Revolution#121, February 24, 2008
Why You Can’t Support the U.S. Troops
While it is possible, and correct, to hate the way in which those who become “the troops” have been systematically lied to in regard to what their mission is all about, and are cynically used by the ruling class—often ending up killed, or more often terribly maimed and wrecked, mentally as well as physically in a large number of cases—there can be no support for these troops, because what they are conditioned, shaped, and trained to do, and what they are actually doing, is carrying out war crimes and crimes against humanity on a massive scale, all in the service of imperialism. They are not “serving their country”—except insofar as “their country” refers to the imperialist state. Nor still less are they “protecting the rights” of the people of the country. They are acting as the massively destructive and murderous forces of invasion and occupation, they are serving the imperialist system and the ruling class of that system, which lures and then organizes and trains and then deploys them in the pursuit of its interests, in opposition to interests of, and to the great detriment of, the masses of people throughout the world who are the target of this imperialist system.
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