Wait, "who teach them that masculinity is toxic"?? I've only ever heard "toxic masculinity means being masculine is toxic" as an *attack* on the concept!
You can tell this person doesn't believe this stuff, because they say "we who teach our kids that masculinity is toxic..." that's not how it works, masculinity isn't toxic
"Hey kids, watch these old movies and re-enact them, I need to prove a point about the woke libs, no you can't watch Moana again, it's time for John Wayne"
Oy. One of the consistent failures of the left I'm seeing is the failure to understand that our efforts to create a peaceful world have failed and we now need the military again, damn it.
BTW, this "peace at any price" propaganda used to be Soviet.
As the founders knew, "arsenal" is in conflict with "democracy." And post World War II the United States has gotten into a lot of wars it didn't need to go into; when you have a big military there's always a temptation to use it. But I think we need one now.
Yes the American revolution was famously fought without any weapons, and likewise the Union won the civil war without any use of their superior defense industrial base. Not to mention world war 2, where global fascism was defeated with no increase of military production! =P
Seriously though, I'm not sure there's any period in history where democracy has been able to survive without a solid defense industrial base to back up those freedoms. There's plenty of space to criticize imperialism without throwing the baby out with the bathwater!
The United States had only a tiny standing military until World War II. Afterwards, they felt they needed one to stand against the Soviet Union. US military leaders were not comfortable with this; that's where Eisenhower's remarks about the military industrial complex came from.
The pre Civil War USA had state militia, which were ineffective but unlikely to conduct coups. The professional army was very small. That's the key to a lot of things about the early USA, including the Second Amendment.
The revolutionaries so much hated a standing federal military that they made it illegal for Congress to fund one for more than 2 years, even wrote that into the Constitution.
This isn't the world or the military they imagined. But they feared the long conflicts of Europe and they were right.
Right but you're talking about the military, which is a distinct concept from an arsenal. An arsenal is where munitions are made - you need an arsenal even if your armed forces are 100% militiamen.
The Arsenal of Democracy by A.J. Baime is a really good read, and the way he describes the state of the military (pathetic) at the time of FDR’s famous speech has really stuck with me. I think it partially explains how over-prepared we’ve felt we needed to be since then. It was not at all
guaranteed that we would be able to arm Britain, much less ourselves, and it took a lot of Ford magic - i.e. the biggest factory the world had ever seen, making planes on an assembly line for the first time
I think that's accurate. I know that post-war analysis focused on how the US nearly lost the war due to lack of preparation and inter-service rivalries.
Kennan's observation that US foreign policy resembled a slow dinosaur still has considerable bite; I've taken to calling it kaiju democracy.
The point is that too many on the left have failed to grasp that we've moved beyond "The US is spending too much on war and fighting bad wars" and entered the time of "The West in general is not spending enough on war, so it is powerless to stop Russia, and maybe soon China, from fighting bad wars."
They're used to seeing whoever the US is angry with at the moment as either the Vanguard of Socialist Labor Liberation or Helpless Victims of Colonial Capitalist Exploitation, and don't realize our enemies are now slave-driving Chinese state capitalists, Russian oil firms, and Islamist Theocrats.
They just see Trump acting like exactly the kind of expansionist capitalist-exploitative bully they always knew the US was, don't realize by so doing he's switching sides to join the same American Enemies they've been cozying up to themselves for decades.
Even the non-Tankie Left is so used to seeing military spending as a wasteful sponge for tax dollars that should be going on healthcare and welfare, they haven't given any real thought to what sort of military we should keep around in case we actually need it for something, or that we need it now.
Also, the military has been practicing lot of progressive ideals: universal healthcare, college accessibility, housing guarantees, robust government infrastructure and services, research investment, etc. The DoD has been modeling the success of many things we’re trying to accomplish here.
Truman's desegregation of the armed forces is underrated. If you're looking for a Black person in charge, the military is still a great place to look, even as Trump starts his purge of Black top brass.
WTF???
It's not "the left" that's proposing to leave Ukrainians hung out to dry in a fake "peace" deal (that Russia and the USA will promptly abandon as soon as convenient) instead of continuing to support Ukrainian military efforts with effective military supplies and intelligence.
I'm thinking of the further left. The international committee of the DSA proposed exactly that. And there's other factions that are critical of weapons manufacturers and not at all willing to explain how the United States is going to defend itself without them.
I would rather cut my toes off than "hippie-punch" LGBT people, abortion rights and a few other things. But in the face of Russian aggression there are a LOT of left-wing items I would put on the backburner without hesitation.
you can tell the horseshoe theory is real because this dipshit is confused by liberal democracies in the way that right wing authoritarians are always confused by liberal democracies. yes, we think misogyny is bad and also we'll fight to defend freedom. so bizarre!
I am struck often by how much Ukraine discourse from the Jacobin types and their sympathizers boils down to “The Soviet collapse was a tragedy for my version of the global Left, Putin also regrets it, therefore doing apologia for him is revolutionary praxis.”
Amusingly they sort of run into the same brick wall Lenin and Stalin did in 1914 (that people will fight wars for nations even if those nations have flaws), but instead of coming up with Soviet nationality policy they buy into the idea Ukraine is just false consciousness and call it sophistication.
It's always interesting to see political theories that assume some group, or everyone, is faking their ideological commitments, because those theories almost always soon run aground. This is especially amusing when the author is themselves an ideologue
There will be a vital left in the US again but it will come after the aging generation that hitched their wagons to Sanders and are consumed by perma-bitterness that he never became president either changes or gets out of the way
a more sober commentary would point out the dangers inherent in boosting the private military-industrial complex and consider ways those could be mitigated (such as nationalization / state-run production, which I assume would be agreeable to Jacobin folks)
Comments
Someone will get there someday I'm sure.
But these days maybe they can just be bribed to look the other way, who knows.
BTW, this "peace at any price" propaganda used to be Soviet.
This isn't the world or the military they imagined. But they feared the long conflicts of Europe and they were right.
Kennan's observation that US foreign policy resembled a slow dinosaur still has considerable bite; I've taken to calling it kaiju democracy.
It's not "the left" that's proposing to leave Ukrainians hung out to dry in a fake "peace" deal (that Russia and the USA will promptly abandon as soon as convenient) instead of continuing to support Ukrainian military efforts with effective military supplies and intelligence.
turn the burner up until they're ash
"Ukraine fighting will lead to empowered war industry which will... create more fascist leaders like the ones who want Ukraine to lose?"
Like, there's a step missing somewhere here.