I did not have the power to change anything from the outside,
You chose to join the military. The entire structure is made of those who choose to participate in an organization that actively kills and maims, and inactively maintains the capitalist system that is fueling the climate crisis.
I single-handedly stopped a sexual assault while I was in. You got a problem with that?
Congrats. You did a commendable act, while enabling the very structure that made the act possible. We are conditionally forced to exist under capitalism. You chose to perpetuate the police force that guards it.
Tell you what. You fly to Ukraine. You go look at their slaughtered, r*ped, tortured, and mutilated men, women, and children. Then you look them in the eyes and tell them what amoral trash they are for fighting back. Then outline for them your pacifist plan for peace with Russia. Then make it work. Then you’ll have the credibility to tell us all that the military is always evil.
Again, you offer a solution that was created by the problem. It is the ever incessant need for capitalism to grow markets and expand that necessitates the need for military bases and “defense orgs” to maintain those markets. There is a case to be made that Ukraine would never have happened if not for capitalist markets and NATO expansion .
George Kennan, the eminent architect of the Soviet “containment” strategy and a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, wrote in 1997 that expanding NATO would be a “fateful error” because it would “inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion.” Kennan was far from alone in his criticism, as journalist Peter Beinart noted this week:
Thomas Friedman, America’s most prominent foreign policy columnist, declared it the “most ill-conceived project of the post-Cold War era.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, widely considered the most erudite member of the US Senate, warned, “We have no idea what we’re getting into.”(Source)
If it makes you feel better, we’re all guilty to some degree for having to participate in capitalism. But making the choice to join the military is like handing the weapon to the climate change executioner that will kill the future of humanity.