Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): Deciding to enter the military is only morally justifiable if your country's military is used in a moral and just way. There's a weird, power-serving taboo against saying this which is born of the idea that it's more important to protect the feelings of "our troops" than to discourage people from enlisting in the most murderous war machine on earth, but it's true.
Not only is it immoral to serve, but serving will likely give you 'moral injury'. A lot of veterans talk about how the actions they've done have caused them deep internal harm. If they're lucky enough to avoid PTSD or the much higher veteran suicide rate. But yes, serving to kill your fellow humans for empire purposes abroad is not only immoral, it will inflict moral injury on you.
This is a terribly difficult one to pull off for those of us living in the US. "Support the troops" is so deeply ingrained, arguing against it is viewed like slapping your grandmother. Veteran's Day, Memorial Day, 4th of July, 9/11 are all public holidays where we must "remember those who fought for us." Never mind that no soldier has fought "for me" during any of my 57 years. You're not allowed to say that out loud in the land of the free.
Another good article Caitlin, I just think a little bit more emphasis and detail on why people are forced to join the American military. There is an excellent Michael Moore documentary the title escapes me where he interviews young African Americans on the reasons for joining the military. They reveal the devils choice - if you come from an impoverished drug ridden housing project with no hope of a decent job or an education or proper healthcare and this is all offered for free by the American military and the alternative is drugs and zero opportunity what do you end up doing?
The idea that loyalty to your country supersedes all other loyalties is inculcated from an early age, and has a strong hold on citizens' minds. It's a confused idea of what your country is, and whether it is defined by what the country's authorities say and do - rather than what your country should say and do. As discussed in the previous comment, the rules that men are taught to live by are often contradictory: in wartime it's permissible to dispense with decency, in fact, indecent actions are often prescribed and considered laudable. My Lai, it turned out, was no exception. Most wars are in themselves indecent, criminal, inhuman. It is amazing in a ridiculous way that the same species that supports art, music, philosophy, creativity, religion - and "family values, " and can joke and laugh and have a good time can also do the most outrageously inhuman things. It is cognitive dissonance by order and habit: we are trained not to see what the authorities, in some contexts, don't want us to see.
Aren’t we weary of veteran suicides yet? Evidently not! US Gov./ military murders and plunders, poisons its own with toxic fuels then tries to deny, as in Hawaii and everywhere there is a military base. Yes, it is immoral, but the leaders have no conscience. They have long lost perspective of right and wrong and media perpetuates for profit.
SOP - first they take over your country and tell you that the other guy did this to you. Then they trash your money and economy , while telling you that the other guy did it and then they keep the propaganda up 24/7. Next Nato walks in and puts up the - Now Hiring Sign - up and the propaganda gets worse , as now the other guy that did this to your country must die for it. Welcome to what they did in Ukraine from 2013 to 2022 - and I watched it all and watch friends go thru the changes. Everything was Illuminescent.
The immoral actions of people serving in the military are subsumed by the chasm between civilians and soldiers, and both parties are very comfortable with this arrangement. Military enlistees and veterans, not all but many, like to imply that civilians cannot talk with any authority about America's wars because they cannot understand what is required to partake in war for the U.S. military. Many civilians do not want to engage soldiers and veterans on the subject of the immorality of killing for an illegitimate government because their "ignorance" will be thrown in their face. The media does a superb job of reinforcing the awkward relationship, never giving any consideration to the idea that the war in question is illegitimate, illegal or with no justification.
One public figure who has tried to bridge this divide is Tulsi Gabbard. She has verbally condemned U.S. jingoism and contempt of sovereignty for countries whose leaders they want to remove. She visited Assad in Syria, when terrorists that were armed with American weapons were attacking his military. Gabbard uses her military service as a justification for her aggressive criticism, but she rarely points out that having to pander to the right-wing codes of correctness only deters civilians from treading in those waters. Her defense of her right to criticize plays into the correctness codes.
I like Gabbard's ballsy approach to saying what most Americans probably believe but don't feel entitled to say, and avoid saying because they know they will be shouted down.
There are 140 MILLION Americans now in poverty according to the Poor Peoples Campaign. I think we should all appreciate what that means in the corruption of our Trade Unions survival terms for our families and communities. A lot of people join the military because they can find no other job. Tjhe responsibility for that lies with the lazy populace who support these insane wars. So let's start there.
3/31/2022
To The Editor:
In October 1962, at age 19, I slept next to the planes with the Paratroopers of the famed 82nd Airborne Division. We were waiting to jump into Havana in what would have been WWIII, if not for President Kennedy.
Russia had placed missiles in Cuba. Kennedy had mobilized our military to remove those missiles while he was in daily contact with the Russians, negotiating a way to Peace.
I am 80 now. Still grateful for president Kennedy’s love for our troops; grateful that he loved us enough to resolve the rush to WWIII by agreeing to remove U.S. missiles aimed at Russia from Turkey if the Russians took their missiles out of Cuba. Which they did.
I voted for President Biden, thinking he might have graduated from his warmongering past to discover a bit of JFK’s heroism for peace. How wrong I was!
Russia, like the United States has a human right to be free from NATO (U.S.) missiles. Most foreign affairs experts agreed. Most foreign affairs experts predicted for decades that if NATO expanded to threaten Russia, we’d be in WWIII. Biden understood that. But Biden does not care. Biden is surrounded by warmongers and fascists from the project for A New American Century, who deliberately led us into this war.
Now the bright spot is Zelensky’s peace offer to insure Ukrainians and Russians that Ukraine will no longer threaten Russia. The U.S. needs to promote this peace.
But on Saturday, Biden’s Secretary of State Tony Blinken, was in Israel trying to drum up more arms from the Israelis and our friends in Saudi Arabia (the folks who did 9/11 and bomb Yemen every day) for the war fighters in Ukraine.
There are many reporters now writing and saying that Biden, Victoria Nuland, and PNAC do not want peace. Biden says his sanctions will damage us all. Biden says we must accept decades more war.
I wonder…..who are these people? They attack us at home by cutting our wages, pensions and close plants. They ship our jobs to slaves in this constant domestic war on workers. And then, they take the domestic war on workers abroad with bullets, bombs and lies. This is their foreign policy.
I wonder….who are these people? Most of them seem to have never had a real job. Most couldn’t care less for working stiffs and our troops. Most of them are somehow the multi-millionaire Elite who are too proud to fight. And thus, the humble do the fighting. We do not need decades of more war. We need a new Peace Movement. We need a new Solidarity Movement. We need Good Jobs for All. We need a raise. We need to get along so our kids can live happy lives in happy communities.
Everywhere.
God bless Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy!
On the choice of viewing your own fortunate circumstances as due to your virtue and hard work: I remember reading about a study in which the experimenters had little groups play Monopoly. One player was given extra cash at the outset, and a special rule (I don't remember what) that made their cruising around the board easier. When the game was over, they asked all the players to what they attributed that player's victory. The others said the advantages made the difference but the player given the edge up usually said it was his or her own skill and smarts, not the extra cash and favorable rule. I've read that the game of Monopoly was invented by a socialist to illustrate the problems with capitalism, which it does...this experiment is pretty illuminating as well.
This post here is related so much to what I have been going over and over. I have read the constitution in regards to the use of the military and it has bothered me for years what has been done with the use of our military as a security/mercenary force for corporate and elite greed. As far as I can tell it was only meant as a defence in protecting the country itself! How and who got away with changing this I do not know. I do know if we gain control back of our military this whole shit show goes down the toilet! This is a must that has to be done. I have stated on democrats sites that our military is being used by the rich to get richer using the blood of the poor and they give a smug response "that's a new spin on it" etc. There is a large percentage of people in this country who are too embedded in the system to ever wake up. I fear that the use of the enemy to fight your enemies has done its work completely with those people. They would send their own children to die.
In case anyone is wondering, this is what the RINOs are saying about the military these days:
"Right now, many of us vets are looking back on our years of service and wondering what the hell we did it all for. We used to know – for the USA. Yet you look at the disaster that is our country, our culture, and our beloved military, and you just want to go find a wall and pound your head against it. But a lot fewer folks are going to have this problem in the future because a lot fewer young people are joining our military. The Pentagon can't meet its recruiting goals, and, of course, the fault is our young people, our potential soldiers, for being unwilling to sacrifice their time, and sometimes their lives, in support of the bizarre social pathologies that our garbage ruling class embraces.
"The military lost our trust, and it seems uninterested in earning it back. Time for the normals to go on strike until the military becomes a military again instead of a camouflaged faculty lounge."
Kurt Schlicter annoys me because he is a day late & a dollar short on many issues that I care about, but I've felt this way about the military in recent years. 20 years ago, I bought into Bush's ideas about 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq. I'm no pacifist, but I regret my support of Bush, now. And I regret the Obama vs. McCain choice in 2008, because Obama was at war with someone for literally 8 years--the longest of any American president. McCain, also, was an awful choice.
Now I really believe that we have a uni-party that behind the scenes tosses out all of these cultural issues just to keep the population at an even split so that we hate each other instead of the warmongering thieves who tax and inflate us into exhaustion.
But I just thought people would like to know that the semi-right wing isn't happy with the military, either.
I have often joked that the propaganda the US uses about its military, has them thinking they are joining G.I Joe, when in fact it is Cobra. The idea of serving a country is strange. Countries don't really exist. You are serving the state and their machinations. There is this concept that the United States needs to be pro active and take preemptive action to protect its boarders. Hence the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The lie that Russia and China are physical threats to us here at home. The US government never mentions anything good about either country or its people. That the isolation and ignorance makes them all that more easier to control. Patriotism is idiocy because it is merely blind loyalty to the government that creates this immoral service.
Yeah it's immoral, my paternal family we're groomed for it from birth, I came from a martial family, Dad at 4 years old had to bounce a shilling off his hospital made bed every morning, if the coin didn't bounce he'd have to do the hospital folds again, lucky he divorced my Mum. Army was the first full time job I ever had. Didn't enjoy being experimented on with the Q-Dots and Nano tech, I think I was the first digger to actually work it out, most of the rest still don't know. Hey, at least I missed out on Bougainville and East Timor where the anti malaria drug trials were, that there plus all the needles(Nano tech) is what causes the high suicide rates, yes, including the moral injuries. You have to live it, to understand it. I know so, they're still trying to cover it up.
Caitlin, when you realize the grave atrocity of the covid-19 injections, it's going to be worse then nuclear war. Presides the evil ones don't want to contaminate all the resources with nuclear fall out, if they drop the big ones, it'll be neutrino bombs. I doubt it will come to that, as the "World Leaders" think they'll be immune to the covid-19 that they've unleashed, they're not. By 2030 the mother of all black swans will arrive.
Not only is it immoral to serve, but serving will likely give you 'moral injury'. A lot of veterans talk about how the actions they've done have caused them deep internal harm. If they're lucky enough to avoid PTSD or the much higher veteran suicide rate. But yes, serving to kill your fellow humans for empire purposes abroad is not only immoral, it will inflict moral injury on you.
This is a terribly difficult one to pull off for those of us living in the US. "Support the troops" is so deeply ingrained, arguing against it is viewed like slapping your grandmother. Veteran's Day, Memorial Day, 4th of July, 9/11 are all public holidays where we must "remember those who fought for us." Never mind that no soldier has fought "for me" during any of my 57 years. You're not allowed to say that out loud in the land of the free.
Another good article Caitlin, I just think a little bit more emphasis and detail on why people are forced to join the American military. There is an excellent Michael Moore documentary the title escapes me where he interviews young African Americans on the reasons for joining the military. They reveal the devils choice - if you come from an impoverished drug ridden housing project with no hope of a decent job or an education or proper healthcare and this is all offered for free by the American military and the alternative is drugs and zero opportunity what do you end up doing?
The idea that loyalty to your country supersedes all other loyalties is inculcated from an early age, and has a strong hold on citizens' minds. It's a confused idea of what your country is, and whether it is defined by what the country's authorities say and do - rather than what your country should say and do. As discussed in the previous comment, the rules that men are taught to live by are often contradictory: in wartime it's permissible to dispense with decency, in fact, indecent actions are often prescribed and considered laudable. My Lai, it turned out, was no exception. Most wars are in themselves indecent, criminal, inhuman. It is amazing in a ridiculous way that the same species that supports art, music, philosophy, creativity, religion - and "family values, " and can joke and laugh and have a good time can also do the most outrageously inhuman things. It is cognitive dissonance by order and habit: we are trained not to see what the authorities, in some contexts, don't want us to see.
Kill one man you are a murderer. Kill thousands for your country, they give you a medal.
Aren’t we weary of veteran suicides yet? Evidently not! US Gov./ military murders and plunders, poisons its own with toxic fuels then tries to deny, as in Hawaii and everywhere there is a military base. Yes, it is immoral, but the leaders have no conscience. They have long lost perspective of right and wrong and media perpetuates for profit.
SOP - first they take over your country and tell you that the other guy did this to you. Then they trash your money and economy , while telling you that the other guy did it and then they keep the propaganda up 24/7. Next Nato walks in and puts up the - Now Hiring Sign - up and the propaganda gets worse , as now the other guy that did this to your country must die for it. Welcome to what they did in Ukraine from 2013 to 2022 - and I watched it all and watch friends go thru the changes. Everything was Illuminescent.
The immoral actions of people serving in the military are subsumed by the chasm between civilians and soldiers, and both parties are very comfortable with this arrangement. Military enlistees and veterans, not all but many, like to imply that civilians cannot talk with any authority about America's wars because they cannot understand what is required to partake in war for the U.S. military. Many civilians do not want to engage soldiers and veterans on the subject of the immorality of killing for an illegitimate government because their "ignorance" will be thrown in their face. The media does a superb job of reinforcing the awkward relationship, never giving any consideration to the idea that the war in question is illegitimate, illegal or with no justification.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FnO3igOkOk
One public figure who has tried to bridge this divide is Tulsi Gabbard. She has verbally condemned U.S. jingoism and contempt of sovereignty for countries whose leaders they want to remove. She visited Assad in Syria, when terrorists that were armed with American weapons were attacking his military. Gabbard uses her military service as a justification for her aggressive criticism, but she rarely points out that having to pander to the right-wing codes of correctness only deters civilians from treading in those waters. Her defense of her right to criticize plays into the correctness codes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4Y1jqwG2Jo
I like Gabbard's ballsy approach to saying what most Americans probably believe but don't feel entitled to say, and avoid saying because they know they will be shouted down.
Cait! Wrong speak, wrong speak! Lol. You’re the best
There are 140 MILLION Americans now in poverty according to the Poor Peoples Campaign. I think we should all appreciate what that means in the corruption of our Trade Unions survival terms for our families and communities. A lot of people join the military because they can find no other job. Tjhe responsibility for that lies with the lazy populace who support these insane wars. So let's start there.
3/31/2022
To The Editor:
In October 1962, at age 19, I slept next to the planes with the Paratroopers of the famed 82nd Airborne Division. We were waiting to jump into Havana in what would have been WWIII, if not for President Kennedy.
Russia had placed missiles in Cuba. Kennedy had mobilized our military to remove those missiles while he was in daily contact with the Russians, negotiating a way to Peace.
I am 80 now. Still grateful for president Kennedy’s love for our troops; grateful that he loved us enough to resolve the rush to WWIII by agreeing to remove U.S. missiles aimed at Russia from Turkey if the Russians took their missiles out of Cuba. Which they did.
I voted for President Biden, thinking he might have graduated from his warmongering past to discover a bit of JFK’s heroism for peace. How wrong I was!
Russia, like the United States has a human right to be free from NATO (U.S.) missiles. Most foreign affairs experts agreed. Most foreign affairs experts predicted for decades that if NATO expanded to threaten Russia, we’d be in WWIII. Biden understood that. But Biden does not care. Biden is surrounded by warmongers and fascists from the project for A New American Century, who deliberately led us into this war.
Now the bright spot is Zelensky’s peace offer to insure Ukrainians and Russians that Ukraine will no longer threaten Russia. The U.S. needs to promote this peace.
But on Saturday, Biden’s Secretary of State Tony Blinken, was in Israel trying to drum up more arms from the Israelis and our friends in Saudi Arabia (the folks who did 9/11 and bomb Yemen every day) for the war fighters in Ukraine.
There are many reporters now writing and saying that Biden, Victoria Nuland, and PNAC do not want peace. Biden says his sanctions will damage us all. Biden says we must accept decades more war.
I wonder…..who are these people? They attack us at home by cutting our wages, pensions and close plants. They ship our jobs to slaves in this constant domestic war on workers. And then, they take the domestic war on workers abroad with bullets, bombs and lies. This is their foreign policy.
I wonder….who are these people? Most of them seem to have never had a real job. Most couldn’t care less for working stiffs and our troops. Most of them are somehow the multi-millionaire Elite who are too proud to fight. And thus, the humble do the fighting. We do not need decades of more war. We need a new Peace Movement. We need a new Solidarity Movement. We need Good Jobs for All. We need a raise. We need to get along so our kids can live happy lives in happy communities.
Everywhere.
God bless Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy!
– Tom Laney, Mercedes, TX
On the choice of viewing your own fortunate circumstances as due to your virtue and hard work: I remember reading about a study in which the experimenters had little groups play Monopoly. One player was given extra cash at the outset, and a special rule (I don't remember what) that made their cruising around the board easier. When the game was over, they asked all the players to what they attributed that player's victory. The others said the advantages made the difference but the player given the edge up usually said it was his or her own skill and smarts, not the extra cash and favorable rule. I've read that the game of Monopoly was invented by a socialist to illustrate the problems with capitalism, which it does...this experiment is pretty illuminating as well.
This post here is related so much to what I have been going over and over. I have read the constitution in regards to the use of the military and it has bothered me for years what has been done with the use of our military as a security/mercenary force for corporate and elite greed. As far as I can tell it was only meant as a defence in protecting the country itself! How and who got away with changing this I do not know. I do know if we gain control back of our military this whole shit show goes down the toilet! This is a must that has to be done. I have stated on democrats sites that our military is being used by the rich to get richer using the blood of the poor and they give a smug response "that's a new spin on it" etc. There is a large percentage of people in this country who are too embedded in the system to ever wake up. I fear that the use of the enemy to fight your enemies has done its work completely with those people. They would send their own children to die.
In case anyone is wondering, this is what the RINOs are saying about the military these days:
"Right now, many of us vets are looking back on our years of service and wondering what the hell we did it all for. We used to know – for the USA. Yet you look at the disaster that is our country, our culture, and our beloved military, and you just want to go find a wall and pound your head against it. But a lot fewer folks are going to have this problem in the future because a lot fewer young people are joining our military. The Pentagon can't meet its recruiting goals, and, of course, the fault is our young people, our potential soldiers, for being unwilling to sacrifice their time, and sometimes their lives, in support of the bizarre social pathologies that our garbage ruling class embraces.
"The military lost our trust, and it seems uninterested in earning it back. Time for the normals to go on strike until the military becomes a military again instead of a camouflaged faculty lounge."
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2023/03/27/americans-have-stopped-trusting-the-pentagon-with-their-lives-n2621099
Kurt Schlicter annoys me because he is a day late & a dollar short on many issues that I care about, but I've felt this way about the military in recent years. 20 years ago, I bought into Bush's ideas about 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq. I'm no pacifist, but I regret my support of Bush, now. And I regret the Obama vs. McCain choice in 2008, because Obama was at war with someone for literally 8 years--the longest of any American president. McCain, also, was an awful choice.
Now I really believe that we have a uni-party that behind the scenes tosses out all of these cultural issues just to keep the population at an even split so that we hate each other instead of the warmongering thieves who tax and inflate us into exhaustion.
But I just thought people would like to know that the semi-right wing isn't happy with the military, either.
What is the single purpose of the military? And what does the real CIA have to say about that?
https://www.theonion.com/god-angrily-clarifies-dont-kill-rule-1819566178
I have often joked that the propaganda the US uses about its military, has them thinking they are joining G.I Joe, when in fact it is Cobra. The idea of serving a country is strange. Countries don't really exist. You are serving the state and their machinations. There is this concept that the United States needs to be pro active and take preemptive action to protect its boarders. Hence the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The lie that Russia and China are physical threats to us here at home. The US government never mentions anything good about either country or its people. That the isolation and ignorance makes them all that more easier to control. Patriotism is idiocy because it is merely blind loyalty to the government that creates this immoral service.
Yeah it's immoral, my paternal family we're groomed for it from birth, I came from a martial family, Dad at 4 years old had to bounce a shilling off his hospital made bed every morning, if the coin didn't bounce he'd have to do the hospital folds again, lucky he divorced my Mum. Army was the first full time job I ever had. Didn't enjoy being experimented on with the Q-Dots and Nano tech, I think I was the first digger to actually work it out, most of the rest still don't know. Hey, at least I missed out on Bougainville and East Timor where the anti malaria drug trials were, that there plus all the needles(Nano tech) is what causes the high suicide rates, yes, including the moral injuries. You have to live it, to understand it. I know so, they're still trying to cover it up.
Caitlin, when you realize the grave atrocity of the covid-19 injections, it's going to be worse then nuclear war. Presides the evil ones don't want to contaminate all the resources with nuclear fall out, if they drop the big ones, it'll be neutrino bombs. I doubt it will come to that, as the "World Leaders" think they'll be immune to the covid-19 that they've unleashed, they're not. By 2030 the mother of all black swans will arrive.