Congressman Warns of Obama’s Youth Corps

And a timely warning, too:

A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

“It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force,” Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. “I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism.”

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

“That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,” Broun said. “When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.”

Obama’s comments about a national security force came during a speech in Colorado about building a new civil service corps. Among other things, he called for expanding the nation’s foreign service and doubling the size of the Peace Corps “to renew our diplomacy.”

“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set,” Obama said in July. “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”

In Germany it was, of course, the Sturmabteilung, in Italy it was the Fascisti, while in Russia it was Military Revolutionary Committee and Red Guards. The commonality is a paramilitary organization outside the control of the normal authorities and owing its allegiance to a political faction. We don’t want such things in America. Ever.

What Obama proposes - civilian national service - is actually a negation of service and of volunteerism. Lured by grants and subjected to peer pressure, the kids who will be sucked into such a program will be easy pawns for whomever commands the organization - and we can just imagine what sort of kook leftists dregs of the “community organizer” world will be placed in charge of such an organization. The safety valve for America is that such a grouping will almost certainly disintegrate into a cash machine for various connected liberal and leftwing politicians and groups - but the worry is that it might be used to intimidate opponents of leftwing opinion. Just the sight of a paramilitary force cruising through a neighborhood will intimidate those who don’t agree with the commanders of the force…no one has to be locked up or even harmed, for the most part. And, of course, if anyone takes forceful exception to paramilitary goons patrolling the local neighborhood, that person will be immediately classed as a criminal.

Provide government funds for the Scouts. Shell out cash for Big Brothers and Big Sisters. Open the floodgates for money for various religious youth organizations. But don’t, even for a moment, have a youth organization directly funded and controlled by the federal government - in that direction lies tyranny, and civil war.

Tags: conservative truth, Extremism, liberal lies, Obama Youth

40 comments November 11th, 2008

Some Questions About the Proposed Obama Youth

We might want to stake out a fighting position against this crackbrained, totalitarian Obama idea:

Obama’s service plan is just as troubling. He wants to mandate 50 hours of community service per year for middle and high school students. And he’s offering a $4,000 federal-funded tuition credit in exchange for 100 hours per year from college students. For most students, the latter will become a mandatory part of getting a degree, as colleges will merely raise their tuition to compensate for the vouchers.

So who gets to decide what constitutes “community service”? Who gets to decide which causes and organizations will be credit-worthy, and which ones won’t?

Something tells me that you’d be more likely to get one of Obama’s vouchers by going door to door for one of ACORN’s living wage campaigns than, say, volunteering for a libertarian nonprofit organization that advocates against things like government-mandated community service.

Volunteerism is good, but government sponsored and group-intimidated activities are the negation of volunteerism. We should encourage our young people to get out there and pitch in, but only encourage - it is their right to not participate and suffer no societal consequences.

The thing about enforced virtue is that it isn’t virtue at all - in Saudi Arabia, they have some sort of police force which goes around ensuring that everyone is being virtuous…which means, of course, that no one in Saudi Arabia has a clue about virtue because you can only do right when you are free to do wrong. God gave us free will for a reason, and we must do as much as we can to leave the will as free as possible. Obama’s plan is collectivist, Bolshevik nonsense, and we should stop it.

Tags: Obama Youth, totalitarianism

12 comments November 7th, 2008