5 ms·
Strange how putrid governments find members of society happy to oppress other members of the society. Such as those soldiers happily waiting to execute orders a
by trilila 7y ago
Strange how putrid governments find members of society happy to oppress other members of the society. Such as those soldiers happily waiting to execute orders against the freedoms of their fellow citizens.
- ptah 7y agoi think the communist party has successfully managed to get most citizens to view themselves as part of a larger community more than as individuals
- MaximumYComb 7y agoI'm assuming you're privileged enough to have never been an enlisted soldier in a military? This isn't hordes of men clamouring to "oppress" someone. Often people are conscripted or come from such a poor background that enlistment helps their life significantly. After the first 6 months in the military, you'll have been broken enough to have lost a lot of sense of individuality and are willing to just blindly follow orders. After your initial training, you're likely dumped into an established unit where you are at the very bottom of the totem pole. Until about 20 years ago in western militaries, you'd experience physical violence on the first day of your first posting into a "real" unit just to show you your place. I'm assuming this still happens in China. If there are soldiers in those trucks it is very likely they haven't been told a single thing about their mission. It's very easy to live your comfortable life and talk about how evil the individual soldiers are but in reality, the troops holding the rifles on the ground are simply a tool of those higher.
- simonh 7y agoMost of those troops will be from rural regions. Everything they know about the wider world is told to them by state media and their commanders.
- kzrdude 7y agoCan we say the same of the soldiers the US sent to Iraq?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kombucha11 7y agoWe can.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoNo. First, the US has considerably more media freedom, so they had at least the potential to access non-government-narrative sources. Second, the US has a volunteer army, not a conscript one.
- zuuow 7y agoNot everybody agrees with your politics. And not everybody who disagrees with the Western, liberal view of the world has been brainwashed. Maybe those soldiers want one China.
- matwood 7y agoYou should read Ordinary Men [1] sometime. All humans have the capacity for evil which is why we must stay vigilant. From the description: Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0062303023 https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Soluti...
- trilila 7y agoThanks for this - added to my list.