PhilipTheBucket

https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/07/09/syria-defectors-describe-orders-shoot-unarmed-protesters

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2011/04/syrian-soldiers-reportedly-shot-refusing-fire-protesters/349571/

https://igcc.ucsd.edu/blog/military-dissent-and-protest-when-soldiers-refuse-orders-to-use-force/

Those are on the first page of results I saw. There are lots of examples, it's a pretty common feature of the end stage of a successful revolution for the troops to see which way the wind is blowing and refuse to fire on the demonstrators.

For me, the fact that Hegseth really wants them to fire on protestors, but instead they're picking up trash and doing landscaping, indicates that there is some disconnect somewhere. Not that they're obviously horrible and will fire on protestors with glee, and the fact that Hegseth wants them to do exactly that just hasn't trickled all the way down to them yet.

I am sure there are some National Guard members who really want to fire on protestors. I think that's part of the point of bringing groups of them from deep-red states to places that are not their home to be deployed. I'm not saying some shit will not go down. But also, the fact that you're going back to the 1890s to find your examples kind of undoes your assertion that every single one of them is waiting with glee for their chance to fire on American civilians because that's exactly what they signed up for. You honestly just have no idea what you're talking about here, you're just airing your sort of vibes assessment of what you think military people are like.

Yes yes, get it all out. There, there. I can tell you're deeply learned about all of this stuff, it makes me feel a little bad that I came in with some kind of examples or anything, I'm sure there are not any more and it was just some crazy outlier.

Also, if there's one word that I really commonly hear from people who've killed other humans in the military, when they talk about their experience, it is "glee." They just glee all over the place, whenever they talk about it.

(What other examples are you even talking about? Kent State and what? I feel like I sent you into some kind of fit by bringing up the example that I did.)

Somehow I think the reaction to this will be totally different than it was when a gunman killed Melissa Hortman and wounded John Hoffman.

Yeah, you gotta find someone who gives a fuck about Hakeem Jeffries lol. That is not me, see if you can find them and talk some sense into them. For example from time to time I post an article complaining bitterly about some awful thing he has done to fuck up democracy in this country, as a random example.

You'll have to pardon me if I don't care what Hakeem Jeffries tweeted one time 5 years ago.

That is literally the opposite of how it works in the end stages of quite a good proportion of revolutions.

At the end of the day, people in any country's armed forces are just human people at the end of the day, and the US National Guard is quite a lot more human than most. Even in shooting wars against other nations, there are troops who decide to do the right thing. Hugh Thompson for example got a medal for landing his helicopter between Americans and Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, and telling his crew to fire on the Americans if they kept advancing.

Yeah. I mean it's not a competition. They can both be horrifying things that need to be stopped.

“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.”

https://www.inmateaid.com/information/inside-the-world-of-ice-detention-centers-what-happens-after-an-immigration-arrest

https://wearemitu.com/wearemitu/news/alligator-alcatraz-migrant-detention-conditions/

I wasn't talking about CECOT exclusively. The Gulag was a whole nationwide archipelago of various small-scale detention facilities, which parallels what Trump is doing more or less to a T.

Every so often, something hits me that makes me think I need to get the fuck out of here. Not just because of the political situation (although that is a factor, I think that "stay and fight" is probably the right answer there). But it just seems like overall the culture and the people and the nature of the place is setting itself up for a massive collapse which there is not a lot of way to prevent... even in times of no real external threats, and right now there are some big ones of those looming.