Your rebuttal rests on several conflations that demand clarification.

You claim systemic analysis and individual accountability are incompatible, but this is a false divide. To recognize how poverty funnels people into militarism does not require absolving their participation in it. Acknowledging coercion is not exoneration—it’s contextualization. The working-class recruit and the defense contractor both perpetuate the machine, but through differing degrees of agency. Moral scrutiny need not be all-or-nothing; it can—and must—scale with power and choice.

The dismissal of historical resistors as “exceptions” misunderstands their purpose. Exceptions disprove inevitability. They reveal cracks in the system, not its invincibility. To say we shouldn’t celebrate Underground Railroad conductors because most enslaved people couldn’t escape would be absurd. Their rarity doesn’t negate their moral significance—it underscores the brutality of the structures that made rebellion so perilous.

Your Nuremberg analogy falters upon closer inspection. While leadership was prioritized, the trials explicitly rejected the “just following orders” defense, convicting bureaucrats, doctors, and industrialists who enabled atrocities. The lesson was clear: systems of oppression require collusion at multiple levels. To focus solely on policymakers is to ignore the ecosystem of complicity that sustains them.

Regarding whistleblowers: Manning and Snowden were not elites. They were low-level operatives whose choices, while exceptional, disprove the notion that dissent requires privilege. Most service members encounter ethical red flags; few act. This isn’t to condemn all who stay silent, but to reject the claim that silence is inevitable. Moral courage is always a choice, however costly.

You argue that effective movements focus on institutions, not individuals, yet history contradicts this. The civil rights movement didn’t just target Jim Crow laws—it shamed segregationists, boycotted businesses, and made racism socially toxic. Cultural stigma and policy change are symbiotic. To exempt individuals is to sanitize activism into a bloodless abstraction.

Your “pragmatism” conflates strategy with fatalism. Yes, we must dismantle systems that weaponize poverty. But refusing to critique those systems’ participants isn’t pragmatism—it’s resignation. The anti-war movement didn’t end the draft by politely petitioning Congress. It normalized resistance: burning draft cards, sheltering deserters, stigmatizing recruitment centers. Cultural shifts are strategy.

Finally, your concern for “alienating allies” presumes veterans cannot handle nuanced critique. Many already do. Organizations like Veterans for Peace or About Face openly reckon with their past roles while condemning militarism. True solidarity trusts people to grapple with complexity—it doesn’t condescend by shielding them from tough questions.

In the end, your framework mistakes compassion for evasion. Believing in systemic change doesn’t require absolving individuals—it demands we hold both the cage and its keepers to account. Revolutions aren’t built on pity for the exploited, but on faith in their capacity to resist, even within constraints. To lower that bar isn’t kindness. It’s despair.

Your rebuttal is a masterclass in conflating material constraint with moral exemption, blending pathos with logical slippage. Let’s dissect:

1. The Privilege Paradox
   You frame my insistence on moral agency as “privileged abstraction” while positioning yourself as the arbiter of working-class reality. This is paternalism disguised as solidarity. To claim poverty negates moral capacity is to reduce the oppressed to instinct-driven animals, not complex humans capable of ethical reflection. Yes, systemic coercion funnels people into the military—but to say they lack all choice is to deny the countless working-class resistors throughout history. The Black Panthers, the GI coffeehouse organizers, the Appalachian draft counselors—these weren’t Ivy elites. They were poor people who chose defiance. Your narrative erases them to sustain your fatalism.

2. Fractal Responsibility ≠ Equal Guilt
   You misrepresent fractal accountability as “meaningless guilt,” a classic strawman. No one claims the mechanic shares equal blame with the general. We assert they share complicity in differing degrees. Nuremberg’s prosecutors didn’t equate IG Farben chemists with Hitler—they tried both, sentencing accordingly. To dismiss all layered culpability is to endorse the myth that oppression requires only villains, not collaborators.

3. The Whistleblower Dodge
   You dismiss Manning and Snowden as “exceptions” to absolve the majority. But exceptions disprove your determinism. They prove that even under duress, moral choice persists. Were their actions rare? Yes. Difficult? Profoundly. But their existence refutes your claim that systemic coercion annihilates agency. Your logic suggests we shouldn’t praise any act of courage because most people conform—a surrender to moral mediocrity.

4. The False Binary of Stigma
   You pit “stigmatizing institutions” against “demonizing individuals,” another strawman. The two are inextricable. To stigmatize the military as an institution requires condemning its function—which necessitates critiquing those who perpetuate it, however reluctantly. This isn’t about “purity”; it’s about refusing to valorize participation in imperialism. Your plea to “embrace veterans as allies” presumes they cannot be both victims and complicit—a nuance my framework allows. Veterans can critique the machine they served while acknowledging their role in it. See Rory Fanning, who left the Army Rangers and became an anti-war activist.

5. The Futility Gambit
   Your “status quo” accusation inverts reality. By quarantining blame to policymakers, you protect the system’s foundation: the myth of passive foot soldiers. Power doesn’t reside solely in the Oval Office—it’s reproduced daily by millions of acquiescent actions. The Vietnam War ended not just because Nixon faced protests, but because draft resistance, GI mutinies, and desertions crippled the war effort. Change requires pressure at all levels.

6. The Myth of “Either/Or” Reform
   You present policy change and cultural critique as opposites—a false dilemma. They’re symbiotic. The draft wasn’t abolished by congressional benevolence but by mass resistance that made conscription politically untenable. Similarly, defunding the military-industrial complex requires both legislative action and a culture that rejects militarism. Stigma isn’t the end—it’s the spark.

7. The Poverty of “No Alternatives”
   You fixate on enlistment as the “only viable path” for the poor, but this fatalism ensures no alternatives emerge. Why not ask why the U.S. offers more funding for bombers than for rural schools? My critique doesn’t attack the enlistee—it attacks the system that makes enlistment a “choice” at all. Demanding better options requires first rejecting the legitimacy of the current ones.

8. The Coercion Canard
   You conflate coercion with compulsion. Poverty limits choices; it doesn’t erase them. The 18-year-old who enlists to feed their family still chooses to prioritize their survival over others’. This doesn’t make them a monster—it makes them a moral agent whose decision warrants sober scrutiny, not blanket absolution. To say otherwise is to reduce ethics to a vending machine: insert desperation, receive exoneration.

Conclusion: The Luxury of Low Expectations

Your entire argument rests on a patronizing premise: that the working class is too besieged to bear ethical consideration. This isn’t solidarity—it’s condescension. True allyship means holding people capable of moral courage, even (especially) when systems seek to crush it. To lower the bar for the oppressed is to deny them full humanity. Revolutions aren’t won by those who see only constraints—they’re won by those who, even in chains, find ways to rattle them.

The insistence that systemic opacity erases moral awareness is itself a weapon of that system—a seductive lie that confuses compartmentalization for innocence. The drone pilot may not see the toddler incinerated by their Hellfire, but they know the missile’s purpose isn’t philanthropy. Institutional fog does not absolve; it presupposes complicity, relying on participants to accept fragmentation as exoneration. To claim soldiers “lack exposure to consequences” is to ignore the voluminous after-action reports, the veteran testimonies, the very public debates about civilian casualties. Ignorance in the information age is a cultivated posture, not an inevitability.

You romanticize enlistment as purely economic desperation, reducing complex moral agents to survival automatons. But this infantilizes the working class you claim to defend. Yes, poverty funnels people into uniform—but so do recruitment ads selling glory, family legacies of service, even the thrill of weaponized masculinity. To flatten enlistment into mere survival is to deny the interplay of coercion and choice. The 19-year-old joining for college funds makes a different calculation than the contractor re-upping for a reenlistment bonus. Both perpetuate the machine, but only one faces true precarity. Moral scrutiny isn’t cruelty—it’s respect, a demand that we recognize their capacity to question the system that exploits them.

Fractal responsibility doesn’t “atomize” blame—it calibrates it. The mechanic servicing a bomber isn’t as guilty as the general who orders its deployment, but neither is they innocent. Nuremberg condemned industrialists alongside officers because systems require collusion at multiple tiers. Your framework, which quarantines guilt to the top, is a gift to power: it tells the CEO, “Only your underlings will face scrutiny,” and whispers to the soldier, “You’re a pawn, unworthy of moral consideration.” True justice scales accountability to agency—it does not vanish it.

You demand “concrete change” while dismissing stigma’s catalytic role. Cultural condemnation isn’t an end—it’s a means. When society stops valorizing military service, recruitment stalls. When engineers face scorn for optimizing kill-chains, talent fleeds the sector. When the VA nurse is asked, “How many insurgents did you stabilize today?” the mythology of heroism crumbles. Your fetish for “practical” policy ignores that laws follow cultural shifts, not precede them. The Civil Rights Act didn’t spring from legislative goodwill but from decades of stigmatizing segregationists.

Vietnam proves nothing but your own misreading. The error wasn’t critiquing service—it was directing that critique at conscripts instead of the war machine itself. Stigmatizing the uniform, not the wearer, is the goal. When we shame the institution, not its conscripts, we drain its moral capital.

Your “false binary” charge is projection. You—not I—insist we must choose between condemning architects or laborers. I reject this. The drone pilot’s choices matter because the senator’s do. Guilt isn’t zero-sum; it accretes. The ICC prosecutes warlords and child soldiers because both sustain conflict. To absolve one is to empower the other.

Finally, your concern for the “working class” is paternalism masquerading as solidarity. True allyship isn’t absolving the poor of moral reckoning—it’s refusing to let them be cannon fodder. To say they “lack agency” is to doom them to perpetual serfdom. The GI who leaks war crimes, the Snowden who exposes surveillance—these aren’t philosophers. They’re proof that even the desperate retain shards of choice. Your worldview—that only the privileged can afford ethics—is the true elitism.

You call my stance impractical. I call yours complicit. Revolutions begin when the exploited stop rationalizing their exploitation—when stigma becomes the spark, not the suffocation.

Your fixation on “practical realities” is itself a surrender to those realities—a capitulation to the notion that systems are too vast, too opaque, to demand individual accountability. Let us dissect this. You claim soldiers lack awareness of consequences due to institutional compartmentalization, but this assumes moral negligence is excusable if engineered efficiently. The drone operator who never sees their victims still knows their joystick commands a Reaper, not a toy. The technician troubleshooting missile guidance systems understands their work enables precision strikes, not crop dusting. Obfuscation is a feature of the machine, yes, but complicity requires active participation in maintaining that machine. To confuse structural opacity with individual innocence is to confuse fog for absolution.

Ah, but the economic argument—always the last refuge. You frame enlistment as “survival,” reducing moral agency to a calculus of desperation. Yet this ignores that survival itself is a spectrum. The 18-year-old enlisting to escape poverty makes a different calculation than the contractor renewing their clearance for a third deployment bonus. Both choose to perpetuate the system, but only one faces true precarity. To flatten all service members into victims of circumstance is to erase the hierarchy of choice within the very structures you defend. The working class deserves more than your paternalism—they deserve recognition as moral actors, capable of questioning the systems that exploit them.

Your dismissal of fractal responsibility as “atomized blame” again reveals your discomfort with nuance. No one claims the mechanic bears equal guilt to the general—only that both bear some. Proportionality is key. The janitor who sweeps the death camp floor is less culpable than the architect, but still complicit. To deny this is to argue that oppression requires only a single guilty mind to function, rather than a constellation of choices. The Vietnam War did not persist solely through LBJ’s orders but through the collective acquiescence of manufacturers, recruiters, and yes, soldiers. Scrutinizing one layer does not preclude scrutinizing others—it demands it.

You ask, sneering, how stigmatization aids reform. Let me educate you. Stigma is not cruelty—it is the withdrawal of social license. When society stops valorizing military service as noble by default, recruitment declines. When engineers face scorn for designing surveillance tech, talent flees the sector. When the VA hospital nurse is asked, “How many civilians did you ‘save’ by stabilizing bomb-makers?” the mythology of heroism cracks. This is not about shaming individuals but dismantling the cultural infrastructure that makes perpetual war palatable. Your beloved “political solutions” are inert without cultural shift—the Civil Rights Act didn’t spring from legislative goodwill but from decades of stigma levied against segregationists.

Your Vietnam analogy is telling. You claim stigmatizing veterans failed, but you misdiagnose the failure. The error wasn’t critique—it was directing that critique at traumatized conscripts rather than the war machine itself. We must stigmatize the institution, not the broken individuals it discards. The anti-war movement’s flaw was compassion misplaced, not principle misapplied.

As for your “false binary” accusation—projection, as ever. You are the one insisting we must either condemn the architect or the laborer, as if moral gravity cannot hold both. I reject this scarcity mindset. The drone pilot’s choices matter because the general’s do. Guilt is multiplicative, not competitive. The ICC indicts warlords and child soldiers because both, in their measure, fuel conflict. Your worldview—that accountability is a zero-sum game—is what truly protects power. It whispers to the CEO: “Fear not; they’ll only come for the low-level engineers.”

Finally, your concern for the “working class” rings hollow. True solidarity isn’t absolving the poor of moral scrutiny—it’s demanding they not be used as cannon fodder in wars serving oligarchs. To say they “have no choice” is to doom them to perpetual serfdom in the empire’s engine room. I propose something radical: that even the desperate retain shards of agency, and that treating them as moral infants—incapable of resistance, unfit for critique—is the true elitism. The Black GI who fragged his racist commander in Vietnam, the Chelsea Manning who leaked atrocity footage, the Edward Snowden who exposed mass surveillance: these were not Ivy idealists. They were cogs who chose to jam the gears.

Your plea for “practicality” is just fear of friction. All revolution begins as philosophy—as stigma, as refusal, as inconvenient questions. You want tidy solutions? Start here: stop sanctifying killers, and you’ll get fewer of them.

This is the lie we’re indoctrinated to believe, yes

Your rebuttal confuses moral ambiguity for moral absolution, mistaking the fog of institutional complexity for a blank check of compliance. Let me illuminate the distinction. The janitor analogy was never about equating modern service members with Holocaust perpetrators—it was about demonstrating how proximity to harm obligates moral reckoning, regardless of institutional remove. A drone pilot operating under today’s bureaucratic veneer may lack the visceral awareness of a death camp worker, but they still choose to participate in systems they know produce civilian casualties. To claim otherwise insults their intelligence. They understand the mission statements, the after-action reports, the veterans’ stories. Ignorance in an age of information is cultivated, not inevitable.

You dismiss draft resistance as a privilege of the few, yet this only underscores how systems weaponize precarity to ensure compliance. That some lacked the means to resist does not render their service morally neutral—it indicts the structures that make dissent a luxury. Shall we absolve all participants in exploitative systems because escape wasn’t universally possible? Then no colonial foot soldier could ever be condemned, no sweatshop overseer held accountable. Your logic collapses into a nihilistic void where only the supremely privileged bear moral burdens—a perverse inversion of justice.

As for your derision of “fractal responsibility”: you fear it dilutes accountability, but in truth, it demands more rigor. The CEO who orders a drone strike and the mechanic who maintains it are both guilty, but not equally. Guilt scales with power, yes—but it does not vanish at the base of the hierarchy. The Nuremberg Trials judged not just politicians but industrialists, physicians, bureaucrats. To focus solely on architects is to ignore that oppression requires laborers—willing or coerced—to function. Your framework would let the architect hide behind the bricklayers, the general behind the privates.

You demand “actionable solutions” as if critique must birth policy bulletins to be valid. But stigma is action. Dismantling the cultural mythos of military heroism reduces recruitment. Refusing to sanctify uniforms forces societies to confront what those uniforms actually do. Engineers abandoning defense contracts, journalists exposing procurement corruption, soldiers leaking atrocity footage—these ripple from the cultural soil tilled by critique.

And spare me the theatrics about “paralyzing discourse.” Moral clarity is not the enemy of nuance—it is its foundation. You frame my position as a demand for moral purity, but I argue for proportionality. The draftee who surrenders to a broken system bears less blame than the career officer who thrives within it, yet both bear some. To pretend otherwise is to endorse a world where slaughter is licensed so long as enough hands touch the knife.

Finally, your accusation that I “serve power structures” by scrutinizing low-level actors is a breathtaking feat of projection. It is your worldview that protects the powerful by insisting blame pools exclusively at the top. The senator who votes for war appropriations sleeps soundly when society fixates solely on their role. No—pressure must ascend and descend the chain. Guilt is not a finite resource. We can condemn the contractor who builds border wall concrete while also damning the president who ordered it.

Your fear of moral expansiveness is really a fear of true accountability—one that unsettles all strata of complicity. You call it paralysis. I call it coherence.

Your labyrinthine prose coils around the heart of the matter like ivy choking a statue—ornate, suffocating, yet failing to obscure the inscription beneath. Let us parse this carefully. You speak of soldiers as vessels of vulnerability, mere marionettes twitching to the whims of distant civilian oligarchs. But does the rifle in their hands not pulse with a kind of power? A power distilled, singular, terminal? To claim they are ‘furthest from decision-making’ is to conflate authority with action. The janitor who sweeps the floor of a death camp does not design the gas chambers, but his broom still enables the machinery. The soldier, even the one stitching wounds or calibrating drones, is a node in the network of violence. Their labor, however benign in isolation, sustains the engine. To absolve them by citing ‘marginalized origins’ is to infantilize them—to deny their capacity for moral reckoning amid the storm.

You invoke complexity as a shield, as if the interplay of socioeconomic forces renders individuals ethereal, weightless. But history is littered with those who, amid greater oppression, clawed at their agency. The Vietnam draft dodger who feigned madness, the conscientious objector who chose prison over complicity—were these not choices carved from the same granite of systemic cruelty you describe? To say ‘they had no meaningful freedom’ is to erase their humanity, to reduce them to thermodynamic particles in a fatalistic universe.

And your deflection—‘most never fire a weapon’—is a syllogistic sleight-of-hand. The medic who stabilizes a soldier for redeployment, the engineer who fortifies a base, the clerk who files the orders: all are cogs in the same Leviathan. The institution’s purpose is domination, and to don its uniform is to be baptized into its logic. You speak of ‘family tradition’ and ‘educational opportunity’ as motivations, but when does a reason become an excuse? The banker laundering cartel money might cite his child’s tuition—does that nullify his guilt?

Ah, but you retreat to abstraction: ‘Moral responsibility increases with power!’ A tidy formula, yet it crumbles under the weight of its own idealism. The CEO’s order is lethal, yes, but only insofar as the warehouse worker packs the drone, the marketer brands it ‘defensive,’ and the soldier pulls the trigger. Responsibility is not a finite resource to be hoarded by the elite; it is a fractal, repeating at every scale. To focus solely on the architects is to ignore the bricklayers who, brick by brick, erect the edifice.

You accuse me of ‘stigmatizing the powerless,’ but power is not a binary. It is a gradient, a spectrum of complicity. The draftee trembling in a trench has more agency than the general, perhaps, but less than the senator—yet all are agents. To critique the soldier is not to exonerate the senator. It is to say that moral gravity bends around every choice, however constrained. To dismiss this is to surrender to nihilism—to say no one is culpable because everyone is a victim.

And let us be clear: stigmatizing the profession is not vilifying the person. It is a refusal to sanctify the mantle they wear. When we strip the uniform of its honor, we do not attack the soul beneath—we attack the lie that the uniform is honorable. This is how systems fracture: when their myths are unmasked, when their foot soldiers begin to question the hymns they’ve been taught to sing.

So no, I will not lobotomize my critique to soothe the conscience of those who fear nuance. The drone pilot in Nevada, the programmer optimizing surveillance algorithms, the corporal raising his rifle—they all dance on the same precipice. Some leap; some hesitate; some shut their eyes. But to pretend they aren’t standing on the edge? That is the true obfuscation.

Someone else mentioned in this thread that after WWII, Carl Jaspers wrote Die Schuldfrage (The Question of German Guilt) which discussed and categorized guilt broadly into 4 types. In terms of the people carrying out these orders, moral guilt applies: to act on clearly morally wrong orders does not absolve you of guilt.

I think your comments are obfuscating the role of each of these professions in their proximity to power.

Above all the jobs you mention, soldiers are the closest to power mainly because they hold a device designed for only 1 purpose: to end life. They may be performing this role out of financial necessity, but many still have the ability to avoid killing. In Vietnam, if one couldn’t dodge the draft, there were still many ways to avoid killing. Sure, they may be in a difficult position, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have agency every day to find ways to not kill.

Regarding critique, we can do 2 things at once. We can both be critical of the systems that perpetuate violence and also critical of people who choose to make a career out of taking people’s lives. Sustained pressure (including negative social pressure) applied to both areas can be important. I’d argue that stigmatizing a profession is a necessary step in critiquing and eventually dismantling power.

Before the war, Hitler was inspired by Jim Crow laws when creating the infamous Nuremberg Laws.

After the war - once the US secured unipolar hegemony - they absorbed more than 1500 former SS scientists into the US government.

Birds of a feather

Yup, the mental gymnastics they use to justify war crimes. No other country has nuked a civilian population. They’ve nuked 2