NNOMY News November 09, 2018

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	Military recruiting in public schools can be disruptive In 2015, the Army recruited 1,440 high school graduates into active duty from NYC, Westchester County and Long Island. I realize that federal law and city regulations require that military recruiters get the same kind of access to students as trade school and college recruiters. But the recruiters’ sense of unregulated access is what bothers me. In fact, in 2007, school officials reminded principals that military recruiters should not be “given unfettered access to students in classrooms, cafeterias, gyms or other areas of the school building,” according to The New York Times. Read More



	A military expert explains why social media is the new battlefield In the historic blink of an eye, the founders of these companies have become some of the most powerful players in war and politics when they never set out for this role. Mark Zuckerberg writes software in his Harvard dorm room to allow fellow students to rate who is hot or not. Twitter is literally named after the term for short bursts of “inconsequential” information. And suddenly, they are setting the rules of everything from whether Russian disinformation campaigns should be allowed to whether Myanmar generals have the right to free speech so that they can spur mass killings. “Social media rewards not morality or veracity, but virality.” But part of the problem is not just their understandable unpreparedness for such a role and less understandable early turning of a blind eye to the abuses on their networks, but also the very design of them. The networks are for-profit businesses that create an attention economy. Social media rewards not morality or veracity, but virality. Their design is a perfect engine for the fast and wide spread of information, which makes them so wonderful. But there is a catch: unlike the truth, lies can be engineered to take advantage of that design and move faster and wider. Read More



	Divest “Your Body” from the War Machine The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth is extending this divestment beyond how we support the vast and socially debilitating war industry with our dollars to include the idea of divesting of our bodies. Of course, from a humanistic point of view, your body is not a financial asset, but like so many things in our contemporary world, we have been reduced from citizens to consumers and the military factors us in financial terms; the cost to maintain our training, deployment and, all too often, our health from being used as soldiers in endless wars and conflicts. Read More
	In Cooperation with Codepink's Divest from the War Machine campaign, The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth contributes A Guide to Countering and Resisting the Militarization of Youth in our schools from the over-reach of a provision of the Every Child Succeeds Act that permits unrestricted access to military recruiters in our schools. This guide instructs activists how to lobby school districts to follow equal access guidelines and to organize communities, parents, teachers, and students to limit recruiter access to their schools. Much of the contents of this Divestment Campaign Guide are borrowed with permission from the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY), National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, Stop Recruiting Kids, and Save Civilian Civilian Education. We are extremely grateful to them for contributing their insight and experience to this movement. To learn more about NNOMY’s work, visit https://nnomy.org/en/. To Protect Student Privacy’s work, visit http://www.studentprivacy.org/. To learn more about Stop Recruiting Kids, visit: http://srkcampaign.org/. To learn more about Save Civilian Education’s work, visit http://savecivilianeducation.org/. You can visit Codepink's Divest from the War Machine website at https://www.divestfromwarmachine.org/ Download the DivestCRguide2018.pdf


	Guns Out of Our Schools, Propaganda Out of Our Classrooms Authored By the editors of Rethinking Schools Just a week after 14 students and three staff members were murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in February, President Donald Trump predictably endorsed the National Rifle Association’s prescription for school shootings and our nation’s gun violence epidemic: more guns and give them to teachers. “You give them a little bit of a bonus, so practically for free, you have now made the school into a hardened target,” Trump said, according to The New York Times, giving a nod to the NRA’s mantra that the “Only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Survivors of the Parkland shooting couldn’t help but find some dark irony in Trump’s stance and that mantra when a couple months later the NRA announced that guns would be banned from both Trump and Vice President Mike Pence’s speeches at their annual convention. Parkland student Matt Deitsch wrote on Twitter: “Wait wait wait wait wait wait you’re telling me to make the VP safe there aren’t any weapons around but when it comes to children they want guns everywhere? Can someone explain this to me? Because it sounds like the NRA wants to protect people who help them sell guns, not kids.” Deitsch is right, of course, and his comment exposes an underlying issue in any conversation about gun violence in schools in the United States: This is fundamentally an issue of profits versus the health and security of our young people. Read More



	Update on military conscription & compulsory "service" In case anyone wants to think about political events that will be happening after today's election, regardless of who is elected: The National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service is continuing to work toward recommendations to Congress and the President on whether draft registration should be ended, extended to women, modified to include people with skills in special demand by the military (health care, foreign languages, tech, etc.), and/or replaced with a compulsory national service scheme with both military and civilian components. More on the activities of the Commission including records of its closed-door meetings and invited briefings, released in response to my ongoing Freedom Of Information Act requests: https://resisters.info/commission.html I will continue to post more Commission documents as I receive them. The Commission completed its initial round of stage-managed public meetings in September 2018. The Commissioners are part-time federal employees, generally meeting for a couple of days each month. Following closed meetings in October, November, and December 2018, the Commissioners plan to release an interim report in January 2019 laying out several possible policy options with respect to the Selective Service System, to test public reaction and set the terms of public debate. The likely extent of resistance to conscription and the feasibility of enforcement of expanded draft registration or compulsory service aren't likely to be considered in the interim report, since the Commission hasn't done any research or invited any testimony on these issues. At its closed meeting in October 2018, the Commission invited legal scholars to discuss the Constitutionality of compulsory national service: https://reason.com/volokh/2018/10/19/why-mandatory-national-service-is-both-u Just after this meeting, an op-ed was published in The Hill which appears to be a trial balloon for at least some of the Commissioners who support a compulsory national service program for all young people: https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/413579-national-service-can-unite-america The Commission plans more formal hearings in 2019 with testimony by invited experts on the issues the Commission things are important. Members of the public can still submit comments through the Commission's Web site or by e-mail, but it's not clear to what extent they will be considered. The Commission is dragging its feet on releasing the comments it has already received, saying it will take more than another year to process my FOIA request for them. I assume the reason it doesn't want to disclose the responses to its request for public comment is that they are overwhelmingly opposed to military conscription or compulsory service. (There are, of course, supporters of the draft and compulsory national service, but I've been able to find no evidence that they mobilized to submit comments to the Commission, as opponents of conscription did.) The law which created the Commission, as amended earlier this year, requires the Commission to issue a final report and recommendations (including whether to end draft registration or extend it to women) by March 2020. The Commission is explicitly focused on "creating a national conversation" about military conscription and national service. A major element of its work is planning how to release its interim and final reports in such a way as to shape and set the terms of public discussion. Our challenge will be to make the resistance to conscription part of that discussion. With the Commission meeting in secret in November and December to finalize its interim report, the next public development will be the release of the Commission's interim report, which is planned for January 2019, followed by formal hearings, probably in Washington, with invited expert witnesses. Even if resisters aren't invited to testify, those hearings will be a focus of public attention and discussion of the issue of the draft. More: https://resisters.info/commission.html Peace, Edward Hasbrouck -------------------- Draft Registration and Draft Resistance: http://www.resisters.info Health Care Workers and the Draft: http://www.MedicalDraft.info Edward Hasbrouck This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. http://hasbrouck.org +1-415-824-0214



	Another Amazing Coincidence: Man Trained to Mass Murder Commits Mass Murder David Swanson - The suspect in today’s mass shooting (well, the biggest one I’ve heard of thus far this morning; the day is young) is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. Another mass shooter in Florida last week just happens to have been in the military. The man who killed with a van in Toronto this year had been briefly in the Canadian military and promoted his crime on Facebook beforehand as a military operation. The mass-killing in a Florida High School earlier this year was also promoted by the killer as a military operation, in the sense that he wore his JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) shirt and killed in the same school where the U.S. Army had trained him to shoot and instructed him in war-supporting views of the world and its history. Obviously having been a member of the U.S. military can’t have any causal connection to mass shootings, and that’s why it makes the most amazing coincidence over and over again that so many individuals who’ve been trained to kill lots of people bizarrely end up killing lots of people. Read more



	War School (A Film by Mic Dixon) Full Film available online only 9th to the 11th of November Click Here to watch on these dates Armed Forces Day, Uniform to Work Day, Camo Day, National Heroes Day - in the streets, on television, on the web, at sports events, in schools, advertising and fashion - the military presence in UK civilian life is increasing daily.   War School reveals how the British government is spending £100m of new public funding and using more than 40 new strategies to promote military values to the public and entice children into the armed forces. The film’s release in November 2018 coincides with the centenary of the 1918 Armistice ending World War 1 – “The War to End All Wars” and, with revelatory testimony from veterans of the numerous conflicts Britain has joined since, tells an untold soldier’s story of the country’s century of perpetual war. Structured around the journey from child to soldier to peace worker, War School features the work of Veterans for Peace, Quakers and Forces Watch becoming, ultimately, a film about the battle for the hearts and minds of Britain’s children.  WAR SCHOOL Documentary Feature Running Time: 82 minutes Executive Producer: Christo Hird Produced By: Mic Dixon & Di Tatham Directed By: Mic Dixon Production Company: POW Productions Ltd Watch Preview



	Veterans For Peace and other anti-war groups want Americans to remember that the holiday was originally meant to celebrate peace, not militarism. Veterans Day is celebrated in the U.S. every year on November 11. That's because World War I effectively ended on that day 100 years ago with the signing of an armistice calling for a ceasefire. November 11 is known as "Armistice Day" in many European countries. And that's also what the U.S. called the holiday until 1954. But in the aftermath of World War II and the Korean War, Congress dropped "Armistice Day" and adopted "Veterans Day" instead to honor all American veterans. Even if that name swap happened more than 60 years ago, some critics are still unhappy about it. One particular group that wants to "reclaim Armistice Day" is Veterans For Peace. The non-profit wants Americans to remember that the holiday was originally meant to celebrate peace and not militarism. In order to do that, Veterans For Peace is organizing events and vigils around the country to encourage attendees to question the meaning of Veterans Day. Read More \| Watch Video



	Copy & paste this Meme on your social media and add this text: Public schools in the United States have increasingly come to resemble the military and prison systems with their hiring of military generals as school administrators and heavy investment in security apparatus. Here is How The Pentagon invades our Schools: http://nnomy.org/en/resources/school-militarization.html

	Please Donate to fund counter-recruitment nationally Help Fund NNOMY to De-Militarize Schools. Your donation to NNOMY supports the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth's efforts to balance the message of military recruiters in our public schools where minors are routinely primed for recruitment through Department of Defense school programs designed for youth. Making a financial contribution supports NNOMY's national demilitarization work with activist organizations inside middle and high schools. Click to Make Your Donation (Your donation is tax-deductible to the extent allowable by law.) through our fiscal sponsor Alliance for Global Justice. Make sure you select from the causes list, The National Network Opposing he Militarization of Youth (NNOMY), or make a check out to:"NNOMY/AFGJ" and mail it to: AFGJ, 225 E. 26th St. Suite 1, Tucson, AZ 85713

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The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY). 2018