Ruxted's Take On Francisco Juarez

[FredDaHead]

Note to officer cadets on army.ca

Don't be this guy

Seriously you gotta feel bad for this guy.
He probably thought he'd join up, spend a little time in, get promoted to captian then leave and begin his public career. This fellow hardly got out of the gate. He's like a private who didn't complete basic training then tries to tell people "well back when I was a soldier"

Ya sure

You know what's sad?

Even here at RMC there seems to be Juarez-wannabe's, who don't really want to serve or fight or anything, they just want their free education, paycheck, and a nice resume when they "retire" from the military. Sad but true.

 

[GDawg]

Everything this guy says is full of Orwellian left-wing double speak. Clearly, the best way to support your position is to re-write the past.

It always astounds me that the "peaceniks" are always the ones resorting to extremely sinister tactics such as:

Ignoring the facts
Distorting the truth
Re-writing the past
Branding your own forces as the bad guys
Branding those who would commit mass murder on the west, and human rights atrocities against their own people as the good guys.
They also present their petitions signed by 10,000 people as representing the will of 30,000,000 people.

They view freedom and democracy as some sort of nuisance, that gets in the way of their shining socialist (read:FACIST) utopia.

 

[vonGarvin]

Francisco Juarez says:  "Armies — and our American brothers here today can attest to this — are by definition meant to close with and destroy the enemy. Armies are not designed to deliver aid and not to help in enabling representative democracy. They are mechanisms of death and destruction — period."

I wonder what the people of Manitoba say to that?  Or the people of Quebec?  Floods and Ice aside, there wasn't much "death and destruction" going on back in the late 1990s.

 

[George Wallace]

He doesn't have to make sense or be consistant in his tirades.  He is a "Talking Head" who has only one agenda; to hear his own voice on the news.  He doesn't care what he says, as long as he can hear himself on the nightly news and have people mention his name.  He is a great big 'wannabe' who failed in this quest via the CF, so now must find another channel.

 

[Teflon]

From Macleans.ca dated 27 Nov:

http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/canada/article.jsp?content=20061127_137184_137184

A resister without a war
Is he a conscientious objector if he was never bound for combat?
MICHAEL FRISCOLANTI
Francisco Juarez is the newest voice of Canada's anti-war movement, and understandably so. A former navy seaman turned army reservist, the 35-year-old famously quit the military because he couldn't stomach the thought of deploying to Afghanistan. Free to speak his mind, Juarez now spends much of his time travelling the country, telling crowds large and small why the rest of Canada's troops don't belong in Kandahar, either. Journalists have dubbed him the "first Afghan war resister" -- a title he happily accepts. "My ethics guide me," Juarez says, "and I followed them."
Peace activists couldn't buy a better spokesman, a real-life soldier who saw the light at the end of the propaganda tunnel. "If we send Canadian Forces members to work and possibly die in another part of the world, we owe them a debate," Juarez says. "There needs to be a broader discussion within our society about what we are doing, and I think the Prime Minister needs to be a bit more honest about the objectives." But others -- including officials at the Department of National Defence -- believe it is Juarez, not Stephen Harper, who needs to start telling the truth. "From my point of view, he doesn't have any credibility," says Commander Denise Laviolette, a spokeswoman for the chief of military personnel. "He wasn't resisting anything because he wasn't even in line to go."
In March, after four years on the water, Juarez transferred from the full-time navy to the part-time army in the hopes of finishing his university degree while training to be an infantry officer. Now a reservist, Juarez was under no obligation to serve in Afghanistan. Part-time soldiers cannot be forced to deploy; they must volunteer. Juarez insists he intended to sign up for a tour by 2009, but then he began to question the military's evolving Afghan strategy, which he describes as war first, aid second. He became so disillusioned that during a training course in New Brunswick he simply refused to participate, citing personal and family reasons. But he never mentioned Afghanistan. "I kept that to myself," he says, speaking by telephone from his home in Victoria, B.C. "I just wanted to make it easy so I could get out and, as a private citizen, express my point of view." He got his wish. The Forces fined Juarez $500 and discharged him without honour.
Since then, he has become a poster boy for peace, applauded in the press for his refusal "to train for the Afghan campaign." To the military's chagrin, most reports have failed to mention the obvious fact: Juarez was never bound for the war he now claims to resist. The Forces' public affairs department has tried to set the record straight, but with little success. "We are not in a situation similar to other nations that have had numerous individuals desert because they didn't want to serve," Laviolette says. "We have had zero conscientious objectors and we have had zero folks go absent without leave." The Ruxted Group, a website that publishes defence-related commentary, has even gone so far as to demand that Juarez apologize for misleading the public. "The time has come for Mr. Juarez to come clean," the site reads. "As a former service member, however briefly, we are sure he is still familiar with the concepts of personal responsibility and honour. As such, he knows that we cannot quietly accept his blatant disregard for the truth."
Juarez insists he was never dishonest. "I was not in danger of being ordered to go to Afghanistan, and I try to make that very, very clear," he says. "I haven't been obfuscatory about that at all. I know in some of the articles it sort of sounds like it, but that was not my intention." He believes his status as a reservist doesn't change the fact that he is a bona fide war resister. "What is a war resister?" he asks. "How do we define a war resister? Certainly some people say you have to be in a situation where you are going to be sent and then you refuse. But I think there are many different kinds of war resisters." Take the United States, for example. Some deserters deployed, then fled. Others simply refused to board the plane. "I sort of see myself in there somewhere," Juarez continues. "But I don't spend a lot of time worrying about what kind of war resister I am. I just know that I oppose the mission as it is in Afghanistan and what Stephen Harper is doing to our country."

 

[bcbarman]

Has any one out there actually met this monkey when he was in Uniform??  If he is from Victoria, he must have been with the Canadian Scottish, even though his time at the unit was probably measured in seconds. 

How about the navy, anyone talked to a shipmate that served with him?  Has he always been this disillusioned or is he just looking for a forum to step up his political aspirations?

Must be something that clicked in his head to make him a peacenic, that or he got busted for something else that he is not telling the rest of the world.

My $0.02

 

[a_majoor]

The best way to deal with the  Francisco Juarez's of this world, who only see the CF as a means to get a "free" education (only because "we" are paying for it), is to rewrite the regulations to change signing bonus and education expenses as "completion bonus'" to be paid after the sucessful fulfillment of the contract.

Granted a 17 year old BOTC officer cadet cannot pony up the funds for his/her four years at RMC, but they certainly should be charged for the entire four years if they pull a stunt like that between signing on the dotted line and the end of their first contract. I have similar feelings for paying a signing bonus, even for specialists. Tell them the cheque is waiting for them at the end of their contract, and let them earn every penny. For 90% of the people in the CF, this probably will not change their desire to serve and carry out every tasking and challenge presented to them, they would probably serve regardless. Weeding out that 10% would save a lot of heartache down the line, however.........

 

[FredDaHead]

The best way to deal with the  Francisco Juarez's of this world, who only see the CF as a means to get a "free" education (only because "we" are paying for it), is to rewrite the regulations to change signing bonus and education expenses as "completion bonus'" to be paid after the sucessful fulfillment of the contract.

Granted a 17 year old BOTC officer cadet cannot pony up the funds for his/her four years at RMC, but they certainly should be charged for the entire four years if they pull a stunt like that between signing on the dotted line and the end of their first contract. I have similar feelings for paying a signing bonus, even for specialists. Tell them the cheque is waiting for them at the end of their contract, and let them earn every penny. For 90% of the people in the CF, this probably will not change their desire to serve and carry out every tasking and challenge presented to them, they would probably serve regardless. Weeding out that 10% would save a lot of heartache down the line, however.........

I don't know the particulars (I could look it up) but if we quit before the end of our contract we DO have to pay for tuition AND repay the salary we received up to that point. (IE, bankrupcy for most) The exception is for people being released for medical reasons and the like.

 

[Magravan]

Not that I want to give him any credibility, but from what I've heard of transfers, they tend to take longer than 2 months, don't they? Especially an OT and CT mixed into one?

He strikes me as someone who couldn't handle it, and has created a reason for his lack after the fact. If you can't handle it, make peace with yourself and leave the stage. Don't stay up there and try to feed people a song and dance, because you might still be on the stage, but you wont like who has attached some strings.

 

[dglad]

The best way to deal with the likes of Mr. Juarez is the same way you deal with any behaviour you wish to extinguish...you ignore it/him.  I suspect that the peace movement has milked him for about all of the mileage they're likely to get out of him; like any news item, the moment he stops being novel or contentious, he ceases to be marketable and, therefore, of no further interest.  The novelty has worn off and, frankly, as a failed Officer Cadet, he simply doesn't have what it takes to be contentious in a national defence context.  If he was a Colonel or General who quit out of "resistance" to the Afghan conflict, or was, at least, someone who had been there and could speak from something resembling experience, there might be some spark left to him.  But he's been retreaded about as much as he can, so he'll get to speak to smaller and smaller groups of people who've already made up their minds anyway, until he eventually dwindles to just what he is--a rather unremarkable person who has, it appears, had his Warhol-ian 15 minutes.

 

[Cloud Cover]

From what I understand, his time in the Navy was for the most part unremarkable one way or the other.

It may be that he had difficulty with the way the Navy treats its people, but that is also unremarkable so far as that complaint is much more frequent about the Navy than in the other branches of the military, and is also an entirely different matter. 

 

[tasop_999]

For those wondering, I did sail with Juarez.  He always seemed a little off but never quite disillusioned.  He just never quite got the ship life.  For more info, PM me or ref. some of my previous posts.

 

[PJOsborne]

Has any one out there actually met this monkey when he was in Uniform??  If he is from Victoria, he must have been with the Canadian Scottish, even though his time at the unit was probably measured in seconds. 

How about the navy, anyone talked to a shipmate that served with him?  Has he always been this disillusioned or is he just looking for a forum to step up his political aspirations?

Must be something that clicked in his head to make him a peacenic, that or he got busted for something else that he is not telling the rest of the world.

My $0.02

I did, in fact, serve some time alongside Juarez. I did my reserve BOTP II course with him in Chilliwack and he seemed normal enough to me. I did my CAP serial two weeks ahead of him and I did see him now and again in the shacks, and once again he seemed normal enough. To my everlasting surprise and disgust, I get home and suddenly this guy is on TV claiming to be resisting the war, saying that he would have been going in 2007. Not bloody likely.. the earliest he'd go overseas (having completed 3/4 of his training) would be in 2008 in a DNS capacity in all likelihood. I felt pretty betrayed, to say the least.