The video/audio is better, more thought out and cognizable, I am extremely dyslexic so read at your own expense :) - Listen or Watch as a podcast on youtube - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5u4DM5WN78whovrOOU_9pQqJqYGUazgt - OR even better add RSS Feed directly to on Pocket Cast - https://pca.st/9c39a6q7
I recently fell down a rabbit hole of military recruiters, military wives, and military hustlers, and when I say fell I mean more jumped down, because I wanted a closer look into the largest terrorist organization in the world: the US DOD. And in my responses condemning their grooming of children in high schools, normalization of the extreme harm they commit daily, and rewriting of history to glorify war criminals, I kept hearing similar responses, and so this video is a response to those responses. So first I’ll make, though incompletely for lack of time, the pretty clear argument that the US military ought to be hated, and then go into why we should do that hating performatively and openly, firstly in response to these people defending the US military and then the things we gain from doing so.
Why DO I hate the US military:
Because the US military and its proxies have been the most lethal entity the world has seen in the past 70 years, if not ever. With just retributive attacks for 9/11 having direct deaths of almost 1 million, with indirect deaths bringing the total to almost 5 million. Not a single one of those invasions was justified (insofar as any action of a genocidal empire could be justified) and every single one of them was criminal1. With a think tank institute estimating between 7 and 13 million direct deaths in US-supported and -instigated armed conflicts and 6 to 10 million deaths.2
But these numbers are too big for anyone to fathom, and before people comment, if we use the methodology of the fascist Victims of Communism Foundation this number would be 100 quadrillion (because they’re just straight up making shit up), so no, I don’t want to hear any whataboutisms with communism3.
And what’s really important is not the number, right, one criminal death is as significant as the other, but that this is the function of the US military: to protect capital abroad through violence and occupation, still occupying a majority of the countries in the world, and the arms of the American state being as expansive as any state apparatus the world has ever seen. This level of control, carnage, and harm should be condemned. This is an exploration not of whether it ought to be but of why this obvious conclusion isn’t taken.
And the basic conclusion, to ruin it all, is that Americans identify with the criminals more than their victims, and if you humanize those in the Global South, the primary victims of US imperialism, even vaguely as much as you humanize the people that are doing the violence against them, then this worldview has absolutely no ability to maintain itself. If you use the language to talk about the US military, even domestically, that the US State Department uses to talk about other military apparatuses across the world, then this worldview falls apart. So I want to go into the actual discussions I’ve had and the actual points (that I think boil down to but are not limited to the above point) about why exactly even seeming progressives shiver at the concept of calling a spade a spade and a soldier a war criminal.
But the Poverty Draft: “You don’t understand, you have to be nice to them”
Whenever I do anti-US military propaganda I inevitably get the well-meaning, or sometimes not well-meaning, response from a “veteran,” military wife, or even self-apologetic current military member that goes something like this: I agree the US military is bad (they might even go so far as to recognize it as a war criminal or a terrorist army) but the people in it are not the thing itself, and in fact many of them are victims of the exact propaganda you’re talking about, so why are you attacking them? Actually, many of them are victims not only of the propaganda but are particularly so because of the targeting of impoverished and lower-class schools to recruit from.
There are many responses to this, the most common of which I think tends to be “it doesn’t matter how much you need to feed your children, it never gives you a right to kill other people’s children,” or my favorite, “would you say this about any other terrorist group in the world? Would you say this about the IDF? ISIS? Because Israelis certainly do.” Both of these reassert the American exceptionalism and the extreme nature of American crimes, but I don’t think they hit the problem, which is that the archetypal apologetic military wife could actually say, yeah, I do actually say that, I try and understand everyone, and no, I don’t think it’s a justified move, I just think that attacking them doesn’t help the problem because you should be attacking the system even if what individual military members are doing is wrong.
And that is why what I’ve tried to start moving toward is this response: if you really believed that they were victims of propaganda, me attacking the perpetrators of that propaganda would not bother you. I.e., if this argument is coming in good faith to protect people not just currently in the military but all people who might be susceptible to the pro-military propaganda out there, then me undermining it and using social tools that we have like shame and ostracization and exposure to undermine that glorification and cool factor that such recruitment ads often project would not be a concern. In fact, the reasonable response would be “wow, I’m so happy, because if my husband had seen this when he was making the mistake of joining the military maybe he wouldn’t have made that mistake,” or better yet, decentering your “victimized” war criminal in the first place: this may hurt my feelings but if it’s effective in undermining recruitment, that saves lives.
The Positive Argument for Being Mean to Them
Why do I care? What’s the goal? In deeply Israeli-esque arguments, I consistently hear from low-level military recruits or, worse, recruiters whenever I call them out on glorifying the military, that they are just doing their job, just as Israelis glorifying Israel who I confront with the crimes they normalize consistently remind us that the state of Israel will not stop its genocide merely because we comment a Palestinian flag under a post. In Tel Aviv, soldiers in America keep reminding us that they’ll continue doing their jobs even if some random commenters that totally don’t bother them tell them they’re doing war crimes. And actually they tell us in a very Democrat way that if we keep on hating on them they’ll just become worse. And I don’t know about those individuals and that might be true for them, but if you were going to become a war criminal more because of internet comments I think you’re going to become a war criminal anyway, so what exactly is my goal?
Well, my goal is to use the exact same levers that the empire is using to recruit people into their org to prevent that recruitment. And if you look at military advertisement, it is very clear that they are not just advertising that you will be able to feed your children, they’re not just advertising that you will be able to feed yourself or go to college. They certainly do mention that, but most important, as was true when Israel is trying to compel people to make aliyah, Rhodesia was trying to compel young white supremacists to join the Rhodesian Bush War, and army recruiters are trying to recruit you to the Navy: they care about looking cool, they care about bringing glory, and most importantly they want you to feel normal. Superior but normal. Whether that looks like feeling successful, or marrying or dating someone hot, or doing what you already had in you.
These things matter, but importantly these things are in our control. We can’t stop them from spending on education or making it so impossible to live in America that the only way some people see (possibly rightly but mostly wrongly) the only way they can live or even move up on the ladder is to go tear other people down their ladder in the Middle East. But we can control whether downwardly mobile middle-class people will feel accepted, tolerated, and even successful if they join the military. And that’s why they’re so sensitive to the internet comments, that’s why Republicans lose their mind when you stomp on a flag or don’t salute a veteran. It is incredibly hard to convince someone to put their life on the line simply because they want money, but if your family will love you more, if your wife will be hotter, and if you will feel more complete and happy, yeah, maybe self-sacrifice can be a part of that: but it requires that you identify your needs and wants with that of the military. And if we elucidate to them as clearly as possible that that is not true (in the direct inverse of what the military propaganda is trying to convince them), then we are doing our jobs.
The Possible Risk
Now to actually address the naysayers: the form of the argument tends to come, sure, you could say all of this, but what actually ends up happening is you remove their ability to have an off-ramp. And this is true interpersonally. It is understandable that if you think your friendship with someone can be leveraged to help them make a better decision, as is done in some antifa circles, then keep that friendship and leverage it as such. Same thing with familial relationships: if you can stop your brother from becoming a Nazi, or even if you have to do the labor of pulling him out of a Nazi cult, do that. But will you promote that publicly? Will you say that that’s the only way you can prevent Nazis, or will you recognize that condemning and ostracizing them serves the purpose of not getting them in the situation in the first place?
And to be cynical, although I think accurate, this often comes from a place of self-preservation much more than pure logic, which is true of most people’s arguments for most things, mine included very likely, where they are uncomfortable with the truth that they believe (their husband is a war criminal comparable to the SS) so they twist and turn to find a permission structure that is plausible, that allows them to feel comfortable where they are. Classic cognitive dissonance. And this is understandable, I don’t condemn it, but I also just have very limited time or patience for therapizing people out of it.
What Is to Be Done?
So what then is my call to action: don’t salute veterans, don’t tolerate recruiters at your high school, be vocally and publicly against them doing that job in any capacity, make no concessions. No, Germany does not need an SS, not even a nicer one. No, occupied Palestine does not need an IDF, not even a nicer one. And no, the US does not need a military, not even a nicer one. And we have some tools that the empire recognizes matter more than all the money they have: social, political, familial pressure. It isn’t everything and we need to address it materially as well, but we cannot undermine it, because if we ignore it we are not helping the victims of it, we are enabling the perpetrators.
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The video/audio is better, more thought out and cognizable, I am extremely dyslexic so read at your own expense :) - Listen or Watch as a podcast on youtube - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5u4DM5WN78whovrOOU_9pQqJqYGUazgt - OR even better add RSS Feed directly to on Pocket Cast - https://pca.st/9c39a6q7
https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/human
https://www.ibon.org/global-victims-of-us-military-aggression/
https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/100-million-killed-by-communist-regimes-these-numbers-are-pulled-out-of-a-hat/
