based entirely around a small slice of WW2 movies and video games, and then assumed that has any bearing on the real world.
The way you actually learn to deal with a machine gun (and this was true even in WW2) is find cover, set up suppressing fires, use smoke and terrain for concealment as you advance, and eventually get someone into a position where they can flank and take out the machine gun nest, probably with a grenade so they don’t expose themselves. Most importantly, everything I just described above involves teamwork. You protect each other, you trust each other, you rely on each other.
Safety is paramount. No one is teaching you to run screaming at a machine gun nest with no regard for your own life. That shit barely even happens in movies anymore.
A huge amount of what you learn as a soldier is basically how to keep yourself safe in extremely dangerous situations. Yes, you still have to have a willingness to put yourself in extremely dangerous situations in the first place, but the whole point of learning to do this stuff well is learning how to be the person who can survive those extremely dangerous situations.
I think you are missing the forest for the trees here.
You’re claiming “forests” (“militaries treat young, enlisted lives as expendable for unnecessary wars”) exist and then pointing at a cardboard standee of a tree you brought as evidence.
Yeah, you’re right, but you can admit when your attempt at artistry fails your point.
You’re claiming “forests” (“militaries treat young, enlisted lives as expendable for unnecessary wars”)
Read my comment again. You are reading things that are not there.
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Because, like, it’s plain obvious your “run toward a firing machine gun” is a figure of speech.
I’m curious what you think OP meant by their statement seeing as they claim my interpretation was reading something that wasn’t there. You’re saying it’s not literal and they’re saying it’s not the idea that war wastes lives carelessly. So how should someone read the statement that the military teaches people to run into machine gun fire? It reads as a critique, although I suppose that could be the start of the misunderstanding.
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Sorry, I was trying to think of a more reasonable alternative than your literal statement that didn’t make sense.
Can you please explain what you meant by
It’s basically an organization designed to take young people and teach them to run toward a firing machine gun when told to do so.
Such that you think someone who explained that the statement is false is missing the forest?
Read back your comment. Does it sound like an honest, good faith effort at dialog?
I’m blocking you now and I’m not going to think twice about this exchange.
This is for people that will come after (assuming the whole post isn’t randomly deleted).
I think my reading of your comment’s anti-military message was reasonable, certainly not mean-spirited. However, I will admit my first comment was more declarative than inquisitive. A more open dialogue might have been “Then what is the forest?”
OK. So elaborate. What is it that disturbs you?
it teaches them that the cause is more important than their individual life.
the cause is usually some politician getting more power… so yeah, lots of brainwashing needed
The rich need cannon fodder.
When we talk about voluntary enlistments they typically rely on mythology of noble and valiant warriors and honorable deaths, or the military represents a path out of poverty.
It’s really eye opening to read accounts of civil war and WW1 soldiers who found out how brutal war actually was.
This is exactly why WWI is so interesting to me. All over the world (mostly Europe) we had these notions about honor and glory in war. Then after a bunch of people got fed to machine gun fire the collective consciousness of humanity shifts. Obviously there were folks ahead of the curve and already knew this.
But in general for western civilization WWI is the inflection point.
It’s so interesting!
I feel like I hear a lot more about how Desert Storm was the massive shift to the general public getting to see the horror of war. It’s absolutely true that there was a step change! I think it’s valuable to include WWI in this discussion because adding to your point about the machine gun the change in war technology fundamentally changed who was surviving the war and how, and what stories and life changing injuries they brought home.
It’s tragic and world changing if your loved one goes off to war and dies, but that’s also very abstract. Having them come back and either:
- re-enter society with visible bodily damage
- require constant care for the rest of their lives
- seem to be okay in body but come hope deeply changed by the trauma
really change how the people who weren’t there view the reality of war. Even for myself, it was hearing my grandmother sobbing as she recalled atrocities in WWII (she was a child) that really shaped how I view war.
I find it hard to digest that people in north america appear to have become less opposed to wars (specifically the wars of the US) than they did in the 2000s (which are the first wars I have adult memory of). If I had to guess I would say it’s a mix of overwhelm with everything else and that war is back to being more remote. I’m sure the people who are being droned still think it’s horrific.
Also US centric but I went to the Atlanta History Center a few years back. I am not from the states. The way the US Civil war was presented was so different from what I had learned. This makes sense, especially as canada uses the US as a shield for their own atrocities, and likes to emphasize how chattel slavery was outlawed here sooner. What I didn’t expect was the exhibit on how the horror of war left such a mark on the population. It was very enlightening!
Good point about Desert Storm. Because North America has been so insulated from war/ major conflicts we have grown to be more tolerable of waging it. Every 20ish years we have to be reminded that it is something to be avoided.
Also, I hadn’t even thought about how much medicine had changed and that allowed more people to survive but with injuries.
Another thing to point out is that Canada and the USA have only seen imperialist/ asymmetric warfare in my lifetime and this colors how we view the seriousness of it. How many d-bag Seals have podcasts or books glorifying themselves and how their rugged manliness got them through war? In reality they just had better equipment, logistics, and training on their side. But again it feeds into the propaganda machine pushing these societies to go to war.
Not to worry - eventually the industrialization of war will be such that invaders only need to use unmanned craft to decimate their opposition’s home population on their 9-5 shift and then get drinks afterwards. (/s)
The police are made to oppress your own citizens while the military is made to oppress foreign citizens
And if you’re smart, you can even use the military to oppress your own citizens!
I smell an incoming quote from “Battlestar Galactica”
I am intrigued, please tell me where to find out what you’re talking about haha
itt: people justifying why their institution of mass murder is actually good
To protect from that other persons institution of mass murder. OBV.
Killing people is bad and war is bad and the military is evil and the only way to stop it is to use the military to do a war and kill people.
Most people don’t understand the concept of the industrial military complex. There is only one way forward to end the madness and that is to dismantle this system permanently.
Amen. But unfortunately, a lot of that dismantling will have to be done at gunpoint.
You are not going to be able to stop this with a game of whack a mole. I am not a fan of a violent solution, but if done it would have to be universal all at once since this concept has already spread to every nation in the world.
Without a doubt an industry that can only grow from death and destruction is inherently a threat to human life. Couple that with fascism and you have a government that conspires with corporations to engaged in wars of opportunity for profit. A closed loop of human destruction that grows like a cancer.
I think the real solution is just getting the wealthy to dismantle the system. It sounds kind of silly and simple, but they are the only ones with the power to actually change anything at this point in a meaningful way.
Absolutely. But the rich will only dismantle the system under threat of violence.
I am not sure I agree with this. Even if the threat of violence is effective I am not sure it is the correct thing to do. I think we can both agree there may be solutions we haven’t even thought of yet.
It is manifestly not the correct thing to do. Coercing people under threat of violence is an inherently evil act.
And I fervently hope there is some other solution, but humanity has had many thousands of years to think of one, and none is forthcoming.
Killing people is wrong.
But you have only a couple of choices when someone wrong shows up to kill you.
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Give in and let them take you over, maybe they kill you
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Put up a fight, possibly killing them, possibly killing you
The military is necessarily bad because humans are necessarily bad. If everyone could just train to defend themselves and agree not to use the military on it’s own citizens, it would be a closer to neutral
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You don’t get it - there are lots of natural resources there!
As a teen I talked to people from all around the world, usually connected by our shared fandoms. I remember talking to a girl in California who said she wanted to join the military when she grew up. Apparently she came from a military family, and couldn’t understand why I was appalled at the idea of choosing such a path. We discussed it civilly, and eventually agreed to disagree. I can’t help but wonder if she went through with it and, if so, how she feels about it today.
She was probably conservative enough to not regret it
You shouldn’t agree to disagree with people who want to oppress and kill millions of innocents.
Guess I’ll have to go back in time and tell my teenage self that, because you’re criticizing something that happened twenty years ago.
I’m curious what the alternative to “agree to disagree” is.
Agree to agree? Refuse to agree? Refuse to disagree?
Either you convince someone to change their mind or you don’t. If you don’t convince them then you either keep trying past the point where it is clearly futile or you stop trying. If both sides of a disagreement stop trying then they’ve agreed that they disagree.
Oh! I did think of an alternative. You could pretend to agree and secretly disagree. Is that what you are suggesting is preferable?
