In the case of a revolution in the U.S...

Not really if you count nationalism as caring about the people who make up the nation not retarded dogmatism about muh heritage

Troops are professionals whose job it is repress working class people, same as cops. The peak of troop radicalism was Vietnam War, and there's no going back to how things were then unless there's a draft. That combined with right-wing militias, the American left will be severely outgunned for a long time. Thus peaceful resistance is essential at the moment, though it must actually challenge the government by having concrete transitional demands. As in, it can't be like Occupy.

There's may have been a simple reason Trump and Sanders were more popular than the others: they looked like they were the least likely candidates to start a frivolous war. Are the troops, dare I say it, anti-imperialists? It might make sense: would you rather go to war and maybe die, or keep your military job with benefits and such without ever having to go to war? Not all of them, of course.

And?

Specifically in the us, the military doesn't have to play a key role since average citizens are armed. All they have to do is refuse to fight their fellow proletarians.

I believe that agencies like the fbi will be the ones waging most of the anti-revolutionary warfare. The military in the us is an army of mercenaries after all

But most civilian weapons like pile of junk if compare them with military ones, is'nt it? And also they didnt have almost any heavy weapons at all.

What about just regular mercenaries like Blackwater? Or fascists like Oathkeepers and 3%-ers? The military is for petite-bourgeois professionals, making it more rather than less likely they will unite with the existing armed organizations that represent their class. Precisely because the military knows the police would win, they would join in to make the victory that much more total and receive credit.

but like i said, an army of mercenaries won't fight against their revolting families. the military is used to spread capitalist interests abroad, they would most likely not be willing to fight us civilians. this isn't universal of course, many armies in many countries are deeply fascist and would kill their own citizens, i just don't think the us army works that way.

i think the state apparatus that will wage counter-revolution is the federal and state law enforcement. they have gotten heavily militarized in the us yes, but a bullet in the head is a bullet in the head and there is so much the us police can do vs a heavily armed population. this is the reason communist parties in the us were historically met with force before they had a chance to become popular. a 10% communist party comprised of unarmed civilians does need the support of the military, while a 10% communist party in the us would be able to wage class warfare by itself

oh yes, they would definitely have no moral qualms about shooting their own citizens. i'm talking about the bulk of the army though, those kids that do 2-3 tours to pay for college or whatever. they wouldn't be willing to shoot their protesting fathers.

there are of course parts of the military that would support the revolution, considering the fact that the government at some point will have to cut into the military budget due to debt accumulation.

...

Most people in the military are in military families. A minority would have significant family ties to revolutionaries, but only a minority within that minority would resist military coercion. Part of your idealism here stems from not realizing that at least half of white people are racists that don't hesitate to cheer on murder. Look at the Kent State shooting: half the country thought the students deserved it.

capitalism's fall isn't idealism user, it's an inevitability. you assume current sociopolitical sentiments will exist ad perpetuem, when it's a fact that they're based on the contemporary material conditions. like i said above, the government will reach a point where it cannot afford to pay its military. dissent in the military was enough to make the revolution in russia successful, where the military was ideologically loyal to the regime. in the us, where most militarymen go in for the money, being unable to pay the soldiers will be the end of that.

as for the racist comment, i don't understand how thats relevant. it's not like workers are solely black, or the military and capitalist class solely white.

im no expert, but i don't think that can stop a rifle round

having been in the army (2001-2009), I can say that anti-imperialism has been a sentiment for a long time, and it isn't even about the things you mention. Anti-imperialism in the military is a much more personal matter, we don't want to see our friends die for sake of the oil companies and other development contractors.

"War is a Racket" is very much alive in the minds of the enlisted men and women.

love it when anarchist show their petty-bourg nature

I'm not just talking about sentiments, I'm talking about class. Obviously, these conditions won't be the same forever, but for the foreseeable the military is going to keep getting paid, even as bridges crumble and people die from lack of healthcare. Just because there are black soldiers doesn't mean the military isn't a white supremacist institution. Just because there are white workers doesn't mean that being white isn't good indicator of class, and that many white workers will sympathize with that class. Whites have more wealth than better educated immigrants because America has a history. And through most of that history, being white has been identical with being a member of the petite-bourgeoisie. The definition of white only came to include Italians, Irish, etc as those groups formed a white supremacist labor movement that excluded everyone else. AFL-CIO money was used to pay death squads that killed people, yet the union is still around because white unionists see themselves as middle class, rather than brown and poor. If you don't see racism as relevant then you just don't understand the class dynamics involved.

Meh

As someone who was in the Navy, I can state that this is correct. I always wondered why it's the case, since the Russian and the German revolution started with sailor mutinies (Kiel and Kronstadt).
The air force while sympathetic to leftists, are also full of religious cults.

You have a chart for Marines and Coast Guard?

How much support do you imagine the Tsarist military had for the socialist cause in 1900? The degradation of society under the auspices of the right wing capitalist system will draw them, even if they're still dosed up on ideology now.

i agree with most of what you wrote. all i said was that in the us, when the conditions are right for revolution, a party wouldn't need to fully convince the army to fight for it, simply convince a chunk not of fight against it.

go on, you amuse me

KYS you sectarian fart, if anything, we need more people with military experience.

I like how you ignore the part where he called you murderer.

mental retardation: the post

There's a difference between having military experience and being proud of it. Veterans who are actually left wing won't pretend what they did wasn't wrong and will actively encourage you NOT to join the military.

in the us, military experience means active duty not simply training. that fucker, for 8 years, was actively MURDERING innocent people on behalf of his country's capitalists. for him to shamelessly proclaim himself a leftist, i imagine some heavy mental gymnastics are in play. believing ideology is separate from your actions is staple petty-bourg thinking.

To be frank, I'm not proud of my time, and while I did spend 8 years, what many people don't realize is that is required in the enlisted contract, 2-6 years active, the remainder in the Reserves or in the Individual Ready Reserves. 4 Years of active time was required for the full GI Bill (college money), which by the way, STILL didn't pay for the whole thing when all was said and done.

I did choose to go to the reserves because I didn't want to get deployed with a bunch of strangers, which is what happens in the IRR.

My enlistment consisted of 4 years active and 4 in the reserves.

I was only trying to shed some light on the sentiments felt by myself and my fellows during the time served. It was by no means an attempt at recruitment or at grand standing.

how many people have you murdered pig? tell us, i'm curious

I don't disagree, but people can become better and regret their actions. There are great anti-imperialist and ML veterans, even though are not at all representative of the military institution. Revolutionary terror isn't about retribution, it's about seizing power.

0 to be honest. Never got deployed.

Yes we all remember when Lenin said the russian imperial army were evil murderers and we should not attempt to recruit them

marxism isn't church user, you don't get absolved of being an imperialist tool for 8 years simply because you're sorry.

it takes a special kind of human scum to willingly enlist to murder innocents for money. this human garbage, that would disregard human life for 8 years of wages cannot be considered a person, let alone a revolutionary. a military career doesn't always mean that of course, as in most countries only a tiny fraction of the military usually participates in nato imperialism. but in the us, you are actively enlisting as a tool for spreading misery in the name of capitalist profits.

so you can take your shame or regret or whatever you feel, and shove it up your fucking asshole.

solid discourse user.

Take your own advice and stop moralizing.

Fuck you hipster scum. We have a draft in the US, an economic draft, outside of major and medium size cities there are no jobs. If you're poor we are forced by capitalism to enlist.
Yeah a handful of people can beat the system but they're the exception not the rule.

there are morals and there are ethics user, learn the difference.

bunch of bullshit, you could work at the service industry. and even if you couldn't possibly do even that, i'd take it up the asshole for a living before enlisting as an imperialist murderer you fucking scum. your attempts at rationalizing the unthinkable are ridiculous. when socialism is established, people will look at current soldiers in the us army the same way they look at nazi soldiers today.

and also at weapon factories?

It's not rationalizing fuck wad, if you have shit education, both parents working, and the only entertainment or cultural you can afford is fucking cable it's next to impossible to suss out the implications of enlisting.
Everyone that enlists does so for money, so fuck you.

good to know

You're culpable dickwad.

kys

ye man, it's not like you can fucking google "iraq war" or anything. how could you possibly deduce the implication of enlisting for murder training and subsequent deployment in another country. it's LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE

i'm not the one rationalizing participation in the imperialist war machine and whitewashing murder you lumpen fucks.

They're going to look down at all proletariats, they're going to be like you, if we over thrown capitalism now, why couldn't they do it then when the bourgeois was weaker.

You obviously don't know shot about the military, not even 10 percent of soilders are combat at arms.
Also googling shit just gives you propaganda too, you have to have a strong intellectual curiosity to see through porky lies, something kids are specifically taught not to foster.
You some butt mad liberal arts major that works at Starbucks or something?

future generations will look down at all proletarians? what the fuck does that even mean?

there are always things that can be ethically justified based on the context they happen, and things that can't. you cannot look down on people owning slaves in ancient egypt, but you can on southern us slave owners because the conditions were different. the same way that today, the official ideological stance of the average us fag was that nazis were remorseless killers, while their country wages profit wars that cost millions of lives. you can see by this thread alone how the average american whitewashes murder, simply because in the back of their heads they accept to some degree it's moralization by the current establishment. but to actually be the hand that pulls the trigger, you have to be human garbage.

Hey dip shit, critical analysis and searching for empirical data aren't fucking natural instincts. If you don't condition kids to think for themselves they fucking won't as adults. Fuck me you ever heard of the superstructure

What do you mean what do I mean? They going to look down on all proles the same way all proles look down on peasants now. Whatever group does ultimately over throw capitalism, it won't be acedmics like yourself. Something as complex as a new MoP is going to require experimentation.

please correct me if i'm wrong, but do people on active military duty have a choice in deployment? can someone signing up for the military refuse to murder innocents?

things like "iraq war death toll" are presented factually even by propaganda outlets like wikipedia. i understand that the average joe won't research it further, but someone actively signing up to become a murderer for pay should take the time to at least research the institution he's murdering for a bit more.

the matter of the fact is that people going in the military are human garbage. all americans live in that shitty system, but only 0.4% of them choose to become paid murderers. your attempts at whitewashing murder only serve to prove how ethically corrupt the us cesspool is

and yet, out of the general population only 0.4% go on to become paid murderers. apparently, the rest of the population has the ethical and logical sense of googling something before signing up for becoming imperialist murderers

no they don't. people look down on the reactionary groups in a contemporary setting. you look down on conservative christians now, but you don't look down on christians in the 5th century. history has a dialectical course, so the contemporary sociopolitical reality plays a major role in shaping opinion. people today look down on the most reactionary cadres of a society in its time. they look down on the us south, because slavery was already an antiquated phenomenon before colonialism gave it its dying breath. the same way people will look down on us soldiers who, at a time where all information is available to you through your fucking phone, chose to actively become murderers while "looking down" on soldiers like the wehrmacht troops during ww2 who got conscripted. this is because globally atm, only the us has such an active network of paid mercenaries and such a normalization of being a murderer for hire. in most european countries, people won't approve of someone who has murdered people in iraq. in my country, only fascist types are career military men. most of them never even dream of combat, but still they are socially shunned by the vast majority of the population. even during the time of the roman empire, people shunned legionaries as paid cutthroats. that's how reactionary your attempts at whitewashing murder are

Yep, someone can shoot above head at last.

you cannot refuse deployment can you?

Yep, and now i hide from recruiters :< .

EXTREMELY IMPORTANT TOPIC
A tiny minority of people (in the 1% range) are normally able to to take killshots. Modern (late 20th century and on) militaries specifically train so that most of their people will be able to shoot to kill. Most revolutions we think about happened before this innovation, back when only about a quarter of soldiers could be expected to even shoot in the rough direction of the enemy. Even a heavily armed citizenry trained in tactics and weapons use with superior numbers would constantly lose firefights to soldiers because only the soldiers would actually shoot to kill them. This element of training is easy to overlook because it's almost never discussed for reasons that should be pretty obvious.

Video on the subject.
youtube.com/watch?v=zViyZGmBhvs

so do most civilian/private trainers. they don't shy away from promoting the use of lethal force. the age of "soldiers who won't kill" is long over

when?

My point is that you can't expect that just because a lot of the people have guns they'll be an effective fighting force. It's key to ingrain a reflex into people that when they have sights on a human shape they pull the trigger.

first of all, revolutions aren't wars. the october revolution was bloodless, what followed was a bloody "civil war", aka an attempt by foreign imperialists at reclaiming russia.

second, you assume that most civilians aren't trained the exact same way. most, if not all gun instructors will always tell you to shoot at center mass/chest level.

That's not what I'm talking about. It's not a matter of instruction. It's a matter of training a reflex to shoot as a way of sidestepping the instinct not to kill.

yeah i meant i agree, and that's true for people who haven't had training or don't use guns habitually. but when it comes to those who have had professional training, i've never heard of anyone being instructed to avoid killing

It's not about instruction. Watch the video. Humans, like other social mammals, have strong instincts to avoid killing. This was a mostly overlooked problem for a long time but any significant military or private security (and some police forces) are aware of it and specifically train people to get around the aversion to shooting other people.

in a revolutionary scenario, the armed militias will consist of ideologically class conscious proletarians user. i don't think any of them would hesitate to shoot an instrument of capitalism.

WATCH
THE
VIDEO
This is a well-understood phenomenon in human behavior. It's just not particularly well-known.

i did watch it up to the che guevara bullshit.

my point is, most soldiers don't know what they're fighting for. communists know exactly what they're fighting for, they are fighting for history. that is why a communist will not feel remorse, because his ethical mission is of the highest grade. a person fighting in some conscription army or a paid killer cannot possibly match that

This is wishful thinking. Put down the fucking Mao quotes.

no, but someone who moralizes situations in terms of "bad guy lel" is a fucking retard.

no its not, it's historical truth. the communist guerillas during ww2 didnt bat a fucking eye at killing nazis, because they knew what they were fighting for. same cant be said about some american kid who couldn't find japan on a map

Whether or not he's able to form good opinions has little bearing on his ability to present facts that he's researched.

1. What evidence do you have that these people were more willing to take killshots than normal people
2. This was WWII which was before the innovation was made, meaning neither side had this advantage over the other.

there are extensive records, at least about the communist partisans in my country and the soviets.

And those records demonstrate what exactly? Because just saying that there are records is equivalent to saying "I have evidence." Do the records show that in fact the guerillas were significantly more willing to kill targets than regular soldiers? And more importantly how does that compare with a modern military where the soldiers are trained to shoot to kill and somewhere in the ballpark of 80% will take kill shots as opposed to around 1% normally?

Frankly I don't even see why you're arguing against me here. What I'm suggesting is incorporating one aspect of training that produces an enormous increase in combat effectiveness.

Such a insufferable cunt.
Bet you wouldn't be able to kill the borgie and his family and denounce everyone that does so as evil during the revolution.

You're retarded. Orwell was a colonial police officer, Stalin tried to enlist in the Tsar's army, half the original IRA were WW1 veterans, Vietnam vets made up a good chunk of the anti war movement, Smedley Butler was a marine general who foiled a fascist coup, the Bolsheviks literally set up soldier's councils in the Tsar's army. For somebody with the read a book flag you sure are fucking illiterate.

orwell was an opportunist

citation needed

conscription

conscription

your point?

which was mostly composed of conscripted recruits.

how this justifies being a nato imperialist murderer in your mind baffles me

ye, just look at the soviet sniper average kill count, or at the various people's courts ΕΑΜ and ΔΣΕ held, that passed justice swiftly and remorselessly to fascists and their collaborators

the us soldier is the one fighting for the bourgeoisie interests you dumb fuck

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_Häyhä

Unsurprising.

Counting sniper's killcount is useless since these guys were literally anti-personnal hard counters.

They were made to kill infantries.

That's bull. Not a single Irishman was ever conscripted from the island of Ireland. The nationalists who joined up were mainly the more subdued part of the Irish Volunteers who believed many different reasons to fight for the UK in WW1 eg: fighting the war will make the UK like us more and maybe give us a government, to save a small Catholic country being invaded by a large protestant one, forming a well disciplined and knowledgeable army which knew British tactics inside out, ect.

Oh and also to the point that you said that career legionaries were viewed as vile in Rome that is just pure bullshit as well. Rome was a citizen army state which viewed military action as the highest honour that you could do. After all the highest power that Rome bestowed on a citizen was "imperium" the power to lead a Roman legion. Let's also not get onto the fact that to serve in the Roman military you actually had to be rich enough to buy all of your equipment and that to advance in anyway on the political ladder you had to serve in the military. (Of course I'm referring to the late Roman Republic era here)

Funny how Jill Stein, the actual anti-war candidate, wasn't among those choices.

...

Snipers and sharpshooters are almost universally that 1% of people who have no problem taking killshots normally.

Passing judgement in a court is completely fucking different from killing someone in combat you fucking idiot.

You're retarded, I assume you're not a burger (and if you are, you're some sheltered cosmopolitan) who doesn't understand some people have little opportunities and the military is the only way out, needed the money for college.

Communism is the manifestation of the collective self-interest of the proletariat and nothing more. Fucking red liberal.

I bet you support professional soldiers of non-western countries

He's a stemfag in uni who probably hasn't worked a day in his life.

Sure, a lot of soldiers were conscripted, and most American soldiers today are desperate proles from the ghetto and trailer park who are lied to and manipulated all their lives and offered a potential way out through the military. If you don't understand the fundamentally proletarian class character of the military then you need to read up on the history of the leftist movement as well as some fucking theory.