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 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.