At least if you work for the National Review's The Corner. Because the Peace Corps is as horrific as the mass murder of European Jewry. By way of Spencer Ackermann:
Oh good, for a moment I thought the Second Holocaust was off. In response to this plan put forward from Obama --
The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation's challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps.
-- John Derbyshire comments at the Corner:
Arbeit Macht Frei (cont.)[John Derbyshire]
Sorry, you had no idea what I was posting about, did you? This.
Because voluntary national service programs are exactly like the wholescale annihilation of European Jewry. I see the similarities between encouraging college graduates to teach in underprivileged schools and shipping Jews in cattle cars, brutalizing them, gassing them, and then incinerating the bodies, don't you? Although, I suppose this is par for the course for a magazine that referred to the civil rights movement as the "Negro Revolt."
When I was ten (give or take), I mouthed off to my dad about "Arbeit macht frei", the slogan hung over the gates of the Auschwitz death camp. Needless to say, that didn't go over well. But ten year olds say stupid shit, well, because they're stupid ten year olds. What's Derbyshire's excuse? Worse, at the National Review, Derbyshire is the slightly sane one.
I bring this up, not to pick on movement conservatives--that's about as fun (or challenging) as picking on the slow kid. But the lunatics of the National Review are considered an acceptable, albeit right-leaning, part of our political discourse. And the National Review has served as a farm system for mainstreaming lunacy into the national media. A serious argument would ask if the program actually accomplishes its goals. But Derbyshire does not present a serious argument. His argument is not even a silly argument. It is a public exhibition of pathology.
Until they regain sanity, movement conservatives need to be called out on this garbage. Currently, they make as much sense as a tinfoil-helmet wearing homeless guy pushing a shopping cart, except, unlike the homeless guy, they get loads of wingnut welfare.
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Hum, apropos of nothing much...
One of my colleagues here in France asked what I thought should happen once Obama takes office, and in my long(!) list of wishes, I happened to mention expanding the Peace Corps. I speculated it probably wasn't in very good shape since Cheney & Bush prefer the Marine Corps.
Any Peace Corps expansion had damn well better go along with major changes in the way that we, and our corporations exploit developing countries. We buy off or remove politicians, dump toxic wastes, exploit natural resources, lure away their best and brightest minds, and sow political and social chaos in order to do it.
The Peace Corps in the context of the above serves as an excellent PR cover. It's quite the perverse use of sincere Americans. So I'm looking forward to an Obama administration fundamentally altering the exploitative relationship between the developed and the developing world. But that is going to take an international commitment. And it will be hugely unpopular and hard on our economy, so I'm guessing it won't happen anytime soon.
quick followup, i'm not saying that it's a bad thing to expand the Peace Corps. It isn't. It is an excellent experience for the volunteers and they work on a lot of excellent projects. But I feel that in terms of benefit to the developing world, it is of trivial impact compared to the damage our other relationships to the developing world do.
Oh, wow.
I think Derbyshire has Godwinned himself now and for all time.
Oh, and I think you need an extra closing blockquote tag in there somewhere.
Developing nations would be A-OK is only we were to stop trade with and immigration from them! Sounds like a plan!
Blake,
Thanks.
Mike
@Oran,
Really? that's your gloss of what I wrote? Eliminate all trade and immigration? Kinda lacks imagination don't you think?. How about we improve the nature of the trade? Reward the positives, eliminate some of the coercive deals we currently make, invest in university education by offering scholarships for those who will work in-country for a certain period after their education instead of the brain-drain approach we have now.
Thank you for your sharing.!