The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY)

NNOMY

Research Allies

Resources

Dr. Lisa Marie Cacho

Department of Latina/Latino Studies
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
1207 W. Oregon Street, M/C 136
Urbana, IL 61801
Telephone: (217)265-0338
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

http://www.lls.illinois.edu/people/lcacho

Lisa Cacho's work demonstrates how race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, and legality work interdependently to assign human value and to render relations of inequality normative, natural, and obvious in both dominant and oppositional discourses. To understand how the rhetoric and discourse of value are both institutionalized and popularized to devastating effect, she analyzes a range of sources, such as ballot measures ascribing “illegality” to persons, legal provisions targeting “criminal aliens,” court documents evaluating degrees of “guilt,” and related media accounts that manage and make sense of racial contradictions. Her book, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (NYU press, 2012) examines the ways in which representations of race and race relations mediate how we affectively and intellectually apprehend criminal justice and civil/human rights.

Playing War: How the Military Uses Video Games

Articles

A new book unfolds how the “military-entertainment complex” entices soldiers to war and treats them when they return

 

Hamza Shaban -

According to popular discourse, video games are either the divine instrument of education’s future or the software of Satan himself, provoking young men to carry out all-too-real rampages. Much like discussions surrounding the Internet, debates on video games carry the vague, scattershot chatter that says too much about the medium (e.g. do video games cause violence?) without saying much at all about the particulars of games or gaming conventions (e.g. how can death be given more weight in first person shooters?).

As Atlantic contributor Ian Bogost argues in his book, How to Do Things with Video Games, we’ve assigned value to games as if they all contain the same logic and agenda. We assume, unfairly, that the entire medium of video games shares inherent properties more important and defining than all the different ways games are applied and played. The way out of this constrained conversation is to bore down into specifics, to tease out various technologies, and to un-generalize the medium. We get such an examination in War Play, Corey Mead’s important new study on the U.S. military’s official deployment of video games.

A professor of English at Baruch College CUNY, Mead has written a history, a book most interested in the machinations of military game development. But War Play, too, lays a solid foundation from which to launch more critical investigations—into soldier’s lives, into computerized combat, and into the most dynamic medium of our time. 

Meet the Sims … and Shoot Them

Articles

P.W. Singer -

The rise of militainment.

The country of Ghanzia is embroiled in a civil war. As a soldier in America’s Army, your job is to do everything from protect U.S. military convoys against AK-47-wielding attackers to sneak up on a mountain observatory where arms dealers are hiding out. It is a tough and dangerous tour of duty that requires dedication, focus, and a bit of luck. Fortunately, if you get hit by a bullet and bleed to death, you can reboot your computer and sign on under a new name.

America’s Army is a video game — a “tactical multiplayer first-person shooter” in gaming lingo — that was originally developed by the U.S. military to aid in its recruiting and training, but is now available for anyone to play. Among the most downloaded Internet games of all time, it is perhaps the best known of a vast array of video game-based military training programs and combat simulations whose scope and importance are rapidly changing not just the video-game marketplace, but also the way the U.S. military finds and trains its future warriors and even how the American public interfaces with the wars carried out in its name. For all the attention to the strategic debates of the post-9/11 era, a different sort of transformation has taken place over the last decade — largely escaping public scrutiny, at modest cost relative to the enormous sums spent elsewhere in the Pentagon budget, and with little planning but enormous consequences.

Counter recruitment continues in U-46 school district, despite opposition that has generated a new ‘Parents for a Say’ initiative

CR Reports

Cheryl Brumbaugh-Cayford -

The counter recruitment effort in U-46 School District, which is the second largest school district in Illinois after Chicago, was begun several years ago by Bettina Perillo. She is a member of Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren in Elgin, and a member of Fox Valley Citizens for Peace and Justice. The effort began with a counter recruitment table at Elgin High School once a month.

As more volunteers joined in and the work gained sponsorship from the two above-named groups, the effort ran into criticism and active opposition from school administrators. Supporters went to the school district board meetings to express the need for counter recruitment in the high schools, meetings were held with school district officials including the school district lawyer, and meetings were held with members of the administration at Elgin High School. With help from AFSC in Chicago, who gave advice and helped speak to the school district board about the legal requirement for equal access to high schools that are visited by military recruiters, the counter recruitment effort was given equal access.

Since then, counter recruitment tables have been at Elgin High School and Larkin High School (also in Elgin) once a month, and for a couple of years also were at South Elgin High School.

What Can You Do About Excessive Military Recruiter Access in Your Schools?

COMMUNITY ACTION
Kathy Barker of Washington Truth in Recruiting
Kathy Barker of Washington Truth in Recruiting

The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY) realizes we need to speak to those individual citizens who respond to our public appeals for participation in school demilitarization campaigns but are not aligned to a peace group.

The information below bridges your concerns and our experience.

 

Who we are

The type of activism called Truth in Recruiting or Counter-recruitment grew out of the anti-draft movement with a realization that there was a need to challenge the so called voluntary military as the Pentagon began an aggressive and manipulative multi-tiered campaign of recruiting America's youth and to oppose a corporatization and privatization of our nation’s schools.

What does NNOMY do?

We assist organizations and individuals to reclaim our schools for learning and not for Military Recruiting.

What can you do to show your concern or objection to excessive military recruiter access in a public school?

You don't have to be an organization to publicly address your concerns with your school or school district. Changing policies to protect student privacy from military recruiters requires community and individual actions.

We welcome you to participate in NNOMY campaigns and we offer resources and assistance according to the time you have, and the commitment you feel. If you want to make an impact you need to share your concerns of the dangers of promoting military culture and veiled and direct military recruitment in our public schools. Here are some actions you can make to address the need for school demilitarization.

You Can:

  • Share this page with your networks that are concerned about increasing school militarization (See share links below)

  • Establish a "Recruitment Observatory" at your public school to keep track of how many of students are being contacted and what they are being told by military recruiters. School officials can be influenced to moderate recruiter access if the community speaks up and follow recommended policies established under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of the U.S. Department of Education.

  • If military recruiters are going beyond career fairs and are roaming your public school hallways and cafeterias, or substituting for regular physical education teachers, you can say enough. Start by writing a letter to your school principal that this is not acceptable and follow it up with a letter to your school board as well. Find out how others have prevailed to reign in military recruiters in their communities.

  • Did you know that the military is likely conducting testing in your public school under the cover of career placement? It is actually data mining student information for a recruiters contact data base and your not being told about it. Send an Email to Your School Officials says the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy (ASVAB testing and DOD student Data mining)

  • One of the most important things we can do is to inform young people fully about what is really at stake in joining the military. Distributing Winning The Peace Palm Cards in front at your local high schools can accomplish answering important questions students should have the answers to directly on their smart phones that they will not get from military recruiters making their enlistment quotas. Our youth deserve an informed decision to join the military or not. Read below to find out more about the Winning the Peace Campaign:

 

 

Other things you can do. You can talk to:

You can find a group near you...

You can join other people doing similar things:

You can inform yourself...

  1. Policy Guidance - Access to High School Students and Information on Students by Military Recruiters
  2. Military Recruitment on High School and College Campuses: A Policy and Legal Analysis - Congressional Research Service | PDF
  3. Ninth Circuit Court Ruling: Confronting Militarism by Using EQUAL ACCESS to High Schools
  4. Career Counselors and Military Recruiting in High Schools | PDF
  5. ‘Parents for a Say’ initiative, Elgin Illinois

You can organize as an activist:

In any Decision you Make to Assist...

...NNOMY is here to assist you. Contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call (760) 634-3604. If no one is available to take your call, leave a message, a contact number, a best time to reach you, and a staff person will get back to you.

 

Revised 02/19/2017

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National Leafleting Inaugurates for International Week of Action Against the Militarisation of Youth

NNOMY Network News

 Winning the Peace is a national leafleting campaign.

In cooperation with War Resisters' League and the Project on Youth and Non-military Opportunities, The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth inaugurates the first national youth intervention against school militarization and military recruitment in U.S. National public schools to be offered for smartphones and mobile devices. Winning the Peace begins as a national intervention in our high schools as part of the Week of Actions Against the Militarisation of Youth, a third year project of War Resisters' International (WRI).

Pat Elder #NoWar2016

SCHOOL BASED COUNTER RECRUITMENT

World Beyond War organized a national conference called NO WAR 2016 at the American University in Washington, D.C., on September 23rd to 26th OF 2016. TheRealNews livestreamed video and video documented all the conference presenters. Pat Elder representing The National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, spoke about the militarization of American public schools by Pentagon programs designed to recruit youth into military service.

Subcategories

Opinion Article Count:  2

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.

Art & Cultural Activism Article Count:  1

The Militarization of U.S. Culture Article Count:  23

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

 

Resources Article Count:  2

The Resources section covers the following topics:

International Networking Article Count:  1

Book Reviews Article Count:  5

NNOMY Network News Article Count:  12

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

CR Reports Article Count:  5

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.

CR in the News Article Count:  8

David Swanson Article Count:  6

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 Mariscal Article Count:  2

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 Guynn Article Count:  1

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 Jahnkow Article Count:  8

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 Elder Article Count:  12

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

COMMUNITY ACTION Article Count:  2

Network Actions Article Count:  5

EVENTS & CONFERENCES Article Count:  4

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

CR Activist Reports Article Count:  2

CR Discussion List Article Count:  1

NNOMY in the News Article Count:  13

National CR Database Article Count:  1

GI Resistance Article Count:  1

Conscientious Objection Article Count:  1

NNOMY National Conference Article Count:  11

Materials/Training Article Count:  1

Model Programs Article Count:  1

School Policies Article Count:  5

EN ESPAÑOL Article Count:  1

Equal access Article Count:  1

NCLB Article Count:  1

MILITARISM & WAR Article Count:  3

FOR ENLISTED PERSONNEL Article Count:  1

FOR PARENTS Article Count:  1

CONSIDERING ENLISTING? Article Count:  1

Know Your Rights Article Count:  2

Delayed Entry Program/DEP Article Count:  1

Alternatives by State Article Count:  1

NNOMY Article Count:  13

ALTERNATIVES TO THE MILITARY Article Count:  3

Facts & Figures Article Count:  1

COUNTER RECRUITING ESSENTIALS Article Count:  1

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.

Steering Committee Article Count:  1

Articles Article Count:  227

John Judge Article Count:  5

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

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