Hello and welcome to Colonial Outcast, your friendly neighborhood podcast about empire and imperialism and stuff.

My name is Greg Stoker.

I'm joined by co-host Mark Wayne.

And I'm basically just here to do the intro on this episode because we're going to touch on military indoctrination.

And though I've been out of the military for years,

there's this massive festival where I live. It's called South by Southwest, and we are currently

boycotting it because it's sponsored this year by both the U.S. Army and Raytheon. So I've been

going to a lot of anti-South by Southwest, punk and metal shows in town. And I was supposed to go to bed

early last night because we're recording this podcast in the morning. But one of my friends was like,

hey, you're going home and going to bed. I thought you were an Army Ranger. And of course,

that challenge to my credibility led me to staying out to like 4 a.m. and being an idiot and now I feel

like death and I'm sure this all sounds dumb. Yes guys are dumb and I am incidentally a guy but the point

I'm trying to make is that this old stupid indoctrination is very powerful and it can manifest obviously

in much dark ways. We are actively

witnessing a genocide in Palestine in real time. And as a former soldier, I struggle to comprehend

the behavior of the IOS soldiers on the ground in Gaza. It's absolutely inhumane and unconscionable. I've been trying to

understand it, which is intellectually and emotionally challenging. So I'm very grateful that we have

Yuval coming on this show. He was a former soldier in Israel because growing up in Israel's

service in the military is and was compulsory.

So he's here to talk about his experiences and his perspective.

Thank you so much for coming on the show.

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

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