August 13, 2019 / William Astore / The Nation - When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I looked to the heavens: to God and Christianity (as arbitrated by the Catholic Church) and to the soaring warbirds of the US military, which I believed kept us safe. To my mind then, they were classic manifestations of American technological superiority over the godless communists.
With all its scandals, especially when it came to priestly sexual abuse, I lost my faith in the Catholic Church. I would later learn that there had been a predatory priest in my parish when I was young, a grim man who made me uneasy at the time, though back then I couldn’t have told you why. As for those warbirds, like so many Americans, I thrilled to their roar at air shows but never gave any real thought to the bombs they were dropping in Vietnam and elsewhere, to the lives they were ending, to the destruction they were causing. Nor at that age did I ever consider their enormous cost in dollars or just how much Americans collectively sacrificed to have top cover, whether of the warplane or godly kind.
Articles
January 18 2021 / Gary Ghirardi / Op-ed / NNOMY - With the violence witnessed in the beginning of 2021 at the nation's capital, we have been forced to acknowledge the culture war that exists in the United States in full expression. We also witnessed in the subtext of that event, and the emerging crisis that will follow it, the government's promise of increasing securitization as a reaction to it. That process did not start at the "surge on the capital" but has been in a steady progression of growth for many years. This latest event only provides an additional justification for the need to increase the militarization of our "democracy."
Nowhere is that trend more evident as in the Junior Reserves Officers Training Corps (JROTC) military cadet program slated for a massive expansion. What is billed by the Pentagon as a character building and good citizenship program designed to instill leadership qualities in young people, now is being funded to expand from 3500 nation-wide units to over 6000. JROTC corps are constructed increasingly of ethnic minority and black youth disadvantaged with a lack of opportunities to jump start their lives. This is not an organic development. Those poorer youth lacking in programs designed to prepare them for college are specifically profiled and targeted for JROTC programs. In Chicago that targeting has gone a step further in configuring actual public schools as military academies complete with military school uniforms, protocols and curriculum.
How the student loan debt crisis forces low-income students of color into the military.
Anna Attie / In These Times - When James Gardner got injured playing basketball as a DePaul University freshman, he lost his financial aid package and was dropped from his classes. To stay in school, he took out a $10,000 loan.
Soon, Gardner (a pseudonym requested in fear of reprisal) and his family realized they couldn’t afford the university. Instead, he transferred to a public university outside Chicago and enrolled in the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) of the Air Force. The military paid for his entire college education — on the condition he serve at least four years after graduation.
Gardner is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and says the military is geared toward “resource extraction and resource allocation.” When DSA colleagues learn about his military background, he says there is a “little bit of a gasp.”
“Would I be in the same predicament,” he wonders, “if college and university were tuition-free? Would I have gone through ROTC? I don’t know.”
Gardner’s situation isn’t unique. Americans owe more than $1.67 trillion in student debt (Source: adjusted for 11/2022 now $1.768 trillion) , and the cost of college has increased by more than 25% in the past 10 years. According to a 2017 poll by the Department of Defense, paying for education is the top reason young people consider enlisting. In 2019, the Army credited the student debt crisis with helping it surpass its recruitment goals.
Fabiola Cardozo / NNOMY / español - Some elements make the popularity, frequency, and increased rate of the military enlistment of many young people possible. One of the most important is the influence they receive from their environment on the part of those people who act as counselors and teachers within the schools they attend, as well as from their parents or relatives at home. The normalization of militarization in American society leads us to think of military enlistment as a great option for young people’s futures. However, little is said about the real difficulties they will face. An adult who advises a teenager on military enlistment has naturalized war in a way that is not conducive to better decision-making on the part of young people, preventing the exploration of less violent alternatives. (See: http://peacefulcareers.org/index.html).
Within the school, some teachers and counselors receive encouragement from the Pentagon to influence and foster an interest in the military sector in young people. As we know, between students and teachers or counselors, there is an inherent power dynamic that gives educators almost unquestionable validity, leading to a dangerous influence. Likewise, the constant visits of military recruiters and the implementation of school programs that encourage entry into military service mean that young people are being permanently influenced by this idea. (See: https://nnomy.org/en/what-is-militarization/school-militarization.html).
Fabiola Cardozo / NNOMY / español - The rhetoric about the need for a military draft in American society is lost sight of in history. The patriotic struggle to defend the nation from possible threats and the urgency to demobilize alleged terrorism attempts and take democracy to other latitudes, has served to implement policies that perpetuate permanent war and make invisible or undermine the possibility of more democratic and pacifist mechanisms in international relations.
Such has been the recurrence of this rhetoric that American society sometimes does not question the actions leading to warfare caused by the government in power. As mentioned in this article:
Yet celebrating the military, nobilizing the military experience, finding purpose and meaning in continuous war, is the very definition of militarism.
A true democracy has a military as a reluctant and regrettable choice, driven by the need to defend itself in a hostile and violent world.
…We’ve become so accustomed to living with the drumbeats of war that we no longer hear them…We’re hearing them all the time today — it’s the background noise to our lives. For some, it’s even become sweet music. But war and militarism is never sweet music to a functioning democracy.
(See: https://bracingviews.com/2015/07/23/the-united-states-of-militarism/)
Despite the potential that the US has, and that could be developed more efficiently to provide greater social welfare to its inhabitants and the rest of the world through inventiveness and technological innovation, it is a country that has assumed militarism and that seeks to lead with exports of weapons in conflict scenarios on a planetary scale.