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<h1><b>Innocent FleshRecruiting Kids to
Kill</b></h1><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16490" eudora="autourl">
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16490<br><br>
</a>February 12, 2008 By <b>Ron Jacobs</b> <br><br>
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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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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.)” <br><br>
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?<br><br>
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