From Draft NOtices, July-September 2012
In the April-June 2012 issue of Draft NOtices, we published an article by Stephanie Jennings on the misleading “Kony 2012” campaign of Invisible Children, a San Diego-based nonprofit organization that has been exposed has having connections to groups pursuing a right-wing religious agenda.
In April 2012, Invisible Children mobilized thousands of students across the U.S. to put pressure on the U.S. government to arrest Joseph Kony, a murderous African leader whose small rebel group has kidnapped children to use as soldiers. One of the many concerns expressed by critics of the Kony 2012 campaign is that it could be used to create a pretext for a much larger U.S. military presence in Africa. The U.S. has so far failed to convince any country on the continent to host the headquarters for the Pentagon’s Africa Command (AFRICOM), which is currently based in Germany (see Draft Notices, January-March 2008, “U.S. Militarization of Africa”).
Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)
From Draft NOtices, July-September 2012
– Rick Jahnkow
Military recruiters are known for minimizing the personal risk associated with joining the armed forces. They are very good at exploiting any sense of invincibility that comes from the average teenager’s lack of direct experience with death or serious injury. If necessary, a recruiter will admit to a young person that bad things do sometimes happen in the military, but they only happen to people who are too “weak” or “stupid” to survive the challenges of being a proud member of the U.S. (insert the military branch here).
It could be a little harder to use this recruiting technique now that government officials have told Associated Press that 45% of the 1.6 million veterans of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are filing injury claims with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Furthermore, the veterans are claiming an average of 8-9 physical or mental injuries each. (For comparison, only 21% of veterans filed injury claims after the 1991 Gulf War.)
According to Dr. David Cifu, the VA’s medical rehabilitation chief, one reason for the high rate of injury claims is that more military personnel are being kept alive. This is presumably because of the greater use of protective gear and improved battlefield medical care.
- Rick Jahnkow
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San Diego Students Give Pink Slip to High School Military Program
From Draft NOtices, April-June 2012
The lesson for their principal: Militarism at school isn’t cool!
— Rick Jahnkow
Students at Mission Bay High School in San Diego are now celebrating what amounts to a very rare organizing victory: the expulsion of a Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps unit from their school. The accomplishment is especially remarkable given that it happened in an area with one of the largest concentrations of military personnel and war industry in the world. San Diego County, with over 100,000 active duty sailors and Marines, has a Department of Defense payroll that frequently tops all other regions in the U.S. It’s not the sort of place where you would expect a rejection of anything military.
There are more than 3000 high schools in the U.S. with JROTC, the Pentagon’s high school military training and indoctrination program. Over the years, those who have objected to having such courses in their schools have learned that when a JROTC unit gets established, it is almost impossible to remove it with a campaign of protest directed at school administrators and governing boards. The reason is that once JROTC is present, the cadets — who are organized in military ranks — can be used as a lobbying force that will intimidate even the most anti-militarist school board. Activists in San Francisco, for example, have failed in multiple attempts to eliminate the program.
This pattern, however, has occasionally been broken. The latest example is at Mission Bay High School in San Diego, where student organizing has now forced the removal of a JROTC unit at the end of the 2011-2012 school year.
The story of this remarkable victory began in the summer of 2007, when Mission Bay principal Cheryl Seelos requested, and received, approval from the San Diego school board for a Marine Corps JROTC unit. Opposition to the program was small at first, but it quickly grew as students and parents learned more about JROTC’s military recruiting function and also heard that college readiness classes like AP Spanish and AVID were being reduced or eliminated. These latter subjects were particularly important as routes to higher education for the school’s mostly Latino student body. People were also shocked to find out that, despite a zero-tolerance policy on weapons, a shooting range would be built inside the school for marksmanship training. When it was discovered that shooting ranges were already in many other schools with JROTC, students and teachers at other San Diego campuses spoke out, which led to the formation of the Education Not Arms Coalition in late 2007.
Ninth CIRCUIT COURT RULING: CONFRONTING MILITARISM BY USING EQUAL ACCESS TO HIGH SCHOOLS
When the military comes to your local high school, you have a legal right to give students an opposing view. This has been the position taken by federal district courts in Florida, Pennsylvania and Illinois and two federal appellate courts. The most broadly-worded decision came from a case that COMD took to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the 1980s. Here is the background:
