If a draft happens I will either get a college deferment or take a random vacation to somewhere pleasant before I’m called to duty and mysteriously forget what year it is.
are you insane? Every kid knows soldiers defend their country! Those children and women are just collateral damage, that’s all..
are you insane? Every kid knows soldiers defend their country! Those children and women are just collateral damage, that’s all..
o/ hail the government, we fight for socialism.
These are some nice vids.
If anything, this seems to be teaching me that perhaps I might take the approach of always appealing to their self-interest, talking about the homlessness/psychological/unemployment problems of vets. Rather than getting into emotional political debates.
If we could just get people to stop joining the army, there’d be no one left to fight all these wars for politicians. Unfortunately, in the absence of a thriving market economy providing plenty of private sector jobs, many poor people have no alternative but to join the military.
@Sukrit: Yeah, I noticed a ramp in recruiting activities as unemployment rose and it dawned on me that the Pentagon definitely has an interest in unemployment, particularly among the young. Ahem, minimum wage laws most affect employment of the young.
As we hear, people join the army and military academies to “defend your country” and all those things…While this is probably 100% true when your country is under attack, it is hardly the case when you “join in” in countries like the U.S. and NATO which have standing armies which are indeed used in limited (?) conflicts.
The reality is that the overwhelming majority of those who join in today, incuding officers at the highest level do join becasue they like the possibility of getting into adventures where the possibility of “legally” killing people is real… In the 19th century, the military would talk about these things much openly and there was hardly any comment against it. In those times, the Defense Dept. was called the War Dept, and cavalry officers openly commented in social meetimgs that they had during the current year yet "not fleshed their swords…Or that shooting people was the greatest sport. Like Gral Wolsely wrote once, that he specifically became a sharpshooter for a while because: “man shooting is the finest sport of all; there is a certain amount of infatuation about it, the more you kill the more you wish to kill.” While talking or writing like that is currently a no-no that is, “not politically correct”, the motivation has of course not changed a bit. We certainly have a good exception during WWII on the U.S. side with Patton, a cartoonesque Gral who openly talked about his love for killing, and enjoyed visiting battlefields, the gore and all that. Someone like Vlad Tepes who has been depicted having lunch among 20,000 impaled people around him…
Going by the Nurembeger Trial laws, Patton and “bomber Harris” should have been executed together with the germans, and some of the germans who were, should have not been executed. But that is another story.
If your army friends are Christian you could also use the arguments from Laurence Vance. According to Anthony Gregory:
“Two of Vance’s most hard-hitting essays — ‘Should a Christian Join the Military?’ and ‘Christian Killers?’ — do not pull any punches in outlining the urgent conflict personally lived by those Christians who are currently carrying out orders for the U.S. military in its aggressive actions. In one profound section in the first of these articles, Vance lays out the case that the U.S. military violates every single Commandment in the Ten Commandments. In the second article, he explores the curious fact that many Christians see less contradiction in the term ‘Christian killers’ than they might in similarly oxymoronic phrases, such as ‘Christian pimps’ or ‘Christian adulterers.’”
There is also Letter to a Christian Young Man Regarding Joining the Military and if your friends aren’t Christian he has written Should Anyone Join the Military?