COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Counter-Recruitment: General
Activists Pose Fresh Challenges to New Recruiter Tactics
Catherine Komp, The New Standard
July28, 2006
As the military develops increasingly sophisticated approaches to
roping in America’s youth, a renewed counter-recruitment movement is
fighting back with its own fresh strategies.
July 28 – Raymond Cyrille thought about joining the military
throughout junior high. The 18-year-old New Yorker said the Navy did
well by two of his uncles, who lead lifestyles in retirement that
Cyrille finds appealing.
But by the end of freshman year, Cyrille had changed his mind.
"They joined the military at a very different time. They’re from the
South, and it was kind of tradition in that area for young men of color
to join the military," Cyrille told The NewStandard. "For me to join
now would be totally different. The money’s different, and we’re at
war."
By his senior year of high school, Cyrille was engaged in
counter-recruitment work with Youth Activists-Youth Allies (Ya-Ya)
Network, a New York-based youth-led advocacy group.
Cyrille is part of a growing movement of anti-war, counter-recruitment
activists across the country, many of them youth, who are using
education, art, music, technology and community-building to face off
against the amply-funded recruiting tactics of the United States
military.
Deep pockets
Over the next week, US Army recruiters have scheduled appearances at
venues as diverse as a rodeo in Abilene, Kansas; a county fair in
Wheeling, West Virginia; "Mall Day" in Erie, Pennsylvania; pro-football
hall-of-fame week in Canton, Ohio; and surfing competitions in
Huntington Beach, California.
"Youth were really calling for the opportunity and the skills to step
into that forefront and start leading the counter-recruitment
movement."
The US military’s recruitment machine has become highly innovative,
proving itself in-touch with many aspects of youth culture. The Army
uses a slick, multi-player online video game that attracts enthusiasts
of all ages from around the world, but most importantly infiltrates
popular culture the Army says offers a "virtual experience within which
to explore entry level and advanced training."
The Marine Corps, meanwhile, has set up its own MySpace.com page,
attracting more than 13,500 "friends" on the social-networking site
popular among young people. And the National Guard gives Internet users
"HOOAH" points, named after the military’s own energy bar and drink.
The points are redeemable for iTunes songs and "other cool stuff" –
after they submit a valid name and e-mail address.
Recruitment goals for June 2006 alone were nearly 50,000 for the Army
National Guard, about 25,000 for the Army Reserve, and about 6,000 for
the Marines.
The Ya-Yas make a mark
Though their budgets pale in comparison to the military’s recruiting
and advertising budget – about $1.4 billion for FY 2006 – grassroots
counter-recruitment organizations across the country are nonetheless
reaching young people about alternatives to war and military service.
The Ya-Ya Network, according to director Amy Wagner, is one of the few
counter-recruitment groups in New York in which young people of color
are leading the organizing.
"Instead of going to Iraq and blowing up people’s homes, you can go to
Sri Lanka for two years and build schools."
"I think that young people have had a lifetime of experience of adults
who ‘know better’ telling them what to do and how to plan their
futures," said Wagner, the only older adult at the organization. "And
it’s very difficult when a recruiter comes in and has the uniform and
the authority and the [billions of dollars] of recruiting advertising
to spend. It’s very difficult to counter that if you’re just another
adult telling kids what to do. And I think it’s a very different thing
when, first of all, young people are empowered to speak for themselves,
and second of all, when they speak directly to their peers to share
information."
Young people, who are employed for 14-month periods with the Ya-Ya
Network, have helped create curriculum for a workshop called
"Counter-recruitment 101," which is conducted in teams for both youth
and adults.
Brian Lewis, the oldest Ya-Ya at age 20 and a sophomore at the New
School university, said when they interact with youth, Ya-Ya activists
are almost like guidance counselors.
"But I think as youth we’re better and more effective than guidance
counselors," added Lewis, "because we can identify directly with the
youth, there’s not that age difference. We really feel comfortable
talking to people and just having real conversations with them about
what their interests are and what they need – [and] try not to preach
to them, give them all this rhetoric."
Listening to what youth want, a skill at which Lewis said recruiters
are experts, is exactly what the Ya-Ya network did when it decided to
organize its first alternative job fair.
Listening to what youth want, a skill at which Lewis said recruiters
are experts, is exactly what the Ya-Ya network did when it decided to
organize its first alternative job fair.
"We did a workshop in the Bronx and the youth had told us, ‘That’s cool
what you all are saying against the war and everything, but we need
money for jobs and we need to get skills,’" Lewis recounted.
The job fair, held this past May at SEIU 1199’s headquarters in
Manhattan, attracted 300 young people, according to Wagner, and
included groups offering all the things the military does: education,
job training and travel.
"Instead of going to Iraq and blowing up people’s homes, you can go to
Sri Lanka for two years and build schools," Wagner said.
Not Your Solider
While groups like the Ya-Ya Network are working locally to reach youth
in their communities, others are organizing coordinated national
campaigns focused both on training youth to do counter-recruitment and
decreasing the military’s access to young people in schools.
Not Your Solider formed in summer 2005, a joint project between the New
York War Resisters League and the Ruckus Society, a grassroots-activism
and direct-action training group. Hannah Strange, co-coordinator of Not
Your Solider, said the project emerged from calls across the country
for more skill-sharing and strategic planning in the
counter-recruitment movement.
"And through all of those kinds of conversations, there was a real
focus and desire for youth leadership to be at the forefront of this
work," Strange told TNS. "Youth were really calling for the opportunity
and the skills to step into that forefront and start leading the
counter-recruitment movement."
Word about the Not Your Soldier project is also spreading with the help
of hip hop artists The Coup. The music group launched a "Not Your
Solider" tour this summer after partnering with the organization on
Punk Ass Crusade, a short, counter-recruitment flash animation video.
Volunteers have been distributing counter-recruitment information at
concerts, and rapper Boots Riley has been discussing the issues from
the stage, according to Strange.
The bigger picture
Other counter-recruitment initiatives, both national and grassroots,
are using similar tactics to educate youth about military alternatives.
In Montclair, New Jersey, Elizabeth Lipschultz helped to found a club
at her high school called "Open Your Eyes, Open Your Ears" to educate
her peers about their right to keep personal information from military
recruiters.
"When the club started, it was just about when a lot of talk about the
war in Iraq was starting," said Lipschultz. "We got involved very
strongly in the anti-war movement, both locally and we participated in
some national events. And through that we began to learn about other
issues that were related, and we learned about the No Child Left Behind
Act."
Lipschultz said she was alarmed to find out about Section 9528 of that
education "reform" package, which required schools to provide students’
names, addresses and telephone numbers to recruiters.
Lipschultz said it took several semesters of work, starting with
pressuring the school principal and then going to the school board.
Eventually, the students and school officials worked out a clear system
of distributing and receiving opt-out forms. The number of families who
submitted paperwork to opt out of the school’s recruitment data
program, according to Montclair High School officials, jumped from 33
to 91 percent during the 2005-2006 school year as a result of the
education campaign.
In Tempe, Arizona, the Counter-Recruitment Coalition distributes
information outside of public libraries, grocery stores and high
schools, and organizes open-mic nights to "spit truth about military
recruitment."
The Los Angeles-based Coalition Against Militarism in our Schools
offers training tools, conscientious objector information, anti-war
propaganda and training videos and an "adopt-a-school" program which
provides support for doing counter-recruitment work at 35 Los Angeles
schools.
In Seattle last year, after heavy counter-recruitment campaigning, the
school board voted to adopt polices to restrict recruiters on school
grounds who harass students or provide misleading or untruthful
information.
Likewise, in Austin last month, the school board voted to limit
recruiters’ access to high schools after protests from students and
parents. The policy change would, in part, require recruiters to
register when they come to schools and restrict where on campus they
can approach students.
While it is difficult to measure the successes of such a newly animated
movement still in the process of training new leaders and refining
campaign tactics, Strange, with Not Your Solider, says these are all
concrete ways to resist the war in Iraq and to address "the war at
home."
TNS Premium
Reinventing Counter-Recruitment
An interview with activist Brian Lewis
http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/3474
This week, TNS talked to several youth involved in counter-recruitment
activism for an article examining the re-emergence of this decades-old
movement. We were only able to include a sliver of these interviews in
the article and wanted to share a fuller picture of one of these young
activists, Brian Lewis, a 20-year-old sophomore at The New School
University. Lewis joined the New York-based YouthActivists-YouthAllies
Network (Ya-Ya) after graduating from high school. The organization
hires youth for 14-month periods to lead campaigns focusing on various
issues affecting youth, including anti-racism, anti-sexism, youth
rights, and anti-war and counter-recruitment efforts.
TNS: You said you "lended an ear" to the military recruiters when you
were coming out of high school and what they were trying to sell you.
At what point did you start reconsidering those things or learning more
about the military and recruitment?
BL: When I was in high school I was part of poetry group and we went
all over the city and performed at different places. It was called
Cumba Link. I got a political education with them and they started
letting me know that a lot of things the military was saying wasn’t
necessarily true – that they promised a lot of things that they
couldn’t necessarily follow through on. And I started hearing about the
violence and the terrible war stories and stuff from going to do
different shows and doing different workshops with them and that really
turned me off to it because I didn’t want to go into combat and I was
really against the war by the time I got to college.
TNS: At what point did you want to start talking to other youth about
this?
BL: I didn’t really know what the Ya-Ya [Network] did or what Ya-Ya
was. I had a friend that worked with them, and I just knew that they
were a youth-led organization and that they did activist work. When I
got here, I found out that a lot of our past work had been in military
recruitment. That’s when my interest really started … I realized this
was something I’d be interested in and wanted to do because they
started telling me things like it was really heavy recruitment in black
neighborhoods and low-income neighborhoods and that touched with me
because I’m black and [come] from those communities.
TNS: What are some of the elements in the counter-recruitment
curriculum that you use when doing workshops?
BL: The first thing we do is we have a basic question session. We have
people stand in a circle and if they agree with the question or
statement we ask, we ask them to step in to the circle so people know
they agree with that and if they don’t, they stay still.
[Editor’s note: Questions range from "Are you in high school?" to
"Would you kill a person if ordered to do so?"]
And that helps establish what people’s interests are, what their views
and values are. That gives us a ground bearing of where people are
coming from who we’re working with because we work with all kinds of
people, from regular high school kids who are most affected by it [to]
community groups and activists who do the work too and want this kind
of training specifically.
After we do the step-in activity, usually we show this video called
Military Myths… and the video shows all the aspects of sexism, racism,
the different things that might affect you once you get into the
military. And it tries not to be too biased, ‘cause it shows the actual
recruiters and the actual people who enlisted talking – more than just
community groups and stuff like that.
After we show Military Myths, we have a ribbon activity that we do and
we show the discrepancy between how much the US spends on the military
and how much they spend on education or how much they spend on health
care. It’s powerful when people see that, they’re like, "Wow."
We tell people, if you don’t think this affects you, look, you can see
that this much money is being spent on military and then we have a fact
sheet that says all this money could have been spent on 30,000
four-year scholarships to colleges, or 20,000 healthcare plans, so
people can really see how directly it affects them economically.
Then we wrap up. If people are really passionate and interested, at
that point we usually ask if they want to build their own campaign in
their school and then we try to walk them through that. What they’ll
need to do in terms of flyering, getting info out to other people,
hosting events, such as an open-mic where you slam military recruitment
which can mean just having people talk about the problems with military
recruitment or, you know, writing hip hop pieces or rap pieces about
that. And trying to bring culture into it too.
TNS: Are you going to keep doing this after you leave the Ya-Ya
network?
BL: Yeah definitely, I mean this part of my life now. As long as
there’s a war and as long as low income people and people of color are
being recruited heavily then I’m going to keep doing this work … .
Lewis and another Ya-Ya member interviewed for the TNS article, Raymond
Cyrille, recently wrote and recorded, "The Malaise." Lewis said the
song "looks at the current situation of war in Iraq and the way war
feels in general and how it seems we as a world have been at war in
various ways in our communities, nationally and a world scale and how
all these conflicts overlap and weighs so heavy on us."
You can listen to "The Malaise" here:
http://media.putfile.com/The-Malaise
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