Pro- war WA senator Patty Murray’s non-response to criticism of the national war budget

Posted on by Kathy Barker

This response of Patty Murray’s to criticism of Trump’s war budget perfectly demonstrates that the democrats and republicans both created and maintain (and profit from) the crisis of ongoing war.

 

Dear xxxx

Thank you for contacting me about the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 (NDAA). I appreciate hearing from you.

As you know, the NDAA is legislation passed annually that authorizes funding and implements new policy for the Department of Defense (DoD) and national security programs housed at the Department of Energy. The NDAA includes provisions for the delivery of a vast array of goods and services, including the procurement of weapons and equipment, the recruitment and training of personnel, as well as the research and development of new technologies.

As the daughter of a disabled World War II veteran, I am intimately aware of the sacrifice that so many men and women make every day by serving in the Armed Forces. I also recognize the duty that we all have to honor their sacrifice by providing our servicemembers with the equipment and training they need to be successful in the field of combat and the services they need to be cared for when they return home.

If you would like to know more about my work in the Senate, please feel free to sign up for my weekly updates at http://murray.senate.gov/updates. Again, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with me.

Sincerely,

Patty Murray
United States Senator

Posted in Democrats, Washington state Tagged with: , ,

War- from “Autopsy, the Democratic Party in Crisis”

Posted on by Kathy Barker

War and the Democratic Party

The most audible dissent inside the 2016 Democratic National Convention came during the two speeches that most forcefully touted policies of perpetual war. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was taken aback when delegates repeatedly interrupted his primetime address with chants of “No more war.” The next night, just after Gen. John Allen encountered the same chant during the convention’s final session, the Washington Post cited poll numbers that indicated the chanting delegates represented a substantial portion of views among Democrats nationwide.

The wisdom of continual war was far clearer to the party’s standard bearer than it was to people in the U.S. communities bearing the brunt of combat deaths, injuries and psychological traumas. After a decade and a half of nonstop warfare, research data from voting patterns suggest that the Clinton campaign’s hawkish stance was a political detriment in working-class communities hard-hit by American casualties from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Even controlling in a statistical model for many other alternative explanations, we find that there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump,” concluded a study by Boston University’s Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen at the University of Minnesota. The professors wrote: “Our statistical model suggests that if three states key to Trump’s victory — Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — had suffered even a modestly lower casualty rate, all three could have flipped from red to blue and sent Hillary Clinton to the White House.”

Clinton’s warlike record and campaign positions helped Trump to have it both ways, playing to jingoism while masquerading as an opponent of the protracted wars that had disillusioned so many Americans. The ongoing Clinton embrace of militarism abetted Trump’s efforts to gain media coverage that framed him as the relatively noninterventionist candidate.

In their study, Professors Kriner and Shen said that Democrats may want to “reexamine their foreign policy posture if they hope to erase Trump’s electoral gains among constituencies exhausted and alienated by 15 years of war.” But while public support for ongoing war on many fronts has ebbed, the Democratic Party’s top leadership has continued to avidly back it. This disconnect not only depresses enthusiasm and support — reflected in donations, volunteer energies, turnout and votes — from the party’s traditional base; it also undermines Democratic capacities to draw in voters who identify as independent or have gravitated to another party.

As with its allegiance to trade agreements that benefit large corporations at the expense of American workers, the top of the party remains woefully out of touch with voters who do not share elite enthusiasm for endless war. Much as the national Democratic Party has ceded economic “populism” to Donald Trump and certain right-wing elements, Democratic leadership has largely ceded the anti-interventionist terrain to some elements of the GOP — as well as to the Libertarian and Green parties, whose antiwar presidential candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein received 4.33 percent of the popular vote between them in 2016, nearly 6 million votes.

The most influential think tanks and media outlets routinely treat adherence to military-industrial-complex orthodoxy as a prerequisite for acceptable candidates. But many voters have other ideas. If anything should be learned from the 2016 presidential election, it is that the inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom holds much more sway with Democratic Party elites than it does with the electorate.

While abdicating responsibility in profound moral dimensions, the Democratic Party leadership has continued to sidestep the immediate, cumulative and long-term negative effects of perpetual war. Overwhelmingly, national party leaders have remained tethered to conventional wisdom that keeps this country engaged in a self-propagating “war on terror” on several continents. Top-ranking congressional Democrats have rarely responded to Republican militarism with a message other than “us too,” or “us too, even more so.” This party-line reflex prevents the Democratic Party from appealing to the anti-interventionist sentiments of large numbers of Americans who question policies of continuous war.

The platform of Justice Democrats notes that “the United States maintains 800 military bases worldwide at a cost of $100 billion a year” — and “this is money that can be spent at home creating jobs, rebuilding infrastructure, and investing in the future of the people.” The organization adds: “The disastrous war in Iraq cost trillions, the war in Afghanistan is 15 years in with no end in sight, and we’re currently bombing seven different countries. We spend more on our military than the next eight countries combined. Despite countless lives lost and destroyed, terrorism has only gotten worse.”

Given that the all-volunteer U.S. military gains recruits in a social context of extreme income inequality, a de facto “economic draft” puts the heaviest burdens of war on the working class. Those burdens have largely worn out their welcome. Yet Democratic Party leaders have rarely made an issue out of the spiraling military costs or the long-term consequences of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” While frequently invoking the legacy of Dr. King, the Democratic leadership has had no use for his cogent warnings about the home-front ravages of war. In a landmark 1967 speech at New York’s Riverside Church, Dr. King deplored the priorities of a bipartisan establishment demonstrating its “hostility to the poor” — appropriating “military funds with alacrity and generosity,” but providing “poverty funds with miserliness.” Fifty years later, the vast majority of Democratic leaders go along with such warfare-state priorities.

Like the Clinton-Kaine campaign, the national Democratic Party’s 2016 platform was in tune with foreign-policy approaches popular among elites. A bloated military budget remained sacrosanct and uncuttable (except for the bromide of eliminating “waste”). Giving a thumbs-up to U.S. war efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and beyond, the platform endorsed continual U.S. warfare that has expanded to many parts of the globe since late 2001. That warfare has been terribly harmful to countless people — but hugely lucrative for military contractors. Overall, the Democratic Party leadership has refused to make a distinction between truly defending the United States and waging interventionist wars. The party’s top leaders have conflated U.S. warfare in many nations with defense of our country. This stance is politically damaging and vastly destructive.

See the whole report at https://democraticautopsy.org.

Posted in antiwar, Democrats, militarism, war Tagged with: , , , ,

Counter military recruiting workshops at FOR’s Annual Northwest Regional Conference

Posted on by Kathy Barker

June 30-July 3, at the Seabeck Conference Center in Seabeck WA;  FOR’s 60th Annual Northwest Regional Conference, theme “Complicating Narratives.”

Complicating Narratives involves us looking at the systematic ways in which toxic narratives permeate our world, as well as the ways in which we all internalize these narratives, creating different realities depending on where our intersecting identities lie within systems of power and oppression. As the first FOR conference organized by youth of color, we are choosing to complicate the narrative of nonviolence by telling our stories.

Keynote Speakers : Taylor Amari Little (Tay) is a proud Black queer femme Muslim and practitioner of African Diasporic ancestral spiritual traditions.  Women of Color Speak Out is a collective of direct action activists that formed during ShellNo. They speak on how capitalism, colonialism, racism, the prison industrial complex and patriarchy have led into climate change.

Workshops:  Human Rights Defenders in Israel & Palestine;  Decolonizing Gender;  Open Floor dance/movement workshop;  Let’s talk about race;  Youth-Driven Participatory Action Research Practices;  Indigenous Equity & Social Justice;  Countering Pentagon Recruitment;  and more.  info and registration http://www.forseabeck.org, or phone 206-789-5565 to request a paper registration form.  Please register as soon as possible!

June 30 @ 4:00 pm – July 3 @ 1:00 pm
13395 Lagoon Drive NW
Seabeck, WA 98380 United States
Posted in antiwar, capitalism, conference, counter military recruiting, Fellowship of Reconciliation, FOR, human rights, youth of color

Washington Senators vote to pass $716 million dollar defense bill

Posted on by Kathy Barker

Washington Senators Maria Cantrell and Patty Murray joined with an almost full house of Republicans to pass a $716 billion dollar defense bill.

Shame on them. But love of war, at the expense of high school students, is a non-partisan issue.

Expect an increase in military recruiting in schools across the country.

Graphic from Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

 

Posted in antiwar, counter military recruiting, militarism, Recruiting, Washington Tagged with: , , , , ,

“Toward What Ends? A Critical Analysis of Militarism, Equity, and STEM Education”

Posted on by Kathy Barker

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“Toward What Ends? A Critical Analysis of Militarism, Equity, and STEM Education”, authored by Shirin Vossoughi and Sepehr Vakil, describes the parallel tracks of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) as a way to find technologically- adept recruits for the military, and to promote equity and diversity among students in public schools.

NNOMY, the National Network Opposing the  Militarization of Youth  has been following this use of STEM for recruiting and it is exhilarating that academics and teachers are working on this issue in schools. We all need to work together to protect students from military and corporate abuse.

This chapter appears in Education at War: The Fight for Students of Color in America’s Public Schools.

Posted in antiwar, counter military recruiting, militarism, Recruiting, students of color Tagged with: , , ,

Youth Groups in Russia and the USA- militarism, patriotism, nationalism

Posted on by Kathy Barker

An article in the March 22, 2018 New York Times, “Patriotic Youth Army Takes Russians Back to the Future,” describes the Youth Army as a “militarized throwback to the Young Pioneers of the Soviet Era.” They are a “hybrid version of the scouts and a reserve officers training program, with an emphasis on patriotism and national service.”  There are 190,000 children ages 8 to 18, spread over all 85 regions of Russia. Members get to play video games such as simulated tank driving and learn to handle a gun.

 

Organizers say it is apolitical. But, at a recent national forum, military videos played, and many members consider the Youth Army to be a glide to the military as a career. Still, the organization’s leader, Dmitry Trunenkov, rejects the idea that the Youth Army is excessively militaristic.

 

The overtone of the article is dark, with references to the the Pioneers of the Soviet era. It is written as if it seems creepy predatory to have kids be so militaristic. It seems to be vastly critical of Russia, and a bit holier-than-thou, an insinuation that the USA would never stoop so low as to militarize children.

 

But the USA has been in the militarizing student business far longer than the Russian Youth Army or the Soviet Young Pioneers. It has the Junior Officer Training Corps, the JROTC, which was started with the National Defense Act in 1916 and now has at 565,000 students signed up, some mandatorially. The Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines each has its own cadet program, ostensibly for high school students, but related military-run clubs cater to middle school and younger students , with a mix of nationalism, patriotism, and christianity.

 

As in the Russian Youth Army, there are guns: the Civilian Marksmanship Program runs the marksmanship section of JROTC, often with funding from the National Rifle Association  The gun training aspect of JROTC recently came to the fore with the Parkland school murders, as gunman Nikolas Cruz was trained to use guns in the JROTC program at Parkland, a training he would use to kill fellow JROTC and other high school students. Oddly, this has gather little attention in the USA, where the JROTC, like the Russian Youth Army, is seen as apolitical and even more strangely, as unmilitary, with its use as a recruiting tool frequently denied.

 
Posted in guns, JROTC, militarism, Recruiting Tagged with: , , , , ,

Florida Gunman Nikolas Cruz Knew How to Use a Gun, Thanks to the NRA and the U.S. Army

Posted on by Kathy Barker

Florida Gunman Nikolas Cruz Knew How to Use a Gun, Thanks to the NRA and the U.S. Army

Democracy Now! Web Exclusive FEBRUARY 23, 2018

GUESTS
• Pat Elder, director of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, an organization that confronts militarism in schools. He’s the author of “Military Recruiting in the United States.”

Extended web-only discussion with Pat Elder, the director of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, a group that confronts militarism in the schools. He is the author of “Military Recruiting in the United States.” The gunman who fired on students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, a 19-year-old white former student named Nikolas Cruz, was a member of the Army Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program, known as JROTC. Cruz also took part in a four-person JROTC marksmanship team at the school which had received $10,000 in funding from the NRA. “[The NRA] realize that if they can start linking the children with the guns at age 13 in the high schools, it’s a win-win proposition for them and for the sellers of weaponry,” says Elder.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report, with Part 2 of our discussion about JROTC and the mass shooting in Florida. While last week’s Florida school shooting has sparked a national debate over guns and the lobbying power of the National Rifle Association, much less attention has been paid to another aspect of the shooting. The Florida gunman, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, was a member of the Army Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program. He was wearing his JROTC shirt when he carried out the massacre, in an attempt to blend in with other students. Cruz was also part of a four-person JROTC marksmanship team at the school which had received $10,000 in funding from the NRA.

We continue our conversation with Pat Elder, the director of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, a group that confronts militarism in the schools. He’s author of Military Recruiting in the United States.
So, first of all, Pat, tell us how JROTC works in the schools. For example, how many kids at Marjory Stoneham Douglas school were in JROTC? What is the average in the United States?
PAT ELDER: I tried to find that information out, Amy, but I know that all schools that hold—that have JROTC programs have to have a minimum of 100 students. And if they cannot maintain 100 students for two years in a row, then the program has to be discontinued.
Now, that brings up an interesting point having to do with a lobbying campaign that was directed by the JROTC Cadet Command, that was directed not at the federal government, not at state legislatures, but instead at individual schools and state school boards of education and superintendents. For instance, in Florida, which is arguably the most friendly state in terms of the militarization of the schools, Florida statutes now allow a student who takes four years of JROTC to substitute biology, physical science, physical education and art for this straight-jacketed military indoctrination program. It is absolutely outrageous.

AMY GOODMAN: Wait. Repeat that.

PAT ELDER: I’m always asked to repeat that. In Florida, it is part of the statute that a child who takes four years of a JROTC program no longer has to take biology, physical science, physical education and art. Those four credits are used—are satisfied by taking the JROTC program.

See, after the No Child Left Behind Act, Amy, a lot of the school systems across the country became a lot more stringent as far as the kinds of credits and the number of credit hours students had to take, and that squeezed out the JROTC program. So the JROTC program has managed, in many jurisdictions, to be able to substitute for physical education and for American government and civics. Florida goes further.
And it must be noted at this juncture that in Florida all teachers hired must have B.A. degrees and must satisfy stringent teacher certification guidelines. They also must have master’s degrees within a few years. The JROTC instructors for the Army need not have a college degree. Where are the unions? Where are the unions on this?

AMY GOODMAN: Three of the children, three of the high school students killed by Cruz, were, like him, in JROTC. I want to turn to Jillian Davis, who said she was in JROTC with the Florida shooting gunman, Nikolas Cruz, in ninth grade.

JILLIAN DAVIS: Not the most normal or sane kid in JROTC. He definitely had a—just something a little off about him. But everyone in the program was just a little quirky, but he was a little extra quirky. And I only remember vaguely of how quirky he was. But it was just, more or less, that he was aggressive and quiet and shy about when—
INTERVIEWER: I see.
JILLIAN DAVIS: When he got aggressive, it was not like him. It was not his character.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, really? Almost like he had a—
JILLIAN DAVIS: A different personality.
INTERVIEWER: I see.
JILLIAN DAVIS: Because he was very quiet.
AMY GOODMAN: The Army has awarded the Medal of Heroism to three JROTC cadets who died in the Parkland, Florida, shooting: 15-year-old Peter Wang and two 14-year-old freshmen, Martin Duque and Alaina Petty. Wang reportedly died while holding a door open to help other classmates escape. Pat Elder, if you can talk about the students who join JROTC?
PAT ELDER: OK. Thank you Amy. Well, first, it’s a horrible tragedy, and I’m deeply saddened by this. I’ve given a great deal of my time in my life to attempting to take the guns out of these children’s hands. Now, it reminds me of a book written by Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman. It’s called Killology. And he documents the Paducah, Kentucky, shooting in the school’s library. Apparently there were eight kids in a prayer circle, and Michael Carneal came into the library, and he had a handgun with eight rounds, and he shot each child in the head one time. And Grossman refers to it as an “amazing accomplishment.”
And I bring that up because—because the Army uses video games—there’s an America’s Army video game—in order to recruit children. It is one of the most popular games in America today, and it’s a free download. These are first-person shooter games. And I believe deeply that it is the Army’s game to put young fingers around as many triggers, whether they be virtual or real, as possible. So, again, we have thousands of 13-year-olds in high schools across America who are given lethal weapons to shoot in their high schools. And if they don’t shoot in their high school, then they shoot in local commercial shooting ranges that are full of lead dust and that are also run by the Civilian Marksmanship Program and the National Rifle Association. It is a program that must be stopped.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to talk more about this, and we discuss this in Part 1, the relationship between the NRA and these marksmanship programs, that are a subset of JROTC, right? I mean, you have Nikolas Cruz, who was one of a four-member team of this marksmanship program. One of the other students said he was a very good shot.
PAT ELDER: Pretty horrible. Well, I think more attention needs to be given to the NRA’s proxy in all of this, and that’s the Civilian Marksmanship Program, or CMP. Now, the CMP is located in Anniston, Alabama. Unlike other countries around the world that prudently destroy their retired military weapons, the Civilian Marksmanship Program recycles them to the American public. So what the Army does is the Army gives, as gifts, to the Civilian Marksmanship Program outdated rifles and pistols now, and those are sold. So, the Civilian Marksmanship Program has assets of $160 million. It’s a private entity. And it is chartered by Congress to sell recycled or Army weapons to the American public at discounted rates.
That organization, the Civilian Marksmanship Program, regulates the shooting programs in the schools. They’re the ones that have to set up the regulations regarding the firing of the weapons, the safety procedures and the issue regarding the lead. The Civilian Marksmanship Program downplays the lead and follows suit of the NRA in claiming that that doesn’t really hurt you and that there is no problem with the lead on the floors and the lead in the air.
So, it’s the Civilian Marksmanship Program that is the proxy for the National Rifle Association. And more attention needs to be paid on the Civilian Marksmanship Program. If you go to that website, you can go to club tracker, and you can download from club tracker all of the JROTC programs with marksmanship programs throughout the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk more about the lead.
PAT ELDER: Well, thanks, Amy, because it’s been my focus. I really think that this issue should be resonating. Well, when someone shoots a lead pellet through a rifle, it scrapes out all of the lead particulate matter that went before. And so, that lead, these minute particles are blown into the air. And, of course, the ventilation systems in the high schools aren’t set up to take care of that air. And so it depends on which way the ventilation system is blowing. In some cases, it is blowing into the faces of the children. The lead accumulates at the muzzle end of the gun, on the floor, and the lead also accumulates at the target backstop.
And the Civilian Marksmanship Program has published very, very stringent guidelines, that are largely ignored in schools across the country. In fact, there are photos, published on our website, from Flint, Michigan, that actually show children walking from the shooting line to the target. And I have several videos, too, that show that, just from from YouTube—it doesn’t take much to download these things—that clearly show high school children violating the strenuous regulations. And when they walk across the gym floor or across the cafeteria floor, they put—they track the lead on their shoes, on their hands, on their feet, on their clothes, through the rest of the building. And we have studies, by both Swedish and German academic groups, that show a clear linkage between shooting only lead pellets and elevated blood lead levels.
Meanwhile, the Civilian Marksmanship Program tells us that it’s fine and that all you have to do is make sure the children don’t eat at the same time and they wash their hands. Meanwhile, NIOSH tells us that washing your hands is not enough in order to clean the lead residue. The Civilian Marksmanship Program also tells schools to use trisodium phosphate in order to clean the gym floors and the cafeteria floors after each shooting. This is simply not being done. And it should be mentioned, too, that TSP is a carcinogen and is extremely dangerous to the environment.
AMY GOODMAN: And if you can say again, Pat, who funds CMP, the Civilian Marksmanship Program? And then, with all of this—JROTC, CMP, the NRA’s involvement—who calls the shots, so to speak, in the school?
PAT ELDER: Got it.

AMY GOODMAN: What role does the principal play?
PAT ELDER: OK, thank you for that question. The Civilian Marksmanship Program’s history is really interesting, Amy. It goes all the way back to 1903. There are memos put out by the Army before that time period that was—it showed the Army was extremely alarmed, because they assumed that American young men who had fought in the Spanish American War would be better marksmen. And so, Congress ordered the establishment of the Civilian Marksmanship Program to train hundreds of thousands of children in firing weaponry, so that, in the case of another war, Americans would be better trained to shoot. Pretty horrible.
In 1996, there’s congressional testimony by Paul Simon and Frank Lautenberg, two great heroes, who called the CMP a “boondoggle” and “a gift to the NRA.” That was the year that the CMP no longer was an arm of Congress. It no longer was a public entity, and instead became a private entity. And as such, it has managed to bankroll $160 million in privately traded securities by selling discarded Army weapons.
Now, to the next part of your question, the individual schools are run by principals. Principals in the schools are ultimately in charge of what takes place. They have amazing—they have an amazing rein and amazing freedom in their schools. But the program itself is run by the individual branch of the military. So, if you have a Marine Corps program, then you have four different Marine Corps textbooks, for freshmen, sophomore, juniors and seniors. It’s all online. And the children are taught history from a Marine Corps perspective. And there are states now that allow this type of curriculum to substitute for the standard curriculum.
So, to answer your question, as far as the lead in the schools, the Civilian Marksmanship regulates it. The individual Army instructor is the person nominally in charge, although it’s a question, Amy: Do we really have an absolute military takeover of the schools? You know, so the responsibility is somehow shared. But legally, it’s the principal who’s in charge of the schools. They simply wash their hands.
It’s the same thing with military testing. We have 700,000 children across the country in 14,000 schools that take this ASVAB test, and all of the information is given to military recruiters—four hours of testing, Social Security numbers—in violation of state laws and federal laws, as well as demographic information. And it is a military test that’s given. And to make the point as quickly as possible, the principals allow this information to go to the military, violating privacy rights. And the military collects the information directly from the children. The state of Maryland and the state of New Hampshire have laws, and those laws specifically say that the military cannot take that information without parental consent. We have more than a thousand schools, Amy, that require students to take the military’s enlistment test, and all of the information is given to mom and dad—given to the recruiters without mom and dad knowing about it. And that violates FERPA, which is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

AMY GOODMAN: So, how can it go on, if it violates a law of the United States?
PAT ELDER: How can anything go on that violates the laws of the United States? How can the Trump administration go on without violating the laws of the United States? It, too, violates the laws of the United States. I can tell you, I’ve been banging my head up against the mainstream for 15 years on this issue.
And we have had some traction in the state of Maryland and in the state of New Hampshire. And I also should mention the state of Hawaii. We went to the school officials, and we went to legislators, and we said, “Hey, you have a law in your state that says you can’t coerce a child to sign their Social Security number. You can’t coerce a child to give up demographic information or student records, without parental consent. Military marches into your cafeteria and tests these children. What do you think of that?” And legislators in those three states agreed with us and passed legislation. We still have 47 states to go.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to the record of Nikolas Cruz and how he can be actually given a gun at school, even though you’re not allowed to take in a gun to that school. More and more evidence has emerged showing that the Florida school gunman Nikolas Cruz shared a common trait with many other men who have carried out mass shootings: He had a record of abusing and threatening women. One student told The New York Times that Cruz was abusive towards his ex-girlfriend. Another student told The New York Times he had been close friends with Cruz but cut him off after he started going after and threatening a female friend of his. And The New York Times also quoted someone saying that he went after a high school student to the point of stalking her.
You put that together with the reports that over the last years the police went to Cruz’s home something like 39 times to deal with issues of domestic violence and other issues. You had the neighbor showing video of Cruz waving a gun in his backyard. I mean, clearly, the school—you have all the kids, like Emma Gonzalez, who has become so well known for an impassioned speech for gun control, saying, “We knew from way back.” And she said, “Don’t tell us we should have told people. We did tell people about Cruz.” And she said, “If you were going to ask, you know, who the mass shooter was, we wouldn’t be surprised,” she said.
But what about this, when it comes to Nikolas Cruz being a member of not only JROTC but also the marksmanship team at the school, being taught to be a better shot?

PAT ELDER: Right. Well, Amy, we need to back up a little bit to get a clearer picture of the United States Military Entrance Processing Command. That’s the government entity behind these abominations. You need to know that 40 percent of all new recruits don’t complete their first term. I have to repeat that: 40 percent of new recruits don’t complete their first term. And just between the period from 2008 to 2014, we had 20,000 people—20,000 soldiers went AWOL. You know, the military hardly tracks them down. And when they do, these soldiers receive a slap on the wrist. That’s because it’s a lot easier to go to the broken urban centers and to the high schools in the Rust Belt and hang with kids in the cafeteria and chill with kids in the parking lot, to try to get them to join. And so, my response here is that we have thousands and thousands of children that are scooped up. It’s not a volunteer force, Amy. It’s a recruited force. And it’s time people understood how insidious it is.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the significance of the state of Florida and how prominent it is in the whole JROTC program?
PAT ELDER: I can. I can tell you that, as I’ve mentioned before, as far as the curriculum is concerned, it is extremely popular. It’s really difficult, Amy, getting the statistics on the JROTC program. Now, I have, for the last 10 years, requested FOIA information, and received it, on military testing. We don’t have that information on the JROTC program. So, I don’t have it. I have—it must be requested, and it’s a lengthy process to begin to get that information.
We have large numbers. We know that there are about 3,300 schools across the country, so we can extrapolate that to figure out how many there might be in Florida. We have data on the Army, but we don’t have the data on the other three branches. But Florida is notoriously friendly to the military. To give you a sample, we have seven urban schools in Miami, the city, and the children in those schools were required to sit for the military’s enlistment test. All of those schools had minority populations exceeding 95 percent. That’s another thing here. There’s a racial component to this, to the military testing aspect of it. But there are testing programs. Let’s say a school wants to help children prepare for the SAT or the ACT tests. The military has an answer for that. It’s called March 2 Success. The military begins its recruiting programs in Florida and elsewhere with a Lego building contest, for—starting in the third grade. So, there are, again, several dozen military programs, operating in virtually every Florida school and every school across the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, explain the racial component a little more, Pat.
PAT ELDER: Sure. Well, eight years ago, I co-wrote legislation in the state of Maryland, and I went to the NAACP director, Elbridge James. And Elbrige is a good guy. And so, he said, yeah—you know, I asked him, “Could you testify in Maryland regarding the military testing?” And he said, “Well, let me see the database there.” And, you know, I gave him a spreadsheet with 150 schools on it, the names of the schools. And he looked at it for about 30 seconds, Amy, and he said, “I’ll testify.” I said, “That was pretty quick, Elbridge.” And he explained that he didn’t see Walt Whitman in Potomac. He didn’t see Churchill in Bethesda. He didn’t see the wealthy white schools represented on that list. And of course not. You know, they’re going to Brown. They’re going to Cornell. They’re not going to the Army. They’re not enlisting. If they go into the Army, they go as officers. So, there is a racial component to military testing, as there is—it’s not just a racial thing, of course. It’s an economic thing.
So, we can see very clearly, with the data that we have on military testing. We just received the data from the military last week. The Trump administration had dragged its feet. So, we have the new data, and I’ll have that on our website, StudentPrivacy.org, within a couple days. It’s very telling. You can pull up your own state and see the numbers of kids that are tested by the military. And you can call your principal and ask him how it is that he says, on the database—the children are not required to take the test—180 children take it. And you can ask them, “How in the world do you voluntarily get 180 kids, that are seniors, to go to the cafeteria to take a four-hour military test?”

AMY GOODMAN: Pat, how did you get so interested in this? What’s your background?
PAT ELDER: Well, when I was 16, the United States entered Cambodia, and I went down to the White House, and I was asked to move from the center front of Lafayette Park, and I did not, and I was arrested. And that was the beginning of my activism. I just could not sit quietly. And I’ve been an activist ever since. In the early, gosh, ’01, I organized demonstrations in Washington with both United for Peace and Justice and the DC Anti-War Network, which I founded. And, you know, I got to the point, in about 2004, 2005, that we could—we could put 300,000 or 400,000 people in the street, Amy. It’s really heady stuff. But it didn’t change the Bush administration’s policies.
And I met up with Rick Jahnkow. He’s with Project YANO in San Diego. And San Diego is pretty much a military town. That guy and that group managed to take all of the guns out of the JROTC program in the city of San Diego. So San Diego has no marksmanship programs. That’s quite an accomplishment. Project YANO is an amazing organization, and it is a go-to place for learning about this issue, as well as NNOMY, which is the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth, and my website, our website, StudentPrivacy.org.
So, for me, it was a pragmatic thing. I realized that any revolution of love, of compassion, of consideration, has to course through the schools, Amy. It must. And so we need to look at that third grade program operated by the military, and we need to look at the Young Marines program, that has children as young as third grade, and we need to combat it. We need to confront it. We need to out it, because this is part of the revolution. It’s going to take a generation of time.

AMY GOODMAN: And with Trump’s massive attempt to put a massive amount of resources into the military—and it’s something we have never seen before, as he tries to expand the military budget—how will that affect the programs you’re talking about in the schools?
PAT ELDER: Well, it’s a nightmare, Amy. Right now, I think the Recruiting Command is still about 8,000 soldiers short. It’s not something you see on CNN, you know. It’s not something you come across on MSNBC. It is—they’re having a heck of a problem.
And, you know, I worked extensively with Child Soldiers International in London, and I also worked with the folks in Geneva regarding the optional protocol of children in armed conflict. And they actually took a couple paragraphs that I drafted, and inserted it into their response to the Obama administration, and so now it’s part of the public record. Apparently, the folks in Geneva felt that that military testing and the JROTC program both violate this protocol. They violate the protocol because Section 3 of the optional protocol of children in armed conflict specifically says that recruiting children under the age of 18 must be done so with absolute full parental consent. It is not, in the United States of America. And the Obama administration, under Secretary Clinton, claimed that no children are required to take a military test and that the JROTC program does not force children or attempt to recruit children without parental consent.

AMY GOODMAN: The $10,000 you believe went to the Parkland high school was in the form of equipment?
PAT ELDER: That’s correct. Typically, you’ll have—schools will contact the NRA, and the NRA has a very robust program for giving grants out. It’s kind of like the Joe Cool Camel cigarette advertisements that targeted youth. It’s the same type of approach. They realize that if they can start putting—linking the children with the guns at age 13 in the high schools, it’s a win-win proposition for them and for the sellers of weaponry. And so, you know, you see that it’s an insidious practice, and it seems like, for the short run, anyway, until more people come to grips with the idea that wars start in high school cafeterias, wars start in high school parking lots, where recruiters are allowed to chill with 13-year-olds.

AMY GOODMAN: And the issue of a kid like Nikolas Cruz, who clearly had a history of harassment, abuse and violence against others, being able to get a gun and learn to be a marksman in school?
PAT ELDER: Well, it’s worse than that. The United States Army put a lethal weapon into the child’s hand when he was in the ninth grade, as it does with thousands of others across the country. Now, he might have been an extreme case, but there are many psychologically unstable youth at 17 and 18 who manage to join the military. And parents are often willing to allow their children to join at 17. Ten percent of the recruited force in the United States of America is 17. That’s tops in the OECD, throughout Europe and the developed world. So, it’s a horrendous practice.
But getting back to Nikolas Cruz, would he have made a good soldier? Perhaps. Perhaps if he had joined, and perhaps if he had been in the ranks and been trained by the Marines or the Army, he might have made an excellent soldier, in their estimation.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you know specifically about Nikolas Cruz’s case and his participation in JROTC and CMP and the marksmanship program at the Parkland high school?
PAT ELDER: No, I don’t. You know, I don’t know anything any more than anyone else, just gathered from various sources, Amy. I know the type.
And I can tell you, too, that I have been called by several hundred mothers across the country. It’s always the mothers, Amy, very rarely the fathers. And they’ll call me. They find me. And they’ll say, “My child is playing one-on-one basketball with a recruiter. And he is dyslexic, and he’s ADHD, and he has an anxiety disorder. This can’t happen, Pat. What can we do about it?” And I say, “Well, you can talk to your principal. You can talk to your child. But once your child’s 18 and they sign, there’s nothing mom can do about it.” And so, oftentimes I will have these extended conversations, these extended email chains, with hundreds of mothers, literally, who are just exasperated because they see their children going off to war, children that they know won’t last. And so it gets back to my earlier statement of fact that 40 percent of new recruits don’t make it past their first year.

AMY GOODMAN: And how does the U.S. compare in this kind of program for kids, this military program, to other countries?
PAT ELDER: Well, I mean, no one—to my knowledge, the Europeans don’t allow recruiters into the schools. You know, they shake their heads. They can’t believe it. They see us as some sort of deranged Wild West. We are. So, we are alone among the countries in the world. And I think if you look, too, at Congress’s insistence that we recycle, that we resell used Army weapons, including M1911—the M1911 was the side arm during Vietnam. It’s a semiautomatic pistol. And so, the policy of the United States government is that rather than destroy these automatic—semiautomatic pistols, it would be better to sell them at discounted rates to the American public. That’s the role of Congress with the Civilian Marksmanship Program. That’s how I answer that.

AMY GOODMAN: And how many schools have said no? I mean, and then go back in time to the Vietnam War, the activism around kicking ROTC out of the schools. And what does that look like today?
PAT ELDER: It’s sad. I mean, there’s very, very little activism. There’s very little resistance. Largely, children are docile. And for the most part, children that are in the high schools wearing these JROTC uniforms are accorded great respect by other students. They wear the uniform of the armed forces, and children are conditioned to salute them and to respect them, because, after all, we support our troops, right?

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Wang, the student who apparently was trying to help other students, was wearing a full uniform when he was gunned down.
PAT ELDER: I understand the Army is giving him full honors. So this is another example of the militarization of youth. They will treat him as a full-fledged soldier at his burial. It’s horrendous. I’m saddened. These are lambs. But the program should be immediately discontinued, and especially the marksmanship program.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Pat Elder, we want to thank you for being with us, director of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, an organization that confronts militarism in the schools, author of Military Recruiting in the United States. We’ll link to the piece that you just wrote, ”JROTC, Military Indoctrination and the Training of Mass Killers.”
This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us. If you’d like to go to Part 1 of our discussion with Pat Elder, you can go to democracynow.org.

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Posted in guns, JROTC, killing, Uncategorized Tagged with: , , , , ,

Tell your legislature to protect student info from military recruiters!

Posted on by Kathy Barker

Abolishing war a lofty goal, but it’s achievable. We need to replace a culture of war with one of peace.

This starts by ending the militarization of America’s children while they attend public schools. The U.S. military collects the names, addresses, and phone numbers of our children from the local high schools. However, the law says parents have the right to “opt-out” from having their child’s information sent to recruiters. High schools are supposed to tell parents they have this right, but many fail to do so. Consequently, most parents don’t know what’s going on, while the Pentagon collects their child’s information.

Click here to easily email your state legislators to insist that parents be afforded the right to say they don’t want their child’s information given to the Pentagon.

Although schools are required to inform parents of their right to opt out, the weak law doesn’t specify how. As a result, many schools send a single notice in a mailing, or tucked away in a student handbook, where parents are not likely to see it.

In Maryland, parents got organized and found a solution. As a result of these parents’ activism, Maryland is the only state that has passed a law that requires military recruiter opt-out language on schools’ mandatory emergency contact forms, which parents must complete annually. As a result, many Marylanders have opted out, so that their children’s information is not sent to military recruiters.

Let’s disrupt military recruitment across the country, and the world. Tell your elected officials to follow Maryland’s example.

We can undermine the institution of war, one school at a time.

Join us,
Pat Elder, World Beyond War

 

Posted in Uncategorized

Did John Kelly tell the Truth?

Posted on by Kathy Barker

The New York Times editorial board today published “Honor the Truth, John Kelly.”  After Trump told Myeshia Johnson that her husband Sgt. La David Johnson, who was killed in Niger, knew what he was signing up for when he joined the military. Chief of staff Kelly then made several remarks that incited huge fury.

But missing in the discussions are the fact that people do join the military, unaware of the chance they may die…or get PTSD, traumatic brain injuries, or be unable to get a job when out of the military. We have a national preoccupation to ignore the effects of the war and of military service on young people.

I wrote a short comment to the NY Times:

There is widespread denial of what military recruiters (who are MANDATED to be in the schools and to have access to students’ home information by NCLB/ESSA) tell the high school students about war. And that is nothing. You can search online and find the recommendations given to recruiters with which to answer questions such as “Will I be sent to battle?” That question is punted always. Add that to the widespread denial of the USA militarism and wars- see the very recent NY Times editorial- and you have recruits and families who believe they will sign up to the military to have a job and to travel the world, or to do good, not knowing that they will be used for other purposes.

Posted in antiwar, militarism, PTSD, Recruiting, war

Make Art Not war- Or Both? From the UK

Posted on by Kathy Barker

Different continents, same problem with militarism and recruiting the young.

Make Art Not War… or both?

Poppy Kohner

The Fringe festival has always been eclectic. Not an inch of Edinburgh is wasted as the whole city becomes a stage and all the people, merely players. But this year, on its 70th anniversary, the well-regarded Fringe venue Summerhall collaborated with a newcomer: the British Army. The Army Reserve Centre and Drill Hall in East Claremont Street transformed into a performance venue that was programmed and staffed by serving soldiers. This was billed as an opportunity to demystify the military, but should we be concerned that this particular kind of militainment is only the beginning of the Army’s engagement in the arts in Scotland and the UK?

I’m an anthropologist of militarism and a theatre-maker, so I felt I had to wander down Leith Walk and make a visit to the drill hall-cum-theatre venue to take a closer look.

Many of the shows programmed by Army@theFringe dealt with subject matters such as race, gender, disability, mental illness and even imperialism. But here I am not interested in reviewing the shows as much as I am reviewing the politics of the Army hosting audiences at the Fringe.

On entering the drill hall I am greeted by soldiers. Lots of soldiers – more than are necessary. There is a relaxed, jovial, slightly disorganised atmosphere that is fairly welcoming. From the research I have done inside military bases the playful banter between soldiers on shift feels fairly familiar to me. Contrary to the marketed image of travel and adventure, being in the army usually entails a lot of waiting around.

I chat to a small crowd of friendly soldiers loitering in the entrance by the makeshift box office. I ask if they are paid any extra on their normal salary to staff the venue. “No,” they tell me, “but we volunteered to do it.” A Superior Officer catches wind of our conversation and strides between us with a brisk yet casual air of importance. He extends his finger in the air and without stopping or looking in my direction he bellows, “All our British soldiers are volunteers! Every single one of them wants to be here!” and continues to walk out the front door.

Compared to a larger conscription army, a volunteer force is easier to train, discipline, and retain. A smaller army also allows for public perception to be controlled by the military public relations team, as a smaller percent of the population actually experience army life. This notion of a professional army full of patriotic volunteers bolsters the cogency of the hero myth that makes up a central tenant of militarism. Once inside the military, individuals have a different (and limited) set of rights compared to civilians, and it is extremely difficult to leave once a contract is signed. In an era of austerity, increasing precarity, and the privatisation of social services such as higher education and healthcare, the army successfully presents itself as a fast track means towards social and economic mobility. So in response to the Superior Officer, how free is a choice between a vanishing number of options?

Inside the drill hall’s Mess there are Chesterfield sofas, a long table complete with tartan tablecloths, cut glass, candelabras, statuettes, trophies and other silver ornaments. The massive stuffed head of a caribou stares over us with glazed eyes and sprawling antlers, framed either side by pictures of Queen Liz and Prince Phillip. Despite all the twee, it feels sterile, solemn and stuffy.

The exhibition at the venue was a celebration of soldiers in both training and operations, including a bigger-than-life-sized photograph of a small child in army camouflage crouching in long grass, without explanation. The Army were keen to assure me that this endeavor was not a recruitment exercise but about public engagement. Lt Col Jo Young, the British Army’s Officer for the Arts commented, “The impact of this is not something we can measure in terms of how many more people will join us as a result.” Lt Col Gordon McKenzie, head of public engagement, described it as “deepening the public understanding of who we are and what we do. So that people can know that behind the uniform we are also human beings”. But focusing on the person behind the uniform diverts the audience’s attention away from the Army as an institution. “Don’t worry about what we might be doing in the Middle East,” it says, “just remember: we’re people too.” In this way, the army’s engagement with the arts is a means to depoliticise the image of a soldier; a deeply political and strategic move.

Theatre is always in danger of becoming an apparatus of the state. Theatre operates on our sensibilities in ways that can evoke deep emotional responses and has the potential to change perceptions and consequential actions (or inaction). Aristotle called this catharsis: an empathetic connection towards the protagonist of a story, which, as the play comes to a resolution, arouses a potent mix of pity and fear in the hearts of the spectators.

Militarism is a kind of theatre in and of itself; a domestic military operation of public relations to recruit our hearts and minds. It communicates a simplified and highly censored story of British exceptionalism and moral righteousness of state sanctioned violence. It transforms violence into something to celebrate. The tragic heroes of this story are service members and we the civilians are a captive audience.

Lt Col Young commented that “Human spirit and human resilience is the common thread that runs throughout our programming. But we are also keen to have conversations with the public about what the forces looks like in the 21st Century. We want to show the public a different side of us. We are society’s army, and so its important that those we serve know about what the army does”.

My research has shown that there is often a disjuncture between imagined and lived military identities. As the protagonists in the narrative of militarism, soldiers and veterans are silenced by idealised notions of their lives and experiences. The more confounding and painful lived realities of post-9/11 military experience get blocked out by the noise of militarism and quickly become unspeakable, un-hearable and invisible. A romanticized public perception of military life can further injure soldiers who are trapped in a traumatic silence, unable to speak their contrary truths.

Lt Col Young and her team are proud to act as programmers, and not actors, writers or directors. Over a gin and tonic Lt Col McKenzie told me that if they become the theatre makers they would be more vulnerable to criticism, but they are not ruling this out for the future. The narratives of militarism that we find at Army@theFringe presents the Army as being inclusive, diverse and open to dialogue. However there is something more at work – the claim to inclusivity conceals the fact that the Army@theFringe is a carefully constructed, morally manageable, imitation of the Army which is difficult to challenge.

Public engagement exercises like the Army@TheFringe venue distance the military from the realities of what it does and disciplines the nation from critically engaging with war, and the implications of our arms trade. “What is often missing from theatre and film depictions of the army” says Iraqi-British playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak “is the voice of those who are/were at the receiving end of military power, namely Afghani, Iraqi, Libyan and Yemeni civilians.”

This is a beginning of much wider programme of work orientated around military engagement in the arts. Army@theFringe is a part of worrying trend of the British military using US-style techniques of garnering public support for the troops. Some of these include the creation of Armed Forces Day in 2009, the commercialization of the Remembrance Poppy, army engagement in schools, learning packs that celebrate British military history for school children, increasing cadet forces across the UK, and a recruitment campaign that exploits young people’s desire to belong.

The Fringe is an open access festival, and this is important for nurturing creative freedom and expression, as was the ethos it was borne out of 70 years ago. I am not advocating censorship or blacklisting. However, this entanglement between the arts and the forces is an issue of censorship – we need to ask, what becomes censored when elite institutions take on the programming and hosting of the arts? Can we really expect to have a meaningful dialogue when the armed forces are calling the shots? How critical can embedded artists really be when in a relationship of gratitude to their military hosts?

The MoD did not have direct influence on four of the shows in their programme, with the exception of Rosie Kay’s dance company for their production of 5 Soldiers: the body is the frontline and the writers of Wired, who visited in the army for a period of time in the research and development stages of their creative process.

So what’s the pull for producers to choose the Army drill hall as the venue to host their show? Lt Col Young tells me that many of the costs involved in putting on a show at the Drill Hall have been subsidised and artists have been further helped out with access to free rehearsal space. The Army@theFringe have already started planning for next year’s Fringe noting in their brief that 2018 is designated Year of the Young Person by the Scottish Government. As part of their package to attract artists they have promised: to organise visits to Army bases or exercises to assist development of productions; access to rehearsal space in army halls across the UK; army personnel and musicians to take part in productions; promotional support from army media and marketing teams, including free distribution of leaflets by uniformed flyer teams; army accommodation being made available for the duration of shows, free meals for casts at the venue; and the possibility of being selected for post-Fringe tours of the Scotland and the UK, supported by the Army.

How to resist being seduced by these offerings that give emerging artists opportunities in a competitive arena like the Fringe? I wanted to ask Summerhall whether, in a time of escalating fear, xenophobia and military activity, is it not the responsibility of arts institutions to make choices that counter, not aide, a growing culture that idolises militarism and war? Despite leaving many messages and sending emails, I’m yet to get an answer.

Militarism operates in innocuous ways that normalise military imaginaries as a part of our everyday lives. At these first stages of the British Armed Forces moving into arts engagement we have a moment to act. Now is the time for artists, writers, directors and arts organisations in the UK and Scotland to come together to make a collective and public declaration on the ethics of collaborating with the Army.

Dr P Kohner is an anthropologist and has a PhD in Applied Social Science specializing in the anthropology of militarism and trauma from the University of Glasgow.  She is also a co-founder of The Workers Theatre cooperative.

https://www.forceswatch.net/blog/make-art-not-war-or-both

Posted in militarism, Recruiting Tagged with: , , , ,