Fwd: [oaklandteachers] Fwd: Recruiting Kids to Kill

[Susan Harman <susanharman@igc.org>]

Begin forwarded message:

  1999,1999,FFFFhttp://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs02072008.html

  February 7, 2008

  Recruiting Kids to Kill

  Innocent Flesh

  By RON JACOBS

  I used to umpire Little League baseball in the roughest section of
  Burlington, VT. Compared to so-called rough sections of bigger cities in
  other parts of the United States, the Old North End was certainly not very
  rough. However, it did have the largest number of working and other poor
  families, a large number of immigrants and a higher number of single parent
  homes than most of the rest of Burlington. On any given game day, there would
  be a couple parole officers hanging around the game watching younger siblings
  of their charges playing ball. One of the officers who used to talk ball with
  me a little told me that he had been the parole officer for two old brothers
  of one of the better players in the league and hoped that the third and
  youngest boy would avoid the fate of his brothers who had both served time
  for drugs and robbery. In addition to the parole officers, various workers
  from Social Services and a good number of parents and relatives, a couple
  military recruiters began showing up at the occasional game in spring 2002.

  The boys (and some of the girls) were intrigued by the recruiters. Their
  uniforms and their sense of certainty seemed to appeal to these young
  people-especially the ones with the least stable home lives. Burlington never
  had much of a gang problem, but it always seemed to me that the appeal of the
  recruiters was that they promised membership in something very much like a
  gang with all of the solidarity and unity such membership could provide. On
  the days the recruiters showed up they would converse with the kids-none who
  were older than 13-about the Red Sox, the game and what they thought about
  high school. After all, the military was only recruiting high school
  graduates at the time. To their credit, the recruiters were more convivial
  than anything else and may even have inspired some of the kids they talked to
  into staying in school. Yet, their primary reason for befriending these kids
  was to get them to join the military and go to war.

  High schools across the nation include JROTC as a standard course. In some
  schools it replaces physical education. The course is about physical
  education but it is also about regimentation and indoctrination. Boys and
  girls in the course do not use guns except when they carry fake ones in
  drill. They do, however, get indoctrinated in the military doctrine and
  nationalistic propaganda. Meanwhile, the US military has total access to
  young people's phone numbers and school records. Recruiters come to schools
  and speak to mandatory assemblies. The US Army sends mail and calls students
  incessantly in their last two years of high school and send recruitment vans
  into neighborhoods where many youth are present. Recruiters hang out in
  shopping malls near arcades hoping to get boys hyped up on the latest video
  game to consider a couple years in Iraq or Afghanistan as an option. They
  push their way into job fairs at two and four year colleges and set up
  offices in as many towns as possible throughout the United States. The
  culture of militarism is pervasive and it is heavily geared toward young
  people between the ages of twelve and twenty.

  I mention all this in relation to a recent news item from the Associated
  Press stating that the group the Pentagon calls Al-Qaida in Iraq is
  recruiting and training teenagers. For the moment, let's assume that this
  article is true and is not some kind of fake news planted by US psy-ops.
  According to the story, some videos were found in an operation against
  insurgents. According to Rear Admiral Smith of the US Navy, the videos "were
  meant to spread Al Qaida's message among the young rather than train the boys
  for missions." This was not the first time such videos had been found, the
  story continued, but "it was the most disturbing."

  Now, if I understand this right, the US military is appalled and disturbed
  because some Iraqi insurgent groups (that may or may not have anything to do
  with Al Qaida in Iraq) are using videos to propagandize among adolescents in
  the hope that they will enlist. Meanwhile, the US military, which is engaged
  in the same type of operations as the Iraqi insurgency only as the occupying
  force, glorifies its mission of bloodshed, intimidation, and killing in
  videos, video games, in schools, on the television, at shopping malls and
  through the mails. Naturally, these methods are not training the US
  adolescents that they are targeting for operations, but they are definitely
  "meant to spread the US military's message among the young (to borrow Admiral
  Smith's words.)"

  As I write this, a news item is coming over the radio stating that the US
  Army Surgeon General issued an order telling military counselors to stop
  helping Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans fill out paperwork required to seek
  psychological assistance. After denying such a document existed, the General
  backtracked from that denial when the document was produced. He is now
  looking for another lie to explain away the order. Do you think the
  recruiters mention this to the teenagers they target?

  Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather
  Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay on Big Bill
  Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's collection on music, art and sex,
  Serpents in the Garden. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published
  by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at: rjacobs3625@charter.net

Vote in the National Cheney Impeachment Poll

http://www.usalone.com/blogvoices.php?Cheney%20Impeachment%3F

Add this text to your own email and blog signatures!