Globalization's Imperialism: Swedish Army Recruiting 'Killer Video Game' Addicts for War in Afghanistan

May 10 (EIRNS) - Having shut down most of the draft service and the regular army for Swedish young men, the Swedish army is starting to recruit "computer interested youth" for the foreign missions in Afghanistan and the Nordic Battle group, an all volunteer force ready for service anywhere in the world within ten days. The army recruiters will attend the "LAN-party" June 16-19th this year in Joenkoeping, Sweden. It is called Dreamhack - the World´s largest computer festival, and expects 30,000 players in place, day and night for four days. Although Captain Martin Sachs from the Recruitment Center of the Defense, denied to EIR that the army intentionally is looking for people trained on point-and-shoot games, most of the games played at the Dreamhack fair are in fact war games like Counterstrike.

In a discussion with EIR, Sachs stated that he himself and many of his officer colleagues who are deployed as part of the "Foreign Force" (Utlandstyrkan) in Afghanistan have played Counterstrike and similar games. He also emphasized that "not all who play Couterstrike become mass killers."

In the past ten years, but especially since September 11, 2001, the Swedish army has been reduced from a national defense army into small "foreign legion" force fighting wars not to defend the territory of Sweden, but to serve in imperial, globalized wars, as is evident in the Swedish engagement in the war in Afghanistan.