Preempting the comments: Yes, your cousin who serves to get free college is a fascist too.
Obligatory US soldier pasta:
You see american choppers in the bright blue sky, hundreds and hundreds of screaming american soldiers drop from it, you look across the field and see the tanks rolling in. You hear a loud explosion and realise that the shrine you have protected for thousands of years with tooth and nail is destroyed by the empire, you come to the realisation that this is very probably the end of your people who’ve struggled to survive all these centuries. You realise that very soon there is going to be a river of blood of your people here; white phosphorus and depleted uranium will be shot very soon, deforming babies for decades to come, and millions of your people are gonna be killed. Your millennia old language and religion will be wiped out, you’re very likely the last of your kind.
Suddenly, an American soldier kicks you down, puts his foot on your neck and aims his standard ar-15 on the side of your head all while screaming; you realise you’re gonna die, and you won’t have to see the destruction of your community that you fostered so carefully all these centuries for.
Just before he pulls the trigger, you think to yourself, “To be fair to him, he probably had a low GPA in highschool and didnt have a health-care, those are notoriously hard to get in America”.
By default and, to a certain degree, necessity, not necessarily by conviction. And many are just POGs for life too (they help but at least they didn’t go as far as killing). Let’s be fair. I do believe that thinking about what you do is a moral imperative (THE moral imperative, perhaps), so they’re still at fault even if their hands are ‘clean’. And often they come back all mentally fucked up too, which shows an overall lack of foresight more than a desire to be evil.
Basically, they’re stupid folk, not Kissingers, cut them some slack. They might repent and change their ideas/ways…
That is fucking heart breaking 💔
There’s more in the source https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures