You aren't using my logic, so your long post is difficult to address.
I am a BAD Quaker. I am a non-aggressionist, not a pacifist. I support the individual right to self-defense, and the right of people to voluntarily organize for mutual defense. However, governments do not represent such a mutual voluntary agreement. Government IS a land pirate gang. And that is where all of your arguments collapse.
A bad Quaker? So is your last name Nixon? Ok, bad joke. Most people don't even know Nixon's odd upbringing. But so this ideology, as much as it may make some sense to even me, has its "gotcha" problems. I'm all for keeping the government at bay...
But I see that the military is one of the quintessential aspects of government which gives it its practicality. A government would be almost worthless without a military, so by neutering it, you have an ineffectual, weak, hopeless nation. It's not much better than anarchy for most continental nation-states.
Religion and God' word teach us to love peace and to turn the other cheek. But I can't pretend that this calling is to be taken up by the government. We all have to face up to this. Even if you and I both vociferously disagree with warfare and we escape conscription because of it, I find it difficult to reconcile with the bad actor examples I laid out (unrestricted submarine warfare and pirates taking women and children for sex slaves). To me, I might lean toward fighting against that, and leave God to sort out who is moral and immoral. I know modern conflicts are much less cut-and-dried,
BUT I WANTED TO MAKE THE CASE... that there are legitimate reasons to gather up a group of able-bodied men to go kill evildoers and their accomplices.
Otherwise, God just might ask us one day why we let so many suffer for the sake of our own righteousness!
Peace, brother in the Lord. Check out my recent posts... as dichotomous as they might be. LOL.
"A government would be almost worthless without a military, so by neutering it, you have an ineffectual, weak, hopeless nation. It's not much better than anarchy for most continental nation-states."
And you are so close now to getting it.
A loyal, obedient military is what allows a government to commit atrocities at home and abroad. That is why the police are militarized as well. The US has the highest prison population in the world in absolute and per capita terms. Foreign interventionism has created more chaos than it has quelled. And the whole project is funded by robbing the productive class to fuel the political class.
Again, government militaries have no relation to voluntary defense associations, and there is no need for a continent-spanning nation-state unless you are in the political plunder business. The State needs us, but we do not need The State.
If you think someone needs killing, take responsibility and do the killing yourself. Don't demand your neighbor be robbed by strangers to satisfy your blood lust, and murdered in turn should he resist.
Then your beef seems to be with political corruption. Like I said, the military is part and parcel with a nation-state. But if the oligarchs and plutocrats are using their influence to fight wars with your military, then stop it at the source. The hard, cold reality I am talking about is that military intervention and capabilities are not the problem. Go back to the source: war-mongering pols and the doctrines of war that make it policy (The Monroe Doctine on down to the Bush doctrine, etc.)
The underlying beef you have with the military can be shown, at every point, to be a beef with the elected leadership of the US. In other countries or times, this might be with the royal elite or the military dictators. You might even have a beef with appointed bureaucrats.
The rank-and-file military, the recipients of the Memorial Day tributes, are probably not the problem. They are definitely not the root of the problem. You have a political grievance, plain and simple, and one that I share. The DOD is only as strong as YOUR TAX DOLLARS make it.
Stop paying taxes if that's what it takes.
Government is institutionalized corruption. it has never been anything else. Why do you think a territorial monopoly in violence is, if not a beacon to the corrupt and a corrosive acid destroying the morals of the well-intentioned?
"I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it."—Lord Acton
You know, if you just realize that the military (and police) are just pawns in the hand of the power brokers... that would change some things. These pawns are there to make a few bucks for their family. They see an ad to join and make money. Meanwhile, the top brass get paid to know how to kill bad guys. But the elitists run the show. Most of the elites who run the military and fund it are politicians. Your disgust with the military should be redirected towards Congress, etc.
That's what Lord Acton was saying. The office holder(s) of this nation. We effectively voted for them, which puts the onus on you and me and us all. Your petty little Memorial Day dissent is a pathetic redirection of your own guilt. You brought about this scourge. Right? You know Acton's words, yet failed to act on them by electing better stewards of the State's power to kill and wage war.
You are essentially dissenting against your own error. And our collective error. The wars you hate can be traced back to poor decisions at the polling station. Right or wrong, you dissent against the duly elected leaders of our nation.
There is no solution in politics, because politics is corrupt to the core. That is the point of Acton's quote. You're blaming the victim. I am pointing out it's time to stop playing the political game or worshiping government enforcers as saints.
Collectives don't exist, BTW. There is no collective guilt, collective action, collective representation, or collective responsibility. Individuals can cooperate, but there is no representation without consent, and no new entity is created by magic voting rituals.