#its about the lack of empathy and sympathy babe

[vancos]

i feel like. the people who get mad when ppl say "i pity the poor ppl who get taken advantage of by military recruiters" and just go on tirades about them being class traitors...have little to no concept of the power of propaganda. like i myself didn't have a single fucking clue of how bad the US military was until WELL after recruitment age. i was in my 20s when i started learning FOR THE FIRST TIME that the us was perpetrating war crimes and racist, imperialist violence.

my whole life I'd been fed so much propaganda, i was a whole ass adult before I'd even heard any perspective other than "military service is a great honorable thing to do to protect us from terrorism." post 9/11 ramped up military propaganda on a scale that is truly frightening, and circumstances and civilian fear allowed it to work.

i cannot even begin to imagine how many teenagers, struggling to afford college with no idea what they're even going to be able to do with their future, being preyed upon by recruiters who will tell them they can pay for their school, their future, if they sign up to do this thing they've been brainwashed since birth to believe is good and noble.

like class traitors?? babes the predatory nature of recruiters isn't just from the fact that they start recruiting children who are too young to decide that sort of thing, it's from recruiting children who haven't had a fucking chance to deconstruct all the propaganda they've been fed (especially if their parents are pro military) on top of having free school hung over their head like a carrot. they don't KNOW what they're signing up for.

the utter lack of empathy for how literal fucking children get manipulated by the whole system, starting with the complete and total effictiveness of our propaganda, means i don't think a lot of you even understand how any of this fucking works. you've got some cartoonish evil villain caricature in your head of people going "hmm yes i will sign my humanity away and become an evil killing machine for us imperialism in exhange for money," and think we're asking you to sympathize because they're poor. you're fucking idiots. the people we are asking you to sympathize with are brainwashed children who have NO idea what they're signing up for and are only thinking about a future they were promised they otherwise couldn't have, and are trading what they think is honorable service for it.

if we can't address that, how are we ever going to start undoing it? how are we going to protect future generations of children from believing the same things? recruiters prey on the people who were raised to think that way, and it does extend even beyond the people who are poor and disadvantaged. propaganda is the root problem of militaty recruitment, and i refuse to be the kind of person who won't have sympathy for children who never were given the chance to unlearn actual brainwashing.

maybe it's just my background, growing up in a cult where i was subjected to an extensive amount of brainwashing since birth, but i know how ugly it is. i know how it can shape your whole fucking worldview, and how annoying it fucking is for people on the outside of that to say "oh but its so easy to see that x stuff is wrong, and if you didn't know that, you're just a bad person."

if you don't have a concept of what it's like to be brainwashed, you're priviliged. that's all I've got to say about that. pity for people who have been brainwashed is not military sympathy, or justification for soldiers. it's grief for the system of us imperialistic violence functioning as intended and manipulating children to do it. its bone deep sadness and anger that they're able to do that. its frustration that for all your anti military posturing, a lot of you don't actually give a fuck about reducing numbers of military recruitment by working to counter propaganda for future gens, because you would rather sit on your high horse and just feel superior for condmening anyone who actually gets recruited, regardless of why or how, or what any of us could have done to change things.