hold up. you’re telling me all the movies from the past century that showed war were lying to me??!
/s
there’s a reason why Vietnam was both the most televized and most protested war in American history.
“You people of the South don’t know what you are doing! This country will be drenched in blood and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war, you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing!”
An oddly prescient quote for our time, I would say.
I have a brother who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and while he’s always been an absolute chud, it was a very radicalizing experience. He came back with PTSD and then started “self-medicating” with meth. He made our family’s lives a living hell, like we were 24/7 911 operators, always waiting for the day he was going to act on his paranoid delusions. He finally went out to some innocent family’s house with a gun and pulled on the cops who’d followed him and got shot in the arm. He’s recovered somewhat, but still has relapses.
These experiences are the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to me or any of my family. Still it pales in comparison to what he experienced, which in turn pales in comparison to what the people living in those countries experienced. My dumbass brother chose to go over there, but they didn’t choose to be born there, and the casualty rates were so much higher for them.
People look at casualty rates (if they bother to) and imagine that that’s the full price of war. But my brother isn’t on any of those casualty lists, because his wounds were “only” psychological. The true scale of harm is literally incomprehensible.
I remember one night that I had come to visit and I went out to eat with my parents, thinking, hoping, that for one night things could be peaceful. Then the texts started coming in. Another crisis, more schizophrenic accusations, veiled threats, reading into every little thing. I remember the tears streaming down my mother’s face as she tried not to make a scene at the restaurant.
Whenever I think about any of the people responsible for those wars, I take what I felt in that moment and multiply by a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, by as much as I’m capable of, and it’s still not enough.
The government and media do such a good job sheltering the public from what war really means. So many people just treat it like a movie or a video game because they know that more than they know about reality. The media rarely covers the human cost, especially of the other side. And so when I come on to Lemmy and vent about how war is bad and we should build schools and hospitals instead of tanks and bombs, people call me a tankie and accuse me of having some secret agenda. Because real life action movies are so cool, who could possibly have a problem with them?
Calling for schools and healthcare instead of tanks and bombs is not tankie crap. Tankies want the other side to have tanks, instead of the US.
Eww.
There’s no faster way to get called a tankie than opposing the construction of more tanks.
Opposing the construction of more tanks necessarily means arguing that those tanks are unnecessary. Arguing that tanks are unnecessary means arguing that the supposed threats our rulers want us to be afraid of are not as significant as they’d have us believe. And if you’re arguing that an “enemy” country is not as much of a threat as our rulers claim, then it’s trivial for someone to accuse you of minimizing the threat because you actually support the enemy.
This is how it’s always been. I opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the start. Back then, instead of “tankie” they called you “terrorist sympathizer.” People who opposed the wars in Vietnam and Korea were called “reds” or “pinkos.” Those who opposed WWI were accused of being “Bolsheviks.” Some dude once criticized Rome’s violence and was accused of plotting violent insurrection and got executed for it. Same shit, different day.
I guess I’m a tankie then. Fuck the wars, fuck this administration, we need education and healthcare more than anything. We need a government that supports its own people rather than trying to obliterate all others.
Regardless of political labels and what makes them accurate, you’re right about war being bad
If you don’t go to war, war will go to you. It’s a terrible thing you can’t escape or avoid. You can’t protest your way out of it, and someone must do it.
You will just be tortured and murdered without resistance, or find yourself in an even worse war.
Fascism must be stopped.
“We have to fight them over there or we’ll be fighting them over here.” I remember that line. They said about the wars in the Middle East, they said it about Vietnam, they said it about Korea. “If we don’t win, there’ll be a 9/11 every day.” But we lost, and somehow there hasn’t been another 9/11. “Vietnam is a domino, if we don’t stop them here, they’ll spread communism to more and more countries.” But we didn’t stop them there and they focused on rebuilding and self-defense.
Every major conflict the US has been involved in since WWII, top officials have evoke WWII and the Nazis. Many of those conflicts were wars of aggression, often seeking to prop up fascists.
If the US military was actually about defense, it could easily be cut in half. We’d still be spending more on it than any other country in the world. The US spends more than the next 9 countries combined and it is the fascist threat that other countries have to defend against.
Yes, sometimes the only way to solve a problem is through force. But it’s also true that when you have this massive hammer, everything looks like a nail. We have this whole industry built off that profits from war and needs a constant state of war (or at least threats) to justify its existence, and if there aren’t any threats, they’ll create them.
Once all the people involved in the previous unjustified wars is in prison, then if the people who threw them in prison want me to believe that there’s a genuine threat, I’ll consider it. But I will never support US military involvement in any conflict until that time, regardless of circumstances.
Preach brother. I agree sometimes things need to happen by force, but it’s far and few between. This war was a joke to distract from Epstein child trafficking bullshit.
Forgot to mention I’m not form the US, so my opinion is war AGAINST the US. But starting with Embargo first, then retaliating with maximum force if the US were to try and break the Embargo or attack in any way.
Americans aren’t keen on reading history. It’s partly how we ended up electing a man who paid smarter people to write his term papers.
Can’t say we’re particularly keen on empathy either.
When the Germans invaded my country in 1940, someone in the street I currently live in was standing behind the window, looking at the approaching soldiers. (I live real close to the border). The Germans, upon seeing him, shot him and he died right there. There’s no memorial, no history book where this guy is mentioned. I only know about this through oral history, my grandfather told my dad and he told me. History is always about the leaders and the armies, never about the civilians.
I’m a veteran with combat experience and people look at me like i’m a crazy person when I advocate against wars. It’s really hard to get people to realize that someone who’s been to war (and isn’t a psychopath) doesn’t want anyone to have to go to war. It breaks everything and everyone.
Who would know better than you? I hope they start listening.
people look at me like i’m a crazy person when I advocate against wars
You might consider finding new friends.
We don’t get a choice man. Going to bomb Iran is dumb, but you need to always be prepared for more war.
Thank you for doing something I couldn’t.
username… checks out?
This is why the US ditched the draft after the Vietnam War.
The only time we ever had a meaningful anti-war movement was when people were forced to send their own kids to die. Having a “volunteer” force eliminates that. The excuse is always that people signed up for it, and people just ignore that it’s the poor and minorities who are still effectively pressed into military duty due to manufactured lack of opportunity.
The draft wasn’t ditched. The selective service has been active for decades, it isn’t supposed to be left active unless somebody is going to use the draft.
Incorrect.
That it is still a law on the books does not make it ‘active’. There is a law here in Kansas City that still bans automobiles on Main St., but I wouldn’t call it ‘active’, and nor should anyone else.
It was ditched, and with good reason. (At least for the the Epstein Class.)
You are required to sign up for the selective service as a penis haver at 18 so I genuinely have no fucking clue what you are talking about.
as a penis haver
Thank you for correctly gendering myself and many others 🥲
Clearly.
I would recommend you go look up the word ‘effective’. That will help with your confusion. Good day to you.
keeping college education and health care expensive is used as motivation for young people to enlist despite lack of conscription, as they see their only opportunity to have those fees waived
Call of duty is actually a bad thing. It gamifies war and doesn’t mention the true horrors.
People always think stuff is just fairy tales and sing along songs until they’re hit with it.
There are exceptions though. But for most it’s true.
People always think stuff is just fairy tales and sing along songs until they’re hit with it.
The current anti-vax movement would not have flourished in a generation that lived through widespread polio and measles.
Yup, I’ve said this for years. To antivaxxers, those old diseases are boogeymen. They legitimately don’t believe the diseases are bad, because “well people survived for thousands of years before” (survivorship bias) and the fact that they’ve never been personally affected by it.
They never lost a childhood friend to measles. They never saw entire hospital wings full of kids in iron lungs because of polio. They never watched a friend or family member go deaf because of a childhood case of mumps. They never had a brother, uncle, etc have to come to terms with being unable to have kids, because a childhood case of mumps left them sterile.
But you know what is real to the antivaxxers? Autism. Everyone knows (or has seen) someone who was severely autistic. It doesn’t matter if the link between autism and vaccines is fake; the imagined threat of autism is a bigger threat in their minds than the very real threat of these diseases.
Oh yeah I could tell so much about autism now (ever since I know). I’ve had so much suffering which is related to people, even now. Being excluded and blamed for being myself.
Being autistic itself never was an issue and even comes with some nice perks. Oh yeah and it’s a development thing. Either you are or not, of course.
Lucky though that I am not in the us, I might be scared there. But since I’m an atypical most people would never notice.
Apologies, went off the rails there. Anyhow lots of these things from the beginning of the thread can be fixed by knowledge, but I’m afraid we’ve peaked and are on the steep decline.
A mother lost her son and said she would still not have vaccinated him. These people are just leftover slop. Oh sorry, did I call them people on accident? Bad habit.
I dunno, there were pretty big anti mask movements back in the 1918 “Spanish” Influenza pandemic. I think it’s completely possible that ignorance can persist, even in the face of obvious oblivion.
by “people”, you mean “Americans”…
No, not only. Humans in general. I think it’s likely basic psychology that everything outside your/their bubble is far away and unrelatable.
If it weren’t a globalized world not it might not be that much of an issue.
Looks at present day Germany…
Uh folks, nothing to see here!
Well it’s not the Afd’s fault the big parties are doing everything to help them out!
(for those not in the know reading this: a lot being done especially by chancellor Merz is literally pushing voters to them. Not really voluntarily, but he’s a champ at doing that)
what war is Germany waging?
War on middle and lower class
It’s true for people literally everywhere
Look up russian population’s opinions on the war in Ukraine, you’d be surprised how much would gleefully support it until their own lives are disrupted by it. Of course, a lot are against it, but that is now illegal to say out loud over there.
It’s easy to think that people in the past were just different. That they could handle the brutalities of the past in a way we don’t.
The truth is that they were all humans just like us. They were just born in a different age.
To institute a draft, Congress would have to update the Military Selective Service Act with specific references to the current conflict, and then the president would have to sign it…
Or, apparently, Trump could just bypass all of that with an Executive Order, because why bother with following the law? Also, it seems, he could make the ages anything he wants, whereas now it’s ages 18 to 25.
I’ve always heard modern missile guidance systems are so accurate they could fly one up the enemy’s asshole and I wonder why not mine?
I wonder why not up yours also.
No no no missiles are dumb and sometimes they accidentally hit schools and hospitals and really all you can just do is shrug 🤷♂️ and say “oopsie doopsie”, because war is hell.
We can send people to the moon but our multi-million dollar jets can’t figure out where to drop a bomb without it striking a school. The tech just isn’t there. The math is just too complex, because I failed high school physics and math is very hard, especially for computers with GPS.
/s if not blatantly obvious. Even with a dumb missle, maybe don’t drop them in close vicinity to these types of buildings? Like, I don’t care who the target is or how solid the intel is, it’s just not worth the chance of collateral damage. If they start camping out near schools or hospitals then either a more hands on approach is warranted, or they aren’t worth the trouble.
I rather believe that missle went exactly where it was programmed to go to. Either that was sloppy and incompetent target selection without enough diligence or someone just vibe bombed Iran with coordinates a LLM regurgitated. I’m quite positive the Tomahawk itself worked fine with precision.
I think Claude essentially did what it thought the US does, so it set the coordinates to some elementary school.
While that might seem enticing at first, it has a climax that just hits you differently.
War. War never changes.
Sure, but when certain countries are targeting civilians intentionally there is good reason to be horrified. You know, the ones that targeting schools and universities and religious buildings and it isn’t just the normal horrific collateral damage.
Look into any major war in human history. This is just modern and highly covered. Its horrific and terrible but completely in line with historical war. Civilians are fodder for casualty numbers. Believing/preaching this is different from other war action in the past (atrocities/crimes/whatever) is ignorance or performative. It’s always been horrific and always will be. Carthage, moguls, every dark ages seige, Dresden, Tokyo firebombings, Japanese nuclear bombs, My Lai, Kosovo, Darfur, North Korean bombings, Iran-Iraq war(1980s), Yugoslavia bombings (1999), battle of Grozny. I could go on for literal pages. This isn’t an individual country thing its a human thing and until thats accepted and addressed it’ll never stop.
It isn’t different, but some sides commit more atrocities than the other and that will get a stronger reaction.
Or in some cases, shame for being on the side committing more atrocities.
This song…
Eyedea & Abilities - A Murder Of Memories
When the album came out he was 19.
It blows my mind, first, that a kid so young can have such a well formed, articulated, and ability to show artistically his understanding of the horror of war.
It eludes me that grown ass men can’t fathom it til it’s within arms reach
