Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)

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From Draft NOtices, April-June 2007


Film Review: G.I. Jesús | watch preview

— Jorge Mariscal

With the exception of John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968), the long U.S. war in Southeast Asia produced no high-profile Hollywood films during its ten-year duration and only a handful of mainstream films immediately after the war’s end. As the U.S occupation of Iraq enters its fifth year, we already have a wide range of superb documentaries and two fictional films — Home of the Brave by veteran film maker Irwin Winkler and G.I. Jesús by Belgian writer-director Carl Colpaert.

G.I. Jesús (2006) chooses an unexpected angle on the debacle in Iraq by focusing on the issue of non-citizens serving in the U.S. military. The protagonist, Jesús Feliciano (Joe Arquette), is a Mexican-American whose immigration status is never made clear. Although early in the film he tells his wife, “I killed a lot of people to make us legal,” his flawless English and Chicano style suggest he is not a recent immigrant.

According to Department of Defense figures, some 60,000 immigrants were on active duty in the U.S. military at the beginning of the invasion of Iraq. Were Jesús in fact “illegal” or undocumented, it would mean he had joined the Marines under false pretenses since technically only citizens and legal permanent residents are accepted for enlistment.

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From Draft NOtices, April-June 2007

 



— Kathy Smith
    

The Navy is refusing to mitigate the harm to marine mammals when it uses sonar for training exercises off the coast of Southern California. The Navy contends that Coastal Commission restrictions are not valid because their training takes place more than three miles off shore, beyond the scope of the commission’s authority.

Joel Reynolds, an attorney in the Los Angeles office of the Natural Resources Defense Council, stated that “the Navy’s rejection of the common sense protective measures . . . is an attack not just on whales and other marine life off our coast, but on the commission itself.”

The issue at hand is the decibel rate of sonar, which commission officials want lowered because whales can be harmed by sonar transmissions that the Navy generates. The Navy’s use of sonar has caused the beaching of whales and dolphins because they surface (breach) too fast and suffer decompression sickness. A congressional report was released last year stating that the Navy’s sonar exercises were responsible for six cases of mass death and stranding of whales in the past decade. The Navy counters these facts by saying that pollution and starvation can cause marine animals to breach.

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From Draft NOtices, April-June 2007


A Review of Chalmers Johnson’s book Nemesis: the Last Days of the American Republic | Buy Book



—Glen Motil
    

    The bloody iron curtain of American Military Power
    Is a mirror image of Russia’s red Babel-Tower.
    — Allen Ginsberg, from the song/poem “Capitol Air,” Plutonian Ode


    Nemesis . . . deals with the way arrogant and misguided American policies have headed us for a series of catastrophes comparable to our disgrace and defeat in Vietnam or even the sort of extinction that befell our former fellow “superpower.”
    — Chalmers Johnson

Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (The American Empire Project)Chalmers Johnson, a UCSD professor emeritus, was formerly a self-described “cold warrior” in academia and viewed the Soviet Union as a “menace.” In light of his past, he often quotes economist John Maynard Keynes when asked how he has become such a stalwart critic of the U.S. military-industrial complex and a prominent voice for the CIA abolitionist movement: “When my information changes, I change my opinion. What do you do?”

Unfortunately, far too few people employ such a thought process, including the majority of America’s elected representatives. Johnson’s new book, Nemesis: the Last Days of the American Republic, is the completion of a trilogy. It follows Blowback, which was written before the events of 9/11 and provides evidence and speculation on how U.S. “covert policies abroad might be coming back to haunt us,” and Sorrows of Empire, which served to “analyze the nature of this militarism and to expose the harm it was doing, not to others but to our own society and governmental system.”

Nemesis is by far the best of the three. Each chapter causes us to stare deeper into the abyss of our own making. Each chapter is worth the price of the book and more. The endnotes provide a treasure trove of useful information, and the bibliography is invaluable for the intellectual arsenal counter-militarists must possess. If you’ve been closely following the existential journey of geopolitical events over the past decade, the endnotes compile in one place the treacherous landmines we have endured, the ideological projectiles we have managed to dodge, and rocky, embattled legal terrain we have tread.

The book instantly challenges readers to question our perspective. In the prologue, Johnson argues persuasively that “Americans cannot truly appreciate the impact of our bases elsewhere because there are no foreign military bases within the United States.” U.S. bases bring with them brothels, brawls, sex crimes, racial and religious insults, and environmental pollution; these “global garrisons provide that threat and are a cause of blowback.”

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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:

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