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Let me ask this, have we (as the vanguard of the proletariat) sufficently exposed the horrors of U.S. imperialism? Have we successfully spread the truth of its barbarities far and wide, making known the vile acts committed under its banner, to ensure every worker understands that to enlist in its ranks is to partake in acts of moral reprehension?
If our collective efforts have fallen short in permeating this critical perspective throughout society, within the working class, in opposition to prevailing propaganda narratives, how can we then maintain the position that enlisting is a moral choice? If we have failed in our duty to unveil the terrors behind the curtain, to educate and rally the proletariat against the imperialist colussus, how could we possess the moral authority to condemn those not awakened to our cause for enlisting in its ranks?
It falls upon us, the vanguard, to disseminate the truths hidden by capitalist propaganda. To reveal to others what we have seen behind the curtain. The imperialist machine, garbed in the guise of national defense and humanitarian aid, cloaks its true nature from the masses. Its recruitment propaganda, shrewdly crafted, showcases deeds of disaster relief and domestic aid relief, yet remains silent on its crimes against humanity, its imperial conquests, and the blood spilled for profit and power. They wouldn’t show the quelling of riots, the wedding drone strikes, the massacres in the global south in their propaganda. This deceit mirrors the magician’s art: drawing the eye away from the sleight, the bloodied hand concealed behind a facade of benevolence. It is our imperative to intensify our efforts, to shatter the illusions cast by imperialism’s sorcerers. Rich men do not die in wars.
The logic is solid, actually really solid, people react and adapt to their material conditions, and that’s why we need to be around those people and build with them an alternative, another solution, that won’t just be the one for their kid, but will help every other kid in every other precarious circumstances, that will build and better future for all. But given the conditions I don’t blame people on her condition at all.
Sorry but there is no excuse for joining the world’s most murderous group of people to assist it in its atrocities. You can try to ameliorate it with poor justifications ( I see you haven’t even tried though ) but ultimately participating in the slaughter of innocent people for your own benefit is always an immoral choice.
Sorry but there is no excuse for joining the world’s most murderous group of people to assist it in its atrocities
That’s why propaganda exists, to deny that it’s the most murderous group who commits atrocities
People only start to have a choice if a communist is here to counter that, and that’s not always the case
People have the capacity of free will. They are not zombie automatons playing out the universe’s sequence of cause and effect from one atom to thee next. The problem with thinking otherwise is that it justifies absolutely everything and anything.
“The IDF members murdering and raping women and children in Gaza were just indoctrinated. Poor guys.”
Everyone in the military isn’t infantry lol. The lady in my scenario was a real person, she was a human resources clerk.
I’ll let the guy driving the Zyklon-B delivery truck to Auschwitz know he isn’t complicit in anything because “he’s just a delivery driver.” He’s not actually directly killing anyone!
Just some liberal claptrap attempting to justify the unjustifiable and doing a bad job of it. Shoe-horning in “Material Conditions” is not a substitute for a reasoned argument. Being poor doesn’t absolve a person for their choices, neither does the fact that they didn’t singlehandedly “create the imperialist war machine” (wtf? really?).
If anything she too is victimised by the machine
So then it’s okay to join the machine and victimise others?
her agency stripped…
So now it isn’t a “choice” at all? In which case the point is moot? It’s always a choice.
You say there’s always a choice, but where do you draw the line? Is it just the military, or is it other things?
I knew a guy who joined the National Guard because his son, they couldn’t afford the insulin for his son. Tricare paid for that. This was before insulin, the price was set at the ceiling. It was a thousand-something dollars a month. What choice should that man have made? Hey, we can provide you health care for your son, you might have a chance of getting called up to do something awful. That’s a real fucked up choice to have to make in this country
I had a friend who was a prison guard.The only job that was available in his area that paid that well. He was a prison guard, and he told me, “man, I’m guarding the same people I went to school with. Isn’t that fucked up?” That he always had a choice, because now he’s engaging with that prison industrial complex. Is that man irredeemable in that scenario?
What about if you’re a engineer? You go to school for aerospace engineering. Ever since you were a kid, you’ve been inspired by the moon landings, and that’s what you want to do. You ain’t politically educated. You get into college, and you have an awakening when you’re 27, after working for Raytheon for three, four years, that what you do is awful, and evil, and contributes to awfulness. Are you irredeemable at that point, because you always had a choice? You could have not worked for Raytheon. You should have known better.
What if you’re from one of the Dakotas? You go work in the tar sands, or from Texas, you go work in the oil fields. Are you not contributing to the heating of our planet, the environmental degradation of our planet? We know what goes behind, what happens behind closed doors with fossil fuel companies. Are those workers not equally to blame? They always had a choice. When the pipeline spills, and all that land, that stolen native is destroyed, are those workers not to blame?
It seems to me that “there’s always a choice” thing. It’s just anti-materialist. It’s moralizing. It doesn’t win people over to your movement. Fundamentally, I don’t give a shit about impressing other communists in the party with how moral, and how holier-than-thou I am. I care about organizing the working class, and in this country the working class sometimes has to make some real shitty fucking choices.
The counter to that, though, is you always have a choice as to what you want to do in the military. Like, that one dude who is, like, a big leader in the PSL, he was a straight-up Guant- Mike whatever, he was a straight Guantanamo Bay torturer. You don’t get to be one of those types of positions unless you like doing that type of shit. Unless you want to do that type of shit. You’re not just picking random people off the street and going, Hey, you’re gonna torture people. No, you pick that role, right? So it’s… There’s a nuance to it. If you were an HR paper pusher, I got a hard time being a Vindical- Vind- Vindiful- Vindical- Vind- Whatever, I got a hard time being a mad at ya. But if you were, like, that guy, well… That’s a- That’s a frag, you know what I mean?
You say there’s always a choice, but where do you draw the line? Is it just the military, or is it other things?
Maybe I don’t understand the question but the line is drawn wherever the question is asked. “Is this a morally thing to do or not?” is the question. Yes you can ask that question of other things.
I knew a guy who joined the National Guard because his son, they couldn’t afford the insulin for his son.
That’s a different case, this person could argue coercion. The example from above is someone joining for greater luxury. But to take this case, how about we frame it as, “Is it okay to kill an innocent to save the life of your own child?”. Granted this person’s culpability in the crimes of the US army is watered down, since there are so many people involved. But no one droplet thinks it’s responsible for the flood. Where you draw the line is up to you.
Prison guard? Sure there’s levels here, and we’re all in some way connected to horrors that are done in our names. Everyone needs to make their own choices.
Dakotas… it seems you’re just painting an increasingly more benign scenario from the original in order to slide its justification down a slippery slope. The Simpsons did a bit on this when the mafia guy was justifying his organised crime to Bart:
Is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family?
And suppose you have a large starving family. Is it wrong to steal a truckload of bread to feed them? And, what if your family don’t like bread? They like cigarettes?
Now, what if instead of giving them away, you sold them at a price that was practically giving them away. Would that be a crime?
The question was about a woman joining the military in order to improve her life. The claim was that this was always justified because mumble mumble material conditions. There is no real argument made as to why he thinks it’s justified.
Now you’re shifting the goalposts and bringing up new scenarios that I need to argue against, and if I fail, then for some reason the original is also justified.
It seems to me that “there’s always a choice” thing. It’s just anti-materialist. It’s moralizing. It doesn’t win people over to your movement.
Now we’re trying to win people over to… sorry what? It was about a woman joining the army for dental and free college, no?
Fundamentally, I don’t give a shit about impressing other communists in the party with how moral, and how holier-than-thou I am. I care about organizing the working class, and in this country the working class sometimes has to make some real shitty fucking choices.
Okay? Spreading communism by justifying joining the US army. It’s a novel approach.
You seem like a real fun dude to be around. Brother we live in the most heavily propagandized country in the world. Billions of dollars spent getting people to have cognitive dissonance about the reality of what America is and what America does.
You can make the Human Resources lady a pariah if you want, but the reason she joined is because of her material conditions, created by our capitalist society. I guess it’s easier to moralize than to build the dual power required to get people to not join.
Want my real take? Read this and learn to have some nuance. https://erikhoudini.com/houdini_blog/news/aaron-bushnell-the-courage-of-principles
The majority of people serving in the US military are middle class white people though?
This. We can talk all day about edge-case exceptions who really do have a good reason but the fact of the matter is that the military is populated by the privileged.
here’s a citation for the factual inaccuracy presented there: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military
racial minorities are slightly over represented among the enlisted in total, but they are definitely far from the majority, and statistically less likely to be among the poorest.
that said, we should try not to vilify individual service members without specific cause (i.e. that particular person saying reactionary shit), just as a matter of practicality. we have enough enemies as is.
frag the officers bc if can go to college you can avoid the military. this is a good citation
i have a hard time demonizing people who had to make the choice between the a life of working at Dollar General and being a paper pusher in the Army.
I did a single enlistment with the National Guard and will forever live with that sin, even if all i did was hurricane relief. It is unfortunate that my entire life has to be defined by a choice I made when I was 18 and homeless. That any work I do for the movement will be lessened by this choice.
