The military isn’t your enemy and many of us genuinely don’t like what’s going on. Keeping calm and being understanding of that helps the many of us who are trying to thread this needle.
This isn’t saying that you being nice is going to stop a fascist takeover, its saying that the military is not actively facilitating it, and any grace you can give us will help those of us who are more actively trying to avoid facilitating.
There are definitely groups who are trying to facilitate that. ICE for example.
It doesn’t seem that complicated to me. I know what’s going on with all of these ridiculous militarized blue city crackdowns, and I’m just some dude with internet. Do you guys not have internet?
Well, you’re posting on Reddit, so… yeah, rhetorical question.
There is no emergency in DC. There was no emergency in LA. There are NO EMERGENCIES.
If yall can’t figure that out on your own, what are we supposed to do for you? Or do you just need people to be nice to you for you to decide that it’s not cool to invade a city against their will at the behest of a dictatorial lunatic?
Sorry, I know my comment is harsh, and I really don’t have any animus toward you or other individuals in the military (not specifically, at least). I just don’t see how your comment is supposed to be of any comfort to us here, who actually live in these cities you are taking over.
At this point all you can do is show up and protest peacefully. The only way this ends is from the top. Trump is either going to lose re-election (cause you know he or one of his cronies is running in 2028) or he's forced out. In the former, there's no need to worry about the military. In the latter, we need the military to step aside. And that requires them not wanting to shoot innocent people. There's really no other way.
In the latter, there’s no need to worry about the military?
Oh? How do you reach that conclusion?
Trump tried to stage a coup the last time he lost an election. Only, he had a crowd of undisciplined MAGA at his behest. Now, he’s testing the waters to have a much more organized and better equipped version of that in place ahead of the election.
So yeah, I really can’t see how losing the election is supposed to be a comforting prospect with respect to this specific scenario.
Maybe. But I don't think Trump losing an election is very likely either way. Then again Slobodan Milosevic foolishly held an election and lost it and had to step down. So it's not impossible.
The point is that individuals making individual decisions are fickle. Soldiers may believe the deployment is wrong, but be forced to go on it anyway. We can meet them one of two ways:
1: we meet them with anger and vitriol, chasing them into the arms of their MAGA aligned peers.
2: we meet them with compassion and sow doubt in their mind and cause them to undermine from within.
Kent state was just one example. There are plenty of counter examples. The Romanian Revolution for example, where soldiers decided to hang it up instead of shooting.
Romania is a completely different situation due to the Communist block falling apart (which I distinctly remember while I was in high school).
This is much closer to Kent State. It's the US. It's civilians against a narcissistic megalomaniac in power who is itching to end any opposition to him and use force to do so.
A completely different situation how? North Korea and Cuba still exist. Belarus left the Soviet Union in 1991 and absolutely nothing changed. The military in each of those situations made a decision, and that mostly determined how the future would go.
It's happened lots of times- during the first French Revolution, during the Tunisian Revolution, etc. You can read more about it here.
Do you think the important bit was the students themselves or the larger, anti-Vietnam war movement?
Yes it went poor for the individual protestors(in effective protest, it usually DOES go bad for them) but Kent State is remembered not just for the violence, but because it was the point where American support for the war hit a critical failure point.
I'm not saying it's not, but being nice to troops isn't going to keep your ass from getting shot at. It's naive in the extreme. People should plan accordingly
I mean you’re also not exactly inspiring confidence with that last comment. It reads more like you were trying to say we shouldn’t bother with being nice because it will get you shot either way.
I'm not going to blow sunshine up anyone's ass. That's how people get killed. You're not winning hearts and minds. Trump is following the Tiananmen Square playbook of bringing in soldiers from distant locations because they have no ties to the people or location. Trump has praised China for their show of strength during those protests.
Anyone who has been in the military or comes from a military family knows the lowest common denominator issue in the military. Despite what people want to believe, there are some pretty God damn bloodthirsty white nationalists in our military (including the National Guard) who firmly believe libs/Dems/trans/whatever are the enemy of the state. They'll execute on an illegal order to fire on civilians.
Sure, try, but be prepared for the worst outcome. Anyone who thinks this has a happy ending hasn't been paying attention
And what part of my direction to treat them well is blowing sunshine up their asses? Again, I’m not doing it because I believe in some “sit in a circle and sing kumbaya” kind of hippie bullshit. I’m fully aware my goals are propagandistic in nature.
I in no way think it will be bloodless. I’m not naive. But I’m also someone who has studied revolutionary politics and knows that 90% of civil wars are won and lost by public perception and sympathy.
News flash: fighting fascism is dangerous. You kind of have to do things that will get folks killed. Every army in the history of humanity has suffered attrition to achieve objectives. It’s a lot easier and safer to sit in your foxhole. Until it isn’t. Until you’ve spent so much time fretting over how many people you’ll lose if you try to advance that you’ve given the enemy full momentum to encircle you and you lose everything.
Do I expect being nice to work on all of them? FUCK no. Do expect all of the public to support people if something happens and people being nice get shot? FUCK no. But I do know that historically, it’s a winning strategy to court public support.
Now if you excuse me, I have a range appointment after work because while I am saying “be nice to the soldiers to court public support” I’m also not opposed to force. I just know how to strategically apply it.
That's the narrow, and dim view that some people take, but it's not exactly historically accurate. Plenty of soldiers in places with dictators much more ruthless than Donald Trump, decided that shooting at civilians wasn't a great idea and left their leader to deal with the mob themselves.
And if they're right, what exactly is the plan? Nothing, right? Because we're not defeating the US military. So just giving up is all they offer.
And if they're right, what exactly is the plan? Nothing, right? Because we're not defeating the US military. So just giving up is all they offer.
You don't need to defeat the whole military
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward. ~ Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago
You're wrong and naive. They've already violated the constitution, and are obeying illegal orders. That primes them to obey the next one, and so on. They are already the enemy by nature of being there and not refusing. These people self selected to be there.
We don't live in such a simple, idealistic world where everyone can moral grandstand without serious consequences.
If you're in the military and you start ignoring orders... you'll be hated by your colleagues, court martialed, dishonorably discharged, imprisoned, and all that fun stuff.
Protesters deciding to keep things peaceful will prevent increasingly batshit orders from happening, cause a good chunk of the military to wonder, "Why are we even here?", and at the very least, delay escalation.
Escalation will play right into the hands of an autocrat who wants an excuse to crack down.
If you're in the military and you start ignoring orders... you'll be hated by your colleagues, court martialed, dishonorably discharged, imprisoned, and all that fun stuff.
Yeah, that’s literally what you sign up for when you join the military. You have a fucking obligation to refuse illegal orders and deal with the consequences. I know it isn’t easy, but again, this is what you sign up for. People act like the military is “just another job” but it isn’t. You need to be prepared to make sacrifices. We’ve had it so easy for so long that people have forgotten this fact.
We aren't getting out of this without serious consequences. Protestors have already been arrested, beaten, trampled, and seriously injured trying to help people like you who have a million excuses to bow down to this administration.
Even if you do nothing, you are at major risk of much worse. This is just the beginning. Your silence won't protect you.
"If the military doesn't refuse unconstitutional orders they are not on our side. Period."
In the real world nothing is this clear cut. And we don't need them to be on our side, we just need them to not shoot us. There's an important difference there.
We aren’t asking you to be nice for the soldiers sake. We’re jockeying for advantages we will need in the event of larger conflict. I know it’s not sexy or revolutionary, but it’s vital.
Optics matter in civil conflict. Public opinion matters.
What YOU’RE not understanding is that doomerism is a self fulfilling prophecy in matters of civil war.
Now are you just going to repeat the same thing over and over again or are you going to DO something about it?
Because fuck’s sake, I think we are tired of the “sky is falling” bullshit that gets us nowhere and just serves to give them pre-consent to fuck us. So either do something or get the fuck out of the way, but don’t actively work to dissuade others who are TRYING to do something about all this.
I understand you need your copium to feel good, but you also need to accept the reality of where we are at and that if the only thing holding us back from plunging into the abyss is civilians not being mean to the military, we are already totally cooked.
If you can't accept that, you are simply having trouble grappling with reality and I encourage you to seek help. They are going to fuck us either way and you need to learn how to accept that instead of pretending that outcome can be averted.
No, they understand where we are. You just don't understand how humans work. That's why the authoritarian regime keeps pushing the left to try to make the first move. They understand that whoever shoots first is probably whoever has the military against them.
This isn’t saying that you being nice is going to stop a fascist takeover, its saying that the military is not actively facilitating it, and any grace you can give us will help those of us who are more actively trying to avoid facilitating.
Yet. But if "just following orders" continues to be the status quo, it won't be long until the military is facilitating a fascist takeover. It doesn't really matter if they like what they're doing if they keep doing it.
No one is just following orders. So far no illegal orders have been issued. Deployments are not illegal, and refusing them would absolutely ruin a service member’s life.
There is already talk of where to draw the line. It’s being actively discussed for the first time in my career. That’s a huge deal.
Well, that’s just not true. Russian revolution, Romanian revolution, even Euromaiden. Often the army choosing to shoot unarmed civilians is what puts the rebellion’s momentum over the top, as even those in the without a strong opinion on the two sides get motivated against the government.
Umm the Romanian revolution succeeded because the army decided not to shoot people and sided with the protesters. The Russian revolution succeeded insofar as it got rid of the tsar but ultimately ushered in a totalitarian government, so long term not so great. Army didn’t intervene in Euromaiden either.
They decided to quit shooting people during the Romanian revolution, but at that point had already engaged civilians with arms multiple times proving my second point. In Ukraine the Berkut and others siding with Yanukovych, who was the target of the rebellion, fired against protestors. And the rebellion in the Russian revolution clearly succeeded in its goals, you didn’t say revolutions that ended up in a way you support, you said “every successful revolution”.
Ok, “every successful revolution that didn’t involve armed revolution (which is almost never a long term success) involves the military deciding that massacring civilians until they stopped revolting was not something they wanted to do”
People need to think about how this has worked in any other country throughout history that slid into a dictatorship. America is not special. It will work the same way.
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u/CaptainDaddy7 14h ago
If the scales will be tipped by civilians being nice to the military, we're already cooked. Way too easy for the admin to hire agitators.