I know, what a blasphemous question.
After all, the troops are what defend our freedom, right?
Surely I'd be entirely unfree, not able to voice my heretical opinions, if not for our friends and family members in costume traveling to the other side of the planet and blowing brown people to scalding bloody bits.
What a piece of shit I must be for even asking it. Nobody should ever question our lord and savior Uncle Sam, or anybody that carries out his holy will.
So, what is a military, exactly?
If you said it's our society's way of protecting itself, then congratulations, your 15,000+ hours of childhood indoctrination were successful, and your training is complete.
In truth, the military does not work for the people, even though the individual troops are taught to believe they do. A military is nothing more than the armed fist of whatever political regime it works for.
Don't believe me? Look at the military's chain of command structure. You'll notice that at the very top of it is not you, it is not I, it is whoever had business sponsors wealthy enough to become the President of the United States; the Commander in Chief of the military.
The job of the Korean military is to point their guns at whomever the Korean politicians tell them to, and the job of the U.S. Military is to point their guns at whomever the U.S. politicians tell them to.
The politicians base their military decisions on the lucrative interests of their partners in the war manufacturing industry - the guys that build the tanks, drones, jets, etc - which receive trillions of dollars that were stolen from you. And yes, if you think about it objectively, taxation is clearly theft. Your instinct to defend taxation is a symptom of Stockholm Syndrome. No, taxes are not necessary to have infrastructural services and defense, and modern wars aren't initiated for defense in the first place.
You think I'm an insane conspiracy theorist, right?
If you believe that a group of people with the power to selectively allocate trillions of continuously stolen dollars, is not receiving a hefty cut of those dollars in exchange for some of the most lucrative contracts on the planet, and that these politicians, of all people, actually have more integrity than normal people would in the same scenario, and that these bureaucrats are actually acting selflessly under the delusion that slaughtering middle eastern people indiscriminately is actually in the interest of the American people, then you're the insane conspiracy theorist.
The parasite class - the politicians - know mass-murder evil. They know it's not at all defensive, and they know they're bathing in blood money. They do not give a fuck. It's mostly sociopaths that are successful in federal politics; it's not a business rewarding to people that are inhibited by things like morals and conscience.
I could rant about the military industrial complex for hours, but let's just get back to the original question; is it evil to join the military?
Well, what happens when you join the military?
You swear an oath. An oath to defend and uphold a piece of parchment (The Constitution) which advocates that one group of people should rob everybody else in order to fund its own monopolistic, socialistic, and virtually unilateral versions of law, defense, justice, and arbitration. A piece of parchment based on the myth that it is okay and necessary for certain people to initiate violence against others, as long as those people were chosen by whatever the political majority of the constituency happens to be. I know, fuck individual rights, right? Fuck being a human being with free will. Let's all just bend over and obey whatever certain individuals tell us, and give them our money, as long as those individuals' supporters outnumber us. What could possibly go wrong?
So, you swear an oath. So what, maybe oaths are meaningless. If that's the case, then ALL the military recruits are doing is signing up to help the fight for the political ruling class, and not even a magical piece of parchment.
- But a lot of the troops are really good people, you asshole!
Yep. That's the sad reality of it. As easy as can be to demonize a huge group of people that specializes in murder, the fact is, they're exactly that....people. I have friends in the military and I've had family in the military. Hell, I tried to join the military myself when I was seventeen. Many of the troops are really good guys. That is the tragedy of the military is that it attracts good people that believe they will be helping their countrymen and combating evil, and tricks them into fighting for the most powerful criminal organization in human history - the U.S. Government. Similar can be said for any military.
Do you think the military of Nazi Germany was made up of evil monsters with horns willing to die in the name of murder and destruction?
Unlikely.
It's uncomfortable to think about, but the Nazi troops were generally just regular guys that believed they were "serving their country", much like our friends and family members in modern American armed forces. Hitler was elected, the Nazis fought in the name of democracy, just as our boys do. I constantly use the Nazis as a rhetorical tool because almost everybody recognizes the 3rd Reich as one of the most evil events in documented history. The American Government isn't exactly Hitler's Reich, but it is the same type of organization - a government; a democratic republic under a constitution, at that - simply with different policies. It's hard to view our own troops in any objective way, because they are our families, friends, and perhaps even yourself, but the fact is that they are manipulable human beings, and so were most of the Nazis. The Nazi soldiers and the American troops bear the same job, just with a different boss. Mob mentality takes no greater of a form than as it manifests in a military, and this groupthink has lead otherwise regular, even good people to commit some of the most horrible atrocities throughout history.
Here's another uncomfortable fact: most of the people in the Middle East shooting back at our siblings, children, parents, cousins, uncles, aunts, and friends in the military, are not Islamic extremists, and are not terrorists. Most of them are regular people, just like our troops, defending their homes from foreign invaders.
Sure, there are plenty of actual Islamic extremists too. What do you think pushes people to such radical ideologies? If it's merely the content of their holy books, then Christians would be burning anybody to death who has sex outside of marriage, or stoning anybody that speaks against Jesus. There must be something more. Might have something to do with the fact that our troops have been slaughtering their people by the hundreds of thousands (some studies estimate millions). War radicalizes people.
I don't know about you, but if Chinese soldiers kicked in my door and started waiving guns around, or invaded my city and started bossing around my neighbors, I'd shoot them. Yeah, I know, cops already do that. The only reason I don't shoot police officers when I see them kidnapping and threatening my neighbors, is that most Americans would fight the Chinese alongside me and it would be strategically sound, whereas defending people from local cops would just make most Americans see anarchists as demons, because most people see evil as justified & legitimate when it is their own elected political masters ordering it, and anybody that fights back as a terrorist. Guerrilla insurrection would enable the state to further restrict liberty and ultimately harm the cause of freedom. I digress.
The people that join the politicians' military are certainly not inherently evil people, they are normal people deceived into signing up to do evil things. Whether they're painting the streets of Iraq with the blood of children, burning Vietnamese people alive with Napalm, or filling Native American families with musket balls, the people that carry out the will of the politicians are complicit victims of a mob mentality culture
designed to serve the interests of evil.