Social: Is OK devotees enrol as Marines and fight?

not for a brahmana for sure hehe

fighting? like with guns and everything?
which website?

I met Parthasarathi prabhu. He met devotees after he joined the Marines. Then his guru (now fallen) told him to reenlist for another 10 years. Now he should be getting for a religious vocation of some sort. He told me that he had distributed a book to his current command officer many years ago. The officer recognized him, amazing huh!

> what kind of Kshatriya will fight for Bush or corporate interests for that matter?

bhisma, pure devotee and first class ksatriya, fought for duryodhana ...

"I think that all Marines enrolled in the US Army should be devotees.'

Marines don't enroll in the US Army. They enroll in the US Navy which has a Marine Corps division. been there. done that.

But yeah ... I agree ... they should all be devotees.

"first of all, traditional varnasrama isn't applicable in today's society. we're all born as sudras, and if all who received second initiation were real brahmanas, we wouldn't have as many problems as we do."

Second initiation, in terms of the second birth and the sacred thread, is traditionally given to all twice-born in the classical varnasrama society - that means brahmanas, ksatriyas, and vaisyas. Not just brahmanas.

I heard that fighting should be only to protect dharma and nothing else...

pelota

> Are you comparing Bush to Duryodhana?

only in the sense that duryodhana was against the pandavas and krsna, the 'bad guy' in the kuruksetra situation. you can't always choose where you end up, and if it's your duty to fight, then you fight. (personally i would make great efforts, though, not to end up in that situation.)

i would be surprised if all or even most marines and US soldiers were fighting for bush personally. for some it's probably a job that comes close to their nature, for others it's a way to get through the army while getting some benefits, and some will want to protect their country. all legitimate reasons, i think. far as i know soldiering is among the honest professions.

In kali yuga soldiers are for money, or have so little brain that they buy the right wing stuff, or are there for some other reason but they wish they weren't there.

If someone believes that America is saving the countries that invades... men, we to do an IQ on them.

http://www.vedanews.com/story.php?title=Be_nice_to_America

Search for Bush in that site and you will be surprised to know that one can be more evil than Duryodhana.

Duryodhana had character, was trained, the citizens were happy with him. I can't produce quotations but afaik we shouldn't even compare with modern leaders.

And no, I am not Kuru relative descendant.

I wonder what he will do when an officer orders him to attack a town full of innocent iraqis. Sorry to pop your soap bubble.

VEDA:I suppose he'll continue to distribute prasadam to them (and books if he has any in Arabic.) ;)

you know there is military law and discipline. It might be not so easy.

In my humble opinion, joining the armed services is problematic because the individual is submitting to the authority of men, and men may lead him astay.

I can see many conflicts of interest where a devotee might have to choose between obedience to the Army and obedience to God. The Guru accepts the karma of his follower, but I'm not sure the Army can accept the karmic consequences for its troops.

Thomas: The Guru accepts the karma of his follower, but I'm not sure the Army can accept the karmic consequences for its troops.

Yes they do. The leader(s) take 1/5th (some say 1/6th) of all of the karmic reactions accumulated by their dependents. Who is the head of all four of the US military branches? .... George W. Bush

I became a devotee after I joined the Marines by acquiring and reading Srila Prabhupada's books in a bookstore outside of base. I immediately went to the nearest temple and understood I had to chant, be a vegetarian, etc. I went AWOL when I was ordered to go on a Mountain Training Package that consisted of thirty days at twenty-nine Palms military base in California.
During the 30 days I would have to "remain tactical" which means pretend we were at war. That means no chanting. You can't really chant your rounds out loud when you are pretending to hide from the enemy or else they will hear you. So that is why it is difficult to chant in the field, and also offer bhoga since they order you to take only certain supplies in your backpack, such as clothing, and no food.
The association was extremely hellish because the way the Marines are always ready to fight is they keep you so agitated all the time that you just want to kill someone.
For example, they might tell you that you are going on a march to get conditioned in case they need to march in a war (I was in during peacetime). So they load up your backpack with lots of stuff so it weighs a lot. Then they make you strap on your canteens, ammo mags and pouches, cartridge belt, rifle, helmet, etc.. Up to seventy-five pounds. Then you go on a race against the other companies around the bases, up to twenty-five miles sometimes. And not all even terrain, we had one mountain on our base known as Mount Motherf*cker that was so steep when you were marching up the mountain you could see the man's butt ahead of you instead of his head because the hill was so steep. But we had to stay in formation. So then after sweating like pigs and being dog tired when you finally want to relax at the end of the day they make you stay on base as a firewatch, which means guard, guard the barracks. Or any other one of a myriad of things to keep you from enjoying yourself so you are stuck on base with tens of thousands of men at Camp Horno and no women and all of the men are full of false pride. Only one person I knew was even religious. One time I went to the Chapel on a Sunday and only three people were there out of the entire Camp.
Even the Chaplain assigned to our unit in Korea, when we went there I personally saw him with a young prostitute under one arm and a bottle of wine in the other. Most of the men I knew were drunk every night while we were in Okinawa and when we got back to California there were so many drugs available you could get whatever you wanted.
There is a saying you aren't a real Marine until you have had "Office Hours" which means getting in trouble with the authorities for one reason or another so it is not uncommon to see things like men ripping the urinals off the walls which happened a lot or one time some of the men in my platoon ran their car off Mount Motherf*cker when they weren't even supposed to be driving up there and it got caught on a tree otherwise they all would have died.
We laughed when our medic told us that if someone drank a six pack of beer a day they were alcoholics because we were all drinking a case of beer a day at the time. The other divisions of the military on Okinawa had a ban on Marines from drinking at their enlisted clubs because the Marines had so many fights there. I was involved one time when our company had a fight that turned into a small riot with the next company over because we were all being "dogged" so much that each of us thought we were being mistreated more than the others.
With so much suffering going on all you can think about is killing the enemy, that is the philosophy they told us in boot camp. There is also a saying that there are no atheists on the battlefield though. But my association was so bad I hated it. Once I became a devotee I tried to preach but no one was interested really so all I wanted to do was get out. When I finally went up in front of the General in charge of the whole base he told me that he wanted to see me personally and that his niece was a devotee and she sold him a different big book every time he went to the airport. They printed a little story about that in the old ISKCON World Review back in the eighties.
Sorry for the unbrahminical language but that's how it was in there.

I usually don't talk about it anymore but I did a lot of reminiscing about it here. That was back in the late seventies and early eighties.

"But if you are already 'in' then you have to make the best of it like HG Parthasarathi Prabhu is doing and has done. This is noble and deserves our respect. "

following this same logic, we also owe our respect to the members of the nazi party that pushed forth hitler's agenda because "they were already in". seems like someone has to take a stand for right at some point and not just maintaining the status quo.

Most of the young guys are half mad and the older soldiers are dedicated to exploring newer and deeper realms of madness. They get these guys so wound up that killing someone is an outlet for the matrix of anger and hatred they are conditioned to experience - even an artform for some.

earlier i wrote that i considered soldiering an honest profession; i didn't konw, though, how crazy the environment of the marines really was. that statement came from a purely theoretical (mis)understanding. i was born in (west) berlin and nobody ever bothered me with any army-duty.

after reading ekendra's and adhikari's posts, i concede that nobody in their right mind should consider this type of job if they have a choice.

It's always been my opinion that armies destroy the people they employ to fight wars then the survivors come home and destroy the communities they belong to, then the children grow up and destroy what they have. And that is what happens to the winners. What happens to the losers is of course worse.

Of course that is not always the case.

more of the same:
http://chakra.org/news/newsAug04_07.html