The author was trying to shield themselves from the despair of political doomscrolling by reading books, but was dismayed to learn of Trump’s plans to declare a national emergency and use the military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. The author speaks with anti-imperialist veteran friends who remind them that this is not the first time Trump has threatened to deploy the military against immigrants, and that actually carrying out such a plan would be a logistical and legal nightmare, requiring a massive expansion of the prison system at immense cost. The author argues that the only reasonable response for active-duty soldiers is to refuse to carry out these immoral orders, drawing parallels to the G.I. resistance during the Vietnam War. They advocate reviving networks of support like “G.I. coffeehouses” to provide a space for soldiers to organize and resist. Experts emphasize that troops have a moral responsibility to disobey illegal and immoral orders, and that immigrants are not the true enemy - it is the ruling class elite who are stealing from the working class. The author acknowledges the impulse to retreat into escapism, but argues that now is the time to collectively challenge these dangerous policies.
Sure, I’m not denying there has been heroic shit.
But so probably so has the other side. Like I’m sure at one point there’s been Russian and Chinese “heroes” throughout the decades. Japanese especially didn’t mind dying in combat, but usually in the Western movies, that’s depicted as them jumping up completely in sight, yelling something for three seconds, then blowing themselves up. I’m not saying that didn’t happen either, but I’m sure with the whole “take as many as you can and don’t care about your own life” mentality there probably were some heroic shenanigans the Japanese also pulled off.
It just wouldn’t really seem like that from our perspective, because we don’t believe in the reasons why he did it as well as we can project ourselves onto the protagonists of war movies that are from our countries.
From war movies, you’d sort of might get the impression that Americans pretty much single-handedly won world war two. Now by no means do I mean to put down the massive effort they put in and the effect it had, but Russians did quite a lot indeed, like the British, and the Americans didn’t join for a few years.
It’s all just about perceptions.
A war movie that followed both armies would actually go a long ways towards puncturing the idea of a “heroic death”.