Do the army support the president even if his orders are against your constitution? How is the overll clima and feeling today?
Just asking because I’m curious, I have no horse in this race :)
Edited to Armed forces since thats exactly what I ment
Do the army support the president even if his orders are against your constitution? How is the overll clima and feeling today?
Just asking because I’m curious, I have no horse in this race :)
Edited to Armed forces since thats exactly what I ment
Most of the US military have zero qualms about obeying illegal orders.
Reference: Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and most other U.S. instigated wars for their entire history.
This is what has been most depressing/distressing about watching all of this unfold. People online (and I’m not immune to this either) have this impulse to think “Surely not right? Surely these people will come to their senses and not just blindly follow transparently evil orders right? We’ve been told these people are heroes who stand up for freedom and democracy and our safety right? Surely at least some of them will do the right thing right?” It’s so ingrained into us through support our troops propaganda and various TV/Movies showing them and cops as principled heroes saving the day. We’ve also seen this with corporations. “Wow I can’t believe this company turned away from DEI so quickly. I can’t believe this company is going to keep selling surveillance tech to the government. Surely someone will see how wrong that is.”
And then I snap back to my senses and remember history. We’ve seen what horrors these people are willing to commit, whether they want to or are “just following orders.” Maybe you at least believe that they won’t do it to US, as cynical as that is… and then you remember Kent State, segregation, the violent crackdown on unions, the police rallying around protecting cops who execute people in the streets, etc.
Nobody is going to come to their senses. None of them are coming to save us from themselves. If we don’t stand up for ourselves this is just going to happen and be another chapter in a long history of cruelty.
The thing is that it becomes different when the order becomes “go to your home town, shoot anyone who disobeys, including your friends and family.”
It might take a decade of brutal civil war, but look what happened in Syria. In the end the people in the army were also tired of murdering their own people.
The solution here is even easier than the division they’ve already been sowing upon the American people.
You don’t send them home. You send them to the place that is the most culturally disparate from the way they grew up possible. You’re a New England liberal? Great. We’ll post you in the center of conservative Texas. Red Cap from a family of Diehard conservatives? You go to Oregon. New York inner city youth? You get special duty, guarding critical corporate infrastructure.
Keep them divided, keep them guessing. All it takes for control of a human being.
The Milgram experiment. The Zimbardo prison experiment. The bystander effect. At the end of the day, humans are just monkeys with smart watches. As social primates, it’s really hard to be the one to stand up against the crowd. Our brains decide how to act based largely on the reactions of other humans around us.
It’s disheartening.
Don’t use the Zimbardo prison experiment. From your link:
That just makes it worse! (From my point of view here.) People behaving reprehensibly because an authority figure asked them to do it? That’s just the Milgram experiment, but without any apparent hesitation!
I’m going to repeat what @plyth said. “Don’t use the Zimbardo prison experiment”.
Zimbardo was as manipulative as the psychologists from the Robbers Cave experiment,
with the only difference being that the former was only done once, while in the latter,
the subjects figured out that they were being manipulated and turned against the psychologists.
Because of this, the conclusions Zimbardo drew himself are very different from when you conclude that
Zimbardo was behind the whole ordeal pulling the strings.
One only needed to stand up against one person, not a crowd.
Military operative have been trained to obey like dogs, their sentience has been mercilessly beaten out if them. Just look at the mindless obedience of your coworkers, sheeps to the slaughter the lot of them. The few that awaken gets co-opted by the system as sheep dogs of the system are rewarded with meaty, juicy bones. Questionning authority is not an option, it’s a sin. They know their masters would never punish their obedience, it would never happen, it NEVER happens.
The military is a corrupt and vile institution, it is irrelevant who they are killing for, they are not on “your” side, they are trying to survive and will kill what they are told. All who participate in organized premeditated militarism as a job, while not under immediate attack of another organized and premeditated military, are simply lost to humanity, they have become the enemy, tools, no matter what flag they jack into at night. In hyperwar militaries are obsolete because they become incoherent, there is no enemy if cannot point to it. The enemy is you.
Of course they do, they also want to keep some sanity or, you know, keep breathing.
I’m certainly not getting my hopes up, but this being in LA instead of Kabul might have a significant effect on how willingly the rank-and-file will just open up on a crowd.
There’s a big Navy base in San Diego; some of the Marines are probably coming from there. Some probably grew up in California, more probably visited LA at some point. Going a few hours to a place where people speak your language and there is an In-and-Out Burger down the street is very different from going halfway across the world to a place where you recognize little and understand far less.
Honestly it depends people have become pretty divided, I’m sure there are enough freaks in the Maga media cult that no longer see their fellow citizens as humans but just as a part of the woke mob. The direct and logical conclusion of the culture war was always an actual fucking war.