If you fly a plane that drops a bomb, you are responsible for the people killed by that bomb. If Israel is the one dropping shit, it's curious that they managed to drop an American F-16 weapons specialist in Iran.
If you vet targets for drones, you are responsible for the targets those drones hit.
If you are a secretary who makes sure that logistics works out, you are culpable for the people whose infrastructure was destroyed by the supply chain you facilitated.
I am much more sympathetic to soldiers than many leftists, and much more understanding of why people join up - which is why I've done a lot of posting about why you shouldn't enlist, how recruiters lie to you, and how you have to be enlisted for three years before you're making more money in the military than you would making minimum wage in california so if you are escaping an abusive situation you would do better to get a bus ticket to the coast and aim for a job at costco with roommates than you would to put yourself in a position where you are going to be responsible for other people dying.
The president said that he wants to eradicate a civilization this week. He has said that he wants to do war crimes that could kill millions of people. If you are currently in the US military, you are following the orders of a genocidal regime.
If the things that Trump has been calling for this week happen, our government and military will be facing our own Nuremberg trials in a few years. And they will absolutely deserve it, and it will be the responsibility of every person of conscience to make sure that people who participated in this war face consequences for their support of genocide.
You are literally saying that if US soldiers bomb bridges and power plants and desalination plants they are just following orders. You are justifying participation atrocities against ninety million people because some American teenagers needed to get out of a bad situation or wanted to pay for college.
I'm not saying that there are no consequences for refusing orders or deserting, I am saying that the morally correct position is to go to military prison rather than taking any actions that will result in the destruction of drinking water treatment for a country that was "preemtively" bombed by a superpower and already had a water crisis.
I'm aware that the US military recruits and propagandizes children, but I'm not interested in infantalizing soldiers. They did make the choices that got them where they are, in the same way that people who sell drugs made that choice and the people who rob banks made that choice - I understand that there are terrible situations that motivate those choices, but if the choice you made hurts other people you have to take responsibility for making that choice.
The bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school was very likely done by US pilots. That bombing killed 100 little girls, in addition to at least 75 other civilians.
The pilots who dropped those bombs likely didn't know what they were dropping bombs on. The specialists who chose the targets may not have known the school was going to be hit during strikes on a nearby base (but they did know that Iran had not struck the US or Israel - those targets were selected when Iran was negotiating to stay out of a war). The Navy loadmasters who transported the bombs didn't know that the bombs were going to spatter schoolbooks with children's blood, or that they were going to be used in a triple-tap strike that would have targeted those children's parents and emergency workers.
But the bombs got there. They were loaded into the planes and they were aimed at targets that had been chosen and approved of. They were flown over a country that the US was not at war with, and a person in that plane had to be the one to make the decision to release the bombs.
If you were part of that chain, yes. You made a horrible decision. You might have been trying to keep yourself safe, you might have been trying to pay for healthcare for your child, you might have needed to get an education to have a better shot at a comfortable life.
And you decided that was worth more than the lives of a hundred little girls who had stickers on their notebooks and inside jokes with their friends and loved their parents and hugged their siblings before they went to school that morning and were buried under the rubble of your choices.
I don't hate soldiers. I pity soldiers.
That's not the kind of thing that I could live with. I don't know how anybody could live with knowing that they were the one who dropped that bomb or delivered it to the gulf or requisitioned its parts or chose where it was going to fall.
So I think they shouldn't live with that. Desert. Refuse orders. Go to jail, get dishonorably discharged, don't sign up in the first place.
There are options, and you should take them rather than spend the rest of your life wondering if the munitions you loaded onto a ship killed a building full of students and teachers who left their homes that morning unaware that they were going to become a casualty of your desire for a housing allowance.
jacobvanloon
prguitarman
janainaart
annaxmalina
gummygunk
