Marine Recruiting

IT HAD TO HAPPEN. The Marines are running paid recruiting advertisements in college newspapers--in fact, there's one on page six of The Crimson today. "We challenge you," the ad read in its original form. "The challenge is leadership. If you want it, work for it. If you've got it, show us. It's one hell of a challenge. But we're looking for one hell of a man."

It's one hell of an ad. It doesn't mention the Marines' most significant activity over the last decade or so, killing Vietnamese. And it doesn't mention the real challenge the Marines had to face, the seemingly unlimited capacity for resistance of the Vietnamese people and the other peoples of revolutionary Indochina. By its wording, by its statement that only three out of 100 of us are men enough to be Marines, the ad fosters the exaltation of a virility equated with violence that helped make possible the Indochina war, as well as such comparatively minor evils as the discrimination to which women and homosexuals are subject in this country. And by its substance, by its offer of command and eventual power in an organization whose recent activities have involved carrying out an illegitimate foreign policy in an indefensible way, the ad fosters the public passivity that lets the United States continue to finance the Indochina war and encourages it to further repression elsewhere.

Of course, the advertisement doesn't address any of these issues. It's written so slickly it could be selling not an old kind of employment opportunity--killing for hire--but a new brand of toothpaste made by a large corporation like the ones J. Walter Thompson more generally sells its talents to. There's a logic to the slickness. Like the other armed forces, the Marines have been used in recent years primarily for protecting large American capitalists from the threat of democratic government in the rest of the world, from Indochina to the Dominican Republic, where Marines overthrew a freely elected government in 1965.

Although the Marines' advertising campaign hasn't hit the big time yet--the other services spend much more--there'd be nothing surprising about its doing so. It makes sense for the Marines to use marketing techniques to help protect the system that creates them.

That system--any system which can't defend itself without repressive violence on the scale used by the Marines and other armed services in Indochina--ought to be abolished. The organizations that applied the violence--the present U.S. government and its military agents as presently constituted--ought to be the first to go. No one should help them implement their aims, and no one should respond to the advertisement on page six.

The Crimson is running the advertisement because its advertising and editorial policies are determined separately. A majority of its executive board believes that all advertisers should continue to have access to The Crimson's columns unless their advertising is blatantly false, malicious or offensive to the general public, and that this advertisement does not fall into those categories. We--a majority of the Crimson staff--disagree with this decision. We think that advertisements for organizations with purposes plausibly described as genocidal can reasonably be called offensive. A newspaper ought not to sell its space to people using it, not for rational or political persuasion, but to strengthen, without attempting to defend, an indefensible bulwark of reaction. We hope the Marines don't advertise here again.