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Teaching Cultural Militarization

Gary Ghirardi 11 April 2022

Introduction

In the United States of America, we are a people at war with the world and ourselves

June 2022 / Gary David Ghirardi & Various Sources / NNOMY - It is the summer of 2022 and the country is reeling with the school shooting of 19 LatinX children in an elementary school in Texas. Multiple shootings before and after are all added together with un-answered questions as to the root causes on the nightly news while the spectacle of it all to the millions of viewers becomes another kind of murder against our collective imaginations.

The reality of what is wrong is invisible in plain sight in a country experiencing endless wars. internally and externally, that define a culture immersed in a “cultural militarization."

We only have to ask ourselves to encompass what such a concept could mean and then we can start collecting the pieces that are all around us, in our politics, our foreign policy, all the endless enemies that we are taught to hate, foreign and domestic, that end up aligning our people to submit to our endless wars.

Some of our wars are engaged by proxy countries funded by money we provide to them as allies who are then directed to buy the weapons we manufacture and sell them. The money provided is often represented as foreign aid and assistance or is owed back to us again as loans.

In our national production of movies, television series and war based video gaming, our imaginations are stoked with militarized or securatized entertainments imposed by consultants from military contractors and the Pentagon itself all folded into each other like the batter of a cake that we readily consume believing it is necessary to do so for our safety and security.

America’s Child Soldiers JROTC and the Militarizing of America

Ann Jones 04 June 2022

08/09/2021 / Ann Jones / Tom Dispatch - Congress surely meant to do the right thing when, in the fall of 2008, it passed the Child Soldiers Prevention Act (CSPA). The law was designed to protect kids worldwide from being forced to fight the wars of Big Men. From then on, any country that coerced children into becoming soldiers was supposed to lose all U.S. military aid.

It turned out, however, that Congress — in its rare moment of concern for the next generation — had it all wrong. In its greater wisdom, the White House found countries like Chad and Yemen so vital to the national interest of the United States that it preferred to overlook what happened to the children in their midst.

As required by CSPA, this year the State Department once again listed 10 countries that use child soldiers: Burma (Myanmar), the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Seven of them were scheduled to receive millions of dollars in U.S. military aid as well as what’s called “U.S. Foreign Military Financing.” That’s a shell game aimed at supporting the Pentagon and American weapons makers by handing millions of taxpayer dollars over to such dodgy “allies,” who must then turn around and buy “services” from the Pentagon or “materiel” from the usual merchants of death. You know the crowd: Lockheed Martin, McDonnell Douglas, Northrop Grumman, and so on.

Navy desertions have more than doubled amid suicide concerns, as sailors feel trapped by contracts

Gary Ghirardi 19 May 2022

The number of sailors who deserted the Navy more than doubled from 2019 to 2021, highlighting the lack of options contract-bound sailors face when they’re desperate to leave.

May 18, 2022 / Melissa Chan / NBC News - The number of sailors who deserted the Navy more than doubled from 2019 to 2021, while desertions in other military branches dropped or stayed flat, pointing to a potential Navy-wide mental health crisis amid a spate of recent suicides, according to experts and federal statistics obtained by NBC News.

Among a fleet of more than 342,000 active sailors, there were 157 new Navy deserters in 2021, compared with 63 in 2019 and 98 in 2020, Navy data shows. The total number of deserters who were still at large in 2021 grew to 166 from 119 in 2019. Most of them were 25 and younger.

“That’s staggering,” said Benjamin Gold, a defense attorney for U.S. service members.

In the wake of several suicides among sailors assigned to the warship the USS George Washington, the new desertion figures highlight the lack of options for sailors when they’re desperate to leave the military but are bound to multiyear contracts that many of them signed just out of high school.

Military law experts said the nearly unbreakable contracts — which can require up to six years of active duty — leave sailors with extreme alternatives: die by suicide or flee and face harsh consequences, including spending years behind bars as patriots-turned-pariahs.

“They feel trapped,” said Lenore Yarger, a resource counselor with the GI Rights Hotline, a nonprofit nongovernmental group that specializes in military discharges.