When we discuss responsibility, we should consider it comprehensively. 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. Is this because educational privilege somehow absolves responsibility? Why do we focus our criticism on those with fewer options rather than those who designed the systems?
The hypocrisy evident in some IT professionals’ comments deserves acknowledgment. Many work for profit-driven corporations that extract wealth, exploit resources, or develop technologies with questionable impacts. Before casting judgment on others, perhaps we should examine our own contributions to systems we criticize.
Every professional should consider their role in larger structures of power. The soldier following orders and the programmer writing code for a corporation that avoids taxes or exploits workers both operate within systems larger than themselves. The difference often lies in who society chooses to blame, not in who bears actual responsibility.
Rather than directing our frustration toward individuals with limited choices, perhaps we should focus on the institutions and power structures that create these ethical dilemmas in the first place.
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.
The classification of guilt into rigid categories overlooks the complexity of human experience in war. While Jaspers’ framework offers conceptual clarity, it fails to account for the layered psychological, socioeconomic, and institutional factors that shape individual choice.
Regarding proximity to power, soldiers are often the furthest from decision-making authority, not the closest. They execute policies determined by civilian leadership and high-ranking officials who rarely face the same moral hazards. The weapon a soldier carries represents their vulnerability to those power structures rather than their proximity to power itself.
The assertion that soldiers “make a career out of taking lives” fundamentally mischaracterizes military service. Most service members never fire their weapons in combat, instead performing logistics, medical care, engineering, and humanitarian functions. This reductive view erases the complex motivations that lead people to service, including family tradition, educational opportunity, and genuine belief in protecting others.
The argument about agency overlooks how military indoctrination, threat of court martial, and combat stress systematically work to eliminate meaningful choice. The social psychology of unit cohesion and institutional pressure create conditions where theoretical agency bears little resemblance to practical freedom of action.
Rather than stigmatizing individuals who often come from marginalized communities with limited economic options, meaningful critique should focus on the systems that create conditions for war and the civilian leadership that authorizes it. Targeting those with the least power in the system perpetuates class divisions while protecting those truly responsible for military action.
True systemic change requires recognizing that moral responsibility increases with power and freedom of choice, not decreasing it as one moves down the chain of command.
Your labyrinthine prose coils around the heart of the matter like ivy choking a statue—ornate, suffocating, yet failing to obscure the inscription beneath. Let us parse this carefully. You speak of soldiers as vessels of vulnerability, mere marionettes twitching to the whims of distant civilian oligarchs. But does the rifle in their hands not pulse with a kind of power? A power distilled, singular, terminal? To claim they are ‘furthest from decision-making’ is to conflate authority with action. The janitor who sweeps the floor of a death camp does not design the gas chambers, but his broom still enables the machinery. The soldier, even the one stitching wounds or calibrating drones, is a node in the network of violence. Their labor, however benign in isolation, sustains the engine. To absolve them by citing ‘marginalized origins’ is to infantilize them—to deny their capacity for moral reckoning amid the storm.
You invoke complexity as a shield, as if the interplay of socioeconomic forces renders individuals ethereal, weightless. But history is littered with those who, amid greater oppression, clawed at their agency. The Vietnam draft dodger who feigned madness, the conscientious objector who chose prison over complicity—were these not choices carved from the same granite of systemic cruelty you describe? To say ‘they had no meaningful freedom’ is to erase their humanity, to reduce them to thermodynamic particles in a fatalistic universe.
And your deflection—‘most never fire a weapon’—is a syllogistic sleight-of-hand. The medic who stabilizes a soldier for redeployment, the engineer who fortifies a base, the clerk who files the orders: all are cogs in the same Leviathan. The institution’s purpose is domination, and to don its uniform is to be baptized into its logic. You speak of ‘family tradition’ and ‘educational opportunity’ as motivations, but when does a reason become an excuse? The banker laundering cartel money might cite his child’s tuition—does that nullify his guilt?
Ah, but you retreat to abstraction: ‘Moral responsibility increases with power!’ A tidy formula, yet it crumbles under the weight of its own idealism. The CEO’s order is lethal, yes, but only insofar as the warehouse worker packs the drone, the marketer brands it ‘defensive,’ and the soldier pulls the trigger. Responsibility is not a finite resource to be hoarded by the elite; it is a fractal, repeating at every scale. To focus solely on the architects is to ignore the bricklayers who, brick by brick, erect the edifice.
You accuse me of ‘stigmatizing the powerless,’ but power is not a binary. It is a gradient, a spectrum of complicity. The draftee trembling in a trench has more agency than the general, perhaps, but less than the senator—yet all are agents. To critique the soldier is not to exonerate the senator. It is to say that moral gravity bends around every choice, however constrained. To dismiss this is to surrender to nihilism—to say no one is culpable because everyone is a victim.
And let us be clear: stigmatizing the profession is not vilifying the person. It is a refusal to sanctify the mantle they wear. When we strip the uniform of its honor, we do not attack the soul beneath—we attack the lie that the uniform is honorable. This is how systems fracture: when their myths are unmasked, when their foot soldiers begin to question the hymns they’ve been taught to sing.
So no, I will not lobotomize my critique to soothe the conscience of those who fear nuance. The drone pilot in Nevada, the programmer optimizing surveillance algorithms, the corporal raising his rifle—they all dance on the same precipice. Some leap; some hesitate; some shut their eyes. But to pretend they aren’t standing on the edge? That is the true obfuscation.
Your argument collapses under the weight of its own philosophical pretensions. You construct an elegant theoretical framework of distributed responsibility that, while intellectually satisfying, fails to engage with the lived reality of power dynamics in modern military structures.
The comparison between a soldier and “the janitor who sweeps the floor of a death camp” reveals the fundamental flaw in your reasoning. This false equivalence ignores crucial distinctions of contextual awareness, historical understanding, and institutional transparency. Today’s military personnel operate within systems far more ambiguous than your stark metaphor suggests. The moral clarity you demand exists primarily in retrospect, not in the moment of decision.
Your invocation of Vietnam draft dodgers and conscientious objectors as exemplars of moral agency betrays a privileged perspective. These exceptional cases required specific social, economic, and cultural capital that many service members simply do not possess. To elevate these outliers as the standard against which all others should be measured is to fundamentally misunderstand how structural forces constrain genuine choice.
The “fractal” theory of responsibility you propose sounds profound but ultimately atomizes blame to the point of meaninglessness. If everyone bears equal moral weight regardless of their position, then responsibility becomes so diffuse that it loses practical significance. This approach doesn’t enhance accountability—it undermines it by refusing to acknowledge the exponential difference between ordering an airstrike and maintaining the equipment that enables it.
Most problematically, your framework offers no path forward beyond condemnation. What actionable change does your philosophy propose? How does stigmatizing individual service members advance structural reform? Your position satisfies intellectual critique but offers nothing toward practical transformation of the systems you criticize.
The moral purity you demand requires perfect information and perfect agency—neither of which exists in reality. Your argument creates a false binary between complete absolution and total condemnation, leaving no room for the complex terrain where most moral decisions actually occur. This absolutist approach doesn’t elevate discourse; it paralyzes it.
In your zealous pursuit of distributed blame, you’ve constructed a theory that, ironically, serves the very power structures you claim to oppose. By focusing moral scrutiny on those with relatively limited influence rather than concentrating pressure on decision-makers with genuine authority, you effectively diffuse accountability upward while intensifying judgment downward.
Your rebuttal confuses moral ambiguity for moral absolution, mistaking the fog of institutional complexity for a blank check of compliance. Let me illuminate the distinction. The janitor analogy was never about equating modern service members with Holocaust perpetrators—it was about demonstrating how proximity to harm obligates moral reckoning, regardless of institutional remove. A drone pilot operating under today’s bureaucratic veneer may lack the visceral awareness of a death camp worker, but they still choose to participate in systems they know produce civilian casualties. To claim otherwise insults their intelligence. They understand the mission statements, the after-action reports, the veterans’ stories. Ignorance in an age of information is cultivated, not inevitable.
You dismiss draft resistance as a privilege of the few, yet this only underscores how systems weaponize precarity to ensure compliance. That some lacked the means to resist does not render their service morally neutral—it indicts the structures that make dissent a luxury. Shall we absolve all participants in exploitative systems because escape wasn’t universally possible? Then no colonial foot soldier could ever be condemned, no sweatshop overseer held accountable. Your logic collapses into a nihilistic void where only the supremely privileged bear moral burdens—a perverse inversion of justice.
As for your derision of “fractal responsibility”: you fear it dilutes accountability, but in truth, it demands more rigor. The CEO who orders a drone strike and the mechanic who maintains it are both guilty, but not equally. Guilt scales with power, yes—but it does not vanish at the base of the hierarchy. The Nuremberg Trials judged not just politicians but industrialists, physicians, bureaucrats. To focus solely on architects is to ignore that oppression requires laborers—willing or coerced—to function. Your framework would let the architect hide behind the bricklayers, the general behind the privates.
You demand “actionable solutions” as if critique must birth policy bulletins to be valid. But stigma is action. Dismantling the cultural mythos of military heroism reduces recruitment. Refusing to sanctify uniforms forces societies to confront what those uniforms actually do. Engineers abandoning defense contracts, journalists exposing procurement corruption, soldiers leaking atrocity footage—these ripple from the cultural soil tilled by critique.
And spare me the theatrics about “paralyzing discourse.” Moral clarity is not the enemy of nuance—it is its foundation. You frame my position as a demand for moral purity, but I argue for proportionality. The draftee who surrenders to a broken system bears less blame than the career officer who thrives within it, yet both bear some. To pretend otherwise is to endorse a world where slaughter is licensed so long as enough hands touch the knife.
Finally, your accusation that I “serve power structures” by scrutinizing low-level actors is a breathtaking feat of projection. It is your worldview that protects the powerful by insisting blame pools exclusively at the top. The senator who votes for war appropriations sleeps soundly when society fixates solely on their role. No—pressure must ascend and descend the chain. Guilt is not a finite resource. We can condemn the contractor who builds border wall concrete while also damning the president who ordered it.
Your fear of moral expansiveness is really a fear of true accountability—one that unsettles all strata of complicity. You call it paralysis. I call it coherence.
Your rebuttal constructs an elegant philosophical framework that, while intellectually stimulating, fundamentally misaligns with the practical realities of power, agency, and responsibility in modern military structures.
The janitor analogy fails not because it compares soldiers to Holocaust perpetrators, but because it falsely equates awareness levels across vastly different contexts. Today’s military personnel operate within deliberately opaque systems designed to fragment responsibility and obscure consequences. Many serve without direct exposure to the outcomes of their collective actions—not through willful ignorance, but through institutional compartmentalization that purposefully distances them from the full implications of their roles.
When you dismiss economic necessity as merely “weaponized precarity,” you reveal a profound disconnect from the lived experience of the working class. For many, military service represents not a moral choice but survival—access to healthcare, education, housing stability, and escape from environments with few alternatives. These aren’t abstract considerations; they’re immediate material realities that shape decision-making more powerfully than philosophical ideals ever could.
Your “fractal responsibility” concept sounds profound but ultimately atomizes blame to the point of practical meaninglessness. By insisting everyone bears some measure of guilt, you create a system where accountability becomes so diffuse it loses any practical force. This approach doesn’t enhance justice—it undermines it by refusing to acknowledge the exponential difference between authorizing an intervention and maintaining equipment that enables it.
Most troublingly, your framework offers no path forward beyond condemnation. What concrete change does your philosophy propose? How does stigmatizing service members advance structural reform? You claim “stigma is action,” but history shows otherwise. Cultural rejection of Vietnam veterans didn’t end American militarism—it merely isolated those who served while leaving power structures intact. Real change comes through political organization, policy reform, and coalition-building—not moral gatekeeping.
The moral clarity you champion requires perfect information and perfect agency—neither of which exists in reality. Your position creates a false binary between complete absolution and comprehensive guilt, leaving no room for the complex terrain where most moral decisions actually occur. This absolutist approach doesn’t elevate discourse; it forecloses it.
In your zeal to distribute responsibility downward, you’ve constructed a philosophy that, paradoxically, serves the very power structures you claim to oppose. By disproportionately focusing moral scrutiny on those with relatively limited influence rather than concentrating pressure on decision-makers with genuine authority, you effectively diffuse accountability while intensifying judgment on those least positioned to resist systemic imperatives.
Your fixation on “practical realities” is itself a surrender to those realities—a capitulation to the notion that systems are too vast, too opaque, to demand individual accountability. Let us dissect this. You claim soldiers lack awareness of consequences due to institutional compartmentalization, but this assumes moral negligence is excusable if engineered efficiently. The drone operator who never sees their victims still knows their joystick commands a Reaper, not a toy. The technician troubleshooting missile guidance systems understands their work enables precision strikes, not crop dusting. Obfuscation is a feature of the machine, yes, but complicity requires active participation in maintaining that machine. To confuse structural opacity with individual innocence is to confuse fog for absolution.
Ah, but the economic argument—always the last refuge. You frame enlistment as “survival,” reducing moral agency to a calculus of desperation. Yet this ignores that survival itself is a spectrum. The 18-year-old enlisting to escape poverty makes a different calculation than the contractor renewing their clearance for a third deployment bonus. Both choose to perpetuate the system, but only one faces true precarity. To flatten all service members into victims of circumstance is to erase the hierarchy of choice within the very structures you defend. The working class deserves more than your paternalism—they deserve recognition as moral actors, capable of questioning the systems that exploit them.
Your dismissal of fractal responsibility as “atomized blame” again reveals your discomfort with nuance. No one claims the mechanic bears equal guilt to the general—only that both bear some. Proportionality is key. The janitor who sweeps the death camp floor is less culpable than the architect, but still complicit. To deny this is to argue that oppression requires only a single guilty mind to function, rather than a constellation of choices. The Vietnam War did not persist solely through LBJ’s orders but through the collective acquiescence of manufacturers, recruiters, and yes, soldiers. Scrutinizing one layer does not preclude scrutinizing others—it demands it.
You ask, sneering, how stigmatization aids reform. Let me educate you. Stigma is not cruelty—it is the withdrawal of social license. When society stops valorizing military service as noble by default, recruitment declines. When engineers face scorn for designing surveillance tech, talent flees the sector. When the VA hospital nurse is asked, “How many civilians did you ‘save’ by stabilizing bomb-makers?” the mythology of heroism cracks. This is not about shaming individuals but dismantling the cultural infrastructure that makes perpetual war palatable. Your beloved “political solutions” are inert without cultural shift—the Civil Rights Act didn’t spring from legislative goodwill but from decades of stigma levied against segregationists.
Your Vietnam analogy is telling. You claim stigmatizing veterans failed, but you misdiagnose the failure. The error wasn’t critique—it was directing that critique at traumatized conscripts rather than the war machine itself. We must stigmatize the institution, not the broken individuals it discards. The anti-war movement’s flaw was compassion misplaced, not principle misapplied.
As for your “false binary” accusation—projection, as ever. You are the one insisting we must either condemn the architect or the laborer, as if moral gravity cannot hold both. I reject this scarcity mindset. The drone pilot’s choices matter because the general’s do. Guilt is multiplicative, not competitive. The ICC indicts warlords and child soldiers because both, in their measure, fuel conflict. Your worldview—that accountability is a zero-sum game—is what truly protects power. It whispers to the CEO: “Fear not; they’ll only come for the low-level engineers.”
Finally, your concern for the “working class” rings hollow. True solidarity isn’t absolving the poor of moral scrutiny—it’s demanding they not be used as cannon fodder in wars serving oligarchs. To say they “have no choice” is to doom them to perpetual serfdom in the empire’s engine room. I propose something radical: that even the desperate retain shards of agency, and that treating them as moral infants—incapable of resistance, unfit for critique—is the true elitism. The Black GI who fragged his racist commander in Vietnam, the Chelsea Manning who leaked atrocity footage, the Edward Snowden who exposed mass surveillance: these were not Ivy idealists. They were cogs who chose to jam the gears.
Your plea for “practicality” is just fear of friction. All revolution begins as philosophy—as stigma, as refusal, as inconvenient questions. You want tidy solutions? Start here: stop sanctifying killers, and you’ll get fewer of them.
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.
I don’t think any cops have been drafted into police service. 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.
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.
The US currently employs “volunteer” troops, but also requires all male citizens to register for a future draft. Many living veterans were drafted. And many others were in vulnerable situations that recruiters recognized and preyed upon. Once you join the US military, it’s a crime to quit.
There is clearly some nuance needed when taking about US war veterans.
Shitlibs like you: Context matters, nuance is important! Think of those poor soldiers! You don’t truly understand what they were going through that led them to join the Kolonial Konquest and Side-Kuests “Defense” Force. The choice between them ending up in the streets or families 12000 km away ending up displaced, starved, tortured, or murdered by their own accord must’ve been real difficult!
Shitlibs like you: SHOOT THEM ALL! LOCK THEM UP! NO MERCY FOR TERRORISTS! THEY ARE THE REAL IMPERIALISTS SPREADING THEIR ICKY ISLAM! KEEP ISLAMISM CONTAINED IN THEIR TERRORIST SAND TERRITORIES! THEY’RE ALL ANTISEMANTIC FANATICS!
Casting sweeping judgments about an entire group you’ve never personally engaged with demonstrates remarkable presumption. There’s a specific term for making such broad generalizations without firsthand knowledge, isn’t there?
I’m curious—what profession grants you the authority to condemn others for circumstances largely outside their control? What position of moral superiority do you occupy that allows you to evaluate the character and choices of people whose lives and constraints you’ve never experienced?
Perhaps before passing judgment so confidently, it would be worth considering the complex realities and limited options many face within larger systems not of their making.
what profession grants you the authority to condemn others for circumstances largely outside their control?
You keep bringing up this point and it’s entirely ad hominem and also makes bizarre, unfounded assumptions about what everyone else does.
I’m an unemployed warehouse worker with a BS in physics, I could’ve joined the military as an officer and made several times what I’ve made instead, but I didn’t. But no doubt, no matter what my story was, you’d find a way to dismiss my perspective. Perhaps the fact that I had enough support from my family to afford college in the first place, even though my degree was never useful and I left burdened with loans.
But it doesn’t fucking matter because regardless of my experiences, how about the experiences of people living in the countries we’ve invaded and bombed? You don’t hear shit from those people, do you? Isn’t their perspective just as valid? Have you sought out their perspectives, or even tried to consider what they might be? It’s so fucking stupid to dismiss critiques of the troops just because the person saying it doesn’t meet your standards of moral purity, it is, again, literally a textbook example of ad hominem. The truth is still the truth regardless of who says it. And the truth is that the troops suck.
The audacity of this argument is infuriating. It deliberately dumps the entire weight of America’s foreign policy disasters onto those with the least say in the matter. This perspective serves no purpose except to create convenient scapegoats so privileged individuals can feel morally superior without doing anything to change the system.
Dividing the working class against itself is exactly what the ruling elite want. We’re all trapped under the control of the same oppressors, yet somehow soldiers—many who enlisted because of economic necessity—are supposed to shoulder the blame for decisions made by politicians WE elected? It’s shortsighted, cruel, and completely ignores how power actually works.
What entitled nonsense expects people who often joined the military because of limited economic options to just disobey orders and risk court martial? Easy to make these moral judgments from behind a keyboard when you’re not the one facing those consequences.
The stench of moral superiority in this argument is overwhelming. If you want to criticize something, direct that energy toward the people actually calling the shots instead of those with the least amount of control. The politicians, defense contractors, and corporate interests profiting from war don’t care about your philosophical arguments—they just want us fighting each other instead of them.
This whole “blame the troops” mentality accomplishes nothing except further dividing those who should be united in demanding better from our leaders and our system. It’s not just wrong—it’s counterproductive.
Do you apply the same perspective to people who escape poverty by selling crack or scamming the elderly? Do I need to refrain from criticizing such people because otherwise I’m “dividing the working class?” Absurd. The only difference between those people and the troops are the proximity of their victims. Defending drug dealers and scammers is what divides the working class by alienating their victims. And in the same way, defending the child murdering troops divides the working class by alienating their victims.
You lecture me on “privilege” while completely writing off all the people who are vastly less privileged than either of us, the people who are orders of magnitude poorer and less privileged, who face terror and brutality beyond what either of us, or any US troop, can expect to face. Every troop had the option to spend their days as I have, working at places like Amazon, with a roof over their head, three square meals a day, and no worry about bombs falling on their house. Relatively speaking, that is a privilege, compared to the conditions that Iraqis and Afghans have experienced.
Working class solidarity means international solidarity, and international solidarity means not only considering the needs of the global poor, but prioritizing them. If you claim to be a leftist, if you claim to care about privilge, and if you condemn Americans who screw over other Americans to get ahead, then you should even more vehmantly condemn Americans who screw over people from poorer countries to get ahead. You are just a chauvanist, the reason you defend the troops is because you view their victims as subhuman, unworthy of consideration.
This “working class solidarity” that somehow includes troops that murder working class people in other countries, does it also include cops who murder working class people in their own country? Or are they not included because you can actually recognize their victims as human beings? Surely “working class solidarity” cannot include working class people who actively oppress and harm other working class people, like cops, troops, con artists, etc.
I have a question for you. If they made it a crime to leave the police until you finished a set term, would that make you object to anyone saying “ACAB?”
ACAB includes the troops. Going to foreign countries to shoot brown kids doesn’t make you any less of a bastard than doing it at home.
When we discuss responsibility, we should consider it comprehensively. 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. Is this because educational privilege somehow absolves responsibility? Why do we focus our criticism on those with fewer options rather than those who designed the systems?
The hypocrisy evident in some IT professionals’ comments deserves acknowledgment. Many work for profit-driven corporations that extract wealth, exploit resources, or develop technologies with questionable impacts. Before casting judgment on others, perhaps we should examine our own contributions to systems we criticize.
Every professional should consider their role in larger structures of power. The soldier following orders and the programmer writing code for a corporation that avoids taxes or exploits workers both operate within systems larger than themselves. The difference often lies in who society chooses to blame, not in who bears actual responsibility.
Rather than directing our frustration toward individuals with limited choices, perhaps we should focus on the institutions and power structures that create these ethical dilemmas in the first place.
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.
The classification of guilt into rigid categories overlooks the complexity of human experience in war. While Jaspers’ framework offers conceptual clarity, it fails to account for the layered psychological, socioeconomic, and institutional factors that shape individual choice.
Regarding proximity to power, soldiers are often the furthest from decision-making authority, not the closest. They execute policies determined by civilian leadership and high-ranking officials who rarely face the same moral hazards. The weapon a soldier carries represents their vulnerability to those power structures rather than their proximity to power itself.
The assertion that soldiers “make a career out of taking lives” fundamentally mischaracterizes military service. Most service members never fire their weapons in combat, instead performing logistics, medical care, engineering, and humanitarian functions. This reductive view erases the complex motivations that lead people to service, including family tradition, educational opportunity, and genuine belief in protecting others.
The argument about agency overlooks how military indoctrination, threat of court martial, and combat stress systematically work to eliminate meaningful choice. The social psychology of unit cohesion and institutional pressure create conditions where theoretical agency bears little resemblance to practical freedom of action.
Rather than stigmatizing individuals who often come from marginalized communities with limited economic options, meaningful critique should focus on the systems that create conditions for war and the civilian leadership that authorizes it. Targeting those with the least power in the system perpetuates class divisions while protecting those truly responsible for military action.
True systemic change requires recognizing that moral responsibility increases with power and freedom of choice, not decreasing it as one moves down the chain of command.
Your labyrinthine prose coils around the heart of the matter like ivy choking a statue—ornate, suffocating, yet failing to obscure the inscription beneath. Let us parse this carefully. You speak of soldiers as vessels of vulnerability, mere marionettes twitching to the whims of distant civilian oligarchs. But does the rifle in their hands not pulse with a kind of power? A power distilled, singular, terminal? To claim they are ‘furthest from decision-making’ is to conflate authority with action. The janitor who sweeps the floor of a death camp does not design the gas chambers, but his broom still enables the machinery. The soldier, even the one stitching wounds or calibrating drones, is a node in the network of violence. Their labor, however benign in isolation, sustains the engine. To absolve them by citing ‘marginalized origins’ is to infantilize them—to deny their capacity for moral reckoning amid the storm.
You invoke complexity as a shield, as if the interplay of socioeconomic forces renders individuals ethereal, weightless. But history is littered with those who, amid greater oppression, clawed at their agency. The Vietnam draft dodger who feigned madness, the conscientious objector who chose prison over complicity—were these not choices carved from the same granite of systemic cruelty you describe? To say ‘they had no meaningful freedom’ is to erase their humanity, to reduce them to thermodynamic particles in a fatalistic universe.
And your deflection—‘most never fire a weapon’—is a syllogistic sleight-of-hand. The medic who stabilizes a soldier for redeployment, the engineer who fortifies a base, the clerk who files the orders: all are cogs in the same Leviathan. The institution’s purpose is domination, and to don its uniform is to be baptized into its logic. You speak of ‘family tradition’ and ‘educational opportunity’ as motivations, but when does a reason become an excuse? The banker laundering cartel money might cite his child’s tuition—does that nullify his guilt?
Ah, but you retreat to abstraction: ‘Moral responsibility increases with power!’ A tidy formula, yet it crumbles under the weight of its own idealism. The CEO’s order is lethal, yes, but only insofar as the warehouse worker packs the drone, the marketer brands it ‘defensive,’ and the soldier pulls the trigger. Responsibility is not a finite resource to be hoarded by the elite; it is a fractal, repeating at every scale. To focus solely on the architects is to ignore the bricklayers who, brick by brick, erect the edifice.
You accuse me of ‘stigmatizing the powerless,’ but power is not a binary. It is a gradient, a spectrum of complicity. The draftee trembling in a trench has more agency than the general, perhaps, but less than the senator—yet all are agents. To critique the soldier is not to exonerate the senator. It is to say that moral gravity bends around every choice, however constrained. To dismiss this is to surrender to nihilism—to say no one is culpable because everyone is a victim.
And let us be clear: stigmatizing the profession is not vilifying the person. It is a refusal to sanctify the mantle they wear. When we strip the uniform of its honor, we do not attack the soul beneath—we attack the lie that the uniform is honorable. This is how systems fracture: when their myths are unmasked, when their foot soldiers begin to question the hymns they’ve been taught to sing.
So no, I will not lobotomize my critique to soothe the conscience of those who fear nuance. The drone pilot in Nevada, the programmer optimizing surveillance algorithms, the corporal raising his rifle—they all dance on the same precipice. Some leap; some hesitate; some shut their eyes. But to pretend they aren’t standing on the edge? That is the true obfuscation.
Your argument collapses under the weight of its own philosophical pretensions. You construct an elegant theoretical framework of distributed responsibility that, while intellectually satisfying, fails to engage with the lived reality of power dynamics in modern military structures.
The comparison between a soldier and “the janitor who sweeps the floor of a death camp” reveals the fundamental flaw in your reasoning. This false equivalence ignores crucial distinctions of contextual awareness, historical understanding, and institutional transparency. Today’s military personnel operate within systems far more ambiguous than your stark metaphor suggests. The moral clarity you demand exists primarily in retrospect, not in the moment of decision.
Your invocation of Vietnam draft dodgers and conscientious objectors as exemplars of moral agency betrays a privileged perspective. These exceptional cases required specific social, economic, and cultural capital that many service members simply do not possess. To elevate these outliers as the standard against which all others should be measured is to fundamentally misunderstand how structural forces constrain genuine choice.
The “fractal” theory of responsibility you propose sounds profound but ultimately atomizes blame to the point of meaninglessness. If everyone bears equal moral weight regardless of their position, then responsibility becomes so diffuse that it loses practical significance. This approach doesn’t enhance accountability—it undermines it by refusing to acknowledge the exponential difference between ordering an airstrike and maintaining the equipment that enables it.
Most problematically, your framework offers no path forward beyond condemnation. What actionable change does your philosophy propose? How does stigmatizing individual service members advance structural reform? Your position satisfies intellectual critique but offers nothing toward practical transformation of the systems you criticize.
The moral purity you demand requires perfect information and perfect agency—neither of which exists in reality. Your argument creates a false binary between complete absolution and total condemnation, leaving no room for the complex terrain where most moral decisions actually occur. This absolutist approach doesn’t elevate discourse; it paralyzes it.
In your zealous pursuit of distributed blame, you’ve constructed a theory that, ironically, serves the very power structures you claim to oppose. By focusing moral scrutiny on those with relatively limited influence rather than concentrating pressure on decision-makers with genuine authority, you effectively diffuse accountability upward while intensifying judgment downward.
Your rebuttal confuses moral ambiguity for moral absolution, mistaking the fog of institutional complexity for a blank check of compliance. Let me illuminate the distinction. The janitor analogy was never about equating modern service members with Holocaust perpetrators—it was about demonstrating how proximity to harm obligates moral reckoning, regardless of institutional remove. A drone pilot operating under today’s bureaucratic veneer may lack the visceral awareness of a death camp worker, but they still choose to participate in systems they know produce civilian casualties. To claim otherwise insults their intelligence. They understand the mission statements, the after-action reports, the veterans’ stories. Ignorance in an age of information is cultivated, not inevitable.
You dismiss draft resistance as a privilege of the few, yet this only underscores how systems weaponize precarity to ensure compliance. That some lacked the means to resist does not render their service morally neutral—it indicts the structures that make dissent a luxury. Shall we absolve all participants in exploitative systems because escape wasn’t universally possible? Then no colonial foot soldier could ever be condemned, no sweatshop overseer held accountable. Your logic collapses into a nihilistic void where only the supremely privileged bear moral burdens—a perverse inversion of justice.
As for your derision of “fractal responsibility”: you fear it dilutes accountability, but in truth, it demands more rigor. The CEO who orders a drone strike and the mechanic who maintains it are both guilty, but not equally. Guilt scales with power, yes—but it does not vanish at the base of the hierarchy. The Nuremberg Trials judged not just politicians but industrialists, physicians, bureaucrats. To focus solely on architects is to ignore that oppression requires laborers—willing or coerced—to function. Your framework would let the architect hide behind the bricklayers, the general behind the privates.
You demand “actionable solutions” as if critique must birth policy bulletins to be valid. But stigma is action. Dismantling the cultural mythos of military heroism reduces recruitment. Refusing to sanctify uniforms forces societies to confront what those uniforms actually do. Engineers abandoning defense contracts, journalists exposing procurement corruption, soldiers leaking atrocity footage—these ripple from the cultural soil tilled by critique.
And spare me the theatrics about “paralyzing discourse.” Moral clarity is not the enemy of nuance—it is its foundation. You frame my position as a demand for moral purity, but I argue for proportionality. The draftee who surrenders to a broken system bears less blame than the career officer who thrives within it, yet both bear some. To pretend otherwise is to endorse a world where slaughter is licensed so long as enough hands touch the knife.
Finally, your accusation that I “serve power structures” by scrutinizing low-level actors is a breathtaking feat of projection. It is your worldview that protects the powerful by insisting blame pools exclusively at the top. The senator who votes for war appropriations sleeps soundly when society fixates solely on their role. No—pressure must ascend and descend the chain. Guilt is not a finite resource. We can condemn the contractor who builds border wall concrete while also damning the president who ordered it.
Your fear of moral expansiveness is really a fear of true accountability—one that unsettles all strata of complicity. You call it paralysis. I call it coherence.
Your rebuttal constructs an elegant philosophical framework that, while intellectually stimulating, fundamentally misaligns with the practical realities of power, agency, and responsibility in modern military structures.
The janitor analogy fails not because it compares soldiers to Holocaust perpetrators, but because it falsely equates awareness levels across vastly different contexts. Today’s military personnel operate within deliberately opaque systems designed to fragment responsibility and obscure consequences. Many serve without direct exposure to the outcomes of their collective actions—not through willful ignorance, but through institutional compartmentalization that purposefully distances them from the full implications of their roles.
When you dismiss economic necessity as merely “weaponized precarity,” you reveal a profound disconnect from the lived experience of the working class. For many, military service represents not a moral choice but survival—access to healthcare, education, housing stability, and escape from environments with few alternatives. These aren’t abstract considerations; they’re immediate material realities that shape decision-making more powerfully than philosophical ideals ever could.
Your “fractal responsibility” concept sounds profound but ultimately atomizes blame to the point of practical meaninglessness. By insisting everyone bears some measure of guilt, you create a system where accountability becomes so diffuse it loses any practical force. This approach doesn’t enhance justice—it undermines it by refusing to acknowledge the exponential difference between authorizing an intervention and maintaining equipment that enables it.
Most troublingly, your framework offers no path forward beyond condemnation. What concrete change does your philosophy propose? How does stigmatizing service members advance structural reform? You claim “stigma is action,” but history shows otherwise. Cultural rejection of Vietnam veterans didn’t end American militarism—it merely isolated those who served while leaving power structures intact. Real change comes through political organization, policy reform, and coalition-building—not moral gatekeeping.
The moral clarity you champion requires perfect information and perfect agency—neither of which exists in reality. Your position creates a false binary between complete absolution and comprehensive guilt, leaving no room for the complex terrain where most moral decisions actually occur. This absolutist approach doesn’t elevate discourse; it forecloses it.
In your zeal to distribute responsibility downward, you’ve constructed a philosophy that, paradoxically, serves the very power structures you claim to oppose. By disproportionately focusing moral scrutiny on those with relatively limited influence rather than concentrating pressure on decision-makers with genuine authority, you effectively diffuse accountability while intensifying judgment on those least positioned to resist systemic imperatives.
Your fixation on “practical realities” is itself a surrender to those realities—a capitulation to the notion that systems are too vast, too opaque, to demand individual accountability. Let us dissect this. You claim soldiers lack awareness of consequences due to institutional compartmentalization, but this assumes moral negligence is excusable if engineered efficiently. The drone operator who never sees their victims still knows their joystick commands a Reaper, not a toy. The technician troubleshooting missile guidance systems understands their work enables precision strikes, not crop dusting. Obfuscation is a feature of the machine, yes, but complicity requires active participation in maintaining that machine. To confuse structural opacity with individual innocence is to confuse fog for absolution.
Ah, but the economic argument—always the last refuge. You frame enlistment as “survival,” reducing moral agency to a calculus of desperation. Yet this ignores that survival itself is a spectrum. The 18-year-old enlisting to escape poverty makes a different calculation than the contractor renewing their clearance for a third deployment bonus. Both choose to perpetuate the system, but only one faces true precarity. To flatten all service members into victims of circumstance is to erase the hierarchy of choice within the very structures you defend. The working class deserves more than your paternalism—they deserve recognition as moral actors, capable of questioning the systems that exploit them.
Your dismissal of fractal responsibility as “atomized blame” again reveals your discomfort with nuance. No one claims the mechanic bears equal guilt to the general—only that both bear some. Proportionality is key. The janitor who sweeps the death camp floor is less culpable than the architect, but still complicit. To deny this is to argue that oppression requires only a single guilty mind to function, rather than a constellation of choices. The Vietnam War did not persist solely through LBJ’s orders but through the collective acquiescence of manufacturers, recruiters, and yes, soldiers. Scrutinizing one layer does not preclude scrutinizing others—it demands it.
You ask, sneering, how stigmatization aids reform. Let me educate you. Stigma is not cruelty—it is the withdrawal of social license. When society stops valorizing military service as noble by default, recruitment declines. When engineers face scorn for designing surveillance tech, talent flees the sector. When the VA hospital nurse is asked, “How many civilians did you ‘save’ by stabilizing bomb-makers?” the mythology of heroism cracks. This is not about shaming individuals but dismantling the cultural infrastructure that makes perpetual war palatable. Your beloved “political solutions” are inert without cultural shift—the Civil Rights Act didn’t spring from legislative goodwill but from decades of stigma levied against segregationists.
Your Vietnam analogy is telling. You claim stigmatizing veterans failed, but you misdiagnose the failure. The error wasn’t critique—it was directing that critique at traumatized conscripts rather than the war machine itself. We must stigmatize the institution, not the broken individuals it discards. The anti-war movement’s flaw was compassion misplaced, not principle misapplied.
As for your “false binary” accusation—projection, as ever. You are the one insisting we must either condemn the architect or the laborer, as if moral gravity cannot hold both. I reject this scarcity mindset. The drone pilot’s choices matter because the general’s do. Guilt is multiplicative, not competitive. The ICC indicts warlords and child soldiers because both, in their measure, fuel conflict. Your worldview—that accountability is a zero-sum game—is what truly protects power. It whispers to the CEO: “Fear not; they’ll only come for the low-level engineers.”
Finally, your concern for the “working class” rings hollow. True solidarity isn’t absolving the poor of moral scrutiny—it’s demanding they not be used as cannon fodder in wars serving oligarchs. To say they “have no choice” is to doom them to perpetual serfdom in the empire’s engine room. I propose something radical: that even the desperate retain shards of agency, and that treating them as moral infants—incapable of resistance, unfit for critique—is the true elitism. The Black GI who fragged his racist commander in Vietnam, the Chelsea Manning who leaked atrocity footage, the Edward Snowden who exposed mass surveillance: these were not Ivy idealists. They were cogs who chose to jam the gears.
Your plea for “practicality” is just fear of friction. All revolution begins as philosophy—as stigma, as refusal, as inconvenient questions. You want tidy solutions? Start here: stop sanctifying killers, and you’ll get fewer of them.
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.
I don’t think any cops have been drafted into police service. 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.
The US (which is what this meme is focusing on) has an all-volunteer force.
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.
Leave it to a .ml user to ignore all context…
The US currently employs “volunteer” troops, but also requires all male citizens to register for a future draft. Many living veterans were drafted. And many others were in vulnerable situations that recruiters recognized and preyed upon. Once you join the US military, it’s a crime to quit.
There is clearly some nuance needed when taking about US war veterans.
Shitlibs like you: Context matters, nuance is important! Think of those poor soldiers! You don’t truly understand what they were going through that led them to join the Kolonial Konquest and Side-Kuests “Defense” Force. The choice between them ending up in the streets or families 12000 km away ending up displaced, starved, tortured, or murdered by their own accord must’ve been real difficult!
literally anyone else: mentions Palestine, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Sudan, etc…
Shitlibs like you: SHOOT THEM ALL! LOCK THEM UP! NO MERCY FOR TERRORISTS! THEY ARE THE REAL IMPERIALISTS SPREADING THEIR ICKY ISLAM! KEEP ISLAMISM CONTAINED IN THEIR TERRORIST SAND TERRITORIES! THEY’RE ALL ANTISEMANTIC FANATICS!
Casting sweeping judgments about an entire group you’ve never personally engaged with demonstrates remarkable presumption. There’s a specific term for making such broad generalizations without firsthand knowledge, isn’t there?
I’m curious—what profession grants you the authority to condemn others for circumstances largely outside their control? What position of moral superiority do you occupy that allows you to evaluate the character and choices of people whose lives and constraints you’ve never experienced?
Perhaps before passing judgment so confidently, it would be worth considering the complex realities and limited options many face within larger systems not of their making.
The choice to join the military and commit war crimes is not outside of their control
🤓☝️
Is that the best argument you can come up with? No wonder we lost the election.
You keep bringing up this point and it’s entirely ad hominem and also makes bizarre, unfounded assumptions about what everyone else does.
I’m an unemployed warehouse worker with a BS in physics, I could’ve joined the military as an officer and made several times what I’ve made instead, but I didn’t. But no doubt, no matter what my story was, you’d find a way to dismiss my perspective. Perhaps the fact that I had enough support from my family to afford college in the first place, even though my degree was never useful and I left burdened with loans.
But it doesn’t fucking matter because regardless of my experiences, how about the experiences of people living in the countries we’ve invaded and bombed? You don’t hear shit from those people, do you? Isn’t their perspective just as valid? Have you sought out their perspectives, or even tried to consider what they might be? It’s so fucking stupid to dismiss critiques of the troops just because the person saying it doesn’t meet your standards of moral purity, it is, again, literally a textbook example of ad hominem. The truth is still the truth regardless of who says it. And the truth is that the troops suck.
The audacity of this argument is infuriating. It deliberately dumps the entire weight of America’s foreign policy disasters onto those with the least say in the matter. This perspective serves no purpose except to create convenient scapegoats so privileged individuals can feel morally superior without doing anything to change the system.
Dividing the working class against itself is exactly what the ruling elite want. We’re all trapped under the control of the same oppressors, yet somehow soldiers—many who enlisted because of economic necessity—are supposed to shoulder the blame for decisions made by politicians WE elected? It’s shortsighted, cruel, and completely ignores how power actually works.
What entitled nonsense expects people who often joined the military because of limited economic options to just disobey orders and risk court martial? Easy to make these moral judgments from behind a keyboard when you’re not the one facing those consequences.
The stench of moral superiority in this argument is overwhelming. If you want to criticize something, direct that energy toward the people actually calling the shots instead of those with the least amount of control. The politicians, defense contractors, and corporate interests profiting from war don’t care about your philosophical arguments—they just want us fighting each other instead of them.
This whole “blame the troops” mentality accomplishes nothing except further dividing those who should be united in demanding better from our leaders and our system. It’s not just wrong—it’s counterproductive.
Do you apply the same perspective to people who escape poverty by selling crack or scamming the elderly? Do I need to refrain from criticizing such people because otherwise I’m “dividing the working class?” Absurd. The only difference between those people and the troops are the proximity of their victims. Defending drug dealers and scammers is what divides the working class by alienating their victims. And in the same way, defending the child murdering troops divides the working class by alienating their victims.
You lecture me on “privilege” while completely writing off all the people who are vastly less privileged than either of us, the people who are orders of magnitude poorer and less privileged, who face terror and brutality beyond what either of us, or any US troop, can expect to face. Every troop had the option to spend their days as I have, working at places like Amazon, with a roof over their head, three square meals a day, and no worry about bombs falling on their house. Relatively speaking, that is a privilege, compared to the conditions that Iraqis and Afghans have experienced.
Working class solidarity means international solidarity, and international solidarity means not only considering the needs of the global poor, but prioritizing them. If you claim to be a leftist, if you claim to care about privilge, and if you condemn Americans who screw over other Americans to get ahead, then you should even more vehmantly condemn Americans who screw over people from poorer countries to get ahead. You are just a chauvanist, the reason you defend the troops is because you view their victims as subhuman, unworthy of consideration.
This “working class solidarity” that somehow includes troops that murder working class people in other countries, does it also include cops who murder working class people in their own country? Or are they not included because you can actually recognize their victims as human beings? Surely “working class solidarity” cannot include working class people who actively oppress and harm other working class people, like cops, troops, con artists, etc.
I have a question for you. If they made it a crime to leave the police until you finished a set term, would that make you object to anyone saying “ACAB?”
If you chose to go kill and uphold imperialist aggression rather than just go to jail then you are in fact a bastard
If @LegitTayUpdates can do it, so can you
Military and police are the two arms of the state that enforce the will of the ruling class. Police do it internally, and military externally.
You know, you could just make a different phrase for troops.
Cops are cops, whether they be foreign or domestic. Why split hairs?
I support the real troops
“Fuck the troops”
ATAB works too. But troops are essentially just cops we unleash on foreign countries.