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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
We're talking about people who used to be soldiers.
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".
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 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
So here’s a question: There are vets in our ranks, is this good or bad?
Good
Okay, struggle session over!
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.
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
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.
Fuck draftees, I guess
Americans haven't been drafted in 46 years.
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