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Let’s have the Hitler Youth for 16 year olds

It is impressive just how much I would like to see this lot annihilated and humiliated in the election, all considered.

33 comments to Let’s have the Hitler Youth for 16 year olds

  • It’s not so much the unattractiveness of this but its irrelevance that is so offputting. There is a world of grief out there, or, in one word: debt. What will you be doing about it, Mr C? This nonsense won’t help.

    It all adds the to sense that he is not up to it. If he is, he is doing a very good job of concealing the fact, which is perhaps his purpose.

  • It is indeed the irrelevance, but it is also that vaguely fascist irrelevance is a particularly bad kind. I think the unattractiveness of it does matter as well, and possibly a fair bit.

  • Ian

    Are the boy scouts also bad and wrong? Those lot are armed, remember. I think you’re being a big spoilsport, and are missing the point of the exercise: it’s not intended to inculcate political ideas, as such, but to get people out of their miserable lives to do something other than getting drunk and annoying their parents. It sounds more like a “Summer Camp” than any sort of military-style “service”. In that sense, it’s perhaps badly named.

  • PersonFromPorlock

    Well, you’re ‘subjects’. Stuff like this happens to subjects.

  • What is so astonishing is how Team Cameron can come up with this kind of Authoritarian, carpet-dinery without so much as a whimper from t’rank n’file.

    They are so desperate to seize power they forget themselves utterly.

    Not. To. Be. Trusted.

  • Richard

    A silly idea but unless they make it compulsory I’m not going to get worked up about it.

  • Jim

    I thought Britan ended slavery.

  • Are the boy scouts also bad and wrong?

    Oh I missed the bit where Dave wants to conscript people into the Boy Scouts.

  • Ian Bennett

    Not even close, Jim; as long as some of us are obliged to work to support others who don’t, we have slavery.

  • lukas

    Jesus, Ian, are you serious?

  • Well, you’re ‘subjects’. Stuff like this happens to subjects.

    People in the USA are ‘subjects’ too… extraterritorial ones in fact, which is even worse… and let us not forget this, which even The Dave is not suggesting… at least not yet.

  • lukas

    (The upper Ian, I mean)

  • f0ul

    The government don’t like the Boy Scouts because its run purely for its own members benefit. It has no social agenda and no community remit – and so, every few years, you get a good quality anti scout story in the main stream media.

    I guess it doesn’t help that people join it voluntarily, and the figures are currently going up!

  • llamas

    . . . becasue banging them up for a decade in State-run reeducation camps doesn’t give us enough time to screw them up completely.

    there’s something decidedly C19-Whiggish about this. I bet that Solange and Tarquin will be exempted because, after all, they’re in the 6th form! And they have to study for Oxbridge! It’s just the riff-raff children of the lower orders that need to be rounded up and chain-ganged into service. Get Some In!

    Summer camp, my eye. People pay to send their children to summer camp – they don’t have to be forced to do it.

    llater,

    llamas

  • Edward

    Remember, this is also backed by Cameron’s threat/promise to recruit 5,000 “community activists” to” help” people build “The Big Society” and (don’t laugh at the back there!) make them INDEPENDENT OF THE STATE.

    This is right out of the Saul Alinsky stable – probably got it from Obama’s cronies. The function of these people would not be unlike the “block leaders” of Nazi Germany or today’s Cuba.

    Fortunately for us, I think he won’t have any money for this sort of stunt.

  • It is directly from Alinsky and it is taken directly from Obama.

    The leader of the Conservative Party is a Marxist.

    We are fucked.

  • Sigivald

    Ian: As Perry said, I’d be against the Boy Scouts if participation was mandatory.

    I don’t care if kids/young adults want to volunteer to worship the state or do some sort of ridiculous volunteer work “for the common good” (or, in the case of the Scouts, volunteer to go camping and shoot at targets… in fact, I rather encourage that).

    I do care if someone wants to force them all to.

  • Johnathan Pearce

    Ian, membership of the scouts is voluntary. That is kind of what is appealing about it. I’ll be interested to see when or if this Tory idea becomes compulsory.

  • John Galt

    The point about the ever increasing demand from youngsters wanting to join the scouts is well made. However, the establishment have put ever increasing pressure on the scouting movement as well as other similar organisations (Boys Brigade, Girl Guides, blah, blah).

    The ever increasing presence of the state in terms of CRB checks, enhanced CRB checks, Vetting and Barring, etc., is a boil-a-frog approach to closing these voluntary and non-state supported organisations down. The ever present suspicion that anyone wishing to spend their spare time developing children through such an approach as the scouts is clearly a paedophile is utterly vile and offensive, but you have to go through all this bullshit to become a scout leader in the current era.

    I spent time in my youth as a cub, scout and member of the Boys Brigade, I still regard the adults who took time out of their lives to organise these things some of the best role models I’ve ever had. Certainly some of their common sense, no-nonsense approach rubbed off on us lads. We were maleable, but in a good way.

    As Perry de Havilland often says “The state is not your friend”.

    Organisations like the scouts are outside the control of the state and as such provide subversive teaching that is not part of the official government curriculum taught in schools. This is why it can, must and will be stopped by the collectivist government of the day. What is the point of them spending billions to brainwash kids if they are being deprogrammed at scouts.

    This is also why Home Education is being targetted using a similar approach of protecting children from abuse. This is despite the overwealming evidence of the benefits and the lack of evidence of a problem of child abuse in Home Education.

    Time for a real revolution methinks – a capitalist one. Up the minarcists! Down with government!

  • Ian B

    The level of naivete expressed by Ian’s comment is breathtaking.

  • Alice

    It is too confusing to have two “Ian”s disagreeing with each other on the same thread.

    In keeping with the modern world, one of you will henceforth have to be known as “Good Ian”. Everything you say (even if it is silly), will have to be treated as profound. The other will unfortunately have to become “Evil Ian”. Sorry about this lads, but in a twittering world, we don’t have time for anything with more subtlety than that.

    Now, please sort out between yourselves which of you is Good Ian and which is Evil Ian, and refer to yourself by those monikers in future. Do it for Dave!

  • Barbary Ape

    As long as it’s not mandatory and it’s run by ‘non-governmental’ groups then I personally like it!

    I can be a libertarian but also believe in some sense of ‘society’ too can I not?

    To be honest I think people are being a bit hard on the Tories. If you look at many on the back benches they are far from being our enemies on economic and social liberty.

    Much better than the Libs and Labour and should be praised for it a little more in my humble opinion.

  • Jackthesmilingblack

    16-year-olds

  • Ian B

    Alice, it’s a bit like New Testament Judea, in which all the women were called Mary.

  • Alice, at least with you and me there is no such problem: we are both equally evil (or so I hope).

  • we are both equally evil

    Hah, I’d marry either or both of you. Your minds are just so sexy.

  • That’s the best compliment ever, Cats. Although the marriage part…

  • Ok, I’d live in sin with either or both of you……

    Actually, that sounds even better.

  • PersonFromPorlock

    Well, you’re ‘subjects’. Stuff like this happens to subjects.

    People in the USA are ‘subjects’ too… extraterritorial ones in fact, which is even worse… and let us not forget this, which even The Dave is not suggesting… at least not yet.

    Posted by Perry de Havilland at April 29, 2010 02:54 PM

    Touché, but… few here argue that taxes and the draft are anything but impositions grudgingly allowed. The distinction between citizen and subject lies in the state’s need for the citizen’s approval, where the subject’s state can act will he or nil he. In this specific case, if the state thinks national service is a Good Thing, you’re going to have it whether you (one or all) want it or not.

    Of course, we get the same thing from our Liberals, who really think government is the province of the Elect. But they’re as much misfits in our system as libertarians are in yours.

  • Ian B

    Of course, we get the same thing from our Liberals, who really think government is the province of the Elect. But they’re as much misfits in our system as libertarians are in yours.

    They seem to be being astonishingly successful for a bunch of “misfits”. You elected Obama, not Ron Paul, did ye not?

  • PersonFromPorlock

    They seem to be being astonishingly successful for a bunch of “misfits”. You elected Obama, not Ron Paul, did ye not?

    Posted by Ian B at April 30, 2010 03:05 PM

    Sadly, they’re misfits to the system (which system is a little schizophrenic anyway), not the electorate. Hopefully, the Tea Party movement shows that the electorate is waking up.

  • Tedd

    Touché, but… few here argue that taxes and the draft are anything but impositions grudgingly allowed.

    I would also add that I think it’s highly unlikely that the U.S. will ever have a draft again (for the purpose of fighting a war; they might have some kind of “national service” draft). If there was to be a draft, the first question that would come up would be, “Why just men and not women?” No administration is going to want to respond to that question by either drafting women or by drafting men and not women. So, no draft.

  • Paul Marks

    There is not even a “sort of” excuse for this disgusting collectivist “Obama lite” policy.

    As civil society alternatives already exist.

    For example the scout movement (covering just this age group) is now HALF A MILLION STRONG and has been growing stongly for five years.

    This is statism for the sake of statism.

    And, of course, such new spending schemes (financed by “money people have forgotten about”) make a total mockery of any claim that Mr Cameron is interested in getting wild government spending under control.