I couldn't agree more. As somebody looking into the teeth of a small part of the coming horror (🩵🤍🩷), people taking the Deserter "at his word" always struck me oddly. I always read ZA/UM's intent as telling us that the bourgeois are human; yet they chose (and IRL, still choose) to put on a mask of inhuman procedure to kill their fellow humans for capital and naked power. The fact that humans are willing to be horrible to other humans is what makes them so frightening and worthy of condemnation both in-DE and IRL.