Veteran here, served during the contentious 2000 election. The US military very strongly prides itself on being an apolitical entity.
There's an important distinction between the electorate having differing opinions about the role and size of the military and the scope of its missions, and the military itself being a political entity.
It seems to me that any country at a point where the combination of its flag together with an oath of office, oath of enlistment or commissioning oath is seen as political rather than patriotic cannot be in a good place. It is not too far from that to one where calling for fair and unbiased administration of elections is considered political rather than patriotic.
Thank you for assisting in the election, and thank you for your excellent software projects, but in this case I think that you were incorrect.
Unfortunately patriotism itself is highly political; the ultimate question of "my country, right or wrong" results in some people noticing that it is in fact wrong in some cases.
Do they not teach Clausewitz in the US military? "War is the continuation of politics by other means". Every shot fired in anger is a political act. Not the politics of the person firing it, but those directing the fire.
It is possible to try to be non-partisan, but an apolitical military is an oxymoron.
The US military is the guarantor of a host of political lines across the world; supporting South Korea or Taiwan or Israel or Germany or Bosnia is a political act.
You can't sign up and then disclaim responsibility for the political results of following orders "apolitically". The last people who tried that got shot at Nuremberg.
... you're almost there... and yet ...
> It is possible to try to be non-partisan, but an apolitical military is an oxymoron. > > The US military is the guarantor of a host of political lines across the world; supporting South Korea or Taiwan or Israel or Germany or Bosnia is a political act.
At the direction of the duly elected civilian leadership.
> You can't sign up and then disclaim responsibility for the political results of following orders "apolitically". The last people who tried that got shot at Nuremberg.
This isn't considered a matter of politics. Its a matter of honor and lawfulness.
Americans need to stop confusing "non-partisan" (or worse "partisan but not along R/D lines") for "apolitical".
But that policy flows from the civilian political realm. Military leadership doesn't decide which missions to take on. Congress and the President do. The military won't decide the fate of this election, no matter how contentious it gets. The civilian bodies will.
Speech gets swamped by mass propaganda. I don't see how it's possible to look at say the run up to the Iraq war and think that antiwar had a meaningful voice. When it comes down to it, the warmongers are just better funded, better connected, and take advantage of basic human nature.
Since it seems impossible to prevent the military from being used for elective wars, or even to simply downsize it, discouraging general support for the military makes sense (when voice fails, try exit). I'm not asking you to agree with my arguments above, but you don't get to make a unilateral call that this isn't a political viewpoint.
Democracy is a closed feedback loop, and thus causality works in both directions. Given the very few bits of input a person has into decisions, it's likely that most influence flows the opposite direction.
> The people have spoken, and they want war
I see where you're coming from, as usually I vote third party or abstain to avoid thinking I support one candidate that differs only by an epsilon of cultural preferences. But when one of the choices is responsible for the deaths of a quarter million Americans, it's a little different.
And yeah, that national response is the job of the executive branch. So very roughly 150k americans are dead now because Trump was in office. Somewhere around there.
But it's a silly digression anyway. If you don't think NY is a good example, then pick Oregon. Or Canada. Or Germany. The point is that lots of large-scale responses of the form a "typical" democratic administration would have taken have very clearly been effective. While the US response, nationally, has not.
You seem to be considering "freedom" as equivalent to irresponsibility. Being a leader means convincing people to do work they don't want to do, like wearing masks during a pandemic. We don't even need to debate whether the federal government should have implemented a national mask mandate. Simply having a president that recommended wearing masks instead of encouraging indignant irresponsibility would have saved tens of thousands of American lives, no laws required.
Trump gets called a dictator because he unilaterally picks nonsensical ideas and then barks them at everyone to get done, while accepting no feedback about how things are actually working out. This is the behavior of a dictator, regardless of how much power he actually wields or how effective he is. The latest example is his hissy fit over losing the election - there's no basis in reality, yet he's continuing to push it anyway. Seeing someone acting like the law does not matter sets off the fascist alarm bells.