cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/44604422
When I was younger, I believed this. But defending innocent people from invading forces is an honorable thing.
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2026
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Yep, that's the problem with violence: it works.
And pacifism can only really exist, when you are capable of defending yourself, otherwise you are just at the mercy of your enemies.
It's very unfortunate that the majority of the world's militaries do exactly the opposite of this.
unfortunately, having a military is a necessary evil in this world.
maybe one day everyone will learn to get along, but I don't see it happening soon.
The problem with the military being a necessary evil is that your own military ends up being the evil that forces others to have their own necessary evil.
Not saying the military shouldn't exist, but we should be way more careful about who ends up running it and what we let them do. Before you know it, unelected officials end up running meetings that choose where they go and who they bomb, based on intelligence gathered from other unelected officials and corporations.
Every country might require a military, or at a minimum a population educated in warfare, gun handling and tactics, but not every country’s military needs to be consistently active
Having a military is necessary.
But using it for anything other than strictly defending your own territory is not necessary. An ethical military would never set foot in any other country unless that country attacked them first (or specifically requested aid in defending themselves from a different country).
The US military is evil. There, I fixed it.
points at Russia
I didn't say only the US military is evil. For example, the British empire was evil as fuck.
Imperialist powers have destroyed untold millions of lives across the globe. Despite what right-wing nationalists would tell you, we are the great evil.
There is a little bit of nuance in there...
For millenials at least, a lot of us grew up with Boomer parents, who saw a very defensive military. Fighting for us against foes who truly wished harm upon us (i.e. Nazis/Axis). These were folks you could proudly look up to.
Whereas what more modern generations have grown up with is an offensive military, which seemingly goes out of its way to create conflict. Not to defend us, but to defend the interests of the rich - including fighting the very public whose tax money funds said military.
And there's no better proof of this than people's opinion of Ukraine's military (outside of tankies) versus the US military.
What about Korea and Vietnam?
The boomers were mostly dying in the jungle during Vietnam, but yea they'd have been kids during Korea
It's a bit more difficult when your building gets bombed and now your wife and child are dead and it will keep happening unless you do something about it.
idk, killing fascists for example is pretty solid in my book
A thing we should do more, so that others may do it less.
No war but the class war.
addendum: im also down for any war on, like, measles or the flu or something we can win merely by vaccinating our population. and war on dirty energy. and war on bad coffee. you know what, bad tasting food altogether everyone deserves a party in their mouth AT ALL TIMES. scratch that, two parties in every mouth and one car in every lake
If you give societies full of amoral, self-centered, antisocial and nihilistic sharp pens, they might try to stab their way into riches and comfort. The way I see it, either humanity will develop into a group that can be trusted, because of ideology and personal decision (you've seen what happens when they just follow their basest desires), with power or it will drive itself extinct.
I'm saying this in a very uhh "politically correct" way but the vast majority of people understand Western imperialism is the enemy of humanity and most of those suffer it everyday. We will survive the West and the West will change its ways or the West will parasitise and corrupt everything before engaging in autophagy.