Americans who at least nominally want to be progressives (let alone actual leftists) need to come to terms with the fact that:
- The American military is known anywhere outside the US, especially anywhere outside the imperial core of the global north, as the current most brutal terrorist organization, active as such since at least the cold war. Your military is profoundly hated in our countries, not due to some Us vs Them sentiment, but because your military has done nothing but genocide us, maim us, torture us, bring famine, bring disease, poison us, rape us, steal our children, destroy our lands, steal from us, and more. So much more. Richard Ramírez was inspired by his Vietnam veteran relative to commit the atrocities he committed, and honestly his serial killing was nothing compared to what the regular combatant US soldier did in Vietnam. Horrendous crimes against humanity en masse is the only way to describe it, and you all keep celebrating those veterans when THEY DIDN’T EVEN WIN THAT WAR. And the US military wasn’t abnormally monstrous in Vietnam. Ask Iraq. Ask Afghanistan.
- The defenses you all constantly come up with for the people who volunteer to the biggest and possibly most brutal terrorist organization the world has ever seen are no different than the excuses used by the nazis as to why they just had to do to their Jewish victims what they did. “They were following orders” “They didn’t shoot or kill anyone directly (they just signed the papers that allowed for it to happen)” etc etc.
You all will never be any better than your average Trump supporting nutjob neighbor until you all internalize those facts and act accordingly.