That’s easy. I have had a friend die in a previous war, a war i didn’t approve of either. All human death is tragic. Most wars are unnecessary and perpetrated by a minority in power, a minority who would never be first to a battlefield. Show me someone in power willing to die for their cause and I’ll consider it a candidate for a worthy cause.
Why do they always send the poor?
People are gambling with their lives when they sign up. I feel sorry for the poor who have little other choice, but that’s about it
I’m legitimately curious if you are asking this because you think only Americans kill other country’s civilians during conflict or if that’s the only country whose murder of innocent civilians bothers you.
I’d hazard a guess that the US kills a lot more civilians than a typical country.
<Russia enters the chat.>
Russia is not a typical country…
Ok, so I gather from the responses, it’s ok to murder citizens if you come in under an atypical country’s murder count.
From which response do you get the sense that it would be ok? I only see explanations why this discussion is about the US.
deleted by creator
Does this mean we’re not going to be penpals?
deleted by creator
It’s a gift.
BTW, it’s not only the murder of civilians that makes the US military so evil. It’s also the sheer scope of brutality, in terms of size and time that the US has perpetrated with not only direct military action, but also proxy military actions, and economic and civil violence that is facilitated by the threat of military action.
Other people being shits has no bearing on how big a shit you are.
So I was right. You are ok with murder at a certain scale and efficiency.
deleted by creator
Beep Boop. You’re ok with murder.
Well that literally the opposite of what I said, but okay.
We’re just exceptional at it.
We’re a country of terrorists. As you say, we’ve streamlined the process.
We’re just not the only country of terrorists and my original question to the OP stands. I couldn’t find his post where he asked why Russia’s populace weren’t up in arms over the wholesale slaughter of Ukrainian civilians. I have to assume that there’s something about the US that bothers him more than the murdered civilians.
This sounds very “you’re not allowed to discipline your child until you’ve disciplined every other naughty child in the world.”
Intentional misinterpretation on your part does not warrant me needing to explain further.
Says the one who’s intentionally misinterpreting almost every response in this thread.
I stopped having sympathy for service people and their families after enough time passed for them to realize how fucked the leadership is (and the US culture that fuels it), and to have at least not reenlisted. At this point my attitude is that every casualty is tragic, but y’all actively deserve it.
My family is friends with another family who have kids of similar age. All three of their kids have enlisted and/or reenlisted during all of this. So far, I have avoided communicating my opinion to them, but if circumstances force the issue, I’ve already decided that I’m going to be honest with them about my attitude.
Because propaganda and indoctrination of course
Honestly, I don’t really care at this point. They signed a contract for a job, just like everyone else. But they get free (not great) healthcare for life, and better mortgage rates than everyone else. In some states veterans get tax breaks. Oh and they get free college afterwards. They can also save up a decent chunk of change since basic expenses are paid when on duty/deployed.
Fucking garbage men do more to benefit my day to day life than any US soldier, and they get fraction of that. We haven’t had a draft since Vietnam. I don’t owe you shit for choosing a job with a lot of rewards and a low retirement age that has a high mortality rate.
Garbage men don’t get parades. They also don’t make 2-5 years of their life the basis of their entire identity, and tell everyone they encounter about it.
Yeah came here to say this. No one in my circles talks about the death of our troops it’s a tragedy. Just another statistic we throw around when talking about how incompetent our government is.
Why would I direct my anger at the every day people who decided to sacrifice to serve our country and not the people that sent them to fight in an unjust and unnecessary conflict?
Can I fault a teenager for believing their country is worth fighting for? No
Honest question: do people really think that attacking a third world country, thousands of kilometres away from your home, that hasn’t attacked you, is “serving their country”?
We’re not talking about defending yourself from an invading attack, but going far away to invade a foreign country.
The soldiers duty to refuse to carry out illegal orders such as slaughtering civilians notwithstanding, yes I think volunteering to fight for your country, even in an unjust war, is service.
The saying goes that the fish rots from the head down. There are stops all down the chain of command that could prevent soldiers from fighting unjust wars, and that’s where the blame should lie.
Sadly the US military has a lot of corruption and pushing back on a CO or refusing an illegal order can end your career in the military or worse. That doesn’t mean I blame the people at the end of the chain, I blame the people at the head. This includes Obama’s illegal drone strikes on targets in Syria and Yemen and various other atrocities and not just Trumps latests
You think soldiers ar absolved of responsibility just because their superiors are corrupt? Ultimately they’re the ones pulling the trigger, so a massive chunk of the blame with America’s crimes lie with precisely them. They are not innocent, they are murderers.
If the soldier is pulling the trigger on civilians then yes they are responsible. If they are pulling the trigger against enemy warfighters in an unjust war, then the buck stops at the CiC. It should not be up to individual soldiers on whether a certain operation is just or not.
Sorry, I can not agree given how the USA systematically engages in unjust wars. The USA has bombed almost 500 schools in Iran this year. Even if you’re just the cook at a US air base, you’re complicit. The whole machinery depends on people signing up and dedicating lots of effort into making it work. You can’t claim ignorance in this day and age, and you can’t say you’re just following orders when you’re there voluntarily.
How do you mean “country is worth fighting for”?
Other than 9/11, when was the last time we worried about being attacked?
The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.
-Stalin
Same reason why you care more about friends and family deaths than random other people. Basic tribalism.
It’s simple: Americans are a kind of fascists
“They might be known murderers, rapists and thieves, but they’re OUR murderers! Also, the death of brown people is not really sad like that, come on…”
It’s ingrained in their culture. From very young, the education system has indoctrinated the belief that their wars were justified and have romanticized the means because the ends promised a better future. They just left out the relevant parts that they eventually manipulate because if they told people the real reasoning, people wouldn’t “fight” for the causes.
The instinctively blind and gullible, short-sighted “patriots” follow the orders they are given because they refuse to see beyond their cult. They buy into the promise and because the story they were told was nice and pretty, they conflate everything and are manipulated into serving the corrupt evil they should be destroying. It’s ironic.
I can understand how people in those circles want to pay respect and may even find some attachment to the idea because someone they were close to got involved in the same cult, but at some point you need to have some kind of moral compass that tells you what you’re doing is wrong. You need to separate the idea from the reality. They don’t.
ranting
To these people, they live their lives as sheep, blindly trusting the patriotic stories being told to them and repeating the same mistakes as those before them. Patriotism is a dangerous mindset. The west likes to romanticize war in every fashion. War is not just and war is not pretty. No matter what. People see the headlines and want to believe “they’re just defending themselves” but that doesn’t justify what happens afterwards.
The death of any soldier is a tragic event. They are at the end of the day just a human being who had wants and desires.
Sure, there will always be some select zealots who really did sign up for “the love of the game”, as it were. But the vast majority of almost all enlisted or conscripted forces are a bunch of regular folk who are either forced into this by desperation or necessity, or fed enough curated propaganda that they think they’re doing the right thing- and don’t know any better.
This applies to even the worst countries, US, russia, even Nazi Germany; most of Germany’s troops in WWII were a bunch of scared kids scammed by propaganda or forced into the service when Hitler’s back was against the wall.
And that’s really the crux of it- That soldier died because of their leader’s actions, and that’s where the blame should lie. Lemmy’s insatiable dehumanization of most “colonizer” military forces is frankly downright disgusting.
Soldiers deaths are always tragic. What is even more tragic is the reason they are dying this time around. To protect the trump-epstein class. For God and Country? No, for Don and Jeff.
Because Americans live inside a special reality where they are never wrong, so if someone kills one of American who was trying to kill them. The soldier is a martyr and the person who killed in self defense is a murderer.
