am*rican supremacists always focusing on his social media posts or the tattoo instead of the fact that he was an enthusiastic imperial jackboot, so enthusiastic that he not only joined the army for a tour in Afghanistan after three tours as a marine in Iraq, but then spent an additional tour as a mercenary
and it’s for the same reason that it always is: am*ricans fundamentally do not see non-am*ricans as fully human
a college degree, a mild improvement in the boot’s conditions, escape from an abusive family, etc. are worth any amount of foreign lives to these people
a college degree, a mild improvement in the boot’s conditions, escape from an abusive family, etc. are worth any amount of foreign lives to these people
The funny thing is Graham Platner isn’t even from a poor or abusive background, he comes from a multi-millionaire petite bourgeois family and went to private schools.
I know that even if he was poor, doing what he did in the US military is still wrong, but it’s just funny seeing American “leftists” trying to use this argument of “if you’re poor, being a jackboot soldier of the American Reich is fine!” for someone as privileged as Platner.
Recently learned about this article and am going to spam it any time defense of the troops comes up: https://archive.ph/2x19K
There is a stubborn faction of the left which still seeks to redeem and organize members of the amerikkkan military, ascribing them with the qualities of a revolutionary class. They constantly seek to reclaim baby-killers as part of the masses which should be organized for the defeat of capitalism, and as such, ward off any defamation of their character. They insist that the volunteer forces that fall in line for imperialist warfare abroad and systematic looting of entire continents are somehow just as much the “victims” of capitalism in the u.$. as those they gun down abroad. One would not, in most cases at least, make these same arguments with regards to police in the united $tates. Why the disconnect?
This misconception generally comes from two baseless assertions: (1) the military disproportionately recruits the most impoverished and nationally oppressed masses, and (2) the experiences of those in the military tend to produce a proletarian class consciousness. These are hefty assumptions, which are entirely inconsistent with what we can see from the political tendencies of the military in the past decades. We question the validity of these claims, however it is insufficient to stop there; we must investigate the assumptions themselves, and how the context of recruitment constructs the consciousness of soldiers today.
I’ll forgive someone who entered at 18 and then left as soon as they possibly could after seeing what is was like and have consistently avowed the military since. I’ve known a couple people like that. I’ll not forgive people who in any way make that service a part of their identity, or who try and bring nuance to the situation. I’ve known many more people like this. This guy seems to be in the second camp.
The fact is 18 year-olds are dumb, fresh from a propaganda mill, and poor. The military preys on this, and I don’t believe anyone is immune to manipulation.
This. I’ll be honest, I kinda agree with their point about cherry-picking, the “Hasan shocks his dog” saga has shown us you can construe anything by cherry-picking from the massive fingerprints people leave online to build the narrative you want, and that the full picture is often gonna end up messy, because people are messy. Their picture of Platner as a contradictory, “politically incorrect”, gun-loving “antifa soldier” isn’t far from my perception of him, it explains how people can hold such wildly disparate views of him.
The article’s biggest sin isn’t that, it’s that it doesn’t interrogate his military service AT ALL and why it took Platner almost 20 years since his first deployment to realise that “Imperialist adventures” are bad and to stop “believing in any of the patriotic nonsense that got [him] there in the first place”. Hard to take any condemnations of war crimes on Reddit seriously when he kept going back to the war crimes machine or was actively in it.
Branko Marcetic basically handwaves it away, saying: see, he’s changed his mind now, when his poor judgement will just make him “oppose all wars except the current one”. Plus, his promise to not vote for “pointless wars” is meaningless anyway when the president can do whatever the fuck he wants.
I also don’t get why Jacobin’s addressing this to liberals. Do radlibs even read Jacobin, let alone regular libs?
You’re right on the money. His service in Americas war machine and as a Merc, and his iffy (at best) stance on that which seems to mostly basically just be ‘we shouldn’t do Iraq again’ is the biggest issue and never gets addressed.
But even if you want to focus on the tattoo, even ignoring his lie about not knowing what it meant (he posted about knowing what it meant on Reddit before running), it shows that A) he’s a dipshit who thought it wouldn’t come up or be used against him and B) despite talking about socialism he doesn’t give a shit about solidarity or public service because keeping his edgy souvenir from his killing tours was more important than the fact that very obviously the people he claims to represent would be (rightly) concerned, offended, or threatened by the fact this guy sports Nazi ink.
As for Jacobin…
Basically all these radlib rags or news orgs go that way. I’ve even contributed to one or two in the past. There’s a fundamental tension between trying to build a business - call it profit or call it circulation / market share / visibility - if you want to work in the same media circles and ecosystem as mainstream media. There are too many stances and arguments and uncomfortable facts that are just verboten. So if you want grow a subscriber base with libs or get your contributers on television news shows you have to moderate your content.
Even if you don’t sell out your ideals completely, you’re now in a situation where readers/viewers who you may have even helped radicalise move past you quickly and they don’t need to moderate their views to get on television or whatever because they’re just ordinary people. So the readers/viewers that are arguably your own success story are quickly to the left of you or at least more ideologically commited than you appear to be. And so they leave and you push harder for that liberal exposure and the process repeats and intensifies.
And that’s even assuming you’re actually moving people left successfully in the first place, rather than just failing and running towards the money.
This reminds me of several professors I had in college, one in particular. As a USAian from red country, they were the farthest left people I ever met, and I enjoyed having my beliefs challenged by them, but as quickly as I was helped past some ideological blinders by them, I came to see that they weren’t interested in actual leftism in any way. I’m still not sure if it was because the topics were verboten, or if their actual opinions are just locked to the leftmost edge of the Overton window.
Overton window isn’t real. The purpose of higher education is to reproduce the superstructure and replace the upper percentage. To give it all an air of legitimacy and postulate the endorsed truths as facts - intellectuals are allowed to „think wider“ but still needs to arrive the forgone endorsed truths.
Professors are also usually from bourgeoise backgrounds. So Marxism is more an abstract idea, intellectual challenge or an niche coffee shop one frequents to feel more cultured - than actual restructuring of their relationship to capitalism.
Even most american leftists are willing to overlook the genocide of Palestinians and the destruction of Venezuela right now, if it means getting another AOC into a position of power.
I also live in Maine. Platner is an ideological violent person. I think what people miss with his SS tattoo is no, he’s not a Nazi. He’s the communist revolutionary type. The tattoo specifically pertains to Jewish extermination camps in WWII.
Jesus Christ, what the FUCK does that even mean lol. The tattoo pertains to extermination camps because it’s the SYMBOL OF THE SS GROUPS THAT GUARDED THEM what does this have to do with communism? The Amerikkkan mind truly is cooked.
when I read this while going through the thread it made me visibly cringe for a second.
Communist revolutionary == jewish extermination camps enjoyer???
what the truck does that mean? He’s apparently ‘a violent ideological communist’ but has a tattoo about nazi things?? Is this horseshoe theory again…???
am*rican supremacists always focusing on his social media posts or the tattoo instead of the fact that he was an enthusiastic imperial jackboot, so enthusiastic that he not only joined the army for a tour in Afghanistan after three tours as a marine in Iraq, but then spent an additional tour as a mercenary
and it’s for the same reason that it always is: am*ricans fundamentally do not see non-am*ricans as fully human
a college degree, a mild improvement in the boot’s conditions, escape from an abusive family, etc. are worth any amount of foreign lives to these people
The funny thing is Graham Platner isn’t even from a poor or abusive background, he comes from a multi-millionaire petite bourgeois family and went to private schools.
I know that even if he was poor, doing what he did in the US military is still wrong, but it’s just funny seeing American “leftists” trying to use this argument of “if you’re poor, being a jackboot soldier of the American Reich is fine!” for someone as privileged as Platner.
Recently learned about this article and am going to spam it any time defense of the troops comes up: https://archive.ph/2x19K
I’ll forgive someone who entered at 18 and then left as soon as they possibly could after seeing what is was like and have consistently avowed the military since. I’ve known a couple people like that. I’ll not forgive people who in any way make that service a part of their identity, or who try and bring nuance to the situation. I’ve known many more people like this. This guy seems to be in the second camp.
The fact is 18 year-olds are dumb, fresh from a propaganda mill, and poor. The military preys on this, and I don’t believe anyone is immune to manipulation.
America delenda est.
This. I’ll be honest, I kinda agree with their point about cherry-picking, the “Hasan shocks his dog” saga has shown us you can construe anything by cherry-picking from the massive fingerprints people leave online to build the narrative you want, and that the full picture is often gonna end up messy, because people are messy. Their picture of Platner as a contradictory, “politically incorrect”, gun-loving “antifa soldier” isn’t far from my perception of him, it explains how people can hold such wildly disparate views of him.
The article’s biggest sin isn’t that, it’s that it doesn’t interrogate his military service AT ALL and why it took Platner almost 20 years since his first deployment to realise that “Imperialist adventures” are bad and to stop “believing in any of the patriotic nonsense that got [him] there in the first place”. Hard to take any condemnations of war crimes on Reddit seriously when he kept going back to the war crimes machine or was actively in it.
Branko Marcetic basically handwaves it away, saying: see, he’s changed his mind now, when his poor judgement will just make him “oppose all wars except the current one”. Plus, his promise to not vote for “pointless wars” is meaningless anyway when the president can do whatever the fuck he wants.
I also don’t get why Jacobin’s addressing this to liberals. Do radlibs even read Jacobin, let alone regular libs?
You’re right on the money. His service in Americas war machine and as a Merc, and his iffy (at best) stance on that which seems to mostly basically just be ‘we shouldn’t do Iraq again’ is the biggest issue and never gets addressed.
But even if you want to focus on the tattoo, even ignoring his lie about not knowing what it meant (he posted about knowing what it meant on Reddit before running), it shows that A) he’s a dipshit who thought it wouldn’t come up or be used against him and B) despite talking about socialism he doesn’t give a shit about solidarity or public service because keeping his edgy souvenir from his killing tours was more important than the fact that very obviously the people he claims to represent would be (rightly) concerned, offended, or threatened by the fact this guy sports Nazi ink.
As for Jacobin…
Basically all these radlib rags or news orgs go that way. I’ve even contributed to one or two in the past. There’s a fundamental tension between trying to build a business - call it profit or call it circulation / market share / visibility - if you want to work in the same media circles and ecosystem as mainstream media. There are too many stances and arguments and uncomfortable facts that are just verboten. So if you want grow a subscriber base with libs or get your contributers on television news shows you have to moderate your content.
Even if you don’t sell out your ideals completely, you’re now in a situation where readers/viewers who you may have even helped radicalise move past you quickly and they don’t need to moderate their views to get on television or whatever because they’re just ordinary people. So the readers/viewers that are arguably your own success story are quickly to the left of you or at least more ideologically commited than you appear to be. And so they leave and you push harder for that liberal exposure and the process repeats and intensifies.
And that’s even assuming you’re actually moving people left successfully in the first place, rather than just failing and running towards the money.
This reminds me of several professors I had in college, one in particular. As a USAian from red country, they were the farthest left people I ever met, and I enjoyed having my beliefs challenged by them, but as quickly as I was helped past some ideological blinders by them, I came to see that they weren’t interested in actual leftism in any way. I’m still not sure if it was because the topics were verboten, or if their actual opinions are just locked to the leftmost edge of the Overton window.
Overton window isn’t real. The purpose of higher education is to reproduce the superstructure and replace the upper percentage. To give it all an air of legitimacy and postulate the endorsed truths as facts - intellectuals are allowed to „think wider“ but still needs to arrive the forgone endorsed truths.
Professors are also usually from bourgeoise backgrounds. So Marxism is more an abstract idea, intellectual challenge or an niche coffee shop one frequents to feel more cultured - than actual restructuring of their relationship to capitalism.
Even most american leftists are willing to overlook the genocide of Palestinians and the destruction of Venezuela right now, if it means getting another AOC into a position of power.
https://xcancel.com/BenMcCombe/status/1982083117709176945
I want to die
Jesus Christ, what the FUCK does that even mean lol. The tattoo pertains to extermination camps because it’s the SYMBOL OF THE SS GROUPS THAT GUARDED THEM what does this have to do with communism? The Amerikkkan mind truly is cooked.
when I read this while going through the thread it made me visibly cringe for a second.
Communist revolutionary == jewish extermination camps enjoyer???
what the truck does that mean? He’s apparently ‘a violent ideological communist’ but has a tattoo about nazi things?? Is this horseshoe theory again…???
SS was a judeo-bolshevik false flag operation
That’s a lot of words to say “I don’t give a fuck about the mass murder of nonwhites”
How do you even begin to re-educate a person like this, is there even a point?
The people you are trying to kill for no reason are fighting back so you get to do whatever you want. Fucking disgusting, America should be glassed.
No. Re-education is not a charity and is usually limited to well meaning libs or workers who got lost on their way to marxism.
Settler logic