depends on if the soldier had a real material choice to enlist or not. some definitely deserve it, but many are as powerless as you and me
When you say “real material choice” you must be more specific. Even for the big majority of people of low income backgrounds that enlist (which is noticably less of a % than a lot of people think) the choice isnt between enlisting to the most genocidal and destructive org in modern history(not saying the already knew it or should) or starvation,asbolute poverty and homelessness. It usualy is between a sucky ,struggling to make ends meet life with no upwards social mobility that is still better than what billions of people experience or enlisting. So it depends if you consider this “not having a real material choice” and if you expect a non american or third worlder to think of it as such . Also thinking about how this can be applied to other jobs that offer safe and stable income and have a similar % of poor people joining in like lets say cops and in context of how that “understanding” could be applied in many other cases through modern history
I’ve said it before, the only reason I joined the military is cause I was homeless, so those people do exist. On top of that most people don’t sign up cause they actually want to fight, its just a well paying job. America has crazy amounts of military and anti “terrorism” propaganda, most people really don’t have any idea of the horrors our military commits. And even if they end up realizing it after they join (I didn’t even see any of it till I was about a year in) you can’t get out, getting out of a military contract is damn near impossible and if you go AWOL you go to jail for a long time.
This has been documented by the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation in their study on the recruitment demographics of the united $tates military, which found that only about 10-11% of the united $tates military recruits come from the poorest quintile
aha ok, it’s only a tenth, then fuck them
my point is that both groups exist
The only notably overrepresented group among recruits are Indigenous people
I know, I basically just use any opportunity to spread that article around to disabuse people (not you, just other readers) of the notion that soldiery is necessarily proletarian or that soldiers as a class have revolutionary potential. It has been a very popular framing, especially in the Bush years (which shaped the political minds of the generation currently vomiting their shit takes all over the pages of every paper of record).
only about 10-11% of the united $tates military recruits come from the poorest quintile (defined as making less than $33,000 annually), with a fourth of the military coming from areas whose median income is more than $65,000 annually.
If 25% come from an area (not a household) with a median income of over $65K annually, doesn’t that mean that 75% – an overwhelming majority – come from areas that make less than that?
We can’t simultaneously say “the middle class has been hollowed out/the costs of a college education have skyrocketed/even once-professional jobs are being proletarianized” but then turn around and say that if your family makes more than $33K you can’t really claim to have been roped in to the military by your material conditions. Sure, the military isn’t primarily made up of the poorest among us. But we can’t say it’s mostly middle class either, because if you’re raising a family on $50K, you aren’t middle class in much of the country.
The other important point here is that a lot of troops are recruited as children, after being fed wall-to-wall lies about what the military actually does, all at the behest of the most pervasive propaganda machine ever created.
They’re not the poorest among us because they’re not homeless or part of the apartheid labor underclass of undocumented immigrants - or at least the vast majority are not.
But sure, on the scale within the imperial core, the military pulls from poorer families. However, this does not justify the murder of others, let alone doing so to advance the interests of capital exporters. Propaganda plays a very heavy role here and it’s one that makes them violent chauvinists, it’s how they get recruited, it’s how they justify their crimes, it’s how they rationalize themselves as a special class of “civilians” later, it’s why vets become cops and chuds so ridiculously often. Finally, materialists will understand that classes and other groupings of people are the product of their conditions. All of the classes and groupings. Academics, thieves, volunteers, Nazis. But it’s very important to separate an understanding of the genesis of these groups of people and sympathizing with them, or reminding oneself to do so for a heinous enemy group in particular.
Unrepentant vets must be treated like cops; you can only consider them assets for socialism if they reject the systems they supported as well as their part in doing so. And they are not ripe for the picking by default; they have a lot more shit to work through to end up a socialist than the average imperial core citizen.
