This might get a lot of down votes but I want to say I don’t think it’s fair to blame the soldiers in the field for the choices of the decision makers in the office. Those horrible events were unwanted ‘byproducts’ of the goal of men with evil plans, they were not veterans going off-book. In other words, these veterans did what was asked of them. I’m not saying they didn’t do some very bad things, but they aren’t the people that should be ‘thanked’.
In German penal law there were discussions on how to treat those that act under orders. Many Germans did act under orders and even in accordance to law in WW2 but also in regard to the Mauerschützen (the soldiers that shot dissidents at the inner German border)- meaning that there were difficulties persecuting them as it was technically legal. There were way too few persecutions, however something called the Radebrechtsche formula was developed. Paraphrasing it says, something that is morally wrong to every morally thinking being cannot be legalized or excused. It is simply illegal to act on orders that are naturally wrong.
Sure, but how many 18 year old boys were convicted for being conscripted into the Wehrmacht?
The US uses economic coercion to force poor kids into joining. They give veterans a massive priority bump for public sector jobs and the GI Bill is often the only way poor kids can afford college.
Also, the US military uses far more obfuscation than the Nazis used. When I was in the Air Force, I worked in geo-spatial intelligence which was mostly extracting heat signatures from satellite collected data. They kept us in the dark on what our intel was being used for. All I knew was that our intel was helping to save the lives of our fellow soldiers somehow and that the government would pay for my college when I was done.
It’s a tricky fucking game they play. More communication amongst ourselves is the only way that could ever be undone.
I believe the word you want is “prosecute/prosecution” rather than “persecute”, but thanks for this.
I fully agree.
In the aftermath of World War II, Carl Jaspers formulated in Die Schuldfrage that there are four types of guilt (/responsibility). Criminal guilt, political guilt, moral guilt, and metaphysical guilt. It is a great distinction in general. Yes, political leaders bear a different kind of guilt for the actions than the soldiers, but acting on clearly morally wrong commands do not obliterate guilt from the soldiers. Just like everyone who basically didn’t give their life in pursuit of the good and the right bears some metaphysical guilt for what is happening in the world.
Yes. I wonder what the outcomes of centering the soldiers gult is?
Do we want the solution to be that soldiers have to consider every order given within the historical context of the time to decide the morally correct actions and do them even if it means court martial or death?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m okay for soldiers to do this in extreme examples. But I don’t think this should be the norm.
I think we should shift the focus to the leaders instead of the soldiers. They are better positioned to make these decisions and have the time to do so.
And it’s their job.
Thank you. 18 year old kids who were never given a sufficient education in history, civics, political science, and basic morality can’t be blamed for working as a cook, secretary, nurse, electrician, intel analyst, etc in the military so that they can afford college.
Never heard of this, thanks
Ah, the Nuremberg defense. 😶
No that would be saying they didn’t do anything bad because doing what is asked of you is always good.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
Superior orders, also known as just following orders or the Nuremberg defense, is a plea in a court of law that a person, whether civilian, military or police, should not be considered guilty of committing crimes ordered by a superior officer or official.[1][2] It is regarded as a complement to command responsibility.[3]
I’m saying we shouldn’t blame the soldiers on the choices of their leaders, I’m not saying we shouldn’t blame the soldiers for their own choice. I totally agree they could’ve chosen to not to follow orders. I’m not saying they are innocent. But their role is not comparable to the role of the people giving orders.
Nuance matters. You think a 18 year old boy that was brainwashed into nationalisl his entire life should be executed for being forced to serve as a cook in the military? The Nazis used conscription while the US uses economic coercion (gate keeping jobs, healthcare, and college for vets)
I didn’t get the feeling this is what the meme is about, maybe it is. I think your discomfort is good, in that it has you questioning what you may have not questioned, before. On one level, we can’t decide what’s okay for you, internally. The bigger question is, if external forces would compel suffering and death for your beliefs and convictions, are you prepared to accept that? Many of us who think we are may not be, when put into that position, just as many of us who think we aren’t may end up being more certain than we knew. And at that end neither really matters, at all. I think deep introspection will have to be both journey and destination, multiple times in our lifetimes. The questioning is the reward.
imagine saying this about 9/11 hijackers – they’re just fighting for their country, don’t blame them, blame Bin Laden!
I’m not going to go refind the examples, but there have been stories about things soldiers do that are definitely not ordered by anyone else. There can be a level of cruelty at times that is completely on the individual and they cannot always hide behind “I was told to”.
O i totally agree, this is exactly why i started with ‘this is might get a lot of downvotes’. But the crimes on the pictures where not crimes by individual soldiers. These things were done by individuals who were told to. I’m not saying that makes them innocent, I’m saying they weren’t the most guilty. The most guilty in my opinion are the men who scheme and think up of plans like this, and then order others to execute it.
If someone did a horrific thing and then told me they weren’t as guilty as their boss I’d be fairly confident saying that if their first priority was to justify their actions then they can also get absolutely fucked.
But not every soldiers’ first priority are justifying their actions. Please note that the title of this post is insinuating that all veterans are to blame, not some or even the majority of them. Also note the title omits the bosses, the people who gave the orders.That is why I replied. We would only disagree if you’d believe the boss isn’t guilty because he didn’t do the execution of his plans.
In other words, these veterans did what was asked of them.
They could just have not.
You are literally arguing the same as all Nazis did. “I was just following orders”. US military decided to join an organisation that constantly attacks other countries.
This was exactly the take I was looking for. “I was just following orders” is, and has always been, a bad take. Grow a pair and accept the consequences of your poor decision making.
They chose to become soldiers. They chose to commit these crimes. That’s not to mention that there are countless, countless examples of cruelty and violence that the average soldier chose to commit even if not ordered to
I wish I could post this here in Australia without getting rocks from every white Australian. You can search my post history to see their reaction to questioning this.
Australia was involved in every one of those crimes. And the celebration for those meaningless murders are everywhere. Questioning this is questioning the sacrifice of Jesus.
Though by order of our north american overlords the US should not be alone in that title.
We really need to separate the trauma that formed the ANZAC legend from the fuckos of any warfare since.
My great-grandfather was an ANZAC - actual, WWI, 23rd Battalion, 16 year old. I knew him extremely well, I was sixteen when he passed. I had a front row seat to what happened to those kids for the rest of their lives.
I don’t fucking venerate servicemen.
Seeing the public reaction to some of the military adjacent cases over the past few years has been incredibly disheartening (e.g. McBride)
People got mad at this one streamer for saying American soldiers deserve PTSD. When you consider that most interventions by the US are not justified or just imperial power plays, and that many soldiers commit war crimes, you realize she has a point.
Every US soldier signed up for killing, they deserve whatever they get.
There are definitely some like that. The American system has a number of tricks to try to force people to do what they like as well though. Poverty, over policing of minorities, lack of social safety nets etc can cause people who grew up barely avoiding prison choosing military thinking the only choices they have are death or military, shoved at them when they’re too young to really know the world. Add education that specifically avoids or lies about what US actually does overseas, plus a bunch of jingoistic propaganda making being a soldier appear to be a respectable profession.
I grew up in a cult that avoided military so I never had those feelings myself, so I got to watch it from the outside, and even the pledge of allegiance every morning was weird jingoistic programming from early ages. It can be difficult to see past that at 17. I’m not saying they don’t deserve any punishment, but I do disagree with the idea that every single one wanted to kill people.
Exactly. When I signed up for the military, it was because I wanted to kill people, and not because I had no other good choices
12 year US Army vet, deployed to Iraq 2007-2008.
Number of people I killed: 0
Why? I was a surgical tech. I helped save lives, including local nationals.
But sure. I deserve “whatever I get” for literally signing up to help people.
Cool, you can be a civil doctor too. Glad you fixed up the people who killed for a living.
I mean. Jimmy just wanted to go to college. But was forced to go to Iraq. The soldiers don’t have much choice. Especially the boys in trailer parks. They have no opportunity and the military gives them that.
Ooh poow widdwe Jimmy … you know who didn’t have a choice? the kids whose heads he blew off. I don’t care if he had a choice in going there or not, Jimmy doesn’t deserve a blink of sleep for the rest of his miserable cunting life if he didn’t knowingly miss every single shot.
“though your path may be set, you can gain as much speed down that path as you would like”
means, even if they had to go to war, they could have missed shots on purpose.
If the choice is “be an acomplice to the destruction of an entier country and it’s people” and “don’t get a discount code for college”, like, surely we can see that’s not really a good excuse.
Yeah, you are not getting it nor are you trying to. You are ignoring the poverty and indoctrination of children aspects of this in order to jerk off.
Nobody was “forced” to go to Iraq.
For some reason, people think it’s ok to pull others down to get ahead but only in the context of the military. There are other ways to escape poverty, like selling crack or scamming the elderly. I wonder if you condone those approaches as well because “they didn’t have another choice if they wanted to escape poverty.” I doubt it. But if the victims aren’t people in our own neighborhoods who you can actually see, if it’s dead children on another continent who the news doesn’t talk about, then somehow it’s perfectly fine.
Everyone in that position who chooses to work at McDonald’s or Walmart or Amazon instead of signing up to murder foreigners is a better person than every troop, they are braver, more ethical, more heroic, and more enlightened. The cowards who pull others down to get ahead deserve no respect and no sympathy.
Just so you are aware. Soldiers were forced. They were by the rule of their contracts forced to redeploy after they found out how terrible the situation in Iraq was. I know this because friends were forced to go back to Iraq because there were not enough replacements. They had little to no choice. The POTUS was able to force this upon them.
Now sure, they could just go awol or force their resignation and go to jail. But some of them have families that rely on base housing or medical coverage.
Nobody forced them to sign up.
I can’t really agree with that. Social economic factors make it impossible for some people to get out of their communities. The military during peacetime. Is a great upward mobility tool for folks in gang lands. We don’t invest in their schools. The jobs left in these regions are pitiful. And the only choice they have to get out is to serve.
It’s how the rich make America such a shit hole to force people to fight in wars for their benefit. It’s so much deeper than just blaming the soldiers.
The amount of cope in this thread is astonishing. I never thought I’d see an actual person justifying killing hundreds of thousands of civilians with a straight face. But here we are
Hollywood conditioned americans to believe they are heros and world savers. They cant grow up out of that for some reason. They also deeply believe that their lives is worth more than others.
In a poll I saw recently, most countries of the world voted the US as the biggest threat to world peace.
They are killing Yemeni civilians as we speak now.
US veteran is going to be treated the same as Nazis as soon as the US will implode and stop controlling the media (the orange clown is already making this process faster).
While I understand the frustration toward those critiquing military personnel, I believe we should consider the broader context of responsibility in our society. Emergency responders who assist during natural disasters deserve our appreciation, even as we examine complex institutional issues.
If we’re discussing responsibility, those in technology fields must also reflect on their contributions. Many STEM professionals work for profit-driven companies developing technologies with significant societal impacts—from military applications to automation that displaces workers.
Throughout history, scientific advancement has brought both progress and devastation. The development of nuclear weapons, chemical agents, and military technology has often proceeded without adequate ethical consideration. When we examine figures like Oppenheimer or Einstein, we must acknowledge both their brilliance and the consequences of their work.
The irony isn’t lost on me that many who quickly assign blame may themselves contribute to systems that concentrate power and wealth. Rather than dividing ourselves through targeted blame, perhaps we should recognize our collective responsibility for the current state of our nation.
I believe that fostering division only benefits those who already hold power. Perhaps approaching these issues with understanding rather than hate might offer a more productive path forward—even if that perspective seems idealistic in today’s polarized climate.
It’s almost like people, places, things, ideas and acts have good and bad consequences, foreseen and unforseen, isn’t it?
Iirc, FBI or some USA government entity convinced? coerced? Hollywood into being the propaganda department of our government sometime during WW2.
Amerikkka!
The mods at non credible defence aren’t going to like this.
What even is the purpose of that sub?
It’s just shitposting but defense themed
Defense, in the same way the pictures in OP were defense.
Of course from a russian POV it musst look like that to a .ml enjoyer.
Russians are the only ones who don’t like it when we drop bombs on kids. Idk why they wanna spoil everyone else’s fun! The kids are fine with it, it’s just those mean ol’ Russians going on about “human rights” or whatever. The million dollar bombs that we build instead of paying for healthcare, education, or functional bridges are so damn cool that the only reason anyone would possibly have a problem with them is if they just hate America.
This is what y’all actually believe, but the even crazier part is that you’ve somehow managed to convince yourselves you’re leftists!
Oof, more .ml talk, I’m not gonna read that shit lmao
Par for the course.
bigoted against people based on where they’re from refuses to educate themself defends the US military
Yup, checks out
hurrr ml 🙈
ja wear a black armband when they shot the man who said peace could last forever?
The first picture is an apartment block getting leveled.
The third is a child who managed to tear her clothes off after the US dropped napalm on them as they fled their village, but was burnt badly enough she had to spend 14 months in the hospital. She was one of the lucky ones.
The fourth is the second atomic bomb the US dropped on a civilian population.
From what perspective is murdering hundreds (hundreds of thousands in the case of Nagasaki) of civilians just trying to live their lives on the other side of the planet acts of self-defense?
Nice spin. The point is that NCD is defense themed and Nato themed, not that the pictures aren’t of atrocities.
NCD is not about “defence” it’s about war and the glorification of weapons used to murder children. At best it’s ironic and incredibly tasteless, more realistically, they’re just a bunch of bloodthirsty fascists hiding behind irony for plausible deniability.
NATO “defence” 🍆 ✊
- The Intercept, 2021: Meet NATO, the Dangerous “Defensive” Alliance Trying to Run the World
- CounterPunch, 2022: NATO is Not a Defensive Alliance
- Noam Chomsky, 2023: NATO “most violent, aggressive alliance in the world”
- Thomas Fazi, 2024: NATO: 75 years of war, unprovoked aggressions and state-sponsored terrorism
- Gabriel Rockhill, 2020: The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It
Claiming that any of the war crimes pictured was anything to do with “defense” (as opposed to “offense” or, better yet, “bloodthirsty neocolonial conquest”) is olympic-tier mental gymnastics.
NATO is the largest Imperialist millitary coalition in the world, NCD being NATO focused directly means that it’s focused on celebrating Imperialist atrocities.
In OP are images of what NATO, an organization that has never fought a defensive war in its entire existence, calls defense.
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Like bear arms?
Literally what the founders wanted.
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Fetishizing NATO, basically.
Spreading war propaganda
a place for chuds to cope
The same as NAFO: shilling for the MIC
They might still cum from the top left one
Being an outsider I thought non credible defence was just memes about military things, are they specifically pro US imperialism?
A lot of excusing going on on that last panel
This was also said in a context that included a military draft
“Just following orders” etc etc.
How’d that work out in nuremburg?
I’m not defending that defence.
Knew exactly what scene this was before I’d even taken a good look, let alone read the text. One of my favourites, along with “I will not carry a gun, Frank”.
ACAB includes the troops. Going to foreign countries to shoot brown kids doesn’t make you any less of a bastard than doing it at home.
I don’t think any cops have been drafted into police service. They also don’t go to jail if they quit their job. And I haven’t heard of police recruiters using predatory tactics and targeting disadvantaged groups. The military does, or has done, all of those things to recruit troops.
If you chose to go kill and uphold imperialist aggression rather than just go to jail then you are in fact a bastard
If @LegitTayUpdates can do it, so can you
I don’t think any cops have been drafted into police service.
The US (which is what this meme is focusing on) has an all-volunteer force.
They also don’t go to jail if they quit their job. And I haven’t heard of police recruiters using predatory tactics and targeting disadvantaged groups. The military does, or has done, all of those things to recruit troops.
There’s plenty of pro-cop propaganda and plenty of people who join the police thinking they’re going to do good. I’m sorry but at some point people have to be held accountable for their actions. Any troop that’s not a bastard and who’s actively trying to leave should understand why I call troops bastards. It was bastards who recruited them, after all, and it’s bastards keeping them there.
In any case, people make way too many excuses for these people, and all it does is reinforce the idea that it’s ok, which leads to more people falling for that propaganda and those predatory tactics.
Leave it to a .ml user to ignore all context…
The US currently employs “volunteer” troops, but also requires all male citizens to register for a future draft. Many living veterans were drafted. And many others were in vulnerable situations that recruiters recognized and preyed upon. Once you join the US military, it’s a crime to quit.
There is clearly some nuance needed when taking about US war veterans.
I have a question for you. If they made it a crime to leave the police until you finished a set term, would that make you object to anyone saying “ACAB?”
Shitlibs like you: Context matters, nuance is important! Think of those poor soldiers! You don’t truly understand what they were going through that led them to join the Kolonial Konquest and Side-Kuests “Defense” Force. The choice between them ending up in the streets or families 12000 km away ending up displaced, starved, tortured, or murdered by their own accord must’ve been real difficult!
literally anyone else: mentions Palestine, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Sudan, etc…
Shitlibs like you: SHOOT THEM ALL! LOCK THEM UP! NO MERCY FOR TERRORISTS! THEY ARE THE REAL IMPERIALISTS SPREADING THEIR ICKY ISLAM! KEEP ISLAMISM CONTAINED IN THEIR TERRORIST SAND TERRITORIES! THEY’RE ALL ANTISEMANTIC FANATICS!
Casting sweeping judgments about an entire group you’ve never personally engaged with demonstrates remarkable presumption. There’s a specific term for making such broad generalizations without firsthand knowledge, isn’t there?
I’m curious—what profession grants you the authority to condemn others for circumstances largely outside their control? What position of moral superiority do you occupy that allows you to evaluate the character and choices of people whose lives and constraints you’ve never experienced?
Perhaps before passing judgment so confidently, it would be worth considering the complex realities and limited options many face within larger systems not of their making.
🤓☝️
Is that the best argument you can come up with? No wonder we lost the election.
Military and police are the two arms of the state that enforce the will of the ruling class. Police do it internally, and military externally.
When we discuss responsibility, we should consider it comprehensively. Scientists and engineers who developed chemical weapons and nuclear bombs made conscious choices about their work, yet they rarely face the same scrutiny as soldiers who carry out orders. Is this because educational privilege somehow absolves responsibility? Why do we focus our criticism on those with fewer options rather than those who designed the systems?
The hypocrisy evident in some IT professionals’ comments deserves acknowledgment. Many work for profit-driven corporations that extract wealth, exploit resources, or develop technologies with questionable impacts. Before casting judgment on others, perhaps we should examine our own contributions to systems we criticize.
Every professional should consider their role in larger structures of power. The soldier following orders and the programmer writing code for a corporation that avoids taxes or exploits workers both operate within systems larger than themselves. The difference often lies in who society chooses to blame, not in who bears actual responsibility.
Rather than directing our frustration toward individuals with limited choices, perhaps we should focus on the institutions and power structures that create these ethical dilemmas in the first place.
Someone else mentioned in this thread that after WWII, Carl Jaspers wrote Die Schuldfrage (The Question of German Guilt) which discussed and categorized guilt broadly into 4 types. In terms of the people carrying out these orders, moral guilt applies: to act on clearly morally wrong orders does not absolve you of guilt.
I think your comments are obfuscating the role of each of these professions in their proximity to power.
Above all the jobs you mention, soldiers are the closest to power mainly because they hold a device designed for only 1 purpose: to end life. They may be performing this role out of financial necessity, but many still have the ability to avoid killing. In Vietnam, if one couldn’t dodge the draft, there were still many ways to avoid killing. Sure, they may be in a difficult position, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have agency every day to find ways to not kill.
Regarding critique, we can do 2 things at once. We can both be critical of the systems that perpetuate violence and also critical of people who choose to make a career out of taking people’s lives. Sustained pressure (including negative social pressure) applied to both areas can be important. I’d argue that stigmatizing a profession is a necessary step in critiquing and eventually dismantling power.
The classification of guilt into rigid categories overlooks the complexity of human experience in war. While Jaspers’ framework offers conceptual clarity, it fails to account for the layered psychological, socioeconomic, and institutional factors that shape individual choice.
Regarding proximity to power, soldiers are often the furthest from decision-making authority, not the closest. They execute policies determined by civilian leadership and high-ranking officials who rarely face the same moral hazards. The weapon a soldier carries represents their vulnerability to those power structures rather than their proximity to power itself.
The assertion that soldiers “make a career out of taking lives” fundamentally mischaracterizes military service. Most service members never fire their weapons in combat, instead performing logistics, medical care, engineering, and humanitarian functions. This reductive view erases the complex motivations that lead people to service, including family tradition, educational opportunity, and genuine belief in protecting others.
The argument about agency overlooks how military indoctrination, threat of court martial, and combat stress systematically work to eliminate meaningful choice. The social psychology of unit cohesion and institutional pressure create conditions where theoretical agency bears little resemblance to practical freedom of action.
Rather than stigmatizing individuals who often come from marginalized communities with limited economic options, meaningful critique should focus on the systems that create conditions for war and the civilian leadership that authorizes it. Targeting those with the least power in the system perpetuates class divisions while protecting those truly responsible for military action.
True systemic change requires recognizing that moral responsibility increases with power and freedom of choice, not decreasing it as one moves down the chain of command.
Your labyrinthine prose coils around the heart of the matter like ivy choking a statue—ornate, suffocating, yet failing to obscure the inscription beneath. Let us parse this carefully. You speak of soldiers as vessels of vulnerability, mere marionettes twitching to the whims of distant civilian oligarchs. But does the rifle in their hands not pulse with a kind of power? A power distilled, singular, terminal? To claim they are ‘furthest from decision-making’ is to conflate authority with action. The janitor who sweeps the floor of a death camp does not design the gas chambers, but his broom still enables the machinery. The soldier, even the one stitching wounds or calibrating drones, is a node in the network of violence. Their labor, however benign in isolation, sustains the engine. To absolve them by citing ‘marginalized origins’ is to infantilize them—to deny their capacity for moral reckoning amid the storm.
You invoke complexity as a shield, as if the interplay of socioeconomic forces renders individuals ethereal, weightless. But history is littered with those who, amid greater oppression, clawed at their agency. The Vietnam draft dodger who feigned madness, the conscientious objector who chose prison over complicity—were these not choices carved from the same granite of systemic cruelty you describe? To say ‘they had no meaningful freedom’ is to erase their humanity, to reduce them to thermodynamic particles in a fatalistic universe.
And your deflection—‘most never fire a weapon’—is a syllogistic sleight-of-hand. The medic who stabilizes a soldier for redeployment, the engineer who fortifies a base, the clerk who files the orders: all are cogs in the same Leviathan. The institution’s purpose is domination, and to don its uniform is to be baptized into its logic. You speak of ‘family tradition’ and ‘educational opportunity’ as motivations, but when does a reason become an excuse? The banker laundering cartel money might cite his child’s tuition—does that nullify his guilt?
Ah, but you retreat to abstraction: ‘Moral responsibility increases with power!’ A tidy formula, yet it crumbles under the weight of its own idealism. The CEO’s order is lethal, yes, but only insofar as the warehouse worker packs the drone, the marketer brands it ‘defensive,’ and the soldier pulls the trigger. Responsibility is not a finite resource to be hoarded by the elite; it is a fractal, repeating at every scale. To focus solely on the architects is to ignore the bricklayers who, brick by brick, erect the edifice.
You accuse me of ‘stigmatizing the powerless,’ but power is not a binary. It is a gradient, a spectrum of complicity. The draftee trembling in a trench has more agency than the general, perhaps, but less than the senator—yet all are agents. To critique the soldier is not to exonerate the senator. It is to say that moral gravity bends around every choice, however constrained. To dismiss this is to surrender to nihilism—to say no one is culpable because everyone is a victim.
And let us be clear: stigmatizing the profession is not vilifying the person. It is a refusal to sanctify the mantle they wear. When we strip the uniform of its honor, we do not attack the soul beneath—we attack the lie that the uniform is honorable. This is how systems fracture: when their myths are unmasked, when their foot soldiers begin to question the hymns they’ve been taught to sing.
So no, I will not lobotomize my critique to soothe the conscience of those who fear nuance. The drone pilot in Nevada, the programmer optimizing surveillance algorithms, the corporal raising his rifle—they all dance on the same precipice. Some leap; some hesitate; some shut their eyes. But to pretend they aren’t standing on the edge? That is the true obfuscation.
Your argument collapses under the weight of its own philosophical pretensions. You construct an elegant theoretical framework of distributed responsibility that, while intellectually satisfying, fails to engage with the lived reality of power dynamics in modern military structures.
The comparison between a soldier and “the janitor who sweeps the floor of a death camp” reveals the fundamental flaw in your reasoning. This false equivalence ignores crucial distinctions of contextual awareness, historical understanding, and institutional transparency. Today’s military personnel operate within systems far more ambiguous than your stark metaphor suggests. The moral clarity you demand exists primarily in retrospect, not in the moment of decision.
Your invocation of Vietnam draft dodgers and conscientious objectors as exemplars of moral agency betrays a privileged perspective. These exceptional cases required specific social, economic, and cultural capital that many service members simply do not possess. To elevate these outliers as the standard against which all others should be measured is to fundamentally misunderstand how structural forces constrain genuine choice.
The “fractal” theory of responsibility you propose sounds profound but ultimately atomizes blame to the point of meaninglessness. If everyone bears equal moral weight regardless of their position, then responsibility becomes so diffuse that it loses practical significance. This approach doesn’t enhance accountability—it undermines it by refusing to acknowledge the exponential difference between ordering an airstrike and maintaining the equipment that enables it.
Most problematically, your framework offers no path forward beyond condemnation. What actionable change does your philosophy propose? How does stigmatizing individual service members advance structural reform? Your position satisfies intellectual critique but offers nothing toward practical transformation of the systems you criticize.
The moral purity you demand requires perfect information and perfect agency—neither of which exists in reality. Your argument creates a false binary between complete absolution and total condemnation, leaving no room for the complex terrain where most moral decisions actually occur. This absolutist approach doesn’t elevate discourse; it paralyzes it.
In your zealous pursuit of distributed blame, you’ve constructed a theory that, ironically, serves the very power structures you claim to oppose. By focusing moral scrutiny on those with relatively limited influence rather than concentrating pressure on decision-makers with genuine authority, you effectively diffuse accountability upward while intensifying judgment downward.
Your rebuttal confuses moral ambiguity for moral absolution, mistaking the fog of institutional complexity for a blank check of compliance. Let me illuminate the distinction. The janitor analogy was never about equating modern service members with Holocaust perpetrators—it was about demonstrating how proximity to harm obligates moral reckoning, regardless of institutional remove. A drone pilot operating under today’s bureaucratic veneer may lack the visceral awareness of a death camp worker, but they still choose to participate in systems they know produce civilian casualties. To claim otherwise insults their intelligence. They understand the mission statements, the after-action reports, the veterans’ stories. Ignorance in an age of information is cultivated, not inevitable.
You dismiss draft resistance as a privilege of the few, yet this only underscores how systems weaponize precarity to ensure compliance. That some lacked the means to resist does not render their service morally neutral—it indicts the structures that make dissent a luxury. Shall we absolve all participants in exploitative systems because escape wasn’t universally possible? Then no colonial foot soldier could ever be condemned, no sweatshop overseer held accountable. Your logic collapses into a nihilistic void where only the supremely privileged bear moral burdens—a perverse inversion of justice.
As for your derision of “fractal responsibility”: you fear it dilutes accountability, but in truth, it demands more rigor. The CEO who orders a drone strike and the mechanic who maintains it are both guilty, but not equally. Guilt scales with power, yes—but it does not vanish at the base of the hierarchy. The Nuremberg Trials judged not just politicians but industrialists, physicians, bureaucrats. To focus solely on architects is to ignore that oppression requires laborers—willing or coerced—to function. Your framework would let the architect hide behind the bricklayers, the general behind the privates.
You demand “actionable solutions” as if critique must birth policy bulletins to be valid. But stigma is action. Dismantling the cultural mythos of military heroism reduces recruitment. Refusing to sanctify uniforms forces societies to confront what those uniforms actually do. Engineers abandoning defense contracts, journalists exposing procurement corruption, soldiers leaking atrocity footage—these ripple from the cultural soil tilled by critique.
And spare me the theatrics about “paralyzing discourse.” Moral clarity is not the enemy of nuance—it is its foundation. You frame my position as a demand for moral purity, but I argue for proportionality. The draftee who surrenders to a broken system bears less blame than the career officer who thrives within it, yet both bear some. To pretend otherwise is to endorse a world where slaughter is licensed so long as enough hands touch the knife.
Finally, your accusation that I “serve power structures” by scrutinizing low-level actors is a breathtaking feat of projection. It is your worldview that protects the powerful by insisting blame pools exclusively at the top. The senator who votes for war appropriations sleeps soundly when society fixates solely on their role. No—pressure must ascend and descend the chain. Guilt is not a finite resource. We can condemn the contractor who builds border wall concrete while also damning the president who ordered it.
Your fear of moral expansiveness is really a fear of true accountability—one that unsettles all strata of complicity. You call it paralysis. I call it coherence.
Your rebuttal constructs an elegant philosophical framework that, while intellectually stimulating, fundamentally misaligns with the practical realities of power, agency, and responsibility in modern military structures.
The janitor analogy fails not because it compares soldiers to Holocaust perpetrators, but because it falsely equates awareness levels across vastly different contexts. Today’s military personnel operate within deliberately opaque systems designed to fragment responsibility and obscure consequences. Many serve without direct exposure to the outcomes of their collective actions—not through willful ignorance, but through institutional compartmentalization that purposefully distances them from the full implications of their roles.
When you dismiss economic necessity as merely “weaponized precarity,” you reveal a profound disconnect from the lived experience of the working class. For many, military service represents not a moral choice but survival—access to healthcare, education, housing stability, and escape from environments with few alternatives. These aren’t abstract considerations; they’re immediate material realities that shape decision-making more powerfully than philosophical ideals ever could.
Your “fractal responsibility” concept sounds profound but ultimately atomizes blame to the point of practical meaninglessness. By insisting everyone bears some measure of guilt, you create a system where accountability becomes so diffuse it loses any practical force. This approach doesn’t enhance justice—it undermines it by refusing to acknowledge the exponential difference between authorizing an intervention and maintaining equipment that enables it.
Most troublingly, your framework offers no path forward beyond condemnation. What concrete change does your philosophy propose? How does stigmatizing service members advance structural reform? You claim “stigma is action,” but history shows otherwise. Cultural rejection of Vietnam veterans didn’t end American militarism—it merely isolated those who served while leaving power structures intact. Real change comes through political organization, policy reform, and coalition-building—not moral gatekeeping.
The moral clarity you champion requires perfect information and perfect agency—neither of which exists in reality. Your position creates a false binary between complete absolution and comprehensive guilt, leaving no room for the complex terrain where most moral decisions actually occur. This absolutist approach doesn’t elevate discourse; it forecloses it.
In your zeal to distribute responsibility downward, you’ve constructed a philosophy that, paradoxically, serves the very power structures you claim to oppose. By disproportionately focusing moral scrutiny on those with relatively limited influence rather than concentrating pressure on decision-makers with genuine authority, you effectively diffuse accountability while intensifying judgment on those least positioned to resist systemic imperatives.
You know, you could just make a different phrase for troops.
I support the real troops
“Fuck the troops”
ATAB works too. But troops are essentially just cops we unleash on foreign countries.
reminds me of how they always try to justify the nuking of japan cities that had hundreds of thousands of civillians (twice even)
Yup, the mental gymnastics they use to justify war crimes. No other country has nuked a civilian population. They’ve nuked 2
Why would we celebrate LOSERS and SUCKERS?
The only accurate thing Trump ever said
One of the few things I agree with him on
When’s the next war on bud light rainbow cans? 🤡🫡🤡
On Thursday.
Thursday is no good for me, planning on having my bros over for a no homo circle fuck and foot rub party. Can’t do that without Bud light, obviously
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“Protecting freedom” by torturing and bombing people halfway across the world
There is absolutely no reason to blindly respect someone just because they’ve “served their country.” We don’t know what they’ve done. We have so many examples of soldiers doing horrible things to civilians around the world that blind respect is simply not warranted.
Agreed. A friend of mine is a veteran, and did something that he regrets every day of his life. Guilt’s been eating the guy. He told some people, and they cut off contact with him. Which he understands and agrees with. He told me too, and yet I can’t blame him for doing something objectively wrong.
Particularly the people we were indoctrinated to trust. Cops, military, politicians, businessmen (read as American Dream reachers), preachers…
Yea, but neither is blind DISrespect. There’s a lot of examples of bad and there’s a lot of examples of good. Kinda fucked up to lump an entire group into one side or the other… Don’t ya think?
Bet I get blasted for this take.
You spend your whole life doing exercises and hauling supplies, but you massacre one village and suddenly everyone hates you.
So you’re going to disrespect and blame the individual that had nothing to do with it because of the actions of others?
I’m not saying that you should let the organization as a whole off the hook, but should we really be putting the individual in the cross hairs without knowing what their story is?
Are you going to put the medic that helped the injured innocent in front of the firing line because other people bombed the area?
The big issue I have with your statements, and those of the OP are that they are extremist. It’s possible to have a nuanced conversation about it without resorting to the extremes. No wonder the pot keeps calling the kettle black
but should we really be putting the individual in the cross hairs without knowing what their story is
Hey so this serial killer who boiled his victims alive had a really sad upbringing. We should just call it a wash and let him back out on the streets right?
Learning what their story is might be good to do for a common thief, and maybe you’ll choose to be sympathetic as opposed to angry at the loss of your material possessions, but at a certain level of depravity, I don’t care what their story is. The victims of their atrocities don’t care what their story is. They can tell their story to the devil before getting thrown in the lake of fire.
Hey man, I just fill deliver fuel for the orphan-crushing machine company. Don’t hold me responsible for the monsters who actually crush the orphans!
If you want a nuanced discussion, start with explaining exactly how guilty different members of the U.S. military are when the military has a long history of committing atrocities, and since the 70s all members have signed up willingly.
If I were to willingly join the mob, how clean are my hands if I just drive guys around, or just patch them up after they’re shot?
If you think the Things the US did as a democracy we’re Bad Just wait and See what autocracy will bring.
Gonna be interesting who’s gonna suffer more. It’s own population or the others.
usa: summons cthulhu to bring destruction of the universe
people: what if it was a republican, things would be worseThere’s just good and bad. No one’s really “good” good. So there’s just bad. So fuck it all. Putin, Obama, Stalin, Trump, Hitler, Merkel. At least some of them don’t even try to hide it so they’re at least honest. That makes it easy.
Well, you’ve already killed one innocent person, so you can go ahead and kill a million more since you’re already a bad person anyway. Much logic.
Those muslim, fascist and communist authoritarians were really just freedom fighters fighting for their people. America bad.
Did fighting Nazis go out of fashion again?
The US was never really that against them. Their motivation in WW2 was not nearly as morally perfect as they like to pretend.
Before the war, Hitler was inspired by Jim Crow laws when creating the infamous Nuremberg Laws.
After the war - once the US secured unipolar hegemony - they absorbed more than 1500 former SS scientists into the US government.
Birds of a feather
Imo the problem wasn’t in trying to rehabilitate, it was that it was insufficient.
Your comment and your home instance blew my mind
I seem to remember the creator of Wolfenstein asking that question shortly before the release of one of their games, in the late 2000s I think. We should have seen the writing on the wall.
What? It’s just enhanced interrogation!
