I don’t understand why you can’t just live in shame and shut the fuck up if you’re a veteran. Just live in shame and shut the fuck up about your experience.
No one’s going to forgive you and rationalize for you, your victims will probably just let go of their anger instead of turning their grief into ghosts as they still need to live and move on. I think most people outside the US know that American troops are brainwashed brutes anyway, as if they’d let that excuse their crimes, but just choose to not obsess about individuals and instead lament and resist the institutions and power behind the American state.
your victims will probably just let go of their anger instead of turning their grief into ghosts as they still need to live and move on
That’s a thought I notice a lot of folks don’t usually have; a lot of people are quick to say the survivors will become ‘terrorists’ (freedom fighters more like), but actually most will try to scrape up what they can of what’s left of their lives. I’m reminded of someone I read about who had to literally pick up the unidentifiable pieces of his brother in a blanket after his brother, wife and kids were struck by a drone bomb, and the poor guy returned to his meager life but gained a stutter after the experience.
(But sure, it’s the veteran we’re supposed to feel sorry for)
I think the word “evil” implies a lot of cartoon and comic book bizarre identifiers and personality, even up to the Nazis and Hitler who were also bombastic and absurd in their embrace of murder and destruction.
That soldier trying to normalize his brutality and aid in cruel occupation is evil. Evil is a person like Eichmann, who fled to Argentina, to lead a mediocre existence there. Evil is a bureaucrat for the Nazis just shuffling papers making sure munitions, food, materiel, and paychecks were being sent to the Wehrmacht.
Arendt’s Banality of Evil’s thesis - that Evil can not flourish without these mundane, career-driven, simple-minded “go with the flow” moral cowards and cretins - has really come to light once more in the past month.
I don’t understand why you can’t just live in shame and shut the fuck up if you’re a veteran. Just live in shame and shut the fuck up about your experience.
No one’s going to forgive you and rationalize for you, your victims will probably just let go of their anger instead of turning their grief into ghosts as they still need to live and move on. I think most people outside the US know that American troops are brainwashed brutes anyway, as if they’d let that excuse their crimes, but just choose to not obsess about individuals and instead lament and resist the institutions and power behind the American state.
That’s a thought I notice a lot of folks don’t usually have; a lot of people are quick to say the survivors will become ‘terrorists’ (freedom fighters more like), but actually most will try to scrape up what they can of what’s left of their lives. I’m reminded of someone I read about who had to literally pick up the unidentifiable pieces of his brother in a blanket after his brother, wife and kids were struck by a drone bomb, and the poor guy returned to his meager life but gained a stutter after the experience.
(But sure, it’s the veteran we’re supposed to feel sorry for)
I think the word “evil” implies a lot of cartoon and comic book bizarre identifiers and personality, even up to the Nazis and Hitler who were also bombastic and absurd in their embrace of murder and destruction.
That soldier trying to normalize his brutality and aid in cruel occupation is evil. Evil is a person like Eichmann, who fled to Argentina, to lead a mediocre existence there. Evil is a bureaucrat for the Nazis just shuffling papers making sure munitions, food, materiel, and paychecks were being sent to the Wehrmacht.
Arendt’s Banality of Evil’s thesis - that Evil can not flourish without these mundane, career-driven, simple-minded “go with the flow” moral cowards and cretins - has really come to light once more in the past month.