With Yassmin Abdel-Maghied currently overseas, someone has to step in stir the ANZAC pot:
Why do people in the armed forces use the word 'serve' to describe their work despite it being no more dangerous or prone to upheaval than many other jobs? It's just a job and work. Throw the term 'serve' in the bin. It's part of the fetishisation of war and violence.
— Catherine Deveny (@CatherineDeveny) April 23, 2018
As examples of those jobs that are just as dangerous or prone to upheaval as “serving” in the armed forces, Catherine lists the following:
Firefighters, paramedics, police, doctors, social workers, nurses, window cleaners, miners, arborists, labours, farmers, construction workers, people who work with those suffering severe mental illness, prison officers, roofers, teachers (in American schools), loggers, fishermen
— Catherine Deveny (@CatherineDeveny) April 24, 2018
Maybe in peacetime, but certainly not in a time of war, which is the whole point of the existence of armed forces. Army, air force and navy personnel live with the reality – however unlikely it might seem in the comfortable times of peace – that at a moment’s notice they can, and often do, face and meet imminent death and injury. With the exception of police and firefighters, in no other job do you sign up for employment where the risk of death is a feature and not a bug. How many arborists and window cleaners died defending Deveny’s right to spew her garbage?
Of course, according to Deveny, being in the armed forces is not only no more dangerous than being a logger, it’s also vastly less socially useful and vastly more morally inferior:
You didn't 'serve your country' you chose a job in the violence industry.
— Catherine Deveny (@CatherineDeveny) April 24, 2018
And:
The suffered because they were sucked in with the glamour of war and racism under the guise of patriotism. They were uneducated and ignorant. Most were up for an adventure and and identity. That's why they went. For their own self serving reasons.
— Catherine Deveny (@CatherineDeveny) April 24, 2018
Deveny describes herself as a “writer, comedian, author, feminist, atheist, cyclist, Gunnas Writing Master, Curvy Crumpet, Pushy Woman, Trollhunter & Atheist Kibbutz founder” so I will venture a bold guess that she probably thinks there would be world peace but for the white male right-wing racist imperialists and so we wouldn’t even need armies. The irony, lost on her, is that in any other alternative universe where all these awful people don’t exist, she would be long dead. And that includes the alternative universes where all those “uneducated and ignorant” boys in “violence industry” either didn’t fight or did fight but lost, in which case Catherine would have ended up in Hitler’s gas oven, the Soviet or Chinese gulag, the Imperial Japanese rape camp, or stoned to death under the caliphate.
A female writer, comedian, author, feminist, atheist, cyclist insulting the living and the dead servicemen and women on social media is a factual combination possible only in those societies that were created precisely by the white male right-wing racist imperialists. And yet…
One of the thing that ANZAC day brings up is the hilarious notion that Australians have fought for our right to free speech. Australians do not have the right to free speech. Australians who have worked in the violence industry have fought wars to suck up to the US and British.
— Catherine Deveny (@CatherineDeveny) April 24, 2018
“Australians do not have the right to free speech”, says the Australian woman freely and publicly exercising her right to free speech. Honestly, you have to be on the left to be this dumb and un-self-aware.
