the_dunk_tank

When there is a draft, people "joining" the military are more likely to be victims.

When there is no draft and you can make more per hour working at Taco Bell than as an E1 in the army, people joining the military are likely suckers at best and imperialist at worst.

There's a big difference between conscripts and drafted soldiers (Vietnam) and volunteer troops that fought in modern US wars.

Are veterans irredeemable? No of course not, but people actually have to show regret for what they did if they want to be forgiven.

Veteran of US wars that simultaneously thinks Ukraine is facing a genocide. Like what does that imply about you?

As far as I'm concerned you can be a veteran and still be based as long as you're on that Mike Prysner shit

Some lefists claim without the military there can be no revolution and that militaries are generally made up of working class folks who are just as frustrated as the rest of us

I mean its a good argument, it's just too bad the US military is the exception to that rule, the US capitalist class and their military establishment are not stupid

Most members of the military come from middle-class neighborhoods. The middle three quintiles for household income were overrepresented among enlisted recruits, and the top and bottom quintiles were underrepresented. Council of foreign relations

There's also no draft, no poltical access to military bases which act as glorified gated communities, insulating the working class service members in a simulation of middle class American achievement

The US military police and intelligence service is also oversized in comparison to other militaries and they're ideologically trained, it's like socialists in the 19th century advising the left to recruit the British military, even then with drafts available it would have been a ludicrous idea on its face

Now if we were talking about ex-troops we may have something there, but even then you still need activated troops with access to arms to pull a revolution off

Basically Thrid Worldists win yet again :spongebob-party:

I think people vastly overrate how useful your average veteran would be in a revolutionary war. The majority of jobs in the military are just typical civilian jobs. Oh boy, the dude who spend his entire stint in Germany driving trucks and loading boxes onto and off of trucks is going to turn the tide in the revolutionary war, having experience that's totally not identical to the countless civilian truck drivers and warehouse workers. And for the people who actually saw combat, the majority are either ghouls who get off of war crimes or suffer from PTSD to the point where you don't want them to be anywhere near a gun.

Of the five veterans I know who actually went into detail about their enlistment, three of them didn't see combat and one of them suffers from PTSD and gives me extremely uncomfortable vibes. So that leaves with one dude out of five who actually has useful combat experience. Except he has multiple health issues (he was deployed in Iraq during Desert Storm) ranging from his finger joints constantly feeling numb to these weird bumps on his neck to tinnitus. The two who didn't see combat also suffer from tinnitus, one of them to the point where you had to half-shout at him or else he couldn't hear what you said.

I'm just not seeing what other people are seeing. You're not going to convince SF to join your cause. They're literally indoctrinated as part of their training to not defect to the enemy, whether the enemy is within or without. It makes about as much sense as trying to convince a CIA case officer to become a communist.

The sad truth that I've come to realize after rubbing shoulders with enough veterans is that most veterans are broken people. If they're lucky, only their physical bodies are broken. If they're not so lucky, well.

It's not they can help us civilians but us civilians who need to help them.

Tankie

Opinion discarded

You can easily tell if someone is truly seeking redemption by the way they react when people don't forgive them immediately just because they say "war bad, actually". Redemption is about doing the right thing to correct your past sins even if others no longer trust you, and forgiveness is up to the people you victimized and betrayed.

As for helping veterans, that's great and all, but I highly doubt the Black Panthers were just giving them free food and housing without educating them on why their actions in Vietnam were wrong and how they can atone for them.

And for the people going "we need military for a revolution." Correct, but take a look back in history. Almost all of the professional military were disillusioned with war or the state and/or starving to death. The communists won them because they promised to end pointless wars and provide food. Right now, your average soldier in the US military is quite comfortable. All they do is stand around on base, sit on a ship for 4 years, get free hot meals and play on their phones until their training session, and they WANT action because they're bored.

The ones who are disillusioned are the ones who fought and got nothing in return or wasted half a decade in service only to have 0 job training. The state isn't scared of those individuals because the majority of soldiers and veterans do fine, and if they aren't doing fine, they're still not angry enough to inspire regiment. And wrt the Black Panthers, they were doing this shit during a turbulent civil rights era where the government considered them the greatest threat - more than the Soviets - because they were uniting all sorts of marginalized people. What group or movement has that status today? Antifa? BLM? Lol.