Excited to find the western chauvinists in this community.
Edit: Wow apparently the only people on chapo dot chat are whitees unaffected by and benefiting from their imperialism confidently declaring how the perpetrators are to be treated.
Y’all have some nerve
Edit 2:
ITT If you shoot a black kid in the back in downtown Baltimore I want nothing to do with you. If you perfarate an entire back family in Mogadischu or Baghdad that’s ok, you did growth and spaces.
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?
1.) Cops can quit
2.) Cops are a completely separate class of petty landless warriors who are distinct from American society. They have class interests that differ from both the working class and bourgeois due to their unique position as the only habitually armed class in society.
3.) Vets are almost all working class upon leaving the military.
That would only be a fair comparison with veterans and ex-cops.
And be honest, how likely is it that an ex-cop has actually reformed?The only ex-cops that I might trust are those that quit as whistle-blowers; or that were minorities policing minority neighborhoods in attempts at harm reduction or something like that.
Yeah, that’s all I’m really commenting on here. This site seems to reject cops pretty quickly but puts a lot of effort into embracing vets and I’m asking what real difference is between the two groups, outside of average age
One difference is the people they’re trained to oppress.
Cops are trained to oppress their own countrymen. Soldiers are trained to oppress people on the other side of the world.
It’s why in revolutions we see the military flip long before cops do. Cops are always the last holdouts.
Does anyone have real problems with ex-cops who have cut ties with cop culture? The problem with that DSA guy was that he was still organizing cop unions and apologizing for cops.
We’re talking about people who used to be soldiers.
I understand that?
ACAB applies to people who are currently cops, if they are “good” and quit, then they are no longer cops.
Hmm. Personally I don’t even agree with that statement, but wouldn’t it be more apt to compare vets to cops that have retired and taken a pension and shit? Like most soldiers don’t quit, their contract ends. Does ACAB not apply to retired cops?
I’m trying to have a good faith talk here
I don’t necessarily agree either, just trying to clarify the position.
Current cops -> bad (no real way to become “good”)
resigned cops who become good one way or another -> mostly goodactive duty soldiers -> bad?
veterans who become good later -> whatever this thread decides, ig
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.
You dumb fuck. Can you read? Where is the talk of “counterrevolutionary” or “reactionaries”. Engels, Mao and Enlai wouldn’t fly into mad rage like you if someone insulted them for being landlords or capitalist. They’d probably join in.
Lol literally all of my comments have been sarcastic, why do you think I’m raging? I’m not a troop, never have been one and never will be one and I’ve even cucked troops on more than one occasion lol. I just think it’s funny as fuck that people on twitter dot com love stirring the pot and think making moral judgements is praxis.
Answer my question, what is the goal of a left wing movement in your mind?
Answer my question, what is the goal of a left wing movement in your mind?
I’m not taking the bait. If you have something to say say it.
I mean I can’t respond to you unless you tell me what the goal of a left wing movement is, and how you think it can be achieved. Otherwise I can only assume you don’t care about the end result and only the moral purity of the movement itself
The achievement of the “left’s” goals will not depend on the feelings of people who apparently are so mentally deficient as to not be able to engage in any demanding activity while stroking their dick up and down. Your view of veterans is much more of an impediment than any insult hurled at them for their service. They are either big boys and will get over it or they are not and you wouldn’t want them near any kind of firearm.
I mean I only care about people’s feelings insofar as they affect material results. I don’t think there will be a revolution any time soon but the obsession with moral atonement like “”“”““leftism””“”“” is a religion is entirely counterproductive. The demand for self-flagellation among former troops is part of a broader trend on the western left, which in it’s impotence has latched onto moralizing as it’s primary focus. I don’t think that spending years investing time in disparaging and admonishing troops is going to end well when the time comes. We don’t live in a place and time where angry masses with semi auto rifles can take on the largest and most technologically advanced military in the world. It wouldn’t be like Vietnam or Afghanistan, it would be a conflict of life and death for the Imperialist forces and they would treat it as such. Revolution in the imperial core would necessitate major defections from Imperialist security forces, most likely from those that are colonized people themselves.
So here’s a question: There are vets in our ranks, is this good or bad?
Good
Okay, struggle session over!
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I don’t know if it is a great strategy to antagonize everyone with actual military training, for the sake of “not forgiving” them.
Sorry sweaty L E F T I S M is about guilt and innocence, not about achieving material goals
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.
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.
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.
This is true, but that’s wholly distinct from pulling our punches on troops out of the desire to attract them to the left, which seems to be the stance a lot of people take
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.
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.
Would you do the same to an ex-cop who shot an unarmed black man?
I didn’t say forgive war criminals. I’m talking about people haven’t committed war crimes and have spent the time after they finished their service working to oppose that system they upheld. Christopher Dorner was a veteran and a cop, I would gladly welcome him into any party.
I’m talking about people haven’t committed war crimes
Every troop who was in Iraq is a criminal. That pure vet who was in the army but didn’t contribute directly to US imperial violence is figment of your imagination.
Well now you’re moving the goalposts, you asked about a cop killing an unarmed black man and now you’re logically extending that to every single ex-cop, even paper pushers and IT guys. Were they complicit in a violent system? Yes. Is there an equivalent value between the guy who spent all his time repairing shit and guarding a base to the people working in Abu Ghraib? No.
You think all the vets you’ll get will be ones who haven’t shot a bullet? What do you do if you get a vet whose job it was to kick in Iraqi doors and arrest all the men? I’m giving you an easy one here, no killing.
You accuse me of moving the goalposts when I stead of answering my question you answered a different one about “vets who didn’t commit war crimes”. I only moved them after you went to a whole different field.
I wouldn’t even say don’t let people who have killed in, the basic line I think we should take is to look at it on a case by case basis. If they understand that what they did was wrong, they embrace marxism-leninism and they haven’t killed or tortured civilians we should let them in.
You started with “Should the cops who killed unarmed black men let into the party?” I responded with “no those who commit war crimes (implying that we shouldn’t let cops who murder unarmed black men or are complicit in that either) shouldn’t be let in.” You then said that “every troop in Iraq was a criminal” implying that all ex-cops shouldn’t be let in as well. If you make a comparison between cops and soldiers, follow through. You’re trying to get me to make your point for you by answering each question one at a time, just make your point.
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.
“Advocacy and empathy regarding issues that do not personally affect you is bad, actually”
Are we talking about advocacy and empathy or are we talking about extremely online people trying to score points on twitter by being more woke than thou?
Contributing to orgs that actually do things is advocacy, listening to people who have experienced the sharp end of imperialism is empathy.
Deliberately poking a sleeping shark in the ass on twitter because you know it’ll do something exciting is neither of those.
I re-read the thing again
If you or someone you love has been murdered by police you can yell at the cops
If you are performatively hand-wringing on behalf of an imaginary person you have created in your mind who has been murdered by police please shut the fuck up.
Cops and soldiers, believe it or not, have very different motivations and experiences that lead to very different outcomes. Lots of soldiers come back from the mistake they made at 18 thinking “god damn that was a huge fucking mistake I should fight against the thing I contributed to”.
Cops don’t do this. Cops get pay raises for twenty years then do shitloads of overtime and then retire with six figure pensions.
There are a lot of leftist veterans because most people become soldiers for reasons like “I wanted to serve my country” or “I’m from a military family” or “I want to get out of this one horse town” or “I want to see the world”. Then they spend four or six years not doing that, realize their country is bullshit and everything they’ve been taught about it is a lie, maybe directly do some war crimes, and then when their contract comes up they’ve got PTSD, disability, and a seething hatred for the US government.
Cops don’t have that experience. People become cops either 1.) Because they want to help people in their communities or 2.) Because they get off on authority and want to use fear and violence to make other people respect them. People in group 1.) usually wash out within a year or become people in group 2.) People in group 2.) do cop shit for twenty years then retired with huge pensions because being a cop is pretty easy and unless you die of a heart attack or do too many crimes too publicly you can basically just cruise til retirement.
Are their roles in imperialism similar? Sure, they are. But the people involved are very different, the way they experience imperialism is very different, and their outcomes are very different.
To whit; At one point during Vietnam there were commies trying to organize the enlisted troops and they almost got away with it.
No one has ever tried to organize the cops.
I honestly don’t know where this hand-wringing about The Troops comes from. It certainly doesn’t come from theory or the lessons of any revolution ever, anywhere in the world. Reading through here I’m starting to suspect it’s a cultural diffusion of the conservative canard that “Anti-War protestors spit on returning soldiers”, like people just assume that the Troops must hate the left and the left must hate the troops because that’s what we were taught growing up and everyone just believed it.
Nice long post when your actual complaint is that people can’t care about issues that don’t personally effect them
“The more groups the left alienates the more powerful it becomes” - Carl Marks
Oooh, good idea. We should also stop criticizing capitalism so we can attract all the capitalists to our cause.
Fuck draftees, I guess
Americans haven’t been drafted in 46 years.
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.
___He’s just as much a victim of capitalism and the US War Machine as anyone else.
Get the fuck out if here with that shit.
The facts are he’s dead and he wouldn’t be if the US wasn’t invading other countries for the material benefit of some shit in an office driving a BMW halfway around the world. I count it as a death of capitalism.
“As much as anyone else” is forgetting the totally innocent people who’s country got invaded.
