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Here's a better message for Catholics in the army:
You swore an oath to defend the US and its constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. A domestic enemy is actively soiling the office of the president, and rather than defend us against him, you continue to follow his orders. Stop doing what's easy, and start doing what's right.
Those people would be mad if they could read.. but one of the reasons they join is because reading wasn't so great
That's not a failure of their own. I got straight As and graduated college and have been working with people with only highschool education. I can tell you that it's the system. Older people can definitely learn new things if they're attention couples with a similar push from the educator's side.
You speak as if half Americans did not actually vote for Trump. They would need to fight much more than just Trump himself. Trump perfectly represents what America has always been.
Closer to a third.
Another full third couldn't be bothered to get off their asses and vote at all.
Um... half of Americans did not actually vote for Trump. That's how halves work. The US isn't one person.
If half the US is lining up to suck Trump's micropenis, and the other half want his head on a pike, which half do you think is my target audience here? The us has a Nazi problem, like fucking bad, but it also has people who aren't Nazis, and Trump absolutely does not represent those people. What they need to be is spurred into action - lumping them in with the Nazis will only serve the Nazis.
The question is if the 2024 election was rigged, or if Trump actually represents the American people.
You can make an argument for some rigging but in the end he did get a lot of organic support. And it is not like the US empire was not doing war crimes and imperialism before Trump.
Why is that the question? Adolf Hitler had a lot of organic support, but that didn't make him any less of an enemy to humanity, to include the Germans who opposed him, and regardless of whether or not those Germans were a minority opinion.
Trump is using the same tactics to manipulate the same kinds of idiots, and while those MAGA (Nazis) are a very real issue in their own right, that doesn't make Trump any less of an issue that also needs to be addressed.
Even if 90% of Americans (Germans) voted for him of their own volition, that still leaves you with 10% of the US population as potential allies.
Hitler is an amazing example. He was a member of the NSDAP party which he represented. He was not a sole person who changed the course of all of history. If Hitler did not exist, history would have likely not changed that much. There were many other prominent members in NSDAP like Adolf Eichmann and Heimlich Himmler who were extreme racial supremacists.
...and? That didn't make Hitler any less of an enemy to Germany or the rest of humanity, nor does the horde of neonazis lined up behind Trump make him any less of an enemy to the US or the rest of humanity.
I guess I'm not really understanding your goal here. Mine is to spur some much needed action against Trump, especially from within the US. You're insistent on refuting that, but you also seem pretty clearly anti-Trump, so why the contradiction? Or if that's not what you're getting at, what is?
I mean, with everybody else dropping the ball so hard it's not like the military or a particular subgroup thereof is different here from the background noise of compliance. If anything the military is the last organization you should expect to get involved in a domestic political conflict. And besides, you don't get into the US military by having a strong moral compass.
exactly. you mostly end up in the military by being poor, and fuck those guys amirite?
I think lemmy would be shocked at how much of the US armed forces rank and file are Trump supporters. It's the majority.
"I did it for a college degree" isn't a good reason to bomb people on the other side of the world, so my point still stands.
I was homeless when I joined.
So was half my division.
You don't seem like a "I want to win" kind of person. Popular revolutions survive on the backs of people who are good at killing. Are you good at killing?
You're not wrong, but I don't think that's really hitting the reality of what's going through those people's heads. Like, no 18 year old is sitting down and crunching a pros and cons list of a ticket to school vs committing war crimes to help distract the world from the fact that their president raped children on some sketchy-ass island.
There are a lot of reasons someone might decide to join the military... and some of them are legit just psychopaths who get off at the thought of killing someone, but those aren't the ones my previous message is directed at. Those are a lost cause, fuck em.
But propaganda is a hell of a drug, and you gotta consider the environment these kids grew up in: in the time took between their mom squeezing them out, and walking out of that hospital front entrance, lil baby John Doe has probably already been hauled passed at least a couple of posters with some soulless "thank you for your service" shit. From literal day one, we're inundated with propaganda touting people in the military as 'heroes' selflessly devoting their lives to serving their community.
As John Doe grows up, he's made aware of some of the more horrific shit the military involves, but even that is tied into the whole altruism schtick: yeah you'll need to kill people - but they're the bad guys! Yeah you might get injured or killed - but who else is going to defend your family??
So John Doe is nearing adulthood - he's developed a sincere sense of patriotism and has been conditioned to believe that the best way to act on it is by joining the military. So he does.
Fast forward a couple years, John has been paying more attention to things like global politics; that brain of his is about finished developing, and he's noticing some increasingly grating incompatibilities with his world view vs what he's actually seeing with his own eyes.
He sees the news from back home, and it's the same shit the rest of us are seeing: people are being disappeared by unnamed police agents, families literally torn from eachothers' arms, people just straight up shot in broad daylight. Human rights are walked back on a daily basis, corruption and malice in office are so rampant that it's become difficult to even distinguish real news from cartoonishly overt parody.
So now we're back to my original comment here - I'm addressing the Johns. The ones who joined for all the right reasons, only to realize after the fact that they are in fact the baddies. But that's the thing, John, you swore an oath to defend us from all threats, foreign and domestic: why do you think it specifies 'and domestic'? The amount of damage someone can do to our country from a position of high office would be (and has been) catastrophically worse than any threat even the most hardcore stereotype of a jihadist with an AK could possibly pose to our country. Your chain of command, all the way up to the president himself, has violated their oath - but you don't have to. This isn't why you joined, but you're uniquely suited to actually do something about it, so stop following that domestic enemy's orders, and actually do something about it.
Anyway, sorry for the long tangent, but the point is there are potential allies within the military. Even if that's a minority of the military, the number is higher than zero, and it only needs to be one. Belittling John for making a shit decision (and it is a shit decision) to enlist isn't going to accomplish anything; acknowledging the sense of conflict growing in John and encouraging him to make it right despite the atrocities of his chain of command... well, it doesn't hurt to try. Hasn't worked yet, and at this point I don't exactly have high hopes, but the military's a big group, and we just need a single one of them to finally take their oath seriously.