NNOMY

Featured

La elección de Trump para secretario de Defensa es un mal presagio para las agresiones sexuales en el ejército | Opinión

  English -

8 de enero de 2025 / Christopher Kilmartin y Ronald Levant / Opinión invitada / Akron Beacon Journal - En la prevención y respuesta a las agresiones sexuales en el ejército, el liderazgo es fundamental. Por lo tanto, nos preocupa profundamente la seguridad de nuestros militares, tanto hombres como mujeres, bajo la presidencia de Donald Trump y su candidato a secretario de Defensa, Pete Hegseth.

Ambos hombres tienen acusaciones de agresión sexual en su contra, y en ambos casos existen pruebas fiables que corroboran estos informes. Trump parece ser un agresor especialmente grave, mencionado en  más de 20 informes . No se trata de un caso de «él dijo, ella dijo», sino de «él dijo,  ellos  dijeron».

El ejército estadounidense publica estimaciones fiables de agresiones sexuales cada dos años, basadas tanto en las denuncias oficiales como en las registradas mediante encuestas. Y esto no afecta solo a las mujeres en las filas: muchas de las víctimas de agresiones son hombres.

Featured

Un veneno en el sistema': la epidemia de agresión sexual en el ejército

Casi una de cada cuatro mujeres militares estadounidenses denuncia haber sido agredida sexualmente en el ejército. ¿Por qué ha sido tan difícil cambiar la cultura?

  English -
Florence Shmorgoner fue violada por un compañero marine en 2015. Después de que ella lo denunciara y el NCIS investigara, un comandante decidió no presentar cargos contra su agresor. Crédito... Danna Singer para The New York Times
Publicado el 3 de agosto de 2021 -  Actualizado el 11 de octubre de 2021 / Melinda Wenner Moyer / New York Times Magazine  - La soldado de primera clase Florence Shmorgoner se despertó una tarde de 2015 y se dio cuenta de que estaba en la cama de otra persona, en la habitación de otra persona. Algo andaba mal. La joven de 19 años había estado jugando videojuegos en la habitación de su amigo en el cuartel con la puerta abierta; la regla en su base de Twentynine Palms, California, era que, si marines masculinos y femeninos estaban juntos en la misma habitación, la puerta debía dejarse abierta. Aunque era media tarde, en algún momento se quedó dormida en su cama. Ahora la puerta estaba cerrada y su amigo la estaba manoseando. Sintió como si estuviera teniendo una experiencia extracorpórea, como si estuviera viendo lo que estaba sucediendo, pero no experimentándolo realmente. Él le quitó la ropa y la penetró.

Featured

‘A Poison in the System’: The Epidemic of Military Sexual Assault

Nearly one in four U.S. servicewomen reports being sexually assaulted in the military. Why has it been so difficult to change the culture?

  español

Pfc. Florence Shmorgoner woke up one afternoon in 2015 and realized that she was in someone else’s bed in someone else’s room. Something was wrong. The 19-year-old had been playing video games in her friend’s room in the barracks with the door open — the rule at their base at Twentynine Palms in California was that if male and female Marines were together in the same room, the door had to be left open. Although it was midafternoon, at some point she had dozed off on his bed. Now the door was closed, and her friend was groping her. She felt as if she was having an out-of-body experience, as if she was watching what was happening but not actually experiencing it. He took off her clothes and penetrated her.

Featured

My rejection of war and violence…

  español

This was my second tattoo at 18 years old.April 23, 2025 / Fabiola Cardozo  Ponte / NNOMY -  It began at a very young age, born and raised in an environment of precariousness and economic hardship, where I felt the hostility of the world. Structural violence reduces your opportunities for advancement and makes your life an endless series of daily challenges. Living in a poor home where violence and its various manifestations were present made me understand that it was neither appropriate nor fair for me or any other human being. Over time, I grew up rejecting all expressions of violence, but at the same time, I strengthened my rebelliousness, my critical thinking, and my insatiable need to explore other ways of relating. From a young age, I was certain that education was my only option to overcome my situation of extreme poverty, and I took refuge in books. I had a special sensitivity to the injustices, slights, and marginalization of the victim era, and although my destiny seemed already determined by my social class and gender, I continued as a good rebel, determined to achieve what I so yearned for… At 16, I had a clear understanding of Gandhi's principles, his peaceful resistance, his Satyagraha, and his rejection of any unjust social imposition. The economic difficulties continued, and although I attended various public universities, it was in 2018 that I finally graduated from the Central University of Venezuela with a degree in Sociology, and in 2021 from the Latin American and Caribbean University with a degree in International Humanitarian Law.

Featured

DOGE gets access to Selective Service registration database

U.S. Selective Service SystemApril 17, 2025 / Edward Hasbrouck / Edward Hasbrouck's Blog - The Selective Service System has confirmed that, as of this week, personnel from the so-called Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have arrived at the SSS and have been given access to the SSS database of men registered for a possible military draft.

Today an SSS spokesperson provided me with this official response to my questions about DOGE and SSS records:

A DOGE representative visited our Agency this week. We’ve established a great working relationship. They asked us about our data and requested access, which we gave in compliance with the President’s Executive Order on Establishing and Implementing the Department of Government Efficiency.

The SSS spokesperson also told me that no new computer matching programs involving SSS registration records have been carried out (yet) by DOGE. But it’s not clear whether the SSS would even know what DOGE has done with SSS data, once DOGE has gotten access to it and possibly exfiltrated it. DOGE and the SSS have operated computer matching programs that appear to violate the Computer Matching Act, so there’s little reason to expect that either would provide the required advance notice of new uses of SSS data.

The SSS registration database contains information on all those male U.S. citizens or residents born on or after 1 January 1960 who have registered with the SSS or have been registered by state driver’s license agencies. Compliance is low, many men in these cohorts never registered, and few of the addresses, even for draft-age men, are up to date. But the database is still huge and vulnerable to abuse. Because SSS registration records are so inaccurate and incomplete, matching them against other databases would produce large numbers of mis-matches, with unknown consequences.

Featured

The Army Is Losing Nearly One-Quarter of Soldiers in the First 2 Years of Enlistment

The Army is grappling with a staggering attrition rate among newly enlisted troops, even as recent recruiting figures suggest the service is clawing its way out of a yearslong enlistment crisis.

Nearly one-quarter of soldiers recruited since 2022 have failed to complete their initial contracts, according to internal Army data reviewed by Military.com. While the Army's recruiting totals look solid on paper, a high dropout rate raises serious doubts about whether those numbers are an accurate portrayal of how well the service is manned.

It remains unclear why the Army is losing so many soldiers, but one explanation could be the declining quality of its recruiting pool. One-quarter of all enlistees last year had to go through at least one of the Future Soldier Preparatory Courses, which were set up as a sort of silver bullet for recruiting woes -- getting applicants up to snuff with academic or body fat enlistment standards before they ship out to basic training.

Featured

The Purge of the Deep State and the Road to Dictatorship

Donald Trump’s dismantling of the deep state presages the formation of something far worse.

 

One Mind - by Mr. FishFeb. 18, 2025 / Chris Hedges / The Chris Hedges Report - The Trump administration’s war with the deep state is not a purgative. It is not about freeing us from the tyranny of intelligence agencies, militarized police, the largest prison system in the world, predatory corporations or the end of mass surveillance. It will not restore the rule of law to hold the powerful and the wealthy accountable. It will not slash the bloated and unaccountable spending — some $1 trillion dollars — by the Pentagon.

All revolutionary movements, on the left or the right, dismantle the old bureaucratic structures. The fascists in Germany and the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, once they seized power, aggressively purged the civil service. They see in these structures, correctly, an enemy that would stymie their absolute grip on power. It is a coup d'état by inches. Now we get our own.

Rearguard battles — as in the early years of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany — are taking place in the courts and media outlets openly hostile to Trump. There will be, at first, pyrrhic victories — the Bolsheviks and the Nazis were stalled by their own judiciaries and hostile press — but gradually the purges, aided by a bankrupt liberalism that no longer stands or fights for anything, ensures the triumph of the new masters.

The Trump administration has expelled or fired officials who investigate wrongdoing within the federal government, including 17 inspectors general. Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, such as the FBI and Homeland Security, are being purged of those deemed hostile to Trump. Courts, as they are stacked with compliant judges, will be mechanisms for the persecution of state “enemies” and protection rackets for the powerful and the rich. The Supreme Court, which has granted Trump legal immunity, has already reached this stage.

Subcategories

The NNOMY Opinion section is a new feature of our articles section. Writing on youth demilitarization issues is quite rare but we have discovered the beginning articles and notes being offered on this subject so we have decided to present them under an opinion category.  The articles presented do not necessarily reflect the views of the NNOMY Steering Committee.

General David Petraeus' rocky first days as a lecturer at the City University of New York Though the United States of America shares with other nations in a history of modern state militarism, the past 65 years following its consolidation as a world military power after World War II, has seen a shift away from previous democratic characterizations of the state.  The last thirty years, with the rise of the neo-conservative Reagan and Bush administrations (2), began the abandonment of moral justifications for democracy building replaced by  bellicose proclamations of the need and right to move towards a national project of global security by preemptive military force .

In the process of global military expansion, the US population has been subjected to an internal re-education to accept the role of the U.S. as consolidating its hegemonic rule internationally in the interest of liberal ideals of wealth creation and protectionism.

The average citizen has slowly come to terms with a stealthly increasing campaign of militarization domestically in media offerings; from television, movies and scripted news networks to reinforce the inevitability of a re-configured society as security state. The effect has begun a transformation of how, as citizens, we undertand our roles and viability as workers and families in relation to this security state. This new order has brought with it a shrinking public common and an increasing privatization of publicly held infrustructure; libraries, health clinics, schools and the expectation of diminished social benefits for the poor and middle-class. The national borders are being militarized as are our domestic police forces in the name of Homeland Security but largely in the interest of business. The rate and expansion of research and development for security industries and the government agencies that fund them, now represent the major growth sector of the U.S.economy. Additionally, as the U.S. economy continually shifts from productive capital to financial capital as the engine of growth for wealth creation and development, the corporate culture has seen its fortunes rise politically and its power over the public sector grow relatively unchallenged by a confused citizenry who are watching their social security and jobs diminishing.

How increasing cultural militarization effects our common future will likely manifest in increased public dissatisfaction with political leadership and economic strictures. Social movements within the peace community, like NNOMY, will need to expand their role of addressing the dangers of  militarists predating youth for military recruitment in school to giving more visibility to the additional dangers of the role of an influential militarized media, violent entertainment and play offerings effecting our youth in formation and a general increase and influence of the military complex in all aspects of our lives. We are confronted with a demand for a greater awareness of the inter-relationships of militarism in the entire landscape of domestic U.S. society.  Where once we could ignore the impacts of U.S. military adventurisms abroad, we are now faced with the transformation of our domestic comfort zone with the impacts of militarism in our day to day lives.

How this warning can be imparted in a meaningful way by a movement seeking to continue with the stated goals of counter-recruitment and public policy activism, and not loose itself in the process, will be the test for those activists, past and future, who take up the call to protect our youth from the cultural violence of militarism.

The "militarization of US culture" category will be an archive of editorials and articles about the increasing dangers we face as a people from those who are invested in the business of war. This page will serve as a resource for the NNOMY community of activists and the movement they represent moving into the future. The arguments presented in this archive will offer important realizations for those who are receptive to NNOMY's message of protecting our youth, and thus our entire society, of the abuses militarism plays upon our hopes for a sustainable and truly democratic society.

NNOMY

 

The Resources section covers the following topics:

News reports from the groups associated to the NNOMY Network including Social Media.

Reports from counter-recruitment groups and activists from the field. Includes information about action reports at recruiting centers and career fairs, school tabling, and actions in relation to school boards and state legislatures.

David SwansonDavid Swanson is the author of the new book, Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union, by Seven Stories Press and of the introduction to The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush by Dennis Kucinich. In addition to cofounding AfterDowningStreet.org, he is the Washington director of Democrats.com and sits on the boards of a number of progressive organizations in Washington, DC.


Charlottesville Right Now: 11-10-11 David Swanson
David Swanson joins Coy to discuss Occupy Charlottesville, protesting Dick Cheney's visit to the University of Virginia, and his new book. -  Listen

Jorge MariscalJorge Mariscal is the grandson of Mexican immigrants and the son of a U.S. Marine who fought in World War II. He served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam and currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego.

Matt GuynnMatt Guynn plays the dual role of program director and coordinator for congregational organizing for On Earth Peace, building peace and nonviolence leadership within the 1000+ congregations of the Church of the Brethren across the United States and Puerto Rico. He previously served a co-coordinator of training for Christian Peacemaker Teams, serving as an unarmed accompanier with political refugees in Chiapas, Mexico, and offering or supporting trainings in the US and Mexico.

Rick JahnkowRick Jahnkow works for two San Diego-based anti-militarist organizations, the Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities and the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft. He can be reached at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Pat ElderPat Elder was a co-founder of the DC Antiwar Network (DAWN) and a member of the Steering Committee of the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth, (NNOMY).  Pat is currently involved in a national campaign with the Women's International League for Peace & Freedom project, Military Poisons,  investigating on U.S. military base contamination domestically and internationally.  Pat’s work has prominently appeared in NSA documents tracking domestic peace groups.

 

All Documents:

Pat Elder - National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth

NNOMY periodically participates in or organizes events(e.i. conferences, rallies) with other organizations.

The Counter-recruitment Essentials section of the NNOMY web site covers the issues and actions spanning this type of activism. Bridging the difficult chasms between religious, veteran, educator, student, and community based activism is no small task. In this section you will find information on how to engage in CR activism in your school and community with the support of the knowledge of others who have been working to inform youth considering enlisting in the military. You will also find resources for those already in the military that are looking for some guidance on how to actively resist injustices  as a soldier or how to choose a path as a conscientious objector.

John Judge was a co-founder of the Committee for High School Options and Information on Careers, Education and Self-Improvement (CHOICES) in Washington DC, an organization engaged since 1985 in countering military recruitment in DC area high schools and educating young people about their options with regard to the military. Beginning with the war in Viet Nam, Judge was a life-long anti-war activist and tireless supporter of active-duty soldiers and veterans.

 

"It is our view that military enlistment puts youth, especially African American youth, at special risk, not only for combat duty, injury and fatality, but for military discipline and less than honorable discharge, which can ruin their chances for employment once they get out. There are other options available to them."


In the 1970's the Selective Service System and the paper draft became unworkable, requiring four induction orders to get one report. Boards  were under siege by anti-war and anti-draft forces, resistance of many kinds was rampant. The lottery system failed to dampen the dissent, since people who knew they were going to be drafted ahead of time became all the more active. Local draft board members quit in such numbers that even I was approached, as a knowledgeable draft counselor to join the board. I refused on the grounds that I could never vote anyone 1-A or eligible to go since I opposed conscription and the war.

At this point the Pentagon decided to replace the paper draft with a poverty draft, based on economic incentive and coercion. It has been working since then to draw in between 200-400,000 enlisted members annually. Soon after, they began to recruit larger numbers of women to "do the jobs men don't want to". Currently recruitment quotas are falling short, especially in Black communities, and reluctant parents are seen as part of the problem. The hidden problem is retention, since the military would have quadrupled by this time at that rate of enlistment, but the percentage who never finish their first time of enlistment drop out at a staggering rate.

I began bringing veterans of the Vietnam War into high schools in Dayton, Ohio in the late 1960s, and have continued since then to expose young people to the realities of military life, the recruiters' false claims and the risks in combat or out. I did it first through Vietnam Veterans Against the War/Winter Soldier Organization, then Dayton Draft & Military Counseling, and since 1985 in DC through C.H.O.I.C.E.S.

The key is to address the broader issues of militarization of the schools and privacy rights for students in community forums and at meetings of the school board and city council. Good counter-recruitment also provides alternatives in the civilian sector to help the poor and people of color, who are the first targets of the poverty draft, to find ways to break into the job market, go to a trade school, join an apprenticeship program, get job skills and placement help, and find money for college without enlisting in the military.

John Judge -- counselor, C.H.O.I.C.E.S.
 
Articles
References:
Videos
Tributes

###

Subscribe to NNOMY Newsletter

NNOMYnews reports on the growing intrusions by the Department of Defense into our public schools in a campaign to normalize perpetual wars with our youth and to promote the recruitment efforts of the Pentagon.

CLICK HERE

Search Articles

Language

FAIR USE NOTICE

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of issues connected with militarism and resistance. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Donate to NNOMY

Your donation to NNOMY works to balance the military's message in our public schools. Our national network of activists go into schools and inform youth considering military service the risks about military service that recruiters leave out.

CONTRIBUTE by Check