The Broken Rifle - Newsletter of War Resisters' International [No. 88, March 2011]
24 Mar 2011 — warresisters
• Oskar Castro
Every year in the United States, millions of young people are faced with the difficult challenge of figuring out what to do with their lives after they graduate from high school. For various reasons, many of them end up considering joining the US Armed Forces, but the commonality among all of those who enlist and those who don’t enlist is that they are all regularly bombarded with military recruitment propaganda pretty much from the time they are born. Whether it is on their television, their computer, at the toy store, or in their classroom, the pitch to embrace the military is everywhere.
The end of World War II saw the United States emerge as a military powerhouse due to the significant role it played in the defeat of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan. Then the Cold War materialised which meant that the perceived threat of communism by way of the powerful Soviet Union had to be met with a show of incredible force. The military propaganda machine ratcheted up and the once neutral nation was now a militaristic monstrosity with an ever-growing military industrial complex benefiting from the fear. Read more . . .
