Largely, we've not been defending ourselves, but rather, maintaining our interests and investments. Who wants to stand behind that other than the misinformed?
Yeah, Until some Ork shoots you for fun while you pass them on your bike, in an occupied zone that was once your hometown. Sometimes you HAVE to make a stand to stop wars of aggression.
Imagine if the World stopped fighting at the end of WWII and the U.S. stopped making any other atomic weapons. Imagine a global "Peace Treaty".
Imagine if each country spent their military $$ on water, food, housing, and free medical care for their citizens.
Fuck them all!!
The World could've been an amazing village of humans living together as friends and have the freedom to roam the globe without the need for a passport.
One World!
Fuck every military leader and/or political leader that has screwed over the people of the World.
If there is a draft for some oil resource war then I'm out of the US.. We have all the tools to replace it I'm not fighting for some mega corp's right to exploit the environment
Well, unfortunately, when you’re poor and want to return to school, or change careers, your cheapest option is the military. Everyone stereotypes the military as offering only combat soldier jobs. The military offers more than just one career option. Want to change careers and become a medic to gain training for when you leave the military and can actually afford medical school? There’s the Army for that. Want to learn how to repair airplanes and jets as an aviation mechanic? There’s the Air Force for that. Everyone will just downvote me anyway. Let’s carry on that anti-military sentiment.
People dont have as much agency as he thinks. And game theory(a relatively new concept for his era) dictates that the one who convinces/forces more of their people to fight, is the one who wins.
Let's say that your entire country, every single person, refuses to go to war. And the country next door has a mere 100 people who are willing(or otherwise) to go to war. Now your country is part of their country and those 100 people are in charge.
In a world where noone wants to fight, those who are willing(or forced) to fight, rule everyone else.
And to bring this concept into the modern era, it is near impossible to post antiwar posts in Russia, because of state control of the internet and the cultivated perception that everyone who is antiwar, is antirussian and a traitor. This is literally the law there.
Yet in the liberal western states, you are free to do that. So what is the result of this difference? People in the West are less willing to go to war. Now you might think that is a good thing but ultimately this benefits Russia, who is then free to take over their smaller neighbours. This is just interference, marketing for Russia's war machine, even if it doesnt feel like that.
Soldiers are a "solution" to a problem they themselves cause.
If there were no soldiers, we wouldn't need any either.
So any person who wants to become a soldier is just a fool. There are of course those who have no choice, but the ones who do and still chose that life definitely are idiots.
Can yall imagine if we only used military to fight actual criminals, like terrorist. Instead of bombing 3rd world countries because they made a your mom joke
That "truth" obviously depends on which side it is that is recruiting one:
if cells in your body who are being run by viruses "take up arms", they are taking up arms against your life, for virus's dominion.
if ideological-supremacism gets people to take up arms for their cause, they are arming to war against real peace.
if cells in your body who fight infection get other cells to "take up arms", they are fighting together against pathogen's dominion.
if people take up arms against ideological rabies's highjacking of our world, or of its dismantling/exterminating civil-rights, then they are fighting for the existence of civil-rights & actual/possible peace.
Ukraina's fighting for its life is right, Russia's fighting to genocide Ukrainians isn't.
.: whether one's taking up arms is morally right or not, has exactly to do with one's opposition-to, or accommodation-of, or even helping-of, the kremlin's genociding-mission.
Same goes for Hamas's deliberately sacrificing the Palestinian people for sake of getting Israel's nihilistic sadistic psychopathy to show enough that the entire surrounding region will ( within a decade or so ) prefer "martyrdom" while annihilating Israel, than to tolerate Israel, genocider who claims "God", to continue to exist.
Hamas & Israel both demonstrate DarkHexad: Narcissism / Machiavellianism / Sociopathy-Psychopathy / Nihilism / Sadism / Systemic-Dishonesty..
Israel's full allegiance to DarkHexad is visible in what IDF was carving in God's eye, with that operation.
Israel's longstanding declaration that it will nuke ALL its neighbours if any ONE overruns it, a nuclear-mass-shooting, is itself proof of its DarkHexad nationalism, which claims that God authorizes it ( the Ezekiel 39 "justification" for genociding Palestinians now, the rest later, e.g. )
Nobody should bother pretending that our countries haven't done exactly the same commitment-of-evil that these 2 examples are doing:
the deliberately-infecting entire shiploads of fabric, with smallpox, before sending them to the Americas, to holocaust the Indigenous peoples, our "Residential School" genociding of their lives ..
is pictures of men whose "crime" in our law was that they wouldn't agree, in writing, with their children being taken, at gunpoint, by us, & put in residential schools .. so we rounded 'em up at gunpoint, & shipped the survivors of our enforcement off to Alcatraz..
That was every bit as evil as what the kremlin-war-on-Ukraina or Israel's genociding now do.
History is unspeakably ugly.
The Catholic inquisition's torture-murdering war against primarily women, & secondarily Jews, "in our Lord, King of all Jews"'s name, had nothing whatsoever to do with the religion of the woke socialist convict/felon that Yehoshua "Jesus" benJoseph was, in their bible.
Africa, whose 2 million year history of tool-using hominids, nearly-all of its history is unrecorded, but the European slave-industry was fed by Arabs & Africans, in Africa, who were leveraging their local authority, turning those who weren't "with" them into "profit"..
the evil committed by the Aztecs, some tiny fraction of it recorded, when records began being created..
the "conquistadors" & their evil against Indiginous peoples..
It's inseparable from our race's history
It isn't that "taking up arms" is wrong, it is that either:
taking up arms for ideological-supremacism, XOR
refusing to take up arms against ideological supremacism
both help ideological supremacism.
Helping ideological supremacism is an active crime against civil-rights being able to exist.
it is a crime against right Principles.
As Martin Luther King Jr pointed-out, silence, itself is the crime of accommodating evil, when evil is acting.
( the "bystander effect" of accommodating a crime against someone, which depends on the culture & the individual-development vs collectivity of the bystanders, is also in the domain of this question, obviously ).