Boy Scouts vs Hitlerjugend

[Doug Millison]

Pynchon makes a pretty good case for this point of view ("All paramilitary
youth organizations have essentially the same goal: brainwashing the next
generation of cannon fodder")  in his writings, they way I read him at
least, and it's a view with which I don't disagree. It's true that many Boy
Scouts have gone on to be members in full standing of a U.S. society that
is guilty of many crimes:  here I am, present and accounted for. Not many
of us have had the opportunity to participate in genocide on the scale of
the Final Solution, however. The extermination of the native Americans --
Pynchon shows us some of the ways that came about, in M&D -- came before
the Boy Scouts; lots of folks had a hand in that one, as they came to North
America from other parts of the world. (See Sven Lindqvist's fine book,
Exterminate All the Brutes for help in filling in the gap between the
colonialism and genocide in Africa and elsewhere by Europeans and Americans
prior to the Nazis.) WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and etc. come after the Boy
Scouts; I imagine that many Boy Scouts died in those wars, some probably
participated in the planning of those wars, and some may have committed
atrocities therein. GR offers up the possibility that whether they fought
on one or the other side of the War, soldiers (and the societies that
supported them) wound up  fighting for the same cause:  perpetuating an
entity,  the War, and the corporations and individuals who profit from War.
Some former Scouts probably go on to become neo-Nazis, too, as they come
into contact with the Nazi ideology and the pantheon of Nazi heroes
available for worship, which represent, unfortunately, part of Germany's
legacy of the 20th century.


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