memes

I mean yeah. Communists aren't nazis. The USSR conducted extensive background checks on the soldiers of the nazi military to prosecute any war criminals for their crimes against humanity.

This isn't saying there's a clean nor permanently stained German military - it was shades on the slider. An example of this was that during the nazi campaign east in the "liebensraum" phase there were both SS and general army battalions engaged in genocide of entire villages. There was also a few battalions that either did not participate ( their commanders actually had a moral backbone). The Soviet investigation into nazi warcrimes would gather evidence of either case and make a judgment to either prosecute the soldiers involved or pardon them.

A more contemporary version would be looking into the service history of soldiers and seeing what careers they lead and their political associations are. An infantryman that was stationed in FOB bumfucksville Valley, Iraq where the most illegal thing he did was drink bootleg rotgut and work out the entire time and has no political associations as a dumb boot that checked out of politics to watch his team on Sundays would be considered pardonable whereas the logistics guy that spent his entire career counting the grooves on rifle handgrips and giving briefings to dipshit officers on the importance of not loosing equipment but has right-militia associations and is suspected of smuggling military equipment out to them would face further investigation and possibly prison if not execution depending on circumstances.

Making sweeping condemnations or pardons is not the communist way. Scientific examination of the evidence on all issues is.

Like Alaskaball pointed out extreme background checks on all US soldiers, draft or not, seeing the actively participated in war crimes and crimes against humanity in any and all of the past and present US wars and punishment accordingly should be the way. For the rest radicalization/re-education till they can recognize the error of their involvement and then actively being comrades is a good line to draw

This is better executed the closer to us the conflict is. For lets say Vietnam we cant do any such thing at this point but when talking active boots on the ground we do know that a a big chunk, likely a majority was involved in crimes against humanity and war crimes one way or another. And we do know that the vast vast vast majority doesnt regret em or has reconsidered and is proud , hell a big majority % of em voted for Trump and supported every subsequent war. So in this sense treating Vietnam vets as you would have treated nazi soldiers will have you be correct more than often than not

The Soviets killed a bunch of Nazi soldiers after they were captured (fucking good) and put a lot more into their gulag system for 4-10 years where they either died or ended up reeducated. Nazi soldiers were not treated well, though said Nazis were trying to genocide all kinds of groups, including settler-colonizing Russia, and burned, raped, and pillaged their way to Stalingrad, so I'm not going to cry over them under any circumstances.

:07: for coming around and winding up on the right side of things.