http://counterpunch.org/philion05062006.html
"The spirit and tactics of the Fordham 9 are seen in today's activism against military recruitment as a means to pressure the US to end its bloody war and occupation of Iraq. In the Twin Cities there have emerged two tactics; the first is seen in the citywide protests against high school and university campuses that culminated in a large rally of students against military recruitment on campus at the University of Minnesota. This protest took place as part of a nationwide protest against the ongoing US military occupation of Iraq and highlighted the role of recruiters in seeking out poor and/or minority youth to serve as canon fodder for that adventure. The intensity of such protests reflects the potential for directly and concretely confronting how this war and war generally shapes and reproduces inequalities of race and class under US capitalism.
The other tactic has shown itself in the form of a protest against military recruitment on Hamline University's campus where students and faculty organized to disallow military recruiters from their campus. However, the motivations for this departed from the nationwide antiwar movement, with a focus instead on the military's blatant disregard for university diversity provisions that prohibit organizations that utilize campus resources from discriminating on the basis of race, creed, gender, sexuality, etc. Diversity and the rights of minorities within the military are not unimportant issues, and certainly leftists should affirm such rights strongly. Nonetheless, it is odd that, at a time of massive death and injury in Iraq being brought to Iraqis by the illegal US invasion and occupation, this should be the primary issue and so much in the forefront at this point. If anything the major problem with the military right now might well be an in-your-face affirmative action policy of actively recruiting poor and minorities to serve in the Iraq quagmire. When the goal of forcing the military to recognize gays and lesbians as full citizen soldiers is met and protest movements then welcome the military back to campuses, what is the message conveyed aside from acceptance of military recruitment on campuses in a time of ever mounting war atrocities /as long as diversity goals are met/?
The spirit of the 1986 anti-CIA recruitment protest that guided the Fordham 9 and other nationwide protests in that period can only be replicated if the relationship between current protests against recruitment by the US military on American high school and college campuses is linked as ones against the military's role in reinforcing the political-economy of capitalist inequality and empire building. These issues are perhaps even more urgent today than they were in 1986, with a situation that requires even sharper and more nuanced analyses of an empire building strategy that embraces the language of global diversity and rights as the US seeks to rationalize its mission as a newfangled kind of human rights imperialism. With any luck, the Fordham 9 action will seem like a Sunday picnic compared with future protests on college campuses against military recruitment and US wars in the Middle East and elsewhere today and to come."
*Stephen Philion* is an assistant professor of sociology at St. Cloud State University in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, teaching social theory, sociology of race, and China and Globalization. His writings can be found at his website <http://stephenphilion.efoliomn2.com/>. He can be reached at: stephen_philion at yahoo.com <mailto:stephen_philion at yahoo.com>