Army Experience Recruits Children

Army Experience Center’s Bad Experience: Turns out Training Kids to Kill Not Popular with Public

(Humanist, Dec. 2009 ) “This is so cool! This is so cool!” a thirteen-year-old boy repeated as he squeezed rounds from a real M-16, picking off “enemy combatants” in a video game while perched atop a real Army Humvee. “I just came to the mall to skateboard but everyone said this was pretty cool. I just had to try it and it’s great!”

The person reporting on this youthful enthusiasm was Pat Elder, who serves on the Steering Committee of the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth. Elder also described young teenagers congratulating each other for “killing ragheads” and “wiping out hajis.”

All of this fun went on at the Army Experience Center (AEC), a 14,500-square-foot “virtual educational facility” in the Franklin Mills Mall in a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The U.S. Army opened the center in August 2008 and planned to run it for two years as a pilot program. If the center proved able to recruit as many new soldiers as five ordinary recruiting stations, the Army planned to build them nationally. The AEC cost more than $12 million to design and construct, but of course the Army spends several billion dollars a year on recruitment.

Peace activists and concerned citizens from the surrounding area and up and down the East Coast quickly formed a campaign dubbed “Shut Down the AEC” (shutdowntheaec.net). Through a series of nonviolent protests and demonstrations, some of them involving arrests, protesters raised concerns and generated a flood of negative media attention for the Army’s latest recruitment tool. As a result, the Pentagon called on Donna Miles, a writer for the American Services Press Service, the Pentagon’s propaganda arm. Miles had already published soothing articles following scandals at Abu Ghraib, Walter Reed, and various incidents involving civilian casualties. As Elder points out, “Either Miles is incredibly prolific, with 229 articles attributed to her this year, or she’s a pseudonym for several under the employ of the Pentagon.”

Miles reported on the AEC thusly: “Thirteen-year-old Sean Yaffee, for example, doesn’t see himself joining the military. But he’s becoming another regular at the center, where he can play the same computer games he has at home, but in the company of his buddies. Yaffee said he’s learned a lot about the Army at the center. ‘It just tells you about the Army experience, but it doesn’t pressure you,’ he said. ‘I’m really just here to have a good time.’”

Sweet, but the public wasn’t buying it and the protests continued. On September 12, 2009, a crowd of 250 activists marched to the AEC in opposition to the use of public dollars to teach children—in a quasi-public-space—that killing can be fun, while also recruiting eighteen-year-olds to engage in the real thing. This time, police arrested six protesters and one journalist. The journalist, Cheryl Biren, wasn’t with the protesters but was picked out of the crowd, apparently because of her professional camera.

Days prior to this long-planned and publicly announced protest, the Army preemptively announced that it would likely close the AEC and not open any others in shopping malls, as had been planned. The reason? Are you ready to hear this?

By their own admission, the Army doesn’t need any more recruits because the bad economy has driven up recruitment significantly.

Now, the truth is that the economy is lousy, unemployment is rising, and the military has cut back on other recruitment expenses, the stated reason being the rise in recruitment that comes with a lousy economy.

The whopper of a lie is that the Army could ever be satisfied with its recruitment numbers. And the glaring omission was the protests. While the Army is cutting back in recruitment on some areas, it’s still spending billions of dollars per year, and it is spending those billions where they’ll be most effective, which means, in part, where they will generate the least opposition and negative attention. Early reports, prior to the protests, were that the AEC was succeeding in its recruitment goals. Following the protests, the AEC mysteriously became ineffective.

Stories in the Associated Press and other news services reported the Army’s likely decision and transcribed the Army’s explanation, noting the protests as an afterthought lower in the reports. Media outlets that support the spread of democracy, as opposed to the spread of militarism under the banner of democracy, would have told this story quite differently and used it as a lesson showing that citizens can have an impact on what their government does.

The Army won’t announce our victories for us. We have to claim them. We the people drove Alberto Gonzales out of town, made the Iraq War illegal by turning the United Nations against it, and we may have scared George W. Bush away from pardoning his subordinates’ crimes. We the people have turned many Americans against wars of empire, and we have made the Army Experience Center a bad experience for the Army.

Seven people were arrested on September 12, six of whom were risking arrest: Debra Sweet, Elaine Brower, Sarah Wellington, Joan Pleune, Beverly Rice, and Richard Marini. The seventh was Biren, who was covering the event for OpEdNews. She didn’t have a shirt or a sign or anything associated with the activists. She made it clear that she was a journalist. Then she and the other five women spent the night in the Roundhouse, the central jail in Philadelphia, from which they were released into the street at 5 a.m. the next morning, denied permission to use their cell phones until after the doors had slammed behind them.

Biren told me: “The images that are most critical to me as a photographer and reporter are those at the end, of protesters being arrested. Trying to prevent me from (or punishing me for) taking them reminds me of Bush not allowing photos of the caskets of dead bodies coming home from war. The way in which they try to prevent us from recording this kind of news in the making is shameful. It’s anti-democracy.”

The reporter continued: “The action against me was violent and vengeful. A police officer rushed me from the side suddenly
and pulled me forcefully into the line of protesters. Later, another officer had to physically pull this officer off of me because he was so incredibly aggressive and enraged. I’m convinced it was because I was taking pictures of the arrests.”

An arraignment for charges of criminal conspiracy and failure to disperse was scheduled for September 23 for the six women. Restoration of our rights to freedom of speech, assembly, and press hangs in the balance. But we can nonetheless chalk up a victory against the mighty war machine. (By David Swanson)

Source: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/47058

We Will Not Be Complicit: Saying No to the Army Experience Center

(THE INDYPENDENT) “We refuse to be educated for a defense that deforms the defenders and that which they defend.” So read the banner we carried with us as we marched with 200 peace activists to face-off with police and military personnel at the Franklin Mills Mall in Northeast Philadelphia on Saturday, Sept. 12.

We were there to shut down the Army Experience Center (AEC), the Pentagon’s $12 million experiment in the use of video games and modern media to indoctrinate youth into the military’s culture of violence.

The AEC looks like a giant classroom nestled in the heart of the heavily-trafficked mall, but instead of desks, the room is filled with cutting edge TV monitors, video game consoles and hypermodern “mission simulators,” each one a tool in the Pentagon’s fight for the hearts and minds of the United States’ malleable youth.

On any given day at the AEC, young people ages 13 and older gather to play the Pentagon’s in-house war games: each participant gets a taste of the “army experience,” although the death, destruction and pain of war are conveniently sanitized, and no one ever leaves the AEC with post traumatic stress disorder. Pre-pubescent boys are locked in a macabre orgy of mediated violence. The veteran soldiers who staff the recruitment center look on, encouraging the gathered youth as they kill “enemy combatants” on the TV screens and promising them similar thrills if only they join up. These are our country’s modern recruitment techniques—violence is fun, war is only a game, and even children can get a piece of the action.

In 1955, in the wake of World War II and the Korean War, the American Friends Service Committee published its seminal peace manifesto titled “Speak Truth to Power,” saying this of modern civilization: “Acceptance of the doctrine of violence is so widespread that man is becoming hardened to mass extermination, and indifferent to mass human suffering. Indeed, man’s indifference to violence is almost as disturbing a symptom of our time as his readiness to practice it. This is an age of violence.”

And what can we say of humankind today? The stifling heat of the Cold War has subsided, but we are faced with a new and more mysterious enemy—the Terrorist—and once again the youth of this nation are being educated for a defense which will surely deform them, just as it long ago deformed whatever it is we are supposed to be defending.

Standing next to us in the crowd at the AEC on Saturday were veterans who had seen first-hand the violence of war; the hyper-technic realist aesthetic of the AEC games was an astonishing affront to their lived experience. They knew that video games could never approximate the reality of war. How can we—as a nation, as a culture—so carelessly and cruelly render the suffering of war?

We wanted it to stop, and so 200 peace activists, including members of Iraq and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, World Can’t Wait and the Granny Peace Brigade, stood outside of that inhumane and aseptic space where kids learn how to kill. We were angry and alive and our loud, messy anger—blaring over bullhorns and plastered on posters—was in service of humanity instead of the culture of death promoted by our country’s political and military machinery.

After hours of protesting, six protesters and an independent journalist were handcuffed and taken away, and the rest of us were pushed onto the street by a wall of approaching policemen. We were silenced, but we’d had our say. Seven people paid dearly for our right to speak: they were charged with “criminal conspiracy” and “failure to obey a police command” and spent the night in jail. But who is surprised? The government prefers a passive populace to dissent.

Our culture is militarized. The government glorification of violence—whether in the news media or by way of the violence-exalting video games which it funds (America’s Army, the Halo series, etc.)—coerces us to accept the unprecedented levels of destruction unleashed by our global dominance.  The critical theorist Herbert Marcuse called this the “pre-established harmony”: the U.S. government produces both the culture of violence and the violence itself, which join together in a vicious cycle that precludes the possibility of peace. Our social cohesion is dependent on the enemy at our door; waging of war stabilizes our society.

The omnipresent culture and the tools of war—which haunt us from cradle to grave—eradicate our hopes for peace, deform our imaginations. Still, we refuse our government’s terrorization of our imaginations, its colonization of our minds. We marched to the AEC, sat down on the ground and told them to “Shut it down!” And we remembered Dr. King’s admonition, hoping it was not in vain: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” (By Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot and Jimmy Tobias)

Source: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/41008