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.
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 wasnt as cynical as you portray and founded a movement of real value for many.