Excited to find the western chauvinists in this community.
Edit: Wow apparently the only people on chapo dot chat are whitees unaffected by and benefiting from their imperialism confidently declaring how the perpetrators are to be treated.
Y’all have some nerve
Edit 2:
ITT If you shoot a black kid in the back in downtown Baltimore I want nothing to do with you. If you perfarate an entire back family in Mogadischu or Baghdad that’s ok, you did growth and spaces.
I re-read the thing again
If you or someone you love has been war crimed you can yell at the troops
If you are performatively hand-wringing on behalf of an imaginary person you have created in your mind who has been war crimed please shut the fuck up.
I re-read the thing again
If you or someone you love has been murdered by police you can yell at the cops
If you are performatively hand-wringing on behalf of an imaginary person you have created in your mind who has been murdered by police please shut the fuck up.
Cops and soldiers, believe it or not, have very different motivations and experiences that lead to very different outcomes. Lots of soldiers come back from the mistake they made at 18 thinking “god damn that was a huge fucking mistake I should fight against the thing I contributed to”.
Cops don’t do this. Cops get pay raises for twenty years then do shitloads of overtime and then retire with six figure pensions.
There are a lot of leftist veterans because most people become soldiers for reasons like “I wanted to serve my country” or “I’m from a military family” or “I want to get out of this one horse town” or “I want to see the world”. Then they spend four or six years not doing that, realize their country is bullshit and everything they’ve been taught about it is a lie, maybe directly do some war crimes, and then when their contract comes up they’ve got PTSD, disability, and a seething hatred for the US government.
Cops don’t have that experience. People become cops either 1.) Because they want to help people in their communities or 2.) Because they get off on authority and want to use fear and violence to make other people respect them. People in group 1.) usually wash out within a year or become people in group 2.) People in group 2.) do cop shit for twenty years then retired with huge pensions because being a cop is pretty easy and unless you die of a heart attack or do too many crimes too publicly you can basically just cruise til retirement.
Are their roles in imperialism similar? Sure, they are. But the people involved are very different, the way they experience imperialism is very different, and their outcomes are very different.
To whit; At one point during Vietnam there were commies trying to organize the enlisted troops and they almost got away with it.
No one has ever tried to organize the cops.
I honestly don’t know where this hand-wringing about The Troops comes from. It certainly doesn’t come from theory or the lessons of any revolution ever, anywhere in the world. Reading through here I’m starting to suspect it’s a cultural diffusion of the conservative canard that “Anti-War protestors spit on returning soldiers”, like people just assume that the Troops must hate the left and the left must hate the troops because that’s what we were taught growing up and everyone just believed it.
“Advocacy and empathy regarding issues that do not personally affect you is bad, actually”
Are we talking about advocacy and empathy or are we talking about extremely online people trying to score points on twitter by being more woke than thou?
Contributing to orgs that actually do things is advocacy, listening to people who have experienced the sharp end of imperialism is empathy.
Deliberately poking a sleeping shark in the ass on twitter because you know it’ll do something exciting is neither of those.
I’m perpetually fascinated by people here who tout ACAB while also twisting themselves into pretzels to excuse soldiers. I guess being complicit in a system that terrorizes the poor, minorities, and marginalized groups while acting as armed forces of capital is bad on US soil, but excusable overseas? Am I understanding this right?
Because I’m not a baby brained liberal who gives a flying fuck about the moral culpability of individuals.
Let’s think materially here. What is the end goal of a left wing movement? Is it Revolution or is it feeling morally superior to those you think have committed sins against the people? If it’s the former, do you think that in a future revolutionary scenario that the people could defeat the largest police state in the world, roving bands of armed reactionary private citizens and the most technologically advanced and well-funded military in the world? Especially in a country where the rural areas are hotbeds of reactionary beliefs and activities while most solidarity-minded people are concentrated in a handful of cities?
1.) Cops can quit
2.) Cops are a completely separate class of petty landless warriors who are distinct from American society. They have class interests that differ from both the working class and bourgeois due to their unique position as the only habitually armed class in society.
3.) Vets are almost all working class upon leaving the military.
That would only be a fair comparison with veterans and ex-cops.
And be honest, how likely is it that an ex-cop has actually reformed?
The only ex-cops that I might trust are those that quit as whistle-blowers; or that were minorities policing minority neighborhoods in attempts at harm reduction or something like that.
Yeah, that’s all I’m really commenting on here. This site seems to reject cops pretty quickly but puts a lot of effort into embracing vets and I’m asking what real difference is between the two groups, outside of average age
One difference is the people they’re trained to oppress.
Cops are trained to oppress their own countrymen. Soldiers are trained to oppress people on the other side of the world.
It’s why in revolutions we see the military flip long before cops do. Cops are always the last holdouts.
ACAB applies to people who are currently cops, if they are “good” and quit, then they are no longer cops.
this is extremely stupid )which is a slur) bullshit because this is stupid jesus shit I don’t give a shit if the vets are contrite I care if they are willing to teach other leftists how to plot artillery trajectories. Shit in one hand and apologize for war crimes in the other and see which fills up? The dead are dead we can do nothing for them and your outrage and demands for contrition are anti-materialist self serving bullshit because you want to prove that you’re holier and smarter and worthier than the ones who were mislead and only came to the light after doing evil.
It’s stupid shit. Some fucking door-kicking grunt who has enough brain cells to jack off and clean a rifle but not both at the same time is not some morally culpable architect of centuries long world spanning evil who has to answer to the people’s tribunal. Fuck that masturbatory performative Austin Red Guards bulls hit.
I don’t need contrition. I don’t need shame. I don’t need vets to roll around in the mud and tear their clothes and abase themselves.
I need veterans who can take a leftist who cries when they see an underfed puppy and turn that leftist in to a cold eyed murderer who will make the call to level a goddamn city block because the capitalists are servicing tanks in the sub basement of a kindergarten. I need murderers and killers and doers of deeds, not your fucking fake ass powerless tumblr kangaroo court where you perform self righteousness for your Steven Universe watching peers. gtfo out of here with that shit. I want to win, and winning is messy and hundreds of millions of people are gonna die. We will make no excuse for the terror and we do not give a shit who you were before you were cast in the mold of a fucking revolutionary.
Revisionist trash wrecker bullshit. You tell me that troops need to writhe at your feet before you deem them worthy, I’m going to break your jaw with a hammer because the thing standing between the world and revolution is you, not the fucking troops.
spikes a bottle of mad dog and rips his shirt off.
The dead are dead we can do nothing for them
What if the dead were my family? Are you so enveloped in your imperialist view you can’t imagine the effect on other people?
Will vengeance bring your family back? Go shoot some veterans in the head. There is nothing to stop you. Go kill a few and then report back on how this has advanced the cause of justice in the world.
Valuing the feelings of the perpetrator over the victim’s is a sure sign you are on the correct path. I’ll bring that up the next time a cop shoots a black teenager in the back of the head for eating chips to loud.
We’d get fucking owned.
You’ll fucking deserve it too .
Excluding vets from American leftist movements
Who is saying that? how is “leftist troops should expect to be dunked on sometimes if they are serious about being leftists” equate to “troops shouldn’t join the leftist movement”.
This tweet is right but the comments are going to be filled to the brim with shit takes because the majority of the users of this website live in the USA or another NATO country.
Edit: yep lol
Reading the comments in this thread is going to unironically turn me into a third world Maoist
Yeah but I’m trying to be aware of my privilege, and I think you can count the number of white people in South Africa that moved to the country post 1994 and live in what is considered an “informal settlement” (I really don’t like calling towns that, but anyways) on less than 400USD a month on one hand.
If you want my take on the military issue, I think leftists should mass organise to join the military for training if they are interested in that, unless they start banning communists or something. I’m not going to tell people in the USA how to do leftism or anything, as that would be extremely arrogant and ignorant as I don’t live there and have little understdanding of how things are on the ground. So just discard my opinion if it’s irrelevant. But please let me make fun of the goons that trained and supplied the apartheid troops, it’s all I have left.
spoiler
Joke at the end there, I’m putting this here because I suck at posting
I don’t hold grudges too much, it’s all good. I just thought it was funny that you were calling out Amerikkkans when white South Africans are probably the only people in the world that are on the whole more reactionary than white Americans. It’s kind of a cope, like we can say "well at least in not some Afrikaaner trying to start an ethnostate in Orania
im a leftist landlord. we exist! please be nice to me
