US Planning To Recruit One in 24 Americans as (Community) Spies. Here’s the government organization’s website. This is nationalism to an extreme unheard of since the Gestapo: “During the Second World War there were 45,000 members of the Gestapo. However, it is estimated they also employed 160,000 agents and informers.“ The only apparent difference is the Nazis were smart enough to pay the informants; Bush is asking for volunteers.
Sign me up! I hate people anyway. 🙂
After living through 9/11, I don’t think this is the worst idea in the world. No amount of police, FBI, CIA, and soldiers are going to protect us. Basically, we have to all be on the lookout for suspicious behavior. The terrorists took the war to us. We are at war, whether you like it or not, and it’s just begun. I didn’t vote for Bush, nor do I care for his politics (I used to be a Republican), but you need to be vigilant. I’m not going to be signing up for any citizen corp., but we should all be smart. Okay, I’m stepping down off the soap box now.
I agree with the fact that we should all be smart, but what the government is doing with this and the Patriot Act is encouraging people with access to the heart of communities (like mail deliverypeople, etc.) the authority of using their access through their occupation to spy on people–and even search their living spaces without the people being searched knowing about it. This sort of vigilantism will be biased with the same prejudices that exist within the members of the community’s local Citizen Corps. If the local corps happens to agree that they should be suspicious of anyone who is not white, for example, as might happen in some towns, then they are unfairly targeting non-white people. Since the Citizen Corps is not a law enforcement agency, the theory is that nobody has to do anything illegal in order to be reported. It just related too directly to the Gestapo for me to be comfortable with this. If you think the Citizen Corps is a good idea, then you must also think the Gestapo is a good idea.
But don’t just take my word for it. Here’s an opinion article from the Boston Globe.