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I get ignored by a lot by people in Milwaukee that know me and my justice and peace concerns. I have often been labeled by that is “my issue”. However, outside sources, be it the editors of the local newspaper or editors of the Catholic Worker newspaper in New York City, who do not really know me, at times do not ignore me and my words. Today I heard from the local newspaper that my letter to the editor that I wrote in my posting last night was being published in the paper and the national Catholic Worker newspaper came out today with my article in it about Dorothy Day, co-founder of Catholic Worker and ROTC, military training, on Catholic campuses. They made some minor changes in the article and the editors changed my title but basically kept the article intact. It is good to get a pat on back once and awhile and makes me feel my conscience is not the only one saying these things. Rejects, like me, do get listen to. Here is the article as it was printed in Catholic Worker for October – November.
Study for Peace, Not For War
When Dorothy Day died in 1980, the US military was still in the process of moving away from the Selective Service draft system to the militarization of the education system and installing, therein, bases for recruiting. Also, it was still perfecting the teaching of killing based on reflex action, aka killing without conscience. Today, the military has perfected the militarization of our education system and has quietly installed this reflexive killing into its training programs.
In the April 1948 Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day wrote the following: “Some of us at the Catholic Worker have been going to the colleges and distributing a leaflet against UMT [Universal Military Training]. And most everyone, to whom we gave the leaflet, has expressed acceptance of UMT and has thought it a good thing. There are no antiwar organizations in the colleges these days, at least not in the Catholic colleges. There is a sense of the inevitable, that war is to come, that morality has nothing to do with it, that it is a question of licking Russia before she gets too strong, before she gets the atomic bomb.”
In the above quote if you substitute DMS, Departments of Military Sciences for UMT Universal Military Training and terrorist for Russia you get a view of today’s Catholic universities and colleges, with no antiwar organizations and a sense of the inevitable, endless wars. However, the military training in Catholic colleges and universities is not that of Dorothy Days’ time.
Dorothy Day was one of the early resisters in the struggle to remove military training from Catholic universities and colleges. Many Catholic colleges and universities desired to bestow awards and honorary degrees on Dorothy Day during her lifetime. She respectfully refused such honors from Catholic universities. Among her reasons for not accepting honorary degrees were humility and her strong opposition to US military presence and influence on campuses. To Father Leo McLaughlin SJ of Fordham University she declined, writing: “The existence of Reserved Officer Training Corps (ROTC) in the colleges and universities makes it impossible for me to accept.” To the President of Catholic University in April 1971 she wrote: “I have had to refuse seven colleges and universities for the reason that they had ROTC and in one way or another were closely allied to the Federal Government. In many areas they receive research grants, many that have to do with war and defense.” (See Dorothy’s explanation for
accepting the Laetare Medal from Notre Dame in Dorothy Day: Writings from Commonweal, Liturgical Press. Chapter 38).
After the Vietnam War, many colleges and universities, both private and public, refused to have military training on campus. The Department of Defense (DOD) developed a new strategy for the militarization of education. For 4th to 8th grade students the DOD developed Starbase the “youth outreach program for raising the interest in learning and improving the knowledge and skills of our nation’s at risk youth so that we may develop a highly educated and skilled American workforce who can meet the advanced technological requirements of the Department of Defense.” The program provides students with twenty-five hours of stimulating experiences at National Guard, Navy, Marine, Air Force Reserve, Army and Air Force bases across the nation.
The Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) was greatly expanded after Vietnam. There are now over 3000 JROTC high school programs for Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force “to foster leadership, patriotism, appreciation, training and recruiting for the US military.” For example, in Chicago there are over forty military academies or JROTC programs in high schools, mostly in areas where low income people of color reside.
The Department of Defense took a different direction in officer military training programs in colleges and universities. During the time of the military draft, 80% of officers were trained at military academies and only 20% in colleges and universities. Now it is reversed. The schools that elected for military training on campus, called host schools, had their programs expanded. Other universities in the region, called partner schools, had recruiting offices on campus but sent their students interested in military scholarships to the host school for classes and training programs.
Even at this low level of participation, universities and colleges, both large and small, from Harvard and Stanford to the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, were reluctant to have military recruiting on campus. It was all changed by an act of Congress in 1996.
The Solomon Amendment is a federal law that allows the Secretary of Defense to deny federal grants (including research grants) to institutions of higher education if they prohibit or prevent ROTC or military recruitment on campus. The law was challenged by law schools in colleges and universities opposed to the presence of military recruiters on campus. In 2006 the Supreme Court upheld the law on recruiting.
Many Catholic colleges and universities became partner schools and sent recruited students to host schools like Marquette University. For example, the Air Force ROTC program at Marquette hosts students from thirteen colleges and universities. As of 2012 there were twenty-three Catholic Universities and colleges that still had military training on campus. Two Catholic Universities, Marquette University and Notre Dame, host all three DOD departments. This is actually a reduction of Catholic universities hosting military training and might seem like a victory for Dorothy Day and other ROTC resisters, until one looks at the content of the military training. A study of soldiers in World War II, published in 1947, found that only one of four soldiers fired weapons directly at the enemy. There was a natural reluctance to kill another human that the military sought to overcome. After scientific study of the brain, the US military developed a way of firing a weapon that bypasses a person’s conscience. It is called reflex killing or reflexive killing. The best explanation of this training technique is described in a paper presented to the Joint Services Conference on Professional Ethics in Washington, DC, January 27–28, 2000 by Captain Pete Kilner, instructor at the US Military Academy.
In a paper titled “Military Leaders’ Obligation to Justify Killing in War” he says: “Training which drills soldiers on how to kill without explaining to them why it is morally permissible for them to do so is harmful to them, yet that is the current norm. Modern combat training conditions soldiers to act reflexively to stimuli—such as fire commands, enemy contact, or the sudden appearance of a “target”—and this maximizes soldiers’ lethality, but it does so by bypassing their moral autonomy. Soldiers are conditioned to act without considering the moral repercussions of their actions; they are enabled to kill without making the conscious decision to do so. In and of itself, such training is appropriate and morally permissible. Battles are won by killing the enemy, so military leaders should strive to produce the most efficient killers.
“The problem, however, is that soldiers who kill reflexively in combat will likely one day reconsider their actions reflectively. If they are unable to justify to themselves the fact that they killed another human being, they will likely—and understandably—suffer enormous guilt. This guilt manifests itself as post-traumatic stress disorder, and it has damaged the lives of thousands of men who performed their duty in combat.”
The military command refuses to morally justify reflexive killing but it is still taught. Due to this method of training, the number of soldiers firing weapons at “targets” has increased from 25% to 98%.
Members of the Catholic Worker were traditionally leaders in the movement to remove DOD military training from Catholic campuses. However, over the years the resistance efforts of Catholic Workers and other war resisters have taken different directions: protests against drones, nuclear bomb facilities and military spending. This is understandable and good. However, I believe, with select schools developing large departments of military sciences and the teaching of reflex killing, Dorothy Day would have directed more of her resistance efforts at this concern. Catholic universities teaching war, violence and killing now promote the endless wars we currently face.
When Dorothy Day heard the Marquette University archives had applied for a grant for the Catholic Worker collection from the Rockefeller Foundation, she informed Bill Miller, her biographer, that if Marquette accepted the grant “no more papers will go to them until we get letters assuring us this will be not be accepted” (recorded in her diary on February 4, 1976). Six days later she reported receiving a “terse letter” from Miller pledging “not to use any Rockefeller funds for archives or his work.”
What would Dorothy Day do with her archives at Marquette if she knew that the University was one of two Catholic Universities in the country to host military training on campus for all three branches of the military and was teaching soldiers reflex killing? Perhaps she would consider disassociating herself from the archives if the libraries received “blood money” from the DOD. But we are just speculating. Sadly not many Catholics would stand with her today in her strong beliefs that Catholic universities should not host military training. Even though it brings in great amounts of money it contributes to militarizing our entire education system.
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