Well the military figure I had around for a little while when I was a kid, was my grandpa, (in the pacific theater).. before lung cancer killed him. I suppose he deserves a memorial day.. supposedly he saved a sinking ship, I guess.. served in all three branches somehow.. was a marine.. was a sharpshooter, (was said never to miss a deer as a civilian hunter).. There was more that he did, of what little he shared, but I forgot the anecdotes.. I suppose I could ask my dad again at some point. May have started fighting at 15? Wanted to go to vietnam, by grandma wouldn't let him.. Maybe that's where the line of ethics started getting blurry though. I mean I think communism is pretty bad (halfway through an interview with Yeonmi Park) , but where does the Adventurism really begin ? By the time of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, there seems to be little centrality to the goal. Maybe that's what adventurism is, is just going somewhere with unclear purpose.. Yet, I have classmates who died there, and went there. My opinion, is that they may have largely joined out of economic motivation. I mean I'm not going to message them and start a debate with them, but that's kind of what I think
America's imperialism began long ago. Have you read General Butler's speech or his book,
War is a Racket?
War is a Racket
He summarizes his military service thus:
"I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
...During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints."
Interestingly, it was also he who blew the whistle on a planned military coup against the "socialist!" Roosevelt administration, when they unwisely attempted to recruit him into the plot.
As for Vietnam, I don't see it as ethically blurry. Remember, Ho Chi Minh was a great admirer of the United States. He'd lived and worked in Boston, and the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence is modeled on the US' declaration.
Ho made many offers of alliance to the US. He wrote letters to US Presidents, asking for assistance, but he was rebuffed. We chose to back Vietnam's former occupiers, the French. It was we who drove him into the hands of the communists.
Vietnam was never a threat to the US. The domino theory was a convenient, red-panic invention.
We chose to overthrow a democratically elected government that promised freedom, prosperity and independence to its citizens.
In any case, the Flynn interview with the cheering is actually... extremely alarming. I don't know, if they did take over, I suppose they'd probably want to see who was on the other side of the criticisms that I am engaging in with these posts. I'm pretty sure that when I last read an article about myanmar, I got the strong impression that there wasn't really a way out for democracy to emerge again
I doubt that that if a military backed, authoritarian regime were to take over the US it would be by an overt act of violence. I expect it would, like many previous military regimes, grow unnoticed, in small, incremental, reasonable-appearing steps.
