Sunday, August 14, 2005

Mad Max on the Peace Corps “Military Option”

Three years ago, Congress authorised a recruitment programme for the military which offers recruits the option to fulfill their post-active duty reserve obligations by serving in the Peace Corps. The military has just begun to promote the programme – hmm, I wonder why – and the first batch of recruits enlisted under the programme will be eligible to apply to Peace Corps in 2007.

http://peacecorpsonline.org/messages/messages/2629/2034362.html

Sargent Shriver, the first director of the Peace Corps, asked JFK to keep Peace Corps independent, and JFK agreed not to put Peace Corps under the control of the Agency for International Development. Later, Peace Corps fought to uphold the rules which maintained its reputation of independence and neutrality, i.e. barring intelligence officers from joining Peace Corps and prohibiting former volunteers from working for intelligence agencies.

The primary reason for keeping Peace Corps beyond suspicion of any military or intelligence involvement is the safety of current volunteers. A volunteer suspected of being CIA would be in danger almost anywhere Peace Corps operates, likewise a volunteer known to have served in the military. Keep in mind that Peace Corps continues to operate in Muslim countries.

A related concern is the integrity of Peace Corps. “Leave the Peace Corps alone. Let us have one bright star of foreign involvement that has nothing to do with killing people” – John Coyne, returned Peace Corps volunteer, Ethiopia, 1960s.

Chris Matthews (returned Peace Corps volunteer, Swaziland, 1960s) talked to Mark Schneider, a former Peace Corps Director (1999-2001) and Frank Gaffney from the Center for Security Policy on Hardball. The conversation went from the Peace Corps “Military Option” to CIA involvement: all three agreed that there are no CIA recruits amongst Peace Corps volunteers.

http://peacecorpsonline.org/messages/messages/2629/2034353.html

On that note, Max, returned Peace Corps volunteer, Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, 1992-1994, has a revelation for you. I know for a fact that the CIA actively recruits amongst people who are about to depart on their Peace Corps service. The CIA did not contact me (they are not that stupid) but they did try to recruit at least one of my fellow volunteers. My friend refused their offer, which came with a cash incentive, but I am certain that there are Peace Corps volunteers who take them up on it.

So now it is out in the open: there are CIA informants in the Peace Corps and there will soon be military reservists. The integrity of the Peace Corps has been destroyed. Well done, motherfuckers.

Thanks for the computer time, DD.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

There is nothing in the constitution authorizing Peace Corps.
For all it's good intentions and laudible goals and ideals, the government doesn't have the power to take money from me and give to the Peace Corp.
If you want to keep the integrity of an organization, keep it private and privately funded.

Monkey's Max said...

Anon, I appreciate your comment. I think it would be better if Peace Corps were privately funded. Aside from the reasons you have given, the fact is that no one trusts Peace Corps anymore because it is government funded and we have a corrupt government.

beamis said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
beamis said...

Government is corrupt by its very nature. When you start out with the premise that Big Brother is entitled to a sizeable portion of your assests, through a tax code (in most languages called theft), you are dealing with nothing more than an old-fashioned shakedown.

The presumption is that nearly 50% or more of your productive capacity is to be handed over to your overseers at the federal, state, county and municipal level for your own good. In fact life itself would not be possible without all of these mandarins guiding us through our life journey.

Starting from that pedestal of criminality, is it any wonder that everything coming afterwards is a form of corruption? When power is gained involuntarily, at the point of a gun barrel, there is never any form of accoutability about how it is used.

What amount of stolen assests was the CIA offering you as a signing bonus?

Monkey's Max said...

Beamis, after I posted my comment I knew that either you or DD would come forward with the premise that "government is corrupt by its very nature." I agree. I can no longer even see how anyone can believe otherwise, unless one accepts naïveté as a valid excuse.

As for a signing bonus, the CIA never contacted me; it was my friend they called, and I no longer remember what they offered him.

beamis said...

Your ability to see this obvious fact makes you special indeed.

Devastatin' Dave said...

Skeeter,

Rothbard would disagree with Rand and so would I. As he put it(paraphrasing)- something as important as protection of rihts should not be left to a government monopoly on force any more than some other service.

All 3 functions listed by Rand as the proper function of government can be(or have been)provided by the private sector as proved by Rothbard, Hoppe and others.

Rand wrote: for all the reasons discussed above, a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate into the chaos of gang warfare. My response to that would be, "you mean like the "gang warfare" perpetrated by governments that were responsible for some 200 million deaths in the 20th century?! I'll take my chances with anarchists, thank you.

Devastatin' Dave said...

Why do you think you can't have objective laws without governments? Maritime law developed privately.

Law enforcement - private security firms(that already exist, by the way), self-defense

Defense - same as above

Courts - private arbitration firms(that already exist, by the way)

I never said I "trusted" people, I said I'd take my chances with them. I'll ask you the same question, you don't trust ordinary citizens, but you'll trust politicians with a gigantic arsenal and a monopoly on the use of force. To be honest, Rand is the naive one to put her trust in politicians.

beamis said...

Nothing in world history has ever been more savage or merciless than a government. Mob rule never produced the Holocaust (6 million dead)or the Soviet collectivization of the Ukraine (10 million dead) or Mao's Long March (20 million dead) or his Great Leap Forward (11 million dead), not to mention the deliberately terroristic fire bombings and nuclear incineration of innocent civilian populations by the Americans during WW 2.

We can go back through the ages and find similar gargantuan slaughter intiated by the all powerful and omnipotent state.

I'd take my chances with anarchy any day.

Skeeter please explain the 200 million deaths by government in the 20th century. You skipped over it when DD mentioned it previously and I want to know how you can square that with your notion that we are better off when they hold the keys to absolute power as opposed to your so-called mob rule?

Devastatin' Dave said...

The Vikings had an anarchic society in Iceland from c.950 AD to about 1250 AD. It started to crumble when they began to tax themselves.

The Irish, prior to being overrun by the Brits had a clan-based, anarchic society

The Quakers of colonial Pennsylvania had a church-based, anarchic society.

Monkey's Max said...

Skeeter, segue.

I'll leave the big boys to argue the rest.

Anonymous said...

"Why do you think you can't have objective laws without governments? Maritime law developed privately."

Actually, you can't have objective laws, period. "Objective law" is an oxymoron. Laws come from people's opinions enforced with violence. People's opinions are by definition subjective.

"And who sets the laws under which this security force can operate. The person who pays for them. Again it boils down to brute force wins."

That's already the way it works. The 'government' has the most access to the use of force, because most people will only use force as approved by the 'government'. It's just a fact of life that law is the combined product of the use of force in a society.

"Government" is just a label the organization that has the most access to violence uses, and this is in fact a hypocritical organization. If it's right to use force then it's right to use force. Reserving that right exclusively for yourself is hypocrisy. If an organization wants to use force, say to arrest, try, and detain a murderer, OK. But it shouldn't be a hypocrit and tell others they can't do the same thing. If it wants to apply the same rules it applies to itself as far as ensuring the rights of the accused that's fine to. As long as it treats itself the way it treats others. Hypocrisy is wrong, period even if the organization that is committing hypocrisy calls itself "Government".

I'm actually against capitalism, which seems to be what most anarchists on this board are promoting. I think property rights based on possession and use (no landlords and all businesses are cooperatives) is legitimate and the current conception of property rights is artificially upheld by the state. However, I'd prefer anarchocapitalism to statist capitalism. Even if the law is wrong at least its enforcers aren't being hypocrits.