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1068: NNOMY News: Third Quarter 2023
Stopping War Where it Begins: In Schools

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Many cultures teach the nation-state as defined by the loyalty of its citizenry to protect it against real or imagined enemies. Much of this ideology is imparted to children in schools through state-supportive naratives built often around magical ideas that the sanctity of the state is divinely sanctioned by our gods, whether those supreme entities be Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist.

The lessons imparted in our educational systems within the liberal economic conception of the "democratic" states of the "west", are that the natural freedoms of the priviledged permit them the right to impose service upon average citizens to defend the political or commericial interests of their wealth when powerful interests are threatened by competing states. These appeals are couched in nationalistic rhetoric to defend the nation.

Unfortunately, much what remains hidden in these lessons for children and youth, who are soon to be adult members of their respective nations, is that much of what binds the suprastate nationalism together are private financial interests whether they be mated to extractive industries or in industries that support the defense of the nation itself. The irony of much of these industries are that they are not bound to any single national country themselves and are often multinational in scope as are their investors who benefit from this wealth creation.Who pay the price in sacrifice are the relatively powerless citizenry.

The Third Quarter NNOMY news visits again the subject of the military indoctrination built into our educational system, from kinder to college, that reinforces both the mythological and practical narratives that serve the wealth of the nation. In this moment of escalating wars in Ukraine against Russia and with Palestine struggling with their own national autonomy within Israel, we broach the subject of how many ways we teach our children to accept the inevitability of war and the necesity of spending the commons to finance the costs of engaging in them, even at the risk of our own collective demise.

Below are stories about indoctrinations to collective violence and accounts within our network of activists challenging that indoctrination by developing new ways of developing educational practice in support of peace.

Humanity is not likely to extricate itself from perpetual warfare anytime soon or neither embrace state violence's corollary impacts on planetary environmental exhaustion until it dedicates itself to teaching our nation's children collective peace making. Thankfully more are rising to the cause of demanding and teaching peace as the world spirals into global conflicts again.

#counter-recruitment | #nnomypeace | #peacefulcareers | #demilitarize |  www.nnomy.org

Federal Legislation Seeks to Restrict High School Junior ROTC

July-September 2023 / Rick Jahnkow / Draft NOtices - A bill has been introduced in the U.S. Senate that, if passed, would impose significant new restrictions on the military’s high school Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) program.

 The idea for the legislation (S.B. 1966) gained traction following the publication of several exposés of JROTC that appeared in The New York Times, beginning in July 2022.

Titled the JROTC Safety Act of 2023, the bill would require the Department of Defense to report on any allegations that an instructor sexually harassed or assaulted a student participating in the program. Systems would also have to be instituted to monitor for and prevent any issues of discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity or disability..

Christian González Martell: Be well. Be Careful

August 08, 2023 / Sonia Santiago Hernández / Mothers Against the War - Christian González Martell is a 39-year-old Puerto Rican young man, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who deprived his father of his life on May 30, 2022 during a psychotic episode. . At the first hearing on September 14, the judge determined that he was not prosecutable at the time. Despite this, he has been subjected to several hearings in court. His trial will begin on September 21st.

His family had tried to get him treated at the Veterans Hospital in Rio Piedras upon his return from the military.. His mother, Romilda Martell, tells us that Christian has multiple mental health diagnoses: schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress syndrome and others, result of his participation in wars. The treatment of him at the Veterans Administration was substandard and irresponsible. They only assisted him sporadically and virtually. He exhibited extreme paranoid behavior, poor judgment, hallucinations. Mrs. Martell asked for support and adequate treatment for her son, to no avail. Today she awaits trial for murder.

 
Congress, do not buy more death with my tax dollars

October 19, 2023 / Aura Kanegis / AFSC / Religion News Service - I first traveled to Gaza in 2014 in the aftermath of Operation Protective Edge, a 51-day Israeli bombing campaign that killed nearly 2,200 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians. Walking the streets with fellow staff members of the American Friends Service Committee, our colleague pointed out empty spaces in the city blocks — sudden, square vacancies like missing teeth extracted by F-16s.

Media portrayals of Gaza are so devoid of humanity — and often facts — that it is unsurprising that the horrifying violence we saw take place on Oct. 7 has been spoken of as “unprovoked.” It is easy to forget our tax dollars — over $3 billion to Israel every year — have been directly supporting war crimes, sowing seeds of anger and war that will yield bitter fruit for generations to come.

After 12 Years of Being Taught to Hate, I’m Going to Prison Today to Say ‘No’

September 6, 2022 / Naveh Shabtai Levine / Haaretz | Opinion - At Memorial Day ceremonies, they teach us that every soldier who died due to the bloody cycle of the Israeli occupation is a hero who “in his death commanded us to live.” They teach us that everyone who fell in battle did so for the sake of the country, rather than because of it and because of its policy. In civics lessons they teach us that the State of Israel is a Jewish and democratic country – just like that, plain and simple, as a clear and eternal axiom.

The militarization reaches its peak in high school – soldiers visit the schools, we have hours of preparatory discussions about the army, the schools prepare us to be good soldiers. They aren’t satisfied with theory alone, they also provide us with practical experience in the Gadna, a program that prepares high school students for military service. They send us to Poland to learn about the Holocaust, but there we have to raise the Israeli flag “to reinforce the sense of obligation to the continuation of Jewish life and the sovereign existence of the State of Israel.” They teach us in the schools about a fictional, unilateral situation in which the Palestinian people are a nation of terrorists who hate us for no reason, while we are only trying to defend our home.

 
Children of War: The War on Terror and the Battle for Young Minds

February 23, 2023 / Cathrine Lutz, Andrea Mazzarino / Tom Dispatch - That week, my children and others in schools across the county spent hours in their classrooms celebrating Veterans Day through a range of activities meant to honor our armed forces. My kindergartener typically made a paper crown, with six colorful peaks for the six branches of service, that framed her little face. Kids in older grades wrote letters to soldiers thanking them for their service.

I have no doubt that if such schoolchildren were ever shown photos in class of what war actually does to kids their age, including of dead and wounded elementary school students and their parents and grandparents in Afghanistan and Iraq, there would be an uproar. And there would be another, of course, if they were told that “their” troops were more likely to be attacked (as in sexually assaulted) by one of their compatriots than by any imaginable enemy. I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, one of the most progressive and highly educated counties in the country and even here, war, American-style, is painted as a sanitized event full of muscular young people, their emotions under control (until, of course, they aren’t).

Even here, few parents and teachers dare talk to young children about the atrocities committed by our military in our wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

 
I’m a Peace Teacher. Here’s How Brain Science Helps My Kids Handle ConflicT

Nov 14, 2019 / Linda Ryden / Social-Emotional Learning / EdSurge - I looked everywhere for a fun storybook to help me teach my younger students about what happened in their brains when they were angry, but surprisingly I couldn’t find one. So I wrote “Rosie’s Brain,” a story about a little girl that helps to explain what is happening in her brain when she is angry, based on some of Dr. Siegel’s work, but also how she can use her mindfulness skills to help her calm down. Understanding your own brain and how to take care of it with mindfulness is transformational. I see it every day.

One day a new boy came into my classroom—a fifth grader who had just moved to D.C. He was angry and not really happy with his new situation. Every time I saw him he looked miserable. Usually he would come into my classroom and sit in the back with his hood up over his face. At one point he came in and lay face down on the rug, his head covered by his hood. I was at a loss so I slipped a copy of “Rosie’s Brain” under his hood.

It sat there for a bit but to my surprise, after a while I realized that he was reading it. After class he came up to me and said, “Ms. Ryden, I don’t think I have a prefrontal cortex. I’m all amygdala.” He looked so sad. We had a great talk about his brain and his feelings and I think he left feeling much better about himself. The next time he came to class he sat in the front and even smiled.

 
WRI executive statement on the escalation of violence in Israel-Palestine, October 2023

As full scale war again returns to Israel-Palestine, we turn to the WRI founding statement, that “War is a crime against humanity. I am therefore determined not to support any kind of war, and to strive for the removal of all causes of war.” 

We, as War Resisters' International executive committee, as people from different countries and territories, condemn the violence and destruction from all sides, in any way and stand in solidarity with conscientious objectors, and all those who believe in peaceful, nonviolent approaches to resolve conflicts.

 
Teacher Education Programs Are Places to Challenge Militarism in Schools

July-September 2023 / Davíd Morales / Draft NOtices - There is no doubt that teachers are key participants in the struggle against militarism in schools and society. Over the years, counter-recruitment efforts have benefited from teachers who sympathize with our mission to provide young people with an alternative point of view about military enlistment so that they can make an educated decision about their future. Teachers have invited our organization, Project YANO (Youth And Non-Military Opportunities), to their middle and high school classrooms to present students with facts about the realities of military life and war. They have helped mobilize students to speak out against predatory military recruitment practices at school sites and, thus, have played a role in successful campaigns for policies that have removed JROTC shooting ranges from campuses, restricted methods recruiters use to target students, and curbed the involuntary enrollment of students in JROTC.

 

ENDCOM.ORG: Elective Military Corps Programs in Schools Should Not Be Forced Upon Minority and Low-income Students

Utilizing the JROTC Organizing Packet

"The JROTC Organizing Packet is a resource for community activists, concerned parents, and school administrators and teachers that wish to exert pressure on local school districts or individual middle and high schools to end the practice of placing youth, primarily those targeted from economically challenged families and communities of color, into Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs without parental notification or prior student consent.

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Act to De-Escalate the Violence in Israel and Palestine

We are heartbroken by the recent violence in Israel and Gaza. As Quakers, we deeply mourn the loss of all lives and pray for those who have lost loved ones due to this latest escalation. We unequivocally condemn Hamas’ attacks and inhumane treatment of civilians and call for the immediate release of all hostages. We also condemn the indiscriminate and violent Israeli response that has already claimed hundreds of civilian lives. ‍

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