Category Archives: Military Philosophy

December 2, 2017

Ways To Improve The U.S. Military: Part 1

By wise sloth

I served in the U.S. Air Force from 2000-2007. My job code was 3C0X1 (Communications computer systems operator). My highest rank was E-5 (Staff Sergeant), and I received an honorable discharge. After separating, I wrote a series of posts about how the U.S. military is a cult that uses brainwashing techniques to indoctrinate recruits and commits other indignities and injustices against them. You can find links to those essays at the bottom of this page. Several people have commented asking what the alternative is. So here’s my tentative list of reforms that would address the systemic flaws in America’s military system.

 

Improve transparency of recruiting and contracts.

In my blogs I state the U.S. military is consciously designed using the cult model to brainwash troops into becoming suicidal, unquestioning zealots, and the Uniform Code of Justice strips enlisted troops of their civil rights and turns them into second-class citizens who live in a totalitarian culture where officers have the same power over them as slave owners.

Many people have argued these are necessary evils; since it’s not rational for human beings to charge into life-threatening situations, it’s necessary to hack recruits’ brains to change the way they think. Believe it or not, I can accept this. The purpose of war is to kill, which conflicts with the premise of civilized society. So if there must be war, then evil acts must be tolerated for the greater good. It would be naive to think otherwise.

However, if we lie to young, impressionable civilians, and tell them the purpose of basic training is to evolve them into a higher form of citizen, then everything they’re fighting for is based on a lie. By not giving recruits fair warning they’ll have their identity methodically stripped away and their values replaced, the U.S. government is stealing their souls. That’s existential murder.

If a patriotic recruit joins the military after receiving a lengthy briefing explaining everything they’re getting into, then that’s their choice. If a poor person joins the military because a recruiter told them they’re signing up for a lucrative adventure that will turn them into an uberman, that’s a bait and switch scam no one should tolerate.

 

Eliminate the use of mind control techniques.

Police officers, firefighters, search and rescue crews, ice road truckers, and civilian contractors in the military put their lives on the line every day without being systematically brainwashed or having their citizenship downgraded. So maybe using traumatic coercion to steal soldiers’ personalities isn’t a moral imperative.

Then again, maybe it is. However, until we’ve tried creating a fighting force that isn’t based on lies, we’ll never know, and we’ll all be guilty of crimes against humanity against our own troops before war even breaks out.

The change doesn’t have to happen overnight. We could create special units that use different training programs and “customs and courtesies.” If those units fail to accomplish their missions, at least we can say cared enough about the troops to try treating them like human beings.

 

Give the troops their freedom and rights back.

Ostensibly, military service can’t be compared to slavery because every troop joins willingly and gets paid. The murky reality is that most enlisted troops join for the paycheck and benefits because they don’t have enough education or certifications to get a job that pays a living wage, offers benefits, or vacation time. According to the American Dream, anyone can work hard and become anything they want, but statistically, if your family is poor and you’re not smart enough to score 50% on the ASVAB, you’re going to spend the rest of your life as a wage slave and die broke. Picking between that and military service is less of a choice and more of a trick to make you volunteer for indentured servitude.

Even if you get paid well and receive full benefits, you still lose your civil rights. Officers have totalitarian power over enlisted troops. The military has legal jurisdiction over you 24 hours a day, and you have to obey all its laws even when you’re off duty on vacation in a foreign country. You’re not free to date or marry a person from a higher caste, change jobs at will, choose where you live, or quit your job. The punishments for walking off the job are: going to prison, getting blacklisted from the civilian job market for life, and execution.

If military service isn’t literally slavery, it’s too close for comfort. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say it resembles apartheid more than freedom, and it literally fits the criteria of multiple “human rights abuses.” If a civilian organization operated the same way, the public would be screaming for the U.S. military to shut it down and convict the leaders for crimes against humanity at The Hague.

If any of this is true, then we should give troops most of their freedom and rights back. The cost is too high, and all the benefits are tainted with sin. At the very least, give troops the freedom to leave. Allow them to pay off the cost of their training or work it off doing community service for a local government office. If these options are always on the table, then any troop who chooses to live as a second-class citizen in a totalitarian regime, is exercising their free will. Those who can’t conform will leave without having to get kicked out, or stay until the end of their enlistment and be a toxic influence on our national defense force. Plus, if politicans ever decide to go to war for corporate profits, the troops can veto the unjust war by boycotting it. This will allow them to serve our country by not supporting counterproductive wars.

 

Eliminate or restructure the officer corps.

The officer corps is an archaic institution that’s incompatible with modern values. It elevates one class of people and gives them total power over another. I’ll concede, it might be necessary for combat troops to work under officers who enjoy more rights and benefits on and off duty, but there’s no reason to give that level of power and privilege to office managers and dentists. Nor is there any reason why network administrators and airplane mechanics should have to salute those people and live in drastically cheaper housing. Stop and think about this slowly. Do we really need segregated cafeterias with first-class and second-class seating that separates the dentists from the network administrators?

I don’t know if government-funded caste-systems are ever moral, but they might be endurable if they were effective. But any enlisted troop can tell you stories of moronic officers with God-sized egos who had bad ideas, wouldn’t listen to advice, and abused their rank. When you give people the power and glory of a dictator, and tell them to act like a leader, they’ll tend to act like megalomaniac dictators. It doesn’t happen to everyone, but it has had deadly consequences in war zones and will continue to do so.

The officer system also puts twenty-three-year-old college graduates with no real-world experience in charge of highly trained and experienced master sergeants who have to groom their lieutenants through their mistakes until they get promoted and are replaced with another unqualified kid. This is a failed experiment that is perpetually impacting the military’s missions and wasting taxpayer money.

All these problems could be solved by eliminating the officer corps and giving the most important jobs to people who have gone through the enlisted ranks and have the most on-the-job training. If the officer corps must exist, you should have to get promoted to at least E-7 before you can apply for Officer Training School. This would at least keep out the trust fund frat boys looking for a cushy, flattering, obscenely high paying job that looks great on a resume, and it would do a better job of matching the most important positions with the most qualified candidates.

 

Democratize the promotion system.

Each branch has its own promotion system, and they’re all so broken it would take too long to list all the reasons here. Basically, your fate is either determined by one or two people who might be idiots who hate you for the wrong reasons or you’re practically guaranteed promotion if you just sit around long enough.

My solution is to eliminate promotion cycles and allow everyone in the military to vote for everyone’s promotion. You log onto a military website, select a person who you feel deserves a promotion, and enter a justification. When a person has reached enough votes, they get reviewed by the promotion board.

Likewise, everyone should also be able to anonymously vote “not recommended for promotion.” This would prevent toxic managers from rising in power by kissing up to a few higher ranking individuals who don’t work with them and barely know them.

 

Put the prison system under the Department of Defense to brainwash and exploit prisoners.

If it’s a moral imperative that we must ignore the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and turn normal human beings into unquestioning killing machines without their fully-informed consent, then perhaps it’s a moral imperative to take this rule to its logical conclusion.

America’s prison system strips civilians of their freedom and rights just like the military. Many prisoners are mentally broken, institutionalized killers who owe a debt to society. If we’re already committing the same human rights abuses against prisoners as we are troops, then why not take advantage of the sin? Turn every prison into a basic training camp and put those sub-humans to good use doing society’s dirty work. They won’t complain about having their rights abused like I am because they’re already used to it, and the public will never get upset because most people don’t care how prisoners are treated.

 

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October 14, 2017

4 Reasons Terrorism Doesn’t Work And 4 Alternatives That Do

By wise sloth

4 REASONS TERRORISM DOESN’T WORK

1: Governments already kill more of their own citizens than you can.

Every country locks its own civilians in prisons for nonviolent, victimless crimes where, with few exceptions, they’re raped and beaten until they’re thrown out in the streets with felony convictions that ruin the rest of their lives. Every country sells tobacco, alcohol, and toxic food to their civilians. They also enforce laws that prevent the poor from being able to afford the medicine they’ll need to save their lives after getting sick from the poisonous food they bought at the grocery store. To make life even scarier and more impossible, most governments set the minimum wage below the poverty level.

It would take an army to kill as many civilians as those countries let die every year. It would be illogical to expect terrorism to hold any leverage over countries that make a full-time job out of terrorizing and slaughtering their own population.

2: You will be killed in retaliation to justify war spending.

Attacking a world superpower is tantamount to personal and ideological suicide. When you attack a superpower, it will attack back. Period. There’s no question about that. Even if a terrorist kills him/herself in their attack, the superpower will still need to attack somebody in retaliation. So they’ll invest billions of dollars into killing you, not because they even care about your ideology but because you went out of your way to give them an excuse to kill someone for money.

3: Everyone you know and love will be killed in retaliation.

And since the largest, most powerful militaries in the world are riddled with bureaucracy, inefficiency, and un-accountability they’re probably going to end up imprisoning and bombing more of your innocent neighbors than your actual associates. If/when/before that happens, you really have to take a step back and ask yourself what terrorism really accomplishes. It just sets in motion a domino effect of murder and mayhem until there’s nobody left to be angry at. The only people who really win are the bullet and bomb merchants.

If you truly have an ideology worth spreading, the worst thing you could possibly do is kill a bunch of innocent civilians. All that’s going to accomplish is getting you and a significant number of like-minded individuals killed, and your ideas are going to die with you.

4: You will make the world hate and reject your ideology.

You’re not going to die as a glorious martyr either. You’re going to be demonized, and your ideology is going to be demonized right along with you. Even if your ideology isn’t demonic, you’ll have made it demonic in the public eye.

Bad Luck Brian Meme: "Kills innocent civilians for the glory of his religion. Now everybody hates his religion."

Some terrorists kill themselves and other people because they believe they’ve been pushed up against the wall. Terrorists say they were forced to use violence as a last resort against overwhelming odds. That’s the line we hear, anyway, but when have the police ever raided a terrorist’s bomb-shack and found a door-length list hanging on the wall of every other method the terrorists had tried before finally resorting to violence? Never. Terrorism isn’t the last resort of courageous men. It’s the first idea of uncreative fools. Here are a few ideas that have worked for other people, which you and your organization should consider trying before resorting to violence:

4 ALTERNATIVES TO TERRORISM THAT DO WORK

1: Bribery

Maybe you have a righteous ideology that you want your government to adopt. Killing innocent people will obligate politicians to reject your ideology. However, history shows that nothing motivates politicians better than money. Instead of funding terrorist training camps, just fund a politician’s political campaign. Even if your ideology doesn’t make any sense and is blatantly in the disinterest of the common citizen, you can still get a politician to sign legislation that will force your ideology onto others. Why do you think America cares so much about Israel? It’s not because America loves Jews. It’s because American politicians love Jewish campaign donations and business connections.

2: Outreach

The Catholic church tried to spread Christianity by the sword. Now the Crusades are remembered by believers and non-believers alike as a prime historical example of FAIL. However, Christianity still spread all the way around the globe because the Christians changed their tactics. They sent missionaries to foreign lands to set up schools, hospitals, orphanages and poor houses. The locals didn’t (usually) fight off the missionaries. The locals came to them. Then, once the locals were lured inside the church the Christians pulled a bait-and-switch and pushed their manifesto on them. Hundreds of years later, Africans, Hawaiians, Maoris, Alaskans, Native Americans and countless other ethnic groups are still worshiping the God who stole their land and erased their culture.

3. Propaganda

You don’t have to kill your enemy to defeat them. Ultimately, what’s your enemy? Your enemy is the ideas in people’s minds. Defeat the ideas and you convert your enemies into your allies. Then you win twice.

If your ideology isn’t sound enough to convince people to adopt without violence then you need to seriously consider whether your ideology is worth spreading at all. If your ideology can convert people without violence then why use violence?

If you have an ideology worth killing/dying for then you must have a giant manifesto detailing your cause, right? If you don’t, then you have to ask yourself what you’re killing/dying for. How do you spread an idea? You put it into a book and then circulate copies of that book. Your money would be better spent on ink than bullets. You don’t even have to be subtle about the fact that you’re spreading propaganda with a bait-and-switch agenda. Just make it cute and funny. If you want to get into people’s minds then DO get into their books and television; DON’T kill them.

4. Regrouping and rebuilding

Joseph Smith had an ideology he wanted to spread. He was killed for his beliefs, and his followers were brutally persecuted by Christians. Afterwards, his followers didn’t start burning churches and attacking government buildings. They moved out into the country and built a new nation based on their ideals. Unfortunately for them, the United States forced them to accept annexation as a state instead of being able to start their own country, but even after that happened they still didn’t start burning churches and blowing up government buildings. They set up schools in places Christians had already done the groundwork of wiping out the local culture. They sent missionaries door to door all over the world to spread their manifesto and convert people’s minds by talking to them, and they’ve had far more success that way than violence could have ever achieved. They haven’t taken over the world yet, but that’s no reason to start killing people. Point in fact, at the time of writing this a Mormon is running for president of the country that wouldn’t let Utah be its own country. Regardless of whether Utah is a state or a country, it’s still a stronghold of the Latter-day Saints, and it became that way through hard work, not violence.

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October 6, 2017

4 Reasons All Troops Aren’t Automatically Heroes

By wise sloth

Note: I served in the U.S. Air Force from 2000-2007. My AFSC was 3C0X1 (Communications computer systems operator). My highest rank was E-5 (Staff Sergeant), and I received an honorable discharge.

 

"Heroes don't wear capes. They wear dog tags."

 

“Hero” is a strong word. The label of “hero” comes with a prestigious amount of respect and privilege. It’s only fair that anyone who claims hero-status should have to give full account of why they deserve to hold the title of hero not just to the civilians they expect to be praised by but to the true heroes who can give full account of their hero status lest any false heroes minimize their sacrifices and accomplishments.

The current culture in America has indiscriminately lumped every member of its military into the hero category with no consideration for achievement or distinction for degrees. This is unfair to the civilian population and all true military heroes for several reasons.

 

1: Not every troop enlists out of patriotism.

Yes, there are many individuals who enlisted because they genuinely wanted to serve their country, be all they can be and selflessly sacrifice themselves for their fellow man. These individuals’ noble intentions put them in the running for hero status, and it’s not fair to give mercenaries equal standing as them.

There are troops who joined the military because they were enticed by an early retirement, free education, travel opportunities, partying, a lucrative and secure pay check, socialized health care for them and their family and all the other practical benefits that come along with being in the military. Some troops even joined as an alternative to prison. Anyone who joined the military for what they could get out of it is a mercenary by degrees.

Granted, they knew there was a chance of death in the line of duty, but every trucker accepts that same risk in their job to deliver goods to consumers across the nation. The big difference between a regular trucker and a mercenary is the mercenary accepts the certainty that they’ll be responsible for killing other human beings (directly or indirectly). If you’d join Murder Incorporated for what you can get out of it, you’ve got a big task ahead of you to explain how that doesn’t make you the opposite of a hero.

 

Definition of the word, "mercenary:" a person primarily concerned with making money at the expense of ethics.

 

2: Not every troop sees combat.

Regardless of why you joined the military, let’s suppose you spend 20 years processing administrative paperwork in a cubicle at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Let’s suppose the closest you come to a combat zone is Ali Al Salem Air Force Base in Kuwait, where you gained 10 pounds from eating stake, lobster, and ice cream bars and returned home with an extra $5000 in separation and hazardous duty pay even though the closest you came to combat was playing paintball in downtown Kuwait City. Would you really tell a Marine (who has done 5 tours in Iraq and lost half his friends in combat) that you’re a hero on the same level as them? No. Hell, no.

Well, if you wouldn’t tell a combat infantry Marine you’re just as much of a hero as them, then don’t tell civilians you’re a combat infantry Marine-level hero, because by my calculations processing paperwork in San Antonio for 20 years doesn’t make you any more of a hero than the taxpayers who paid that Marine’s paycheck.

 

3: Doing something you’re forced to isn’t brave

Regardless of how close you came to the battlefield, what would happen if you refused to support the mission? Technically, the UCMJ gives the military the right to execute its own troops for going AWOL during a time of war. Granted, in this day and age the negative press that would generate almost guarantees that won’t happen. What will happen though is you’ll go to jail for a few months and then get kicked out of the military with no benefits… but you will get a dishonorable discharge that’s designed to almost guarantee you’ll never be able to earn a living wage again for the rest of your life. This means every soldier is constantly faced with two choices: Support the mission and possibly die on the battlefield or don’t support the mission and face certain destitution by your own leaders.

This means it would require as much of a sacrifice, if not more, to conscientiously object to the mission as it would to support the mission. This means it’s theoretically possible to continue to support a mission you disagree with out of cowardice. This doesn’t mean all troops are cowards. It just illustrates how important it is to make the distinction that not all troops are automatically heroes so as not to lump the hypocritical cowards in with the troops who do genuinely continue to serve out of courage and selflessness.

It also raises an uncomfortable point. The mere existence of the dishonorable discharge will always cast a shadow of doubt on the heroism of any soldier. I don’t say that to be spiteful, at least, not to the troops. I say that to encourage discussion about whether or not the dishonorable discharge should exist at all. Is it just that the military expects civilians to embrace every troop as selfless heroes, but the military itself holds a gun to every troop’s head and orders them to dance or die? Is it mentally healthy to be comfortable with this?

 

4: Nobody who fights for an oppressive government is a hero

Some troops do willingly fight on the battlefield selflessly and die in the line of combat. Some even willingly and consciously sacrifice their lives in order to save the lives of their fellow soldiers. As taboo as it is to question the heroism of these martyrs, it’s imperative to do so in order to fully validate their heroism.

Consider this. Soldiers died selflessly fighting for Hitler, Ho Chi Mihn, Stalin and Pol Pot. If we made it a rule that any soldier who dies in the line of duty is automatically a hero then we owe every fallen Nazi and kamikaze pilot full hero honors on par with every American soldier who died in the Korean War, the Vietnam War or the Iraq War.

If that doesn’t sound reasonable then we have to ask ourselves if reason ever played a role in our decision to call our soldiers heroes or are we really just saying that any time one of our troops dies they become a hero and anytime anyone else’s troops die, they’re just the bad guy getting what they deserve? If that’s what we’re doing then the only determining factor in who becomes a hero is who wins the war, and that cheapens every hero’s death everywhere.

Even if a man dies in battle, he still needs to pass 2 more tests before he’s granted full hero status. The first question we have to ask is how their unit behaved. Did they maim or kill any civilians? Did they harass and bully civilians? Did they engage their enemy with unnecessary cruelty? Did they torture? Did they kill for sport? Did they use their victims’ skulls as ashtrays? Did they commit any war crimes? Did they break the Geneva Convention?

 

Picture of two old people talking next to Nazi troops marching down the street. "Well, I don't agree with Hitler's policies, but I still believe that we should support the troops."

 

There is an American War Crimes Museum in Vietnam. It contains pictures of American soldiers committing war crimes. Some of those Americans in those pictures died in the line of combat and received medals. Why should they get a free pass to the hall of heroes? They wouldn’t if they had Nazi flags on their shoulders instead of American flags. But the Nazis killed 6 million Jews and invaded other countries though. Well, America is responsible for the deaths of 100,000 Iraqis and has sent troops to as many, if not more countries than Germany. I’m not saying America is the same as Nazi Germany. I’m saying we need to have a measured conversation about America’s military actions without whitewashing over every uncomfortable fact with euphoric propaganda.

This brings me to the second question we have to ask about our fallen soldiers before we write them into the history books as divine heroes, and that is the righteousness of the wars they fight. No matter how valiantly and selflessly any Nazi soldier fought and died, they won’t be remembered as heroes by most of the world because the war they supported was unjust. The American government tells its civilians and soldiers that every war it fights is just, but every single government that has ever gone to war has always told everyone that their actions were just.  Therefore, you can never take any government’s reasons for going to war at face value. When a government gives you the reasons why they’re going to war, that’s your cue to question those reasons relentlessly….and that takes courage.

Look at the war in Iraq. Many Americans have lost their lives there. The surviving soldiers spit venom at any civilian who questions the Iraq war, but is it really the civilians who deserve to have their integrity questioned? Any American soldier who expects to be regarded as a hero or at least expects to be exempt from criticism needs to objectively analyze for themselves why America invaded Iraq.

If you look past the propaganda and look at the hard facts you’ll find…nothing. George Bush claimed America had to invade Iraq because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction even though America knew Saddam didn’t have nuclear capability, and the only chemical weapons Saddam had were the ones America sold him. America knew Saddam had used those weapons on civilians years before America used those war crimes as justification to hang him. When it came to light that Saddam didn’t have the weapons of mass destruction General Colin Powell claimed, then George Bush changed his story and said America went into Iraq to liberate the Iraqi people. Years later, the Iraqi people still have their roads blockaded by American troops. So which reason did America go to war? Journalists, Nobel Prize winners, politicians, soldiers, and citizens have been arguing for years about why America went to war in Iraq because there’s no clear answer.

 

 

100,000 people dead require a clear cut answer, which the American government has yet to produce. I can’t yield unquestioning trust to a government that can’t give a solid account for why it’s killed so many people and spent so much of its taxpayers’ hard-earned money. Nor can I endorse hero status on soldiers who are killing for a cause with no clear justification. Nor can I exempt soldiers from criticism if I can’t determine with certainty that the cause they serve is just. Nor should you, nor should the troops themselves.

I can’t support the troops if the troops cannot give me a full account of what they’re fighting for.  This isn’t disrespectful, arrogant, impudent or ungrateful. This is completely reasonable and justified. In response to everything said here I know that many troops (as well as family members, friends, and supporters of the troops) will respond by saying, “The troops protect your freedoms….” as if that fact justifies everything they’ve done and exempts them from all criticism.

To this I would say, what about the Iraqi’s freedom to travel? What about their freedom from search and seizure? What about their freedom from torture? America backs the Palestinian holocaust, which the rest of the world would step in and end, was it not for America’s military. Even back in America, civilians don’t have the freedom to marry whomever they want. Americans don’t have the freedom of privacy. Our phones are wiretapped. Our genitals are groped at airports. You can’t buy certain books without your name appearing on a CIA or FBI blacklist. Peace activists are put on the TSA terrorist list and lose the freedom to fly. The American government has given itself the right to take anyone in the world to secret prisons to be tortured and denied the right to a fair, public trial. Americans don’t have the freedom to buy alcohol except in limited times and places. Americans don’t have the right to grow medical marijuana.

The troops claim they protect Americans’ freedoms yet America has more people in prison than any other country in the world. Americans don’t have the freedom to choose how their taxes or spent. Americans don’t have the freedom to dispose of a president with a 30% approval rating or a Congress with a 12% approval rating. Americans aren’t protected from predatory financial practices. American women don’t even have the same freedom to take off their shirt that American men have. How can you the American military supports and guarantees Americans’ freedom when it’s illegal for half the population to take their shirt off?

To this you might say, life is better in America than in a lot of third world countries. So Americans should be grateful and not complain. You know why life is cheap and bountiful in America? Because America actively and consistently represses the freedoms, rights, and opportunities of other people so they can be used as cheap slave labor for American companies that have moved their sweatshops overseas. That’s the freedom our precious military martyrs are dying for, and if you’re angry at me for saying that you’re directing your indignation in the wrong direction.

 

 

You can even bring the issue closer to home. The enlisted troops of the military themselves are literally slaves who are exploited and subjugated by the military caste system. The troops are made up of American civilians. Therefore the American government is enslaving civilians and justifying it by using the UCMJ as a loophole around the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If the American government can enslave 1% of its population and systematically and brazenly brainwash those slaves to belligerently defend their own subjugation then why should I feel safe in America? The American government reserves the right to draft able-bodied men into slavery at any time as long as it claims there’s a need for it, and we’ve seen how reliable its reasons for going to war are.

I’m not impressed by a soldier’s ability to follow orders without questioning them. I’m not impressed by a soldiers’ willingness to die for a cause they don’t understand. I’m not impressed by the freedoms soldiers willingly surrender to men with a track record of authorizing human rights abuses and lying about it. I’m not impressed by how belligerently you tell me I’m ungrateful. I’m impressed by people who question their answers. I’m impressed by people who stand up to injustice in their own house. I’m impressed by troops who refuse to serve politicians who torture whistleblowers.

 

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October 6, 2017

5 Ways The UCMJ Treats Troops Unethically

By wise sloth

Note: I served in the U.S. Air Force from 2000-2007. My AFSC was 3C0X1 (Communications computer systems operator). My highest rank was E-5 (Staff Sergeant), and I received an honorable discharge.

Many American civilians don’t fully understand that military service members fall under a completely separate legal jurisdiction than civilians. This legal code is known as the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). The existence of the UCMJ isn’t necessarily a sinister thing. In a lot of ways, pointing out that civilians and troops fall under different legal codes is like saying people who work for McDonalds and people who work for Burger King have different employee handbooks. The military is a bureaucratic institution that exists to accomplish a specific purpose just like the United States Post Office. Neither could operate without some kind of guidelines that outline the operating procedures for how they accomplish their purpose.

 

 

This sounds reasonable on paper, but the UCMJ redefines the basic human rights of the people who fall under its jurisdiction in ways that are considered unethical and unconstitutional. It’s literally illegal to treat civilians the same way troops are treated under the UCMJ. Here are five ways the UCMJ treats the troops unethically:

 

1. Bad Conduct and Dishonorable Discharges

There’s effectively no difference between a bad conduct/dishonorable discharge and a felony conviction. No other place of employment has the ability to punish dissenting employees with prison time and felony convictions for not obeying their boss at work. However, the military reserves this right because the UCMJ gives it that right, which is like saying the Bible is true because the Bible says it’s true.

Just like how the Bible causes its followers to carry around the burden of the threat of Hell in their minds every time they commit the most innocent, victimless sin, the troops carry around the burden of the threat of a dishonorable discharge with them all the time, everywhere they go. This is tolerable if you don’t think about it, but once you realize that the rest of your life will be unceremoniously destroyed if you decide not to do a jumping jack when you’re ordered to or you decide not to button up your shirt when you’re ordered to and persist in refusing to do so after repeated orders you’ll come to realize that your life isn’t your own, and your personhood isn’t important to the military. You’re a slave whose worth is measured by your willingness to conform, and you’ll be unceremoniously thrown out onto the street and made an example out of the moment it’s convenient for the military.

You can find ways to justify this, but it’s a legal fact that McDonald’s couldn’t do this to its employees because that would be grossly unethical. So let’s be clear that in justifying the existence of bad conduct/dishonorable discharges we are in effect justifying second-class citizenship for the troops; they have less protection under the law and can be treated worse than other people and we’re fine with this.

 

2. Institutionalized Victimhood/Subjugation

Imagine if you had to salute teachers, police officers, doctors or politicians any time you pass them in the street. Imagine if you had to address everyone who gets paid more than you as “Sir or Ma’am.” Imagine if you had to deliver these gestures of submission to people you don’t work with and don’t know. Or imagine if you had to offer these gestures of submission to individuals who you knew for a fact were dumber than you and had less moral character than you.

Now imagine if I told you that you had to salute all these people and address them with a superior title because you respected them….well, that and the fact that if you don’t then you’ll be demoted, fired, go to jail and/or receive a felony conviction on your permanent employment record that you can’t hide from future prospective employers….but the fear of permanent destitution isn’t why you salute them. You salute them because you respect them…even if you don’t know them or you know for a fact that one of those individuals is a scum bag.

What if I told you that you had to respect these people because they were white, or older than you, or joined the company before you or went to school a little longer than you? In a world where “all men are created equal” does it matter what reason someone tells you to subjugate yourself to another person, especially when the order to subjugate yourself comes with the threat of destitution?

Mandatory gestures of subjugation are reprehensible and illegal in every walk of life except the military, and in that case, insult is added to injury by training the troops to glorify participation in their own subjugation. Military training teaches you that the way to be the perfect human is to be the perfect victim or abuser, depending on which side of the caste system your rank places you in relation to the human being standing in front of you.

Again, I understand that there are reasons for the military caste system and for saluting, but those reasons merely justify the exact same level of institutionalized victimhood and subjugation that was imposed on Negro slaves before the Emancipation Proclamation.

Just like with Negro slavery, many honest, well-intentioned people used similar reasons to justify the institutionalized victimhood and subjugation of those slaves, and the worst part is that from one narrow point of view they were right. If you ignore the inherent value of human beings and only look at the well-being of a nation from the standpoint of its economic and political strength, then a caste system looks justifiable. So feel free to argue that the troops need to or deserve to be held to a lower standard of ethical treatment than the civilian population. Just understand that when you do that, saying “Support the Troops” is as meaningful as saying “Support the Slaves.”

 

3. Inhumane Training Methods

Have you ever wondered why police officers, firemen, lawyers, CEOs or politicians don’t go through military basic training? After all, the commercials say that military training will turn you into a superhuman. If military basic training is such a powerful tool for raising human beings to their full potential then why doesn’t everyone or at least the most powerful people in the world go through basic training?

The answer is because military training doesn’t raise you to your full potential. It uses time-tested brainwashing techniques to break you down mentally and replace your values and beliefs with those that will ensure you shut down your capacity to reason and question. It indoctrinates you to willfully subjugate yourself to external control and kill without question.

Public and private organizations alike regularly produce literature condemning the training techniques used in military basic training. However, these techniques are only condemned when cults use them, not when the military does. I strongly urge you to put this claim to the test. Go look in any brainwashing textbook, and compare those methods to military basic training. Military basic training is copied word-for-word from brainwashing textbooks. This isn’t a subjective opinion you can disagree with for your own subjective reasons. This is a cut-and-dry, verifiable fact.

 

 

Another way you can put this theory to the test is to set up your own basic training camp. Hire ex-basic training instructors to train a group of psychology students using the exact same training manuals and techniques used in military basic training. Then invite the American Psychological Association to monitor your training program for any ethical violations. Your experiment would be shut down before it finished if not before it started.

This raises the question, why the double standards? Why have we taken one group of people and exempted them from the same protections we guarantee everyone else? And does it even matter if there’s a reason? What’s our freedom worth if it’s bought with the blood of slaves and can be taken away from us by our own government with the flick of a pen? Are we even worth protecting if we agree to strip our fellow man of their humanity?

 

4. Pushing the Limits of Contractual Obligation

We justify exempting troops from the same rights and protections every other human being is entitled to because the troops signed a contract and took an oath. Actually, this statement is only half true. In the case of a draft the troops don’t have a choice. They have to take the oath or go to jail. In that case, the government gets to throw all the rights and protections guaranteed by the constitution out the window at its own discretion. In other words, the government can suspend the constitution at will like it did in the Vietnam War (or as the Vietnamese call it, The American War) when there was zero threat to the American public and the troops were sent in (many against their will) to protect American business’s access to the South East Asian economy against the will of the majority of the Vietnamese (and all of the Cambodian) people…but I digress.

The draft sets a precedent that the government can throw out the constitution at will and it doesn’t need airtight justification to do so. It can also throw out the constitution if it can get a person to sign a piece of paper waiving their rights. Before you start screaming, “The troops knew what they were getting into before they signed up!” go visit a military recruiter and tell them you want to sign up for the military. They’ll put a piece of paper and a pen in front of you and pressure you to sign it as fast as possible.

If you ask them the hard questions about the U.C.M.J. they’ll make excuses and dodge the subjects. They’ll reassure you everything is on the level and promise you anything they can to get you to sign that paper so they can meet their recruitment quota. They’ll even flat out lie to you. Any honest basic training instructor will tell you that military recruiters are synonymous with dishonesty.

To military apologists this is all just nit-picking; the bottom line is the troops signed a contract that’s more legally binding than the constitution or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I suppose, from a purely technical standpoint that’s legally valid. But if that’s the case then what the hell are we doing here? If I can just give you a $3,000 kicker bonus and promise to pay for your pregnant wife’s upcoming hospital bills (that you can’t afford because you work for McDonald’s) in exchange for all your civil liberties then why have civil liberties in the first place? The issue here isn’t whether or not it’s illegal to strip human beings of their civil liberties. The question is whether or not it should be legal. The answer is no. It shouldn’t, because as the military says, “A threat to liberty anywhere is a threat to liberty everywhere.”

 

5. Loss of civil liberties

Many of the laws in the UCMJ are inoffensive and inarguable. For example, Article 128 of the UCMJ deals with assault. Of course, we don’t want people assaulting each other. Article 120 deals with rape, and that’s great too. Nobody should be raped. So I agree with that, but the fact that there are some reasonable lines in the UCMJ doesn’t prove that they’re all reasonable, practical or just. Look at Articles 133 and 134, which say,

“Any commissioned officer, cadet, or midshipman who is convicted of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.” and “Though not specifically mentioned in this chapter, all disorders and neglects to the prejudice of good order and discipline in the armed forces, all conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces, and crimes and offenses not capital, of which persons subject to this chapter may be guilty, shall be taken cognizance of by a general, special, or summary court-martial, according to the nature and degree of the offense, and shall be punished at the discretion of that court.“

If those statements sound borderline meaningless, that’s because they are. They were designed as catchall laws to allow the military to incriminate and punish the troops for any reason it subjectively decides. Michelle Manhart was discharged for posing nude in Playboy magazine because it brought discredit on the military. Others have been reprimanded and discharged for moonlighting as strippers even though they kept their daytime job in the military a secret. You’ll go to jail and/or get a dishonorable discharge for publicly speaking your mind about morally questionable things your employer (who won’t let you quit) is doing. You can be demoted at work for cussing at a minor at a grocery store.

You might not have a problem with this, but let’s just be clear about the precedent we’re setting here. The military enforces subjective cultural taboos, and retains broad discretion in its ability to destroy the lives of its service members for not conforming to the military’s narrow perception of morality. Imagine if you were a member of a church, and your pastor found out you cheated on your wife. Then he told your boss and you got demoted at work. Imagine if you got fired at work for marching in a gay pride parade over the weekend. Imagine if you were sentenced to life in prison for whistle-blowing human rights abuses committed by your employer. Would that be fair? Would that be just? No, but that’s everyday life for the troops. The human beings are so un-free that they’re subject to laws that basically say anything you do can be illegal if your boss wants it to. That’s literally the opposite of freedom. That’s totalitarian control over the life of a human being, and there’s no dignity in that.

All of the extraordinary rules/regulations in the UCMJ are supposedly justified because they ensure good order and discipline, but never forget that this good order and discipline comes at the cost of respect for human dignity and equality. These measures aren’t necessary to maintain good order and discipline in the civilian population because civilian employers don’t have the same mission as the military. The military’s mission is to kill people and blow things up without asking why.

This is an unnatural mission that human instincts, common sense, and reason-based morality cannot accept. As a result, the military must use invasive techniques to break its members’ minds and bind them in an unnatural psychological state against their will if/when necessary. If the military can’t break the mind of a troop it will tattoo “failure to conform” on their forehead and throw them in the gutter and make an example of them to scare the remaining troops into submission. To the military, the perfect hero is the perfect slave, and all their benefits and perks are just golden handcuffs. Putting bigger golden handcuffs on the slaves is a hollow way to support them. Refusing to allow open, honest discussion about what the troops are dying/killing for is a hollow way to support them. If you really, truly care about the troops, the best way you can support them is to end the UCMJ and give the troops their rights, their dignity and their freedom back.

 

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October 5, 2017

Every Civilian Owes Every Troop A War Debt

By wise sloth

Note: I served in the U.S. Air Force from 2000-2007. My AFSC was 3C0X1 (Communications computer systems operator). My highest rank was E-5 (Staff Sergeant), and I received an honorable discharge.

 

Hopefully, you’ve never been to war. Hopefully, the closest you’ve come to war is watching movies about ones that happened before you were born, but you probably aren’t that isolated. You probably know a few service members, and if you don’t, you know someone who does.

If you’ve spent half your life sitting on the couch watching television and the other half surfing the internet, then you’ve seen some really realistic war movies. You’ve watched fifty documentaries on the Holocaust, and you’ve seen a billion news segments on the wars in the Middle East. So even if you’ve never been to war, you still understand the concept. You deserve a good amount of credit for understanding what war is, why it happens, and what it costs.

You’ve probably seen “Saving Private Ryan,” “The Pacific,” “Band of Brothers,”  “Hurt Locker,” and maybe even “Generation Kill.” You’ve seen the sacrifice. You were moved by the orchestra music, and you’re not stupid. You understand that you owe a debt to all the soldiers throughout history who have died in vain or successfully so you could have a better life. The thought has got to have crossed your mind at some point in your life, and if it hasn’t, I’m telling you now. You owe a debt to every soldier, living and dead.

 

 

Here’s the thing about that. Those soldiers didn’t die just so you could be comfortable. Each generation has to give something to the next in order for humanity to survive, much less fulfill its greatest potential. Fallen soldiers took a bullet for the team. What have you done for the team? Without being accusatory, it’s a legitimate question every human being needs to ask themselves.

Only you can answer that question, and if you haven’t thought about it, then you’ve let your fallen brethren down. They thought about it, and they put their money where their mouth was. If you haven’t even thought about it, and you aren’t going to do anything about it as long as you’re not actively being guilt-tripped, then those soldiers died for nothing. If you’re going to let the world devolve into “Jersey Shore” then it might have been better if the Nazis had won. I’m being sarcastic and raising a valid point. The civilian sector shouldn’t be spending their hard-won years of freedom resigned to their couches, learning how to act stupid. The civilian sector was supposed to pick up where the soldiers left off and go on to build paradise.

That’s how it works. You don’t just sit there and be thankful. You repay the debt. You owe it to your ancestors and descendants. You’re not the tip of the spear. You’re a link in a chain. You owe it to everybody to devote your life to helping humanity achieve its potential. If you don’t know how to do that, then you need to ask as many people as it takes until someone explains it to you or you figure out for yourself, because you can’t weasel out of the debt by claiming ignorance. You’re not ignorant, and it wouldn’t make the debt go away even if you were.

Soldiers don’t get to make excuses. They don’t get to say no. If they can’t do something they figure out a workaround. If they don’t know how to do something they teach themselves. They don’t sit around cursing their uselessness and using it to justify future uselessness. They accomplish the mission and/or die trying.

That’s the bar soldiers set for humanity. The civilian sector is capable of the exact same level of accountability, and it’s not like this is a terrible, burden that’s going to cost civilians everything they hold dear. Civilians don’t even need to bother setting out POW tables or sticking “Fallen but not forgotten” bumper stickers on their trucks. All they need to do is try to figure out how they can make the world a better place for themselves and everyone else to live in…and then do that. Coincidentally, we were all supposed to be doing that for a bunch of reasons anyway.

And yet we live in Idiocracy. Someone’s not paying their war debt.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Military Mind Control
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September 28, 2017

Tweets by The Wise Sloth #25: War, Military Industrial Complex and Soldiers

By wise sloth

Cartoon image of a sloth sitting on a mountain top. He is wearing a yellow robe. His head is bowed with his eyes shut, and beams of light shine from around his head. With his left arm, he is holding one finger in the air. Above him are the words, "Tweets by The Wise Sloth."

America has over a million prisoners working in sweatshops (mostly nonviolent drug offenders), who all wish someone was fighting for their freedom.

American CEOs and investors tend to profit far more than American workers each time America goes to war.

Debt hurts more Americans than drugs and terrorism combined. If there were a war on debt, the American government would fight on debt’s side.

If you join the military, never forget that you’re fighting to defend a minimum wage that’s half the living wage.

On Memorial Day we remember all the striking workers shot by the National Guard and law-abiding citizens shot by the police… or not.

Not being able to afford to survive is a more imminent threat to Americans than terrorism. The source of that problem is in Washington DC.

America’s military will fight anyone who tries to take away Americans’ freedoms… everyone except employers. Then they back ’em.

As a veteran, I feel sick and guilty when Americans thank me for “fighting” for their freedom. They lost freedoms on my watch.

It takes every cop and soldier working together with the best of intentions to prop up a corrupt government.

It’s not mature to learn how to follow orders if you’re taught to obey psychopathic, sociopathic, greedy, megalomaniac, idiot leaders.

Let’s everyone (except the homeless, prisoners, soldiers, slaves, refugees, and terminally ill) celebrate another apocalypse-free year.

Think about this before enlisting. American presidents, the commander in chiefs of the military, are as synonymous with dishonesty as American military recruiters.

It doesn’t matter if America is the world’s police, if it’s the main importer of sweatshop goods and exporter of sweatshop jobs.

Smart men started the war in Iraq, which only accomplished destabilizing the Middle East. Makes you wonder if that was the whole point.

Either the Iraq war was started by dumb people screwing up or smart people being evil. Either way, America needs a better political system.

How to solve all the crises in the Middle East: Every country pays into a fund to turn the Middle East into the world’s largest farm.

If Palestinians were gorillas, America would be sending its children to save them.

Our soldiers have been protecting our freedoms by killing foreign goat herders while our police and politicians take our freedoms away.

The solution to Middle East terrorism=build sustainable infrastructure that makes life not suck so bad residents would rather kill than live.

Most of the largest nations in the world have troops fighting in the Middle East. Isn’t that the definition of World War 3?

 

If you enjoyed these Tweets, you’ll also like these:

My Tweets About Self-Help
My Tweets About Romance
My Tweets About Philosophy 
My Tweets About Religion
My Tweets About Politics
My Tweets About Economics
My Tweets About Pop Culture

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October 30, 2009

Six Lessons Civilians Can Learn From The Military

By wise sloth

Photo of a military officer speaking to a room full of civilians wearing business suits

 

Note: I served in the U.S. Air Force from 2000-2007. My AFSC was 3C0X1 (Communications computer systems operator). My highest rank was E-5 (Staff Sergeant), and I received an honorable discharge.

Do:

Streamline and centralize your personnel databases. In the military all your training records, pay records, promotion records, performance reviews, medical records, and disciplinary records, etc. are managed by one central data bank. If the civilian world would adopt this system we wouldn’t need to apply to colleges. They would simply know who they were willing to accept. We wouldn’t need to write resumes. Prospective employers would already have all the information they need. Any hospital you go to would already know your medical history. Your time towards retirement could easily roll over to your new job. Basically, half of the bullshit bureaucratic paperwork you have to do to stay alive would be eliminated. Granted, this is flirting with socialism, but that’s because the military is a socialist organization. But the military is socialist because it’s efficient.

Do:

Socialize healthcare. One of the things I liked best about being in the military was never having to worry about healthcare. Every day I carried with me the peace of mind that if anything happens to me I’m taken care of, and I didn’t have to pay a cent for it. Granted, that health care was crap, but crappy health care is better than no health care, and I didn’t need good medical attention anyway. Just enough to get by. Oh, and did I mention it was free? If I wanted cosmetic surgery, a second opinion, or a better doctor I could always go on the free market and pay for it, and officers and higher ranking enlisted people who could afford that often did. Another good thing about the military’s socialized medical system is I didn’t have to worry if my HMO covered this procedure or that procedure, and I didn’t have to worry about finding a doctor that was covered under my health plan. If I got injured far from a military hospital I just went to a civilian one and handed the bill to the military when I got back. I didn’t worry about shit really.

Do:

Socialize education. You don’t have to pay anything to go to military training. And guess what. Military personnel are trained to do their jobs. This means they can support the organization to the best of their abilities. Imagine if everyone in America were trained to the best of their abilities. Life would be good. But apparently, it’s more important to put college deans in corvettes than to make life good for the rest of the people and industries in America.

Don’t:

Socialize the workforce. When everybody gets paid the same amount regardless of how much they work they typically do as little work as possible. There’s a very popular phrase thrown around the Air Force: “The harder you work the harder you work.” You may be disappointed to know that for every hard charger your tax dollars are employing in the Air Force there are 5 sloth-asses surfing the internet not doing shit because they have no incentive to. I’m sure this is one of the reasons the Soviet Union fell apart. Nobody did any work.

Don’t:

Institute indentured servitude. In the military, you can’t just quit. I think military members should be able to quit. Some people say, “You signed up knowing you couldn’t quit, and you took an oath. So you can’t complain.” Great. You win the argument. Now let’s talk about how that plays out in reality. A contract is a two-way street. You can’t quit, but you can’t get fired either. If I came up to you at your job and said, “I don’t care how much you hate your job you can’t quit for the next 4 years. Your dignity means nothing to me. You’ll just have to be absolutely miserable until your contract is up. Oh, and by the way, you’ll basically have to face fuck a baby to death in order to get fired.” You know what you’re going to be doing at the job you hate but are guaranteed to get a paycheck from regardless of how little you work? The bare minimum.

Don’t:

Think a college degree is proof of job qualification. Forrest Gump had a college degree. Does that mean he’s so great he should be saluted or be made department head? No. Both the military and civilian sector need to make accurate intelligence tests and use personality tests to determine who is most qualified for certain jobs. That and job performance. But the only thing a college degree means anymore is that you can drink for 4 years and still be able to get out of bed and go somewhere…most of the time.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Military Mind Control
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