Posted on 06/26/2013 10:40:00 AM PDT by Oldpuppymax
WH Price of The Spearhead clues us in on Scouting’s self-inflicted woes, as well as their sordid beginnings. If you have always bought into the mythology, this zinger from Price should blow your mind:
That politicians and preachers today could talk about scouting as though its origins are godly, clean-cut and wholesome is, quite frankly, hilarious. The origin of scouting has more to do with taking scalps than it does with...
(Excerpt) Read more at coachisright.com ...
The Soviets always had a down on scouting, insisting that it was just paramilitary training, and there was even a hilarious editorial comic in Pravda, showing a boy scout using a stick to detect a buried antitank mine.
WH Price is a homo. It’s obvious he’s never been in the Boy Scouts. He might have been in the Girl Scouts though. He certainly seems to know more about them.
Odd—I’m an Eagle Scout (1972), as are both of my sons (2006 and 2010), and none of us can recall ever taking scalps as part of our Scouting programs.
Maybe we missed something.
BSA has made a terrible mistake, but this article is bizarre and makes no sense.
Who is this fag?
Pirran June 24, 2013 at 11:15We now see these revisionist attacks against American Scouting, based on ancient Homosexual German Nambla-like groups, or bloodthirsty Imperialistic jingoists. In the 1960's Scouting was pure and faithful to the Scout Law. The salami slicing attacks of the past fifty years have taken us to where we are now. This kind of leftist tripe is bunk!A somewhat cynical view of the Scouts (and Baden-Powell). It was initially formed as a scouting offshoot of the Boys Brigade (of which Baden-Powell was Vice-President). Although undoubtedly militaristic (and certainly Imperialistic) in outlook, both movements were concerned with the healthy Christian development of boys into disciplined, devoted men. This might seem quaint now, but to entertain the notion that Baden-Powell wanted to turn boys into pubescent psychopaths is absurdly over the top. Baden-Powell did recruit children at Mafeking to act as messengers and medical orderlies, but hardly as guerrilla fighters.
Although Powell and William Smith (founder of the BB) approved of the notion of creating generations of young men fit to fight for God, King and Empire, they were primarily motivated by the desire to imbue self-confidence and Christian duty in their charges. Despite the origins of scouting per se having little to do with religion, the Boys Brigade and the Scouts certainly did.
Innocent, no. But your caricature of Baden-Powell and the Boy Scouts is too crude and tendentious. They were a creation of their time and elements of the movement are undoubtedly anachronistic now, but they did fulfill a real need to give working-class boys a sense of direction and purpose. That the movements were taken over by middle-class worthies and their bored progeny was hardly the fault of the founders.
I was only briefly a Scout (and the movement had become corrupted even then) but it was one of the few places where boys from all backgrounds could meet and mix (and without an empowerment seminar in sight). Baden-Powell wasn’t as cynical as you portray and founded a movement of real value for many.
Remember the original “Red Dawn?”
The Cuban officer who was part of the Russian occupation of the fictional town of Calumet, Colorado was asking the town’s mayor about one of the local “Wolverine” teenagers.
When he found out the teenager was an Eagle Scout, the Cuban looked at the mayor and said, “A paramilitary organization?”
>>>The Soviets always had a down on scouting, insisting that it was just paramilitary training, and there was even a hilarious editorial comic in Pravda, showing a boy scout using a stick to detect a buried antitank mine.<<<
They had scouts too, and it was actually a military training. They had nationwide championships between local branches in games like “fox hunt” - a kids as young as 8-10 used their radio skills to locate transmitters hidden in a remote places, “zarnitsa” - a team flag hunt game using military tactics and equipment (apcs, helicopters, hazmat gear).
Up to late 1980s every Soviet secondary school graduate could strip and assemble AK blindfolded and hit a mock IFV air intakes with training Molotov from a distance of 30 yards. It was a part of GTO (ready-to-labor-and-defence) test. AKs were actually their standard school gym gear.
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