Service or Slavery? - Compassion Fascism

The New American ^ | July 21, 1997 | William Norman Grigg

[Tailgunner Joe]

In The State of the World's Children 1997, UNICEF reports that "Romania has launched a pilot project in Bucharest to give juvenile offenders who would normally be sent to reform school the opportunity to remain with their families, receive counseling by social workers and carry out community service work in public institutions." Curiously, this penal reform would require youthful miscreants in socialist Romania to be treated in much the same way an ever-increasing number of school districts treat law-abiding American high school students. Across the nation, students are being sentenced to "community service" as a prerequisite for a high school diploma -- and Bill Clinton seeks to make community service part of every high school education.

"Good Citizenship"

The Goals 2000 Act dictates that "all students will be involved in activities that promote and demonstrate good citizenship [including] community service...." During last April's Presidents' Summit on America's Future, Mr. Clinton issued a "challenge [to] schools and communities in every state to make service a part of the curriculum in high school and even in middle school." "There are many creative ways to do this [such as] putting service on a student's transcript or even requiring it, as Maryland does.... [E]very young American should be taught the joy and duty of serving and should learn it at the moment when it will have the most enduring impact on the rest of their lives." Henceforth, he asserted, students must be taught to consider themselves "citizen-servants."

Bill Clinton is an individual who avoided military service and whose brow has never been moistened by the sweat of honest labor. Yet during the Philadelphia summit, he issued a call for American youth "to enlist in America" by becoming part of what he has described as an "army of ... young people restoring urban and rural communities and giving their labor in exchange for education and training."

"I'm here because I want to redefine the meaning of citizenship in America," declared Mr. Clinton in Philadelphia. "I want the children here ... and all over America -- if you're asked in school, 'What does it mean to be a good citizen?,' I want the answer to be, well, to be a good citizen, you have to obey the law, you've got to go to work or be in school, you've got to pay your taxes and, oh, yes, you have to serve...."

Although many supporters of the concept describe national service as a way to address "unmet needs" in the education and welfare system, for Mr. Clinton it is primarily a way to "change the culture and the life in which people live." In a 1994 speech to the Democratic Leadership Council, Mr. Clinton stated that national service "literally has the potential to revolutionize the way young people all across America look at their country and themselves." He returned to that theme at the Philadelphia summit: "Before they have their own families, the young can make a unique contribution to the family of America. In doing so, they can acquire the habit of service, and get a deeper understanding of what it really means to be a citizen."

In other words, national service is seen by Mr. Clinton as a means of teaching students that the state must intervene to solve the nation's social ills and that, consequently, their duty to the state transcends any other loyalty. Newsweek correspondent Steven Waldman, who has carefully followed the progress of Mr. Clinton's national service initiative, points out that the President grew up in an era when "government was considered an effective -- even noble -- way to change society" and that he considers national service a way to "re-establish faith in government."

Old Idea

Mr. Clinton is certainly not the first collectivist to exalt the notion of the "citizen-servant." The Communist Manifesto asserts the "Equal liability of all to labor," calls for the "Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture," and requires that "Free education for all children in public schools" be combined with "industrial production." Vladimir Lenin's revolutionary Bolshevik regime institutionalized these Marxist tenets in the Young Communist League.

In an October 2, 1920 address to the Young Communist League, Lenin promised the youthful cadres a "new communist upbringing ... against the self-servers and small owners, against the psychology and habits which say, 'I seek my own profit and I do not care about anyone else.'... The Young Communist League should be the shock group which, in every job that has to be done, gives a hand, displays initiative, makes the start. The League should be such that any worker may see that it consists of people whose doctrines he may not understand, whose doctrines he may not immediately adopt, but whose practical work, whose activities, prove to him that they are the people who are showing him the right road."

Like Mr. Clinton, Lenin maintained that every student be "taught the joy and duty of serving":

We must organize all labor, no matter how dirty and arduous it may be, so that every [individual] may regard himself as part of that great army of free labor.... The generation that is now fifteen years old ... must arrange all their tasks of education in such a way that every day, and in every city, the young people shall engage in the practical solution of the problems of common labor, even of the smallest, most simple kind.

In his 1976 study of Soviet polytechnical education, Vladimir Turchenko pointed out that, in compliance with Lenin's decree, Soviet schools required students to "participate with adults in voluntary public work on city and village improvement, in cleaning up parks, in 'green patrols,'" and in other state-defined tasks intended "to take care of nature...." Turchenko could just as easily have been describing contemporary American students who are required to minister to the needs of "Mother Earth" as a way of meeting community service requirements.

Hitler's Vision

The concept of "citizen-servant" was also a key tenet of the National Socialist version of collectivism. In a 1933 speech, Hitler insisted that "the higher interests involved in the life of the whole must here set the limits and lay down the duties of the interests of the individual." According to Hitler, the noblest German attribute was a quality called pflichterfulling or "fulfillment of duty": "It means not to be self-sufficient, but to serve the community." One favored Nazi slogan was "Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz!" ("The common interest before self!") Nazi author Friedrich Sieburg offered this summary of the Nazi ethos: "There are no more private Germans; each is to attain significance only by his service to the state, and to find complete self-fulfillment in this service."

Like Clinton's Americorps and Lenin's Young Communist League, the Hitler Youth were to serve as missionaries for the collectivist state. "This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing," Hitler announced in a May 1, 1937 speech. Hitler had earlier acknowledged that indoctrinating Germany's youth in his preferred version of collectivism was one of his chief ambitions.

"When an opponent says, 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already,'" Hitler declared in a speech on November 6, 1933. "What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community."

The dramatic growth of the Hitler Youth illustrates how quickly such a movement can metastasize. In 1932, the last year of the Weimar Republic, the Hitler Youth numbered a mere 107,956 in comparison to the more than ten million German youth involved in non-political associations (such as the Boy Scouts). By 1938 -- five years after the Nazi party's ascent to power -- the ranks of the Hitler Youth had swollen to 7,728,259. In 1939 Hitler made membership in the organization mandatory by enacting a law conscripting all German youngsters into it. Notes leftist historian William Shirer, "Recalcitrant parents were warned that their children would be taken from them and put into orphanages or other homes unless they enrolled" in the Hitler Youth program.

"Voluntary" Servitude

In similar fashion, the Clinton Administration's relatively modest national service initiatives are the harbinger of compulsory universal service. "All the people I know who are driving for a form of national service, primarily want it to be compulsory," warned Martin Anderson of the Hoover Institution in the November 29, 1992 Boston Globe. "They realize that's a terrible problem politically, so they're not willing to say it. It is endangerment of freedom and the potential for indoctrination that skeptics do not like in the national service concept. However benign the program, some think it will not succeed on any meaningful scale unless it is compulsory."

One of the most forthright advocates of compelled "volunteerism" is Scott Shuger, a consultant to the federal government on National Service. Shuger recommends that the federal government "make national service mandatory and assign the Selective Service System the task of locating 18-year-olds and matching them with national service slots." Writing in the January 1996 issue of The Washington Monthly, Shuger insisted that a program of domestic conscription "could be putting the vast unused talents and energies of our citizens, especially those between age 15 and 30, to work systematically on our country's most pressing social needs -- in schools, daycare centers, environmental projects, hospitals, drug clinics, nursing homes, the criminal justice system, and so on." Of course, with the state and not the citizen-servant deciding what qualifies as service, this litany of "pressing social needs" most assuredly would not include peaceful pro-life sidewalk counseling or protecting private property rights.

Shuger also maintains that "having organized service programs in which mostly young people of all racial, ethnic, and economic groups work side by side for a clear, common purpose would help overcome the very un-American barriers that have sprung up between these groups in the past generation."

While social engineers like Shuger might be enchanted with the prospect of a national program to conscript the "talents and energies of our citizens" to serve a state-defined "common purpose," Americans who cherish individual freedom and retain some understanding of the proper role of government must do our nation the service of resisting compulsory "volunteerism."

The implications of state-mandated "volunteerism" are obvious to Thomas Moralis, the father of two straight-A students denied high school diplomas for their refusal to comply with a "community service" requirement. "What they're trying to do is enslave our society by taking our children's rights away," Moralis observes. "Young people who go through these programs learn to submit, and later on they won't mind giving up a few more of their rights when the government says it's necessary."

Compassion Fascism

by William Norman Grigg - June 9, 1997

National Service boils down to state-mandated slavery

Fascist ethics begin ... with the acknowledgment that it is not the individual who confers a meaning upon society, but it is, instead, the existence of a human society which determines the human character of the individual.... According to Fascism, a true, a great spiritual life cannot take place unless the State has risen to a position of pre-eminence in the world of man. The curtailment of liberty thus becomes justified at once, with this need of raising the State to its rightful position. -- Mario Palmieri, The Philosophy of Fascism (1936)

A decidedly post-modern version of Fascism was on display during the "Presidents' Summit on America's Future," which took place in Philadelphia April 27th-29th. Call it "Compassion Fascism": social regimentation swaddled in the rhetoric of altruism. According to President Clinton, the Philadelphia Summit was intended to "redefine the meaning of citizenship in America." Henceforth, every American should be regarded as a "citizen-servant."

The national service Summit's opening and closing ceremonies, which were staged in front of Independence Hall, exalted a collectivist ethic that amounts to a repudiation of the principled individualism embraced by the authors of the Declaration of Independence. While the Declaration specifies that governments exist to protect God-given individual rights, the Summit was dedicated to the proposition that the individual exists to serve the state.

"As each of us has the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, each of us has an obligation to give something back to the country and community," stated the Summit Declaration, which was signed by President Clinton, former Presidents Ford, Carter, and Bush, and by Nancy Reagan on behalf of former President Reagan. "We owe a debt of service.... The challenges of today, especially those that confront our children, require a special commitment from us all."

The document asserted that "the need for shared responsibility is self-evident" and insisted that "every caring citizen" should "pledge individual commitments of citizen service [and] voluntary action" to carry out government-mandated social goals. Such statements resonate with Mussolini's Fascist Labor Charter of 70 years earlier. Declaring that "Work in all its forms is a social duty," Mussolini's Charter proclaimed, "A Nation is an organism having ends, life, and means superior to the single individuals or groups of individuals composing it."

The Summit Declaration's obliquely totalitarian cadences were complemented by the Orwellian staging of the opening and closing ceremonies. Huge television monitors were erected near Independence Hall to broadcast the event to the assembled crowd. Between speeches and videotaped segments, the screen catechized the audience by flashing the five "goal areas" outlined by the Summit: Mentor, Protect, Nurture, Teach, Serve. These endlessly recited buzzwords reflected the major theme of the event -- namely, that there are 15 million "at-risk" children in America who must be redeemed by the intervention of a "volunteer army" that will provide them with guidance, direction, and hope.

General Colin Powell, who chaired the gathering and who presides over "America's Promise -- The Alliance for Youth," explained that the Summit was intended as a literal mobilization of America in a quasi-military crusade. "We have a new enemy, and now we're creating a new great alliance to go after that enemy," Powell declared during an April 28th luncheon for corporate and political heavyweights. According to the organization's literature, America's Promise is working "to develop a strategic plan" to connect two million children and youth to "five basic resources" -- "a caring adult, a healthy start, safe and structured places, education for marketable skills, [and] opportunities to serve."

"America's Promise will continue mobilizing national and local commitments from all sectors," explained the group's prospectus. "It will track, monitor, and publicly report progress toward the goals each year; it will carry out an extensive marketing and awareness effort to inspire new commitments and to promote the five fundamental resources. Working in partnership with others, America's Promise is designed to be a fluid alliance of corporations, foundations, organizations, communities of faith, public agencies and individuals that will together ensure our promises to America's young people."

Such public/private "partnerships," in which government agencies and corporations pool their efforts to achieve national goals, were pioneered by Mussolini. Il Duce also delighted in campaigns of mass conscription on behalf of government initiatives -- for instance, a government campaign to increase the wheat crop was called "the war for wheat." The military metaphors favored by speakers at the Service Summit were eagerly retailed in press accounts of the event. The April 29th Reading (Pennsylvania) Times reported: "Like gung-ho military recruiters, President Clinton and three predecessors began drafting a national army of community service volunteers.... 'Let's go save our children!' summit chairman Colin Powell barked to the delegates at the rally, sounding like the Army general he used to be."

Summit organizers took great pains to wrap the meeting's fascistic content in rhetorical "warm fuzzies." Rather than the snarling belligerence of Der Fuhrer or Il Duce, the Service Summit's opening ceremony offered the lip-biting, pain-feeling, conspicuously sensitive pronouncements of the Empathizer-in-Chief. A major purpose of the summit was to infect attendees -- including 25 governors, 84 mayors, scores of corporate CEOs, and approximately 2,000 state and local delegates -- with a sense of authoritarian do-goodism. However, organizers and supporters of the event were careful to specify that "volunteerism" and "community service" would not in any way reduce the size, expense, and intrusiveness of the welfare state. Of course, in any public/private "partnership," government is always the dominant "partner," with a monopoly on the means of extraction, redistribution, and coercion. The America's Promise "Alliance" will use the language of privatization and volunteerism to enhance government's power over all Americans to tax their time and labor as well as their wealth.

Shortly before the summit, Bruce Reed, the President's Domestic Policy Adviser, asserted, "Government can do a lot to address the challenges that our children face, but we won't get there unless every citizen also does their part as well." The identical point was made by former President Bush (who was an honorary co-chair of the Summit) in an April 28th Newsweek column: "Volunteerism isn't an excuse for government to be completely rolled back.... [T]he philosophy behind the Philadelphia Summit ... is that fixing the country requires our time, not just our tax dollars. It takes both."

In an April 27th New York Times op-ed column, former New York Governor Mario Cuomo warned Summit participants that "there is the danger we will feel so good about being good to one another privately that we will be tempted to believe government does not need to do anything more.... American charities, at their very best, can build a bridge only a short part of the way across the chasm. The rest must be done by the real ultimate form of volunteerism, our government [which is] the coming together of Americans to decide how best to handle common problems and common resources."

Another pre-emptive strike against privatizing charity was fired in Newsweek magazine by Nicholas Lemann of The Atlantic Monthly, who chastised those who believe that "charities are morally and functionally superior to government and ought to be groomed to replace government wherever possible.... A program's success depends on how well it is conceived and run, not on some law of nature that makes government bad and charity good."

While there is no law of nature that dictates that government is bad, government inescapably involves coercion. A basic assumption held by the authors of the Declaration of Independence was that freedom is "morally and functionally superior" to coercion, and that social needs should be supplied by private means -- either through compassionate service or through the free market. The role of government, in the Founders' view, is simply to employ its coercive and proscriptive powers in the defense of God-given individual rights. But the ethic on display at the Service Summit holds that the state is the primary provider of social goods and in return it asks for its subjects to pay their "debt" through uncompensated service.

Furthermore, the Clinton Administration is prepared to make such "volunteer" service mandatory. "This is the right time to enlist in America," declared the President in his April 25th weekly radio address. Mr. Clinton, who has lived a life devoid of service to anything more exalted than his appetites and ambition, enthused, "Citizen service ... is an essential part of what it means to be an American. We all have to promote it." The same theme was sung by Mr. Clinton in his April 5th radio address, during which he explained that the purpose of the Service Summit "is nothing less than to spark a renewed sense of obligation, a new sense of duty, a new season of service" for all Americans. After all, he insisted, "Service is in our deepest national tradition."

Bruce Reed was asked to address the oxymoronic concept of "compulsory volunteerism" during an April 25th press conference. In response to the question, "Should the government be in the position of requiring Americans to volunteer?" Reed replied that "the first debate on national service in the early '90s before the President was elected engaged this whole issue of compulsory service, and the Congress was unable to reach agreement on it. We came back with our own proposal in the '92 campaign" -- namely, the "AmeriCorps" program, in which "volunteers" receive federal remuneration for their work on behalf of government.

Although Reed insisted that he had never asked Mr. Clinton the "specific question" about government-mandated community service, he acknowledged that "the President has been very supportive of what Maryland is doing" -- namely, requiring each high school student to perform community service as a graduation requirement. Mr. Clinton used his April 5th radio message to promote Maryland's program as a national model. With practiced guile, the President segued seamlessly from praise for volunteerism to an endorsement of state-mandated servitude: "Today I challenge schools and communities in every state to make service a part of the curriculum in high school and even in middle school. There are many creative ways to do this [such as] making service part of the curriculum, putting service on a student's transcript, or even requiring it, as Maryland does.... [E]very young American should be taught the joy and duty of serving and should learn it at the moment when it will have the most enduring impact on the rest of their lives."

Mr. Clinton reiterated his support for state-mandated servitude in his remarks during the Service Summit's opening ceremony. "In Philadelphia, the superintendent of schools is working to make service the expected thing in elementary and middle schools," he pointed out. "Maryland has required it in high schools. And I challenge every state and every school in this country at least to offer in a disciplined, organized way, every young person in school a chance to serve." But what Mr. Clinton is describing is not "a chance to serve," but a government-imposed requirement to serve. This is in harmony with planks eight and ten of the Communist Manifesto -- the document from which the Clinton Administration draws most of its policy recommendations -- which pronounces the "Equal liability of all to labor," calls for the "Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture," and advises that "Free education for all children in public schools" must be combined with "industrial production."

Scot Shuger, a consultant to the federal government on national service, is even more candid about the "need" for compulsory volunteerism. Shuger recommends that the federal government "make national service mandatory" and "assign the Selective Service System the task of locating 18-year-olds and matching them with national service slots." Writing in the January 1996 issue of The Washington Monthly, Shuger insisted that a program of domestic conscription "could be putting the vast unused talents and energies of our citizens, especially those between age 15 and 30, to work systematically on our country's most pressing social needs -- in schools, day-care centers, environmental projects, hospitals, drug clinics, nursing homes, the criminal justice system, and so on."

Shuger also maintained that "having organized service programs in which mostly young people of all racial, ethnic, and economic groups work side by side for a clear, common purpose would help overcome the very un-American barriers that have sprung up between these groups in the past generation." Once again, Shuger's arguments resonate with the earlier teachings of Fascism. According to Fascist apologist Mario Palmieri, "The Fascist Revolution [teaches] ... that there is a way to end the war of classes and that this way is found in placing all classes under the protection, the aegis, and the discipline of the state."

The Service Summit attracted a small group of protesters from the "Coalition of Students Against Servitude," an ad hoc group affiliated with the Ayn Rand Institute. Coalition President Barry Wood denounced the "mounting calls for duty, service, and sacrifice, backed up with a heady dose of guilt and coercion" as "a declaration of universal dependence, the shackling of all to all."

"This is a new low in the history of American political philosophy," Scott McConnell of the Ayn Rand Institute declared to THE NEW AMERICAN. "We have the current President and three of his predecessors publicly promoting service to the state. Once the state defines a public obligation to serve other people, it quickly becomes an obligation to serve the state. It's just a matter of time before the government says, 'Since we've defined that moral duty, the state now has a moral right to impose that duty.' Mr. Clinton now refers to us as 'servants.' Is this what the Founders fought for? Of course not. They fought to be free from King George, and they created a government intended to keep us free from any kind of dictatorship."

McConnell pointed out that the idea of citizen service "is the essential collectivist idea. In Soviet Russia, the requirement was to serve the proletariat; in Nazi Germany, it was service to the volk; in various absolutist monarchies, it was service to the king; in some religious regimes it's service to God. Now were's seeing the same notion take root here in the form of some vague obligation to serve the lame, the halt, and the blind. But it doesn't matter who the supposed beneficiary might be; the key problem here is the state promoting the idea that an individual has a duty to serve others."

While the disciples of the late libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand believe that altruism in any form is insidious, and that sacrifice in any form is essentially irrational, Lynn Steirer of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a devout Christian who believes in serving God, rejects mandated service just as vigorously as the Randians. Lynn is passionately committed to genuine altruism -- and she has paid a price for her commitment.

As Miss Steirer recalled in an April 22nd New York Times op-ed column, "in 1991, the Bethlehem school board ... began requiring students to perform community service or other volunteer work. Students would have to show that they had done 60 hours of such service, or they would not receive their high school diploma. That forced me to make a decision. Would I submit to the program even though I thought it was involuntary servitude, or would I stand against it on principle? I chose principle, and was denied a diploma."

Lynn's family give generously of themselves to their neighborhood and community. Over the years, Lynn and her sister Deborah have spent numerous hours in volunteer service to their community, church, and family. However, Lynn was denied her diploma in 1994 for refusing to comply with the mandatory service requirement. One problem with her high school's service requirement, Lynn pointed out, is that the definition of "service" is entirely arbitrary. "There's one person who defines what counts as service, and she can basically decide whether or not your work or volunteer activity counts -- meaning that she can decide whether or not you graduate," Lynn explained to THE NEW AMERICAN. "She has not really been difficult to work with, but it is possible that someone whose idea of community service didn't agree with hers could have problems."

Here Lynn points to one of the most dangerous aspects of government-mandated community service -- namely, that it is government that will decide what qualifies as service, not the "citizen-servant." Would a "community service" agency run by abortion supporters be willing to recognize as "community service" the peaceful educational outreach of pro-life sidewalk counselors? Would volunteer activism on behalf of groups that support the right to keep and bear arms and other "politically incorrect" causes be counted toward graduation?

The Clinton Administration has emphasized that one of the main tasks to be carried out through national service is environmental activism. Thus, volunteer work on behalf of the Sierra Club and other statist green lobbies would probably be considered acceptable. Would similar service rendered on behalf of property rights groups be recognized as valid "community service"? As Lynn Steirer suggested, students with strong convictions which don't happen to coincide with the government's notion of proper service may be presented with a dismal choice: Either forgo graduation, or perform politically correct "service" in defiance of their political and ethical beliefs.

In spite of her refusal to complete the service requirement, Lynn was able to obtain a GED, which was presented to her in a "Graduation Celebration of Liberty and Freedom" sponsored by friends and acquaintances on June 14, 1994. The theme of the alternative graduation ceremony was borrowed from Epictetus: "No man is free who is not master of himself." "This may become a regular event," Lynn told THE NEW AMERICAN. "It seems like from time to time there are a handful of students who refuse to comply with the service requirement." This year's non-graduating class will include Lynn's sister Deborah, who has refused to submit her own volunteer work for official approval and will be denied her diploma this summer.

Presently attending Northampton Area Community College, Lynn is exploring the possibility of a career in law enforcement. She also remains involved in volunteer service to others. "I work and go to school full-time, but I also take care of my grandmother and some elderly friends," she explained. "Many of my friends do the same kind of things, and they're always ready to help others when the need arises. We certainly don't need government telling us how or when to volunteer, or the kinds of things that count as 'real' volunteerism."

Lynn's friend David Moralis, who was denied a diploma in 1993, completed his senior year with a 3.8 GPA and a score of 780 (out of a possible 800) in the math portion of his SAT. Now David's younger sister Katherine, whose grades rank her at or near the top of her graduating class, is also about to be denied a diploma. "Katherine's number one in her class, and she won't get her diploma," her father Thomas Moralis told THE NEW AMERICAN. "Dave was ranked 28th out of a class of about 450 students, and he didn't get his diploma. He did get his GED and is about to graduate from Penn State with a math degree. Katherine is planning to go there as well and get a chemistry degree. They're obviously great students and highly motivated kids, and they've always been involved in service. It's just that they cannot, in principle, accept the idea that they owe service to the state."

Needless to say, that very idea of one's obligation to the state has taken root among many students at Bethlehem's Liberty High School. One such is student journalist Shawn Price, who used a column in the April 11th school newspaper to endorse the idea of mandatory national service. "It seems as if the mandatory sixty hours [of community service] have gotten in the way of a diploma for a few ridiculously pseudo-ideological individuals," wrote Price. "Not every person may have dreamed about going to college, but most every child dreamed about graduating high school with their classmates, rather than receiving a G.E.D. at an alternate ceremony sponsored by a group of egocentric people whose idea of community service is joining the fight against community service."

Noting that the Steirers, Moralises, and others have opposed the service requirement on constitutional grounds, Price asserted that "in order to be a true Constitutionalist, you must be an American, and in order to be an American, you must be willing to make sacrifices that benefit your neighbors and community." Price urged student holdouts to "reform" and become "community servers" rather than "ungrateful time bandits." Although Mr. Price is obviously very bright and transparently sincere, his knack for collectivist peer pressure would have placed him in good stead with Mao's Red Guards or Mussolini's Black Shirts.

Bill Clinton has said on several occasions that his National Service drive is intended to "reconstruct America from the grass roots up." As he signed the national service bill on September 21, 1993, he urged America's youth to "change America forever." The Service Summit was intended to create "pressure from above" on the part of state and local leaders and corporate heavyweights to complement the "pressure from below" generated by budding collectivists like Shawn Price and the growing ranks of "AmeriCorps" alumni. All of this is to bring about Mr. Clinton's desired re-definition of American citizenship. Conveniently, Fascist theoretician Alfredo Rocco supplied a definition that appears to fit Mr. Clinton's needs: "For Fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends."

Times Change, But Collectivist Message Remains Constant

We must organize all labor, no matter how dirty and arduous it may be, so that every [citizen] may regard himself as part of that great army of free labor.... The generation that is now fifteen years old ... must arrange all their tasks of education in such a way that every day, and in every city, the young people shall engage in the practical solution of the problems of common labor, even of the smallest, most simple kind.

-- Vladimir Lenin

Imagine an army of 100,000 young people restoring urban and rural communities and giving their labor in exchange for education and training.... [National Service] will harness the energy of our youth and attack the problems of our time. It literally has the potential to revolutionize the way young people all across America look at their country and feel about themselves.

-- Bill Clinton

[T]here is the great silent, continuous struggle; the struggle between the State and the individual; between the State which demands and the Individual who attempts to evade such demands. Because the individual, left to himself, unless he be a saint or a hero, always refuses to pay taxes, obey laws, or go to war.

-- Benito Mussolini

I'm here because I want to redefine the meaning of citizenship in America.... [I]f you're asked in school, "What does it mean to be a good citizen?" I want the answer to be, "Well, to be a good citizen, you have to obey the law, you've got to go to work or be in school, you've got to pay your taxes and -- oh, yes, you have to serve...."

-- Bill Clinton

All the people I know who are driving for a form of national service, primarily want it to be compulsory. They realize that's a terrible problem politically, so they're not willing to say it. It is endangerment of freedom and the potential for indoctrination that skeptics do not like in the national service concept. However benign the program, some think it will not succeed on any meaningful scale unless it is compulsory.

-- Martin Anderson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution Boston Globe, November 29, 1992

In his April 5 radio address outlining the goals of the summit, the President endorsed compulsory volunteerism -- and even called for extending it to middle schools. In other words, the man who so famously avoided the dangerous duty of fighting in Vietnam as a young man now proposes drafting a new generation of young people to perform a different set of difficult tasks.

-- New York Post editorial, April 27, 1997

Fascism finds it necessary, at the outset, to take away from the ordinary human being what he has been taught and has grown to cherish the most: personal liberty. And it can be affirmed, without falling into exaggeration, that a curtailment of personal liberty not only has proved to be, but necessarily must be, a fundamental condition of the triumph of Fascism.

-- Mario Palmieri The Philosophy of Fascism (1936)

[W]hen we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly.... [However, now] there's a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there's too much freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it.

-- Bill Clinton

Before they have their own families, the young can make a unique contribution to the family of America. In doing so, they can acquire the habit of service, and get a deeper understanding of what it really means to be a citizen. That is the main reason, perhaps, why we are here.

-- Bill Clinton

Family -- see Fascist State.

-- Benito Mussolini's Fascist dictionary

We're here ... for the first President's Summit for America's Future -- to mobilize every community and challenge every citizen ... and to ask our young people to become citizen-servants, too.

-- Bill Clinton

According to Fascism, a true, a great spiritual life cannot take place unless the State has risen to a position of pre-eminence in the world of man. The curtailment of liberty thus becomes justified at once, with this need of raising the State to its rightful position.

-- Mario Palmieri

What they're trying to do is enslave our society by taking our children's rights away. Young people who go through these [mandatory community service] programs learn to submit, and later on they won't mind giving up a few more of their rights when the government says it's necessary.

-- Thomas Moralis (father of two students denied high school diplomas for not complying with a mandatory service requirement)

When an opponent says, "I will not come over to your side," I calmly say, "Your child belongs to us already.... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community."

-- Adolf Hitler

We need a national-corporate commitment to public service to look after [the elderly]. We aren't able to provide resources unless the young pay something for their patrimony through public service.

-- William F. Buckley Jr. in Mother Jones magazine

We will not recognize [American Fascism] as it rises. It will wear no black shirts here. It will probably have no marching songs. It will rise out of a congealing of a group of elements that exist here and that are the essential components of Fascism....

It will be at first decorous, humane, glowing with homely American sentiment. But a dictatorship cannot remain benevolent. To continue, it must become ruthless. When this stage is reached we shall see that appeal by radio, movies, and government-controlled newspapers to all the worst instincts and emotions of our people. The rough, the violent, the lawless men will come to the surface and into power. This is the terrifying prospect as we move along our present course.

-- John T. Flynn Writing in the American Mercury, February 1941

[Tailgunner Joe]

Clark Calling for Civilian Reserve Corps

[Support Free Republic]

	God Bless Those who Protect our Liberty --- Past, Present and Future.
Please visit the FR Fundraiser

[Delphinium]

Clark says its his most important issue.

[Held_to_Ransom]

Clark is desperately looking for an issue to define himself as a viable alternative. This only gives fuel to the line of thought that contends he is just the foil for developing a run by Hilliary. Once Clark finds a decent running theme that the party buys, then in will step Hitlery with that theme. We shall see.

http://www.waragainsttheweak.com/

[WhiteGuy]

Way too long....................

One of my mottos is:

"If it's worth doing, it's worth going for money"

[TopQuark]

What a great article it would've been had the author provided the citations.