Snip:
More and more US troops deployed to West Asia are expressing doubts about fighting in the war against Iran, including having to “die for Israel,” the Huffington Post reported on 23 March.
A veteran and reservist who mentors younger officers told HuffPost that troops she speaks with are expressing a loss of faith after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu helped push US President Donald Trump to go to war against Iran.
[…]
Interviews further revealed that troops are worried about inadequate protection from Iranian ballistic missiles and drones targeting US bases in the Gulf region.
“Getting random indirect fire is not the same as watching the entire gym and coffee shop and some dorms get blown up from a door less than 50 meters away,” said one service member.
“Getting random indirect fire is not the same as watching the entire gym and coffee shop and some dorms get blown up from a door less than 50 meters away,” said one service member.
US troops experience real war for the first time ever
“Hm… This is a lot different than Call of Duty…”
This is in fact nothing like Boss Baby
It’s like when reddit brigade got hit with a Russian missile almost immediately after crossing Ukrainian border and survivors started whining that it is unfair.
It’s so funny. What did they think war was?
Killing brown people with overwhelming force, of course!
Calling in an airstrike on a family picnic from half a mile away
“Getting random indirect fire is not the same as watching the entire gym and coffee shop and some dorms get blown up from a door less than 50 meters away,”
and that the idea itself is a modern invention.
Wow, guess Marcus Aurelius, a literal Emperor, wrote a book about something else…
These people aren’t even human, I swear
This guy has been trying to back up his point by citing Meditations…
Holy fucking shit
oh pooor babies, don’t want to fight a foe that can actually punch back. If it was invading another weak country, these same troops would only be thinking about their free health care and college.
I am harm’s way, you’re not supposed to send me into harm’s way
the entire gym and coffee shop
wtf do soldiers even do
Secure the existence of our treats and a future for white mocha FrappucinosI laughed too hard at this holy shit lmao
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Paid vacation where you execute doctors and newlyweds for fun
This reminds me of the “Survivor fight” scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Huh, wonder what this graph says.
maybe the data simply reflects a renewed interest in arena FPS games 🙂
googling “fragging” on my barracks wifi before I immediately get court martialed and executed
“Getting random indirect fire is not the same as watching the entire gym and coffee shop and some dorms get blown up from a door less than 50 meters away,” said one service member.
Thirteen troops have been killed in the war so far, and at least 232 have been wounded.
Putting those two lines next to each other seems to imply the author has some doubts about those figures too.
Its The Cradle, so yes, that is the intention. The huffpo article which it’s summarizing does not have those two lines next to each other.
Is US militarism built largely on the shaky ground of claiming to be the best, untouchable military force? An agreed upon humiliation on the world stage really could kick off this long-coming chain reaction then.
Certainly since Vietnam it is.
Damn you probably shouldn’t have signed up to kill babies if you’re afraid to die.
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this extreme reductive, vast simplification makes it very difficult to identify and address the systemic causes and motivating factors.
American troops should be extremely reduced into simplified parts that are very difficult to identify
you will drink the mouse smoothie
Terrifying
That’s gross and not funny
I every single member of the US millitary dropped dead right now, It would be the single most positive event in the history of humanity up until that point.
if only because thousands of people randomly dropping dead normally doesn’t happen.
but you could also figuratively “destroy the solider” by flipping them to the socialist cause
Edited for clarity, I meant “them” as is the persons in the military not the entity itself.
but you could also figuratively “destroy them” by flipping them to the socialist cause
Anything that has the power to “flip” the Us millitary to the socialist cause without somehow destroying it in the process would make needing to flip it in the first place irrelevent.
You do know what the military is made of, right? It’s all removable.
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Opposing a criminal organization that double taps elementry schools with impunity is a extremely useful goal and pretending these monsters deserve special consideration is a dangerous act of ego stroking that lets everyone else in the path of this monster known exactly where you stand. You would never say the same about the iof but the people who will follow the order to fight beside them arm in arm are somehow victims of that choice?
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If you don’t think you’re coming off as humanizing and empathizing the waffen SS in this thread I dunno what to tell you.
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Most people joining up are willing participants in the horrors they perpetuate on the global south
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Depends on what you mean by “vulnerable” and “impoverished”. If you mean actually in poverty, the US Federal poverty line in 2025 was an annual income of $15650 for individuals, $21150 if you’re in a household family with two children. However, if you look at the below infographic:
The vast majority of US military recruits are well above the poverty line. Even if you could extrapolate most of the 19% of recruits who fall beneath the annual income of $41691 as being at or close to poverty line, that still puts the remaining 81% of recruits in a broadly middle/ upper-middle class income bracket.
Just for reference, the average median income (that’s the 50th percentile of all income earners, not the average which tends to be skewed by the upper class) in the US was only $43222 in 2023. That means the majority of US military recruits came from a household that was already earning more than 50% of the US population.
So by any of these metrics, you cannot consider most US military recruits to be impoverished.
Additionally, the racial and ethnic demographics of the military, especially in the higher ranks, is disproportionately White by a huge margin. I think it is reasonable to say that these majorly White recruits are nowhere near as vulnerable to discrimination or poverty as someone who has a non-White background, such as a black person whose family descended from slavery, or a Hispanic who migrated from a poor Hispanic country that could very well be deported by ICE any day now.
What can we ascertain from these facts then? That most people that join the US military are White, middle class individuals who are very likely joining not because they are desperate to leave poverty, but because they like the idea of being a stormtrooper of the empire whose propaganda they willingly ate up. There are far more Graham Platners than Mike Prysners in the US military.
On your other statements about purges and pragmatism, it is ironic that you say purges lead to counter-revolutionary outcomes when purges are what prevented the USSR from being completely destroyed from the inside during WW2 (see the number of Nazi collaborators in the occupied Baltic and Ukrainian territories), and is why the PRC and the DPRK still exist today.
As a non-American communist, I fail to see how it is pragmatic to try and defend the jackboots of the American Empire who are willingly carrying out war crimes and imperialist atrocities while completely ignoring all the actually impoverished, brown people they are currently murdering in the Middle East.
If empathy is ‘pragmatic’ as you claim, then I will say it is far more pragmatic to empathize the victims of the empire and materially support them to bring them to our cause, than the stormtroopers who carry out the orders of the Empire without question. It is like saying we should ‘pragmatically’ empathize IDF soldiers who are genociding Palestinians because they are all conscripts who came from all socioeconomic backgrounds and maybeeee 1% will defect if we just keep saying Free Palestine.
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Boris Yeltsin wasn’t purged. Gorbachev kept him around naively because he thought he was a loyal, valuable comrade that would carry out Glasnost effectively. Look how that turned out.
Deng Xiaoping purged liberals like Zhao Ziyang, the then General Secretary of the CPC that was expected to replace Deng as paramount leader, was one of the biggest supporters of Glasnost-style economic reforms and fully supported the colour revolutionaries of 1989.
By purging Zhao Ziyang, the PRC is still alive today. By not purging Boris Yeltsin, the USSR is not.
By not continually cleaning up shop in the party, you invite the exact corruption and implosion you warn of.
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You:
empathy isn’t just a virtue, it is pragmatic.
Also you:
frankly, if we are speaking purely pragmatically, empathizing with victims really helps no one
Also you:
if you won’t be more humane, at least be smarter
You are so all over the place and full of contradictory statements that you are incoherent. But so far as I can tell, what I’m getting is: “We need to have empathy for imperialist murderers and counterrevolutionary traitors but not for their victims.” Gotcha. You’re a reactionary.
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I’m simply saying that you have to address the circumstances that create these people in order to have any real change.
Which you claimed was because vulnerable, impoverished Americans join the US military apparatus for desperation. Neither of which are true as I just proved in my previous comment. By continuing to use this false narrative which comes from liberals who defend Democrat military vet “progressives” like Graham Platner, you are not inacting any real change but just perpetuating the system.
if your idea of change includes removing people rather than educating them, you’ve already lost.
Well I guess Marx, Engels, and Lenin were completely wrong in his theories then! The October Revolution was the first mistake they made by removing the provisional bourgeois government that just wanted to “educate” the peasants hey!
people are not born with a predestined character, they are created. stop with this bullshit appeals to the metaphysical.
By your logic then, Americans who are born poor are not predestined to join the US military industrial complex and can actually just, you know, choose to not become an imperialist war criminal?
if we are speaking purely pragmatically, empathizing with victims really helps no one.
Empathizing imperialist war criminals also doesn’t help anyone except the war criminals. You still haven’t made any good case for how this benefits the international left at all.
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I was vulnerable, impoverished, and 18 at one time, and recruiters told me I could have free 3 squares and then college paid for, which I would have loved, but for some reason I still had the good sense to recognize immediately that it wasn’t worth killing other poor people in other parts of the world. In fact it was empathy that played a big part in my refusal to be a part of such an evil institution.
Yes, having empathy for the victims of the US military, like the poor working class families of brown people they murder, having more empathy for them than the ones who signed up to do the murdering is virtuous and pragmatic.
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so because you didn’t fall to propaganda and total desperation it’s unthinkable for anyone to?
Because I and millions of other people who are in situations just as if not more dire than the troops are able to not “fall to propaganda,” yes, I expect others to be able to do the same. You’re missing the point though, It doesn’t matter what I expect, it’s simple and undeniable proof that being 18, impoverished, and offered (mostly false) promises of alleviation from that poverty, is not reason enough for most people to be willing to join a murder cult.
you need to open your fucking eyes lmao.
Says the one simping for murderers.
bad people are results of the systems that produced them.
Guess we had better stop hatin’ on capitalists then. It’s all just material conditions, not their fault. Cops? They just needed a job like anyone else!
getting rid of said people doesn’t fix what made them and it hurts your own chances by falling to purity politics.
Wtf are you even talking about? When did I say I had the ability to “get rid of them”? That would be nice, but I… Ohhhh, you’re talking about letting child murderers and their facilitators join socialist orgs, something which wasn’t even part of this thread, but apparently is a bug stuck in your craw from some previous discussion. Fine, I’ll bite. Yeah, that’s just purity politics, we should let cops join our orgs too. (Eyeroll). Personally, I actually might be willing to let a veteran join an org where I had control of who could become a member if and only if they fully recognized that they chose to become class traitors and joined the enemy, that they made a nearly irredeemably cruel and selfish choice that caused real material harm and have spent their lives since that recognition doing what they can to make amends to the peoples they wronged and being willing to sacrifice their own well being to improve the lives of the victims of the imperialism they were a willing part of. Most vets though think they deserve our “respect” for their cowardly choice and want special benefits above other poor people. Fuck anyone like that, they should be grateful they didn’t come home in a box. There were millions of other poor people who weren’t willing to facilitate or outright commit mass murder in exchange for college tuition. However I would not blame any org for refusing any and all US vets and I wouldn’t blame anyone for refusing to join an org who does allow US vets in. The same way I wouldn’t expect someone whose family had been murdered to let bygones be bygones and work hand in hand with the “rehabilitated” murderer of their family.
the only thing I’m hearing from most of y’all is “making the opposition suffer and purge them”
It’s the only thing you’re hearing? That’s really weird considering no one here has said anything even remotely like that.
if you won’t be more humane, at least be smarter
Your position is neither more humane nor is it “smarter.”
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in order to help victims, you first have to help the perpetrators themselves.
Get that everybody? We have to help the bourgeoisie first before we can help the working class. We have to help the leaders of the imperialist hegemon first before we can help the people of the global south. We have to help the entity first before… fuck it, I don’t even want to finish saying that one.
The poverty draft isn’t actually a thing. The nunber one motivator for US troops joining (statistically) is having a family member in the military. And even more damning is that the poor sections of american society are less likely to join the military than more. That’s despite the plague of recruiters sent into poor and black neighbourhoods and schools.
The American proletariat by and large hates the guts of the American state.
most people who join are vulnerable, impoverished 18 year olds who are predated upon by recruiters at high schools under the promises of free education and stable income.
Like how ICE have good singing on bonus so it’s understandable.
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You’re not justifying it, you’re excusing it. Everyone here understand the underlying structural issues. The problem for me at least, it seems, that you don’t want these people to have to take responsibility and this is a sentiment I get from most of these people as well. They just got “tricked” or “just followed orders” or “the money was too good” or something. No need for self crit or doing any of the actual work. I bet you most of them still have their uniforms neatly folded and tucked away instead of burning that shit on the spot.
If you got “tricked” into joining baby crusher incorporated, honestly you’re a liability until you’ve proven otherwise. Trying to doge that responsibility is big yikes. And if taking that responsibility is a deal breaker for you, then even bigger yikes.
Just look at libs invasion logic, where they go “we got lied to about x” and 10 years later they’re doing it again, having learned nothing, or rather refused to learn anything.
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Youre right and no amount of poor people turned away from having criminal records, being too overweightor too uneducated will change their mind that more poor people would join if the US didnt already betray them to point so they cant even be part of the war machine. Because too overweight, did crimes and/or cant pass the ASVAB. You’re right but they’re holding onto a graphic that doesnt really prove anything either and ignores the amount of poors in the military.
I’m sorry you’re totally right, critical support for baby killers because now they understand what it’s like to have a poopy diaper.
It’s pretty insulting to assume that we’re talking about people being ontologically evil. US soldiers have been shaped by the viciously brutal US society, right, no one is a literal demon spawn from hell doing evil for free, pretty basic stuff. Accountability is not a crusade though, if you’re doing politics for real you suppress these people because they’ve been made into baby killers and baby killers can’t be allowed to simply be there and do what they do
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“Getting random indirect fire is not the same as watching the entire gym and coffee shop and some dorms get blown up from a door less than 50 meters away,” said one service member.
The US does not have an army, it has a colonial police force with delusions of grandeur.
It is morally correct to frag your CO
do not be a good german. You have more in common with the Iranian workers than you ever do with the owning class.
Huh, i wonder if it have something to do with a remote probablity of being killed because they attacked a opponent that can fight back, for once, instead of just massacring helpless people like usual.
Of course not! Americans famously have high levels of empathy for West Asia.
American GI, you have readily access to firearms and explosives, and you greatly outnumber your leaders
Just Do It™
It’s for bad reasons, but doing the right thing for bad reasons is still a step up from doing the wrong thing for bad reasons.
For any US navy soldiers who may be lurking, just remember that apparently their carrier laundry rooms are very flammable…
and the toilets are very pluggable.
