Trump, Tulsa & the Rise of Military Dissent

Danny Sjursen goes undercover in Trumplandia and comes back with this reflection on the U.S. president’s loss of loyalty among soldiers and veterans.

[consortiumnews.com]

{Today’s rising doubt and opposition has three main components: retired senior officers, younger combat veterans, and — most disturbingly for national-security elites — rank-and-file serving soldiers and National Guardsmen.}

{In fact, for all their chatter about the Constitution, oaths betrayed, and citizen rights violated, anti-Trumpism ultimately glues this star-studded crew together. If Joe Biden ever takes the helm, expect these former flag officers to go mute on this country’s forever wars waged in Baghdad and Baltimore alike.}

{In the last year, credible polls showed that two-thirds of veterans believed the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria “were not worth fighting,” and 73 percent supported full withdrawal from the Afghan War in particular. Notably, such rates of antiwar sentiment exceed those of civilians, something for which there may be no precedent.}

As I have stated in this group uncountable times to such. Why are we so compliant to send our men and women off to be mere sacrifices for the ruling class? When the rate of those in service are now of dissenting views is higher than those willing to send them off, yet we remain in silence to the outcomes willing to allow it to continue. I can bellow out all the defining deceitful tools I often do leading to perception management, but I can't understand how we seemingly are feared into this compliance fearful of peer pressure when it comes to our families. Are there really that many people ignorant to the results and deceit from the past 2 decades that when a family member or close friend announces they are joining the service they can't offer logical advice to why that's a fucking moronic life change.

{As both the Covid-19 crisis and the militarization of the police in the streets of American cities have made clear, the imperial power that we veterans fought for abroad is the same one some of us are now struggling against at home and the two couldn’t be more intimately linked. Our struggle is, at least in part, over who gets to define patriotism.}

And then they came after me couldn't be any more clearer than today.

“While there is a lower class,
I am in it,
While there is a criminal element,
I am of it,
While there is a soul in prison,
I am not free.”

Eugene V. Debs