-Caveat Lector- Here we were all worried that HR 3598 was a reinstatement of the draft waiting to happen. This is an angle that hadn't occurred to me, and it's far more chilling than the draft, imo - especially in our current "homeland security" climate...
Keep your eye on that bill: http://thomas.loc.gov/ (for those that are not familiar with it, this bill was introduced in December 2001, a search on "hr 3598" at this link will give you all the info on it. It has been sitting in committee for the past year, waiting to "ripen".) ----- Original Message ----- Compulsory Boot Camp as Public Relations By Tabatha Static Back in December, the Universal Military Training and Service Act (HR 3598) was proposed in the House of Representatives. If approved, a new law would be created that forces ALL males between 18 and 22 years old to submit to military training and education for either six or twelve months (depending upon what the Secretary of War thinks, in this case Donald Rumsfeld). Registered and documented religious conscientious objectors would perform civilian alternative service, but only after completing boot camp and combat training; high school dropouts must serve an additional six months. Women are not forced into this program, but they would be strongly encouraged to volunteer for duty as well. When I first heard about this, I thought that it was the first step in reactivating the military draft. But as I began to read up on it, I saw that even some of the supporters of HR 3598 have gone on record to say that a return to a military draft is not necessary, and that a draft could even be detrimental to the military. And another thing: HR 3598's military training and service is supposed to last from between 6 and 12 months, which is not really enough time to make the average 18 year-old ready for combat in Iraq, Colombia, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, or wherever else in the Southern hemisphere that the Executive Branch is sending people to kill and die. So what the hell is really going on here? The objective of HR 3598 is to militarize hundreds of thousands of young people for up to a year, and then release them back into civilian society with pro-military (in other words, pro-war) attitudes. This may sound paranoid at first, but think about it: over the last year, we^ve been told to get used to seeing armed soldiers on city street corners, in airports, and on trains. The Pentagon and the White House are desperate to brainwash civilian society as much as possible, as they have already been doing with ambitious youth publicity programs that include slick Army of One television commercials, internet webcam propaganda, and free computer video wargames, as well as blockbuster Hollywood movies that spew inane patriotism and demonize people who live in the so-called Third World. HR 3598 is a six-month Pentagon pep rally and a brainwashing session into the ridiculous Homeland Security cult. It would allow rigid warmongering hierarchies unprecedented influence over the socialization of young people, dehumanizing and desensitizing them into becoming submissive, mindless patriots who follow orders without question. HR 3598 is a Pentagon public-relations operation with a captive audience robbed of at least six months of their lives. In many ways, HR 3598 is just one more variation on the subtle methods used to influence the civilian population to be less suspicious of the military, like we^ve seen in high schools with the JROTC, military aptitude (ASVAB) testing, and youth mentoring by Army recruiters. The Pentagon knows that starting up the draft again would anger a lot of people immediately, and this is why they have spent so much time hanging around schools and calling up high-school seniors before graduation, telling many low-income kids that joining up with the National Guard is the only way to earn money for college.To make the whole thing less threatening to high school kids, they point out how the majority of U.S. military operations in the last fifteen years have been low-risk tactics like high-tech, high-altitude bombing or getting locals in these faraway countries to do the real fighting with guidance from U.S. military advisors. As the current regime commits more troops and weapons to its petro- imperial adventures across the globe in order to erect the New World Order at gunpoint, it will become increasingly necessary to massage people^s attitudes domestically and internationally to accept it. After all, it is obvious that the Bush-Cheney Administration has put a great deal of time and effort into engineering public opinion: the Pentagon's proposed Office of Strategic Information was meant to spread disinformation that would bolster U.S. defense policy; the U.S. Department of State has an Office of Public Diplomacy whose job it is to convince people that the U.S. is not a corrupt, war-mongering empire driven by oil companies and investment banks; the White House recently opened an Office of Global Communications to provide spin directly from the West Wing. If it becomes law, and young people are packed off to boot camp to have their behavior modified by systematic humiliation, desensitization, and militarism before being mixed back into the general population, HR 3598 will have served its purpose as just one more public relations campaign designed to make the U.S. war and the war machine as something logical, inevitable, and normal, instead of an outrageous abomination that must be stopped. http://free.freespeech.org/mn/daybreak!/article2.html <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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