COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Leaving Military: Conscientious Objector
Camilo Mejía on war and anti-immigrant policies
ERIC RUDER, Socialist Worker
April 28, 2006
HOW DOES being an immigrant affect how people are recruited into the
U.S. military?
IT DEPENDS. You have immigrants who were born and raised here, and whose
families are really Americanized, and there’s not much of a difference
between them and a native-born soldier.
But when it comes to someone who, for instance, grew up in Mexico, they
don’t have that blind patriotism, because their patriotism was acquired
later in life. They don’t have the same innate imprint that America is
perfect and beautiful and generous and infallible.
Instead, they have more of a longing to be American--a longing to be a
part of this great nation, to be a patriot and to pledge allegiance to
all these symbols that, sadly, people identify with being American. But
they don’t have that imprint that for people born and raised here goes
unquestioned--until something big happens in their life, and they start
seeing things from a different perspective.
Still, everyone in the military has to struggle with a lot of
demons--the heavy indoctrination of constantly being told that we live
in America, the Beautiful and the Generous. Suddenly, they’re in Iraq,
and the filter is removed. It’s not easy to digest the reality--this war
is not for democracy or against terrorism, this is an imperial war.
DO YOU think some immigrants come with the feeling that they would like
to serve in the military to prove their loyalty?
I DON’T think that’s the engine that drives people to join. It’s more a
self-justification--one of the things you tell yourself that sounds
noble and idealistic as a reason to join. I think the bottom line
always comes down to lack of options.
Because if you’re from Mexico, but you come from an
upper-middle-class
family, and you have access to go to Harvard, or to travel and go
backpacking for a year through Europe, and you came to the U.S. because
you have so much money that you’re afraid you’ll be kidnapped in
Mexico City, then you couldn’t give a damn about being American, or about
being
a patriot or being accepted into American culture. You have what you
need, and you don’t need to take it from the military--your parents
give
it to you.
When you don’t have that, and you view the military as an option to get
those things, telling yourself that I’m just going to join because of
the money for college or because of two paychecks or because of medical
insurance, that doesn’t quite cut it.
It’s not very pretty to tell yourself I’m just doing it for the money.
No one wants to sign up to be a mercenary for four or five years. So you
say you’re doing it because you want to be a part of the
country--because you want to fight for patriotism, or freedom or
democracy.
But when you look at the socioeconomic background of almost all the
people joining the military, you find that they lack options--patriotism
isn’t the driving factor.
THE MILITARY is trying to recruit among Latinos who aren’t citizens by
tempting them with citizenship down the road.
THIS IS just a higher form of bribery based on the same lack of
options.
You have two kids--one from the U.S., one from Mexico. You can recruit
both of them because both are poor--by promising them college money, two
paychecks, medical insurance and so on. With the Latin kid, you also
have the tool of citizenship--promising them a green card or a passport
in exchange for fighting a war.
But it’s a mercenary army even if people are citizens--because the main
engine behind the recruiting is poverty.
If this were a military where people actually fought for ideas, for
democracy, the demographics would reflect that. You would have people
from all classes in society. But this military feeds on poverty.
There’s an extreme hypocrisy, though, when the U.S. military recruits
people without citizenship or residency papers. Usually, they’re the
children of undocumented immigrants. And here you have a government that
feeds on these people, while criminalizing their parents or even
themselves.
They pay taxes, and they can make the “ultimate sacrifice” for this
“country”--because they’re not really fighting for the country; in
reality, they’re fighting for corporations. They can’t vote, they can’t
run for office, they can’t be president, and in many places, they can’t
be cops or work for the post office. But they can die for this country.
It’s a huge hypocrisy. They expect the ultimate sacrifice from them, but
they don’t give them the same benefits as everybody else.
DO YOU think that U.S. intervention abroad creates the conditions of
poverty and human rights abuses that drive many immigrants to come to
the U.S.?
ABSOLUTELY. IN most poor countries that people leave in search of a
better life, you have the complicity of puppet governments set up by the
U.S., which do all the damage--through their oppression and unfair
policies. American and Western corporations ransack the natural
resources, impoverishing the people and causing the migration to the
U.S.
When you have hardheaded dictators that turn against their masters, like
in the case of Saddam Hussein, you no longer have the ability to
manipulate that government to allow your corporations to exploit that
country and exploit the natural resources.
Then you call in the military for an invasion, and the U.S. military
directly makes the country safe for corporate exploitation--and in the
process, impoverishes the people. It’s an extension of the same policy
enforced by different means--that is, war and occupation. But it’s the
same struggle, the same injustice, and it’s the same system behind
it.
RACISM ALSO plays a part both in U.S. wars and in the politicians’
opposition to immigrants.
I THINK racism is another tool that they use. It’s not a natural
reaction for humans to hate and kill other human beings. You have to
create divisions--to plant the seeds of hatred, anger, frustration.
When the Katrina disaster happened, the U.S. government handed out all
these billion-dollar contracts to companies, which, instead of hiring
the locals who were unemployed and homeless, brought in undocumented
workers.
That created a conflict between the Mexican workers and the people from
New Orleans, and now you have all this racial division that helps the
government get away with a criminal policy. They can pay lower wages and
exploit the Mexican workers because these people have no voice
whatsoever--anything happens, and they can get deported. They have no
rights and no say in the matter.
In Iraq, it’s a different scenario, but it’s still the same principle.
You don’t just go there and automatically hate the Iraqis. There has to
be an element of racism and anger and frustration that is created.
And you have to look at it not only in terms of the relationship between
U.S. soldiers and Iraqis, but also in terms of the relationship between
Iraqis and Iraqis.
My mother just came back from Spain, and she met an Iraqi woman there
whose entire family was killed at an American checkpoint. This woman is
Catholic, and she told my mom how the division between Shia and Sunni
and Kurds that people talk about here and in the West in general didn’t
exist before.
Sure, there were differences in religion and perhaps some cultural
differences and some ethnic differences, particularly when it comes to
the Kurds, but nothing out of the ordinary. These people still married
one another--for instance, there are families with Sunnis and Shia in
them.
But now, with all this division being created, that creates instability.
It gives the military the ability to get away with their crimes. Why?
Because there’s a “need” for the military to be there, unleashing
oppression and injustice.
It’s a pretty strong connection to the situation in the U.S.--and it’s a
tool that imperialist powers have used throughout history.
Another argument that points to the use of racism in terms of justifying
imperial intervention is the commonly used idea that an occupying force
can’t leave a country because its people will just kill one another.
This is a very racist view that says that we’re the civilized ones, and
you need us here for you to respect life, to respect one another, to be
able to govern yourselves in the future. This is an argument that has
always been made, and has hardly ever been true.
WHAT DO you think about the potential to wed the issues that are taken
up by the antiwar and immigrant rights movements?
I THINK it’s great that people are coming together, and I think that
people are also beginning to see the connections.
For instance, I went to the rally in San Francisco with the
Peregrinación por la Paz [Latino March for Peace], and when we all
converged outside Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office, people were making
the connections between the immigrant rights struggle, the
counter-recruitment struggle and the out-of-Iraq struggle. People were
saying how the government wants to claim that we’re criminals, and yet
you want to recruit us to fight in the military.
These movements aren’t separate from another, and that’s very important.
Former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter said that the
antiwar movement needs to be laser-focused on being antiwar, and not
talking about other issues. I think that’s a mistake, and that’s one of
the things that we have to appreciate about both the antiwar and
immigrant rights movements.
They’re not getting trapped by this tunnel vision--just looking to take
care of their own grievances and then go home. They’re being more
analytical and going after the broader evil, the broader injustice.
They’re realizing that it’s not just a matter of Latinos being
criminalized for looking for a better standard of living, but that it
also has to do with imperialism--that it has to do with a chronic state
of social injustice in this country and throughout the world.
The fact that both movements are making these connections is crucial.
This time around, we have the opportunity to not simply go after the war
or go after anti-immigrant policies, but to go after the larger system.
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