I didn’t do shit. I was in high school when that happened. Fuck off. You don’t understand how people get pressured in joining and how recruiters con a bunch of kids to sign up using the lack if health care and education as leverage.

I don’t understand why solders from other countries even join up.

For generations.

Gotta be more inhumane than the enemy

that’s the art of war

Promptly swept under the rug and censored so the country doesn’t get a bad rep

… oh wait

Gotta blow em up make a point y’know

I feel like it’s how my gut flora aren’t responsible for my actions or anything but will suffer my choices and others’ choices involving me.

Solution: build bigger bombs!

Ok, I assumed it was in retaliation for Pearl harbour?

… and to avoid a boots-on-ground invasion of the main landmass of Japan, which would have cost probably a million soldiers lives, and who knows how many Japanese civilians.

This is offtopic, but is there any reason for using a word derived from USA instead of saying veterans from the USA? Usian sounds wrong

No, any member of the SS was used and helped the SS to commit these crimes and kill people. Everyone in the SS was responsible in many ways.

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It’s just shitposting but defense themed

Fetishizing NATO, basically.

Spreading war propaganda

a place for chuds to cope

The same as NAFO: shilling for the MIC

This was also said in a context that included a military draft

“Just following orders” etc etc.

Thanks for the link. And this should be the new motto.

Or I came up with a different one. Lest we forget how some struggled to kill many for the profit of few.

And that includes the sacrosanct anzac. But that opinion can get me killed here.

Iirc, FBI or some USA government entity convinced? coerced? Hollywood into being the propaganda department of our government sometime during WW2.

While I understand the frustration toward those critiquing military personnel, I believe we should consider the broader context of responsibility in our society. Emergency responders who assist during natural disasters deserve our appreciation, even as we examine complex institutional issues.

If we’re discussing responsibility, those in technology fields must also reflect on their contributions. Many STEM professionals work for profit-driven companies developing technologies with significant societal impacts—from military applications to automation that displaces workers.

Throughout history, scientific advancement has brought both progress and devastation. The development of nuclear weapons, chemical agents, and military technology has often proceeded without adequate ethical consideration. When we examine figures like Oppenheimer or Einstein, we must acknowledge both their brilliance and the consequences of their work.

The irony isn’t lost on me that many who quickly assign blame may themselves contribute to systems that concentrate power and wealth. Rather than dividing ourselves through targeted blame, perhaps we should recognize our collective responsibility for the current state of our nation.

I believe that fostering division only benefits those who already hold power. Perhaps approaching these issues with understanding rather than hate might offer a more productive path forward—even if that perspective seems idealistic in today’s polarized climate.

If you chose to go kill and uphold imperialist aggression rather than just go to jail then you are in fact a bastard

I don’t think any cops have been drafted into police service.

The US (which is what this meme is focusing on) has an all-volunteer force.

They also don’t go to jail if they quit their job. And I haven’t heard of police recruiters using predatory tactics and targeting disadvantaged groups. The military does, or has done, all of those things to recruit troops.

There’s plenty of pro-cop propaganda and plenty of people who join the police thinking they’re going to do good. I’m sorry but at some point people have to be held accountable for their actions. Any troop that’s not a bastard and who’s actively trying to leave should understand why I call troops bastards. It was bastards who recruited them, after all, and it’s bastards keeping them there.

In any case, people make way too many excuses for these people, and all it does is reinforce the idea that it’s ok, which leads to more people falling for that propaganda and those predatory tactics.

Someone else mentioned in this thread that after WWII, Carl Jaspers wrote Die Schuldfrage (The Question of German Guilt) which discussed and categorized guilt broadly into 4 types. In terms of the people carrying out these orders, moral guilt applies: to act on clearly morally wrong orders does not absolve you of guilt.

I think your comments are obfuscating the role of each of these professions in their proximity to power.

Above all the jobs you mention, soldiers are the closest to power mainly because they hold a device designed for only 1 purpose: to end life. They may be performing this role out of financial necessity, but many still have the ability to avoid killing. In Vietnam, if one couldn’t dodge the draft, there were still many ways to avoid killing. Sure, they may be in a difficult position, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have agency every day to find ways to not kill.

Regarding critique, we can do 2 things at once. We can both be critical of the systems that perpetuate violence and also critical of people who choose to make a career out of taking people’s lives. Sustained pressure (including negative social pressure) applied to both areas can be important. I’d argue that stigmatizing a profession is a necessary step in critiquing and eventually dismantling power.

Scientists and engineers who developed chemical weapons and nuclear bombs made conscious choices about their work, yet they rarely face the same scrutiny as soldiers who carry out orders.

They should face the same scrutiny. As a matter of fact, it played a part in me personally giving up on my persuit of physics, even if it meant doing menial labor instead. I used to think that developing new technology would uplift everyone and advance all humanity together, but the more I looked at the world, the more I saw ways in which technology was used irresponsibly, or for the benefit one group at the expense of another. Specifically with climate change, it became apparent to me that we already have the technological means to confront it, the problem is the way our society is structured, and as long as it’s structured that way, no new technology is going to fix anything, and the idea that it might only serves to make people hesitant to confront power and change structures in the ways that are desperately needed. Technological development without social development only creates more advanced forms of oppression.

Heinz Guderian was the developer of Blitzkrieg doctrine and maintained in trials and works afterwards that he had no interest in the Nazis’ “politics,” and that he was “just doing his job.” There’s a good chance he was lying to cover his own ass, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume he was telling the truth. Is developing military theory for Hitler fundamentally different from developing theories of physics for Hitler, which would allow him to construct new weapons and bombs? I say no. There may have been people in Nazi Germany who ignored what was going on in the world and simply focused their attention, as many scientifically minded people do, on the interesting problems of their field, just solving problems without regard for whose problems they are or what they’re going to do with the solutions. If such people existed, they are undeniably culpable - just because you find it more “stimulating” to work on the technical mechanics of a gas chamber than to think about whether the gas chamber should exist does not give you license to design it.

I cannot fully fault everyone involved in the nuclear program in the US, because the US was on the right side of the war and potentially the bomb might have been needed. Nevertheless, a weapon of mass destruction was handed over to the politicians, to use however they see fit. Many of the scientists involved petitioned Truman not to use it (though others, like Oppenheimer, said the opposite), and many high ranking military officials considered it unnecessary. The fact is that there were multiple ways that Truman could’ve ended the war without the bomb, either through better cooperation with the Soviets at Potsdam (but then he’d have to share the spotlight), or by accepting surrender with the sole condition of sparing the emperor (which he planned to do anyway, but he wanted the newspapers to say, “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!”). Once in the hands of politicians, the decisions on whether and how to use it came down to political concerns, things like, “we need to use it to justify all the money we spent on it,” not ethical or even strategic ones.

Anyone involved in weapons development in the US today is certainly culpable in how the US decides to use them. And the US is an aggressive rogue state that has declared jurisdiction over the entire world, that it can and will drone strike wherever it pleases, regardless of soverignty, it routinely invades and oppresses soverign countries, and of all the many, many conflicts it’s been involved in, the last time it was really justified in a conflict was 80 years ago. Anyone involved in weapons development in the US is a monster, and the only reason these sorts of people have been spared of blame historically is that the winning side found their expertise too useful to punish them.

The arguments that you make in no way wash soldiers hands clean of the atrocities they directly commit, it only shows that other people have blood on their hands as well.

“Fuck the troops”

ATAB works too. But troops are essentially just cops we unleash on foreign countries.

I support the real troops

Cops are cops, whether they be foreign or domestic. Why split hairs?

Thank you.

Thursday is no good for me, planning on having my bros over for a no homo circle fuck and foot rub party. Can’t do that without Bud light, obviously

You spend your whole life doing exercises and hauling supplies, but you massacre one village and suddenly everyone hates you.

There are definitely some like that. The American system has a number of tricks to try to force people to do what they like as well though. Poverty, over policing of minorities, lack of social safety nets etc can cause people who grew up barely avoiding prison choosing military thinking the only choices they have are death or military, shoved at them when they’re too young to really know the world. Add education that specifically avoids or lies about what US actually does overseas, plus a bunch of jingoistic propaganda making being a soldier appear to be a respectable profession.

I grew up in a cult that avoided military so I never had those feelings myself, so I got to watch it from the outside, and even the pledge of allegiance every morning was weird jingoistic programming from early ages. It can be difficult to see past that at 17. I’m not saying they don’t deserve any punishment, but I do disagree with the idea that every single one wanted to kill people.

Exactly. When I signed up for the military, it was because I wanted to kill people, and not because I had no other good choices

12 year US Army vet, deployed to Iraq 2007-2008.

Number of people I killed: 0

Why? I was a surgical tech. I helped save lives, including local nationals.

But sure. I deserve “whatever I get” for literally signing up to help people.

Nobody was “forced” to go to Iraq.

For some reason, people think it’s ok to pull others down to get ahead but only in the context of the military. There are other ways to escape poverty, like selling crack or scamming the elderly. I wonder if you condone those approaches as well because “they didn’t have another choice if they wanted to escape poverty.” I doubt it. But if the victims aren’t people in our own neighborhoods who you can actually see, if it’s dead children on another continent who the news doesn’t talk about, then somehow it’s perfectly fine.

Everyone in that position who chooses to work at McDonald’s or Walmart or Amazon instead of signing up to murder foreigners is a better person than every troop, they are braver, more ethical, more heroic, and more enlightened. The cowards who pull others down to get ahead deserve no respect and no sympathy.

Ooh poow widdwe Jimmy … you know who didn’t have a choice? the kids whose heads he blew off. I don’t care if he had a choice in going there or not, Jimmy doesn’t deserve a blink of sleep for the rest of his miserable cunting life if he didn’t knowingly miss every single shot.

“though your path may be set, you can gain as much speed down that path as you would like”

means, even if they had to go to war, they could have missed shots on purpose.