OBAMA'S SECURITY APPARATUS (SA) IS FORMING IN A HURRY

Well, that did not take long, did it? The Obama transition team already has plans for coercing our children into the SA to do community service – 50 hours for the little ones, 100 for the bigger ones every year. (read all about it at http://change.gov/americaserves/).

Based on the President-elect's past record, I suspect that “community service” really means “community organization.” In other words, our youngsters will be indoctrinated, then marched somewhere and made to organize people to do Mr. Obama’s bidding, whether or not these hapless people need or want such “help."

This is a manifestation of President-elect Obama’s well-documented impatience with enumerated powers in the Constitution that limit excessive concentrations of power. He seeks more: much more. He wishes to be the supreme arbiter of what is right and wrong, moral and immoral, and to codify it in an ukase. He would issue diktats to us, taking charge of our lives and giving us no option to make decisions for ourselves. And he would frog-march the youngest and most impressionable ones among us out to do his dirty work.

Learn your history in a hurry, folks. That is the way it always happened in real socialist countries like my native Czechoslovakia of 1948-1989.

This how things will work for you under the Obama plan (as they did for us then). If you do not obey, you will not graduate. Your opposition will be noted down in a secret political reliability file (kádrový posudek, it was called). All potential employers will have to review this file before even granting you a job interview. Despite the size of the country and the population, this is a piece of cake, what with nationwide digital databases and instantaneous communication. Evidence of political unreliability, permanently entered in your file, will keep you out of any job other than hard manual labor - digging ditches or shoveling manure, for instance. Finally, if you do not land a job (a real possibility for an ideological adversary), you will be classified as a vagrant and a burden to society after 30 days or so - and you will get to do your "community service" anyway, only on chains.

Conveniently, those of us who are over 55 are only “encouraged” to take part - for now. There are sound strategic reasons for this sashay. First, given our age and life’s experiences, we are (theoretically) least vulnerable to brainwashing. Second, we are most likely to oppose this “change” since we know more about our rights under the Constitution than the younger set. Third, knowing a little more history that the young ones, we may have actual facts to impart about the real meaning of forced labor - because that is what the Obama plan proposes. We could create havoc by pointing this out, and make still more trouble by mentioning such simple but inconvenient truths as the complete lack of precedent for this in a free society. The closest analogy are FDR’s programs like the CCC, but these were voluntary, for adults only, and they paid. So they are really no precedent at all. The true precedents for the Obama plan are the forced labor systems of all the great, failed socialist experiments of the Twentieth Century: the USSR, National Socialist Germany, Fascist Italy, and all their more recent spawn like Khmer Rouge Cambodia.

My fellow oldsters, consider two things.

First, we are at risk, too. If history has anything of value to teach us, then, once the system is in place, we will no longer be able to opt out. And, if we do not obey…well, just recall that the first “reeducation camps” were set up for the domestic opposition – e.g. Solovki and Belbaltlag (and hundreds more) in the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, Oranienburg and Dachau in National Socialist Germany. So we, too, will be given an opportunity to serve the cause of change in such places if we do not obey.

And second. When, in the 1920s, details about the Soviet "community service" camps began to leak out, the British Anti-Slavery Society - one of a number of organizations and individuals still unafraid to speak out - actually started an investigation into the matter. I submit that we must duplicate that feat now, while we still have freedom of speech and freedom after speech; and shout out forcefully on behalf of our children.

Because if we do not, there will be no one left to even whisper for us when we are made to go.