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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

" It's made a complete mockery of what has always been a silent service and honorable job"

Killing people and enabling the mass murder machine that is the military is not and has never been honorable.

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

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So I'll offer a counterpoint. Maybe what they were doing and the hands moving them weren't honorable but many of these guys joined because they did believe that they were going to defend freedom, they were going to serve their country, and they were going to protect innocents. Now whether or not that's what they actually ended up doing is a question for open debate.

But these guys did believe in what they were doing, and they made huge sacrifices for it, including being willing to lay down their own lives. So maybe the overall operation being conducted wasn't honorable, however in my mind at least, what they were willing to sacrifice for what they believed was right, is something commendable.

I don't think being ignorant is a valid excuse. Anyone paying attention from 2003ish onward can see that the US military in its current state is not honorable. Signing up because you're too naive to see that doesn't make you honorable.

> But these guys did believe in what they were doing, and they made huge sacrifices for it, including being willing to lay down their own lives. So maybe the overall operation being conducted wasn't honorable, however in my mind at least, what they were willing to sacrifice for what they believed was right, is something commendable.

So did the Nazis.

John Brown’s zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the taper light; his was as the burning sun. I could live for the slave; John Brown could die for him. The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery. – Frederick Douglass

Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature, and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth. -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Second to the slaves who produced this country, John Brown is probably the greatest American hero.

There are bad people out there. I don't mean assholes and undesirebles. I mean men willing to kidnap and enslave women for sex. I got no issue with them being killed.

And if the US military was a machine for murder they do a pretty bad job of it.

"There are bad people out there. I don't mean assholes and undesirebles. I mean men willing to kidnap and enslave women for sex. I got no issue with them being killed."

This is some John Wayne fantasy of what the military does and what war is about.

[flagged]

Please don't respond to a bad comment by taking the thread even further into flamewar. That helps nothing. Especially not generic flamewar topics like Nazi Germany.

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That doesn't work forever. Name an honourable war conducted by the US military since 1946.

We should also acknowledge the desperate lengths to which the US government has gone to soil any honor accrued in any previous wars.

On the recent anniversary of the fall of Auschwitz, The White House twitter account claimed it as a victory of ‘The United States and UK’. Supposedly the already-dishonest ‘Allied Troops’ is not cutting it anymore.

(The Red Army liberated Auschwitz)

> (The Red Army liberated Auschwitz)

And then proceeded to imprison the whole country this camp is located in. And a few others on top of that.

Not to defend Trump, I can't think of more than a handful of times I've ever agreed with him, but can you imagine the uproar had he praised Russia for their efforts at Auschwitz?

Probably would have been best to praise the result without mentioning any specific parties involved in carrying it out. Then again, Trump isn't really known for thinking in nuance.

Why should that be an uproar? We've had these memorials of world war II for decades since the end of the war.

> can you imagine the uproar had he praised Russia for their efforts at Auschwitz?

From his supporters? Bearing in mind that he has a well established history of openly admiring Putin? I don't see why that would be a problem at all.

Korea, the gulf war, arguably Afghanistan, the cold war.

What is honorable is certainly subjective though.

Check out living standards in North Korea vs. South Korea. Taiwan vs. China. Western Europe vs. Eastern Europe.

Korea. Afghanistan.

Edit: And destroying Isis.

And then we shamed ourselves by giving up on the Kurds immediately, who did a lot of the fighting.

Operation Desert Storm

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