One could also say that firearms training is “among the activities” of the Boy Scouts. There are merit badges for rifle and shotgun shooting, and most camps will have a firing range for the boys’ use. It’s certainly not the primary activity, and arguably not even a major one (I don’t think anyone in my troop got either of the firearms merit badges), but it’s definitely there.
As for the “assault courses”, that was never officially on our list, but hardly a campout went by without some sort of game along those lines being put together by the boys.
A book called “The Reader’s Companion to Military History” edited by Robert Crowley and Geoffrey Parker talks about “Children in War” (by Thomas J Arnold). It notes how after Napoleon’s disaster in Russia, he filled his army with beardless teenagers so young they were often mistaken for girls “les Marie Louises”. The Ottoman empire raised their elite corps, the janissaries, by taxing Christians in the balkans, the tax being their sons. A fourteenth century chronicler noted boy soldiers “hot and impetuous, quick with weapons, careless of safety”. German soldier Ernest Junger, a lieutenant at age 19 in the First World war, felt troops of boys of twenty, under experienced leadership, are the best. The Iraq vs Iran wars of the 1980s had Iranian boys of 11. The Khymer Rouge of the 1970s showed that children weren’t born lambs, but quite willing to commit genocide on a massive scale against adults.
That’s the point though; getting a merit badge in firearms isn’t mandatory, and certainly isn’t practiced with M-4 carbines. Firearms training was a mandatory part of the HJ, and was conducted using the same Mauser 98 rifles that they would find themselves using when they came of age (or late in the war, before they came of age) and were drafted into the military.
With due respect, there’s a world of difference between a bunch of kids playing grab ass and assault course drills. I only made it to webelos, but I don’t recall ever crawling in the mud under barbed wire making sure to keep the muzzle of my rifle clear of the mud, then practicing assaulting trench lines and bayoneting dummies as part of anything I ever did or heard of. Calling the two comparable is well, the exact same thing as saying kids playing war and boot camp are comparable.
It pains me to discover that there are adults who still believe the allies never committed any war crimes. The biggest two are the Dresden bombing and Hiroshima. But I wouldn’t put torture past the Allies as well. And if the Canadians stopped taking prisoners, well that’s a crime too, and of course, it doesn’t matter that the other side did it too.
Sure, scale matters, and the extermination of jews and the Roma and the Sinti and the Africans in the death camps knows almost no precedent when it comes to big numbers of people killed in the shortest of times.
But to suggest that both sides didn’t do it is dishonest and naive.
And if it was just the HJ killing PoWs, in their situation, it’s not so uncommon, they didn’t have the resources to care for them. the Canadians, however, would have had the ability to get those.
in the end there’s no good way to compare these things.
Just remember, the history is written by the victor, so …
bump was clarifying my question, which see, since you which didn’s see. Only. He did not suggest anything else, certainly not what you say he did.
Hiroshima was a decisive mission of war, and prevented further Japanese suffering, not to speak of Allied.
The Jewish Holocaust is not about number of victims. If it is, that has no bearing.
I hope this thread is not hijacked to GD.
This is the “But Clinton!” of World War 2. Someone posts about a specfic war crime committed by a specific Nazi unit, and the response is “But the Allies…!” Where did anyone in this thread say the Allies never commited war crimes?
Thanks- I was a bit confused. The only distinction I was trying to make is that the Normandy war crimes were by the 12th SS division, not the Hitler Youth as an organization.
If someone started a thread asking for advice on buying an airplane, and I replied, completely seriously, that Harry Potter swears by his Nimbus 2000, would that not be a pretty fucking dumb reply?