I was in a military contingent "incidental" to the Americans sent to Kosovo for a time. The most depressing and memorable part about my experience there was when I met the marines off duty, and realized that none of them really wanted to be there. Not in the sense they didn't choose to go, but that they didn't care about the mission in any way whatsoever. At best there was a utilitarian explanation - free school programs, money they could save up. But a large part of it was just a total capitulation to whatever the government was doing - even for those who knew none of it made any sense.

I'm not sure if I'm explaining this well enough - imagine your country is engaged in an expansive war to stem the rise of another perceived threat. You have bases in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East. Your military command and state department makes agreements with allied governments that undercut overt diplomatic efforts in the UN, and even in NATO. This happens on the abstract level with the exceptionalism the US subscribes to, along with literally requiring agreements with allied nations that allow the US to use them as offensive plattforms. Anything from former East-bloc countries to somewhat peaceful Scandinavian countries enter into agreements like this, which causes them all great difficulties diplomatically when engaging with Europe as a whole, other allied countries, and of course our "great enemies". Because we all become part of the US's unstated foreign policy, whenever that runs in opposition to whatever principles we supposedly stand for in public.

But it also happens on the practical level, with ROEs that literally excuse murder, abuse and torture, assassinations and any kind of strike directed at civillian targets in order to "instruct" or coerce local and national opinion.

So when you're in that system, you think that perhaps this is something most soliders don't really understand, and that they run around torturing people out of the goodness of their hearts to save the world from villains from "24" and things like that.

But even the stupidest American grunt isn't that stupid. They know for a fact that they are on the modern imperial project, that they are politically speaking selling democracy, inclusion, racial equality, capitalism, freedom, and so on, in a TV-spot commercial - while really everything they're actually doing is something completely different. I knew someone for a while who had basically resigned to the whole thing, had shot at someone after being in the "specialist training" program (i.e., 3 months training and straight into the field - our forces had 12 months before we were stationed anywhere..), and didn't have any other escape route for their life after that (we specifically recruit people who have a job, family and something to come back to - it's a specific move to avoid this utterly obvious thing).

And in that situation, they complained, of course. And they realized it was a lot of bs going on. But they also couldn't actually do the nr. 1 thing that we would be taught in the first boot-camp: to not execute illegal orders, and to have the right to do so.

They didn't have that. What they had were JAGs running around manufacturing legal justifications to excuse the absolutely worst tendences that the army would end up in. And that it inevitably did end up in because of a bad command, lack of discipline, and no clear purpose. But it didn't matter, because none of it was actually illegal, and there is no limitations to anything you can do whatsoever.

The nazis in Germany had more restraint than that. And they had that restraint out of sheer self-interest: to avoid having the worst atrocities destroy the command from within.

The US doesn't have that. The strategy is just to literally break everyone to the point where you don't just accept the war-logic rhetorically - but also that you participate in it. Once upon a time, Starship Troopers was satire. The US had problems with it's military, as with it's political culture, for sure. But it wasn't by design and intent.

And that's just not how it is since about 2007- 2010, with the officially changing ROEs, the way the courts martial system has been used, and with the defined extrajudicial areas, along with carving out entirely new judicial avenues to conduct wars without even a vote in Congress.

Like, the nazis were bad, don't get me wrong. And the US is not Nazi Germany. The US's strategy remains to destroy and split potential powers apart, not to collect them in a united force. But in some ways, and in practice in many ways, the US is objectively worse than a wild, expansive militaristic empire driven by absurd ideology and mythical want for a past that never existed.

And included in that is for it's participants loving the idea of torturing some folks for a good purpose, and fully committing to it in practice and theory - while smiling for the camera in the TV-spot that justifies it. That's just a fact. And the only thing allowed to be criticized about that is for soliders to destroy their own lives and to resign their citizenship, basically, like in Heinlein's book or Verhoeven's film XD It's completely absurd.

I used to think that Nazi-Germany was some kind of aberration. A perfect storm of bad things resulting in worse ones. The truth is that there were many opportunities for an off-ramp to all of it, for years and years, even after the fascists came to power. And it wasn't chosen, and it wasn't fought against. Instead we fought on it's behalf. Even here in Norway, we sent people to the eastern front to fight against the communists, to protect Europe. And that exact dynamic is happening now as well. Oh, we are only doing these horrifying things, because otherwise our enemies will do it to us first. And the sacrifice is made by all the people who would otherwise be rebelling in the streets.

That part is literally the same.