[News] Innocent Flesh­Recruiting Kids to Kill

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Innocent Flesh­Recruiting Kids to Kill

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16490

February 12, 2008 By Ron Jacobs


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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 older 
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 people­especially 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 
kids­none who were older than 13­about 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?




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