This is an interesting article on the tactics used by military recruiters. However, what I found more interesting was the history that is taught in the recruiting material. It is false and could not be
published as scholarship or be considered serious history. Is the military habitually misrepresenting US military history to both its recruits and to its active duty soldiers? This would explain why our
soldiers tend to restate very black and white and oversimplified America first opinions. It brings up the question of how many even understand the history of the country they believe they are representing.
http://codepinkalert.org/article.php?id=3911#nochild1
The textbooks are full of reactionary militaristic, propaganda
JROTC is a Propaganda Tool that distorts U.S. History to a captive audience of 500,000 American school children yearly. “What did you learn in school today?” “I learned that might makes right and the U.S. is never wrong.”
See the Army’s JROTC textbook to read this outrageous distortion of truth
(allow 30 seconds to download)
Examine the following brief survey of historical inaccuracies:
The words in quotes are taken from the standard Army JROTC text used in classrooms across the country.
Most high school history texts in use today discuss U.S. imperialism when discussing the Spanish American War of 1898, not the JROTC text:
“America went to war on the side of Cuba to help that country gain its freedom from Spain…. According to the terms of the peace treaty, signed in December 1898, Spain gave Guam,
the Philippines, and Puerto Rico to the United States and agreed to give up its claim to Cuba. Cuba became a free nation in 1902… The Spanish – American War helped to dim the sour feelings between the North and South as all Americans united together to fight for one cause. The war also proved to the rest of the world that the United States was once again a truly united and powerful nation.”
World War I: The JROTC text fails to mention that the Lusitania was heavily armed or that the US regularly used passenger ships to sell ammunition to the British:
“Then, in May 1915, a German U-boat (submarine) sank the British liner Lusitania resulting in the loss of 1,198 lives, including 128 Americans. The sinking of the Lusitania outraged the American public, and it lead the U.S. government to officially protest the German action. However, German submarines
continued to sink ships with American cargo.”
JROTC’s treatment of the Korean War is completely distorted. Korea’s first President, U.S. – intalled Syngman Rhee, was a ruthless dictator. He is associated with the Daejun and Suwon Massacres that claimed 80,000 lives. Rhee is also implicated in the assassinations of countless political rivals. The Koreans despised him and he was chased out in 1960. Also, he U.S. never “withdrew from South Korea.” We’re still there!
“When the Soviet Union evacuated North Korea in 1948, they left behind a Communist puppet government that did not allow free elections to unify Korea. In 1949, the Americans withdrew from South Korea and left a democratic government led by Syngman Rhee
The Gulf of Tonkin incident was fabricated by the Johnson administration to provide a pretext for war, not dissimilar from President Bush’s lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq:
“The event that marked the turning point in the American policy in Vietnam was the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964. Two U.S. destroyers were conducting routine intelligence-gathering patrols in international waters when North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked them.”
The U.S. murdered thousands while invading the Dominican Republic four times in the 20th century to protect American corporate interests:
“When a revolt broke out in the Dominican Republic, its government requested U.S. assistance. Fearing that pro-Communist rebels supplied by Castro might overthrow the Dominican government, President Johnson sent in the Marines and the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division. The Americans remained in the Dominican Republic for a year, acting as a peace-keeping force until the political situation settled down.”
Obtain a copy of JROTC textbooks in use in your schools and tell school administrators you object to this reactionary, military propaganda
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July 30, 2008 at 5:18 pm
batguano101
A young man who does not have what it takes to perform military service is not likely to have what it takes to make a living.
–John F. Kennedy–
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
–George Orwell–
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
–John Stewart Mill–