Benign origins can lead to frightening things.

The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a plan to set up a new “volunteer corps” and consider whether “a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people” should be developed.

The legislation also refers to “uniforms” that would be worn by the “volunteers” and the “need” for a “public service academy…”

The vote yesterday came on H.R. 1388, which reauthorizes through 2014 the National and Community Service Act of 1990 and the Domestic Volunteer Service Act of 1973, acts that originally, among other programs, funded the AmeriCorps…

What is perhaps most frightening is the erosion of meaning (and shame) that allows ‘mandatory’ and ‘volunteer’ to exist in the same sentence. AmeriCorps? Great thing. Friend of my daughter’s just finished a one-year stint. Voluntary. Repeat: voluntary.

On December 1, 1936, Hitler decreed “The Law concerning the Hitler Youth” which mandated that all young Germans (excluding Jews) would “be educated physically, intellectually and morally in the spirit of National Socialism” though the Hitler Youth from the age of ten onward. This law also effectively ended the Catholic Youth Organization which had managed to hold for three years amid continual Nazi harassment.

Parents who prevented their children from joining the Hitler Youth were subject to heavy prison sentences. Membership thus grew to nearly six million. As a result, the organization sprouted into a giant bureaucracy in Berlin and began to acquire the dreariness of a big governmental institution in marked contrast to the dynamic organization it had been in the 1920s and early ’30s…

UPDATE: A friend rightly points out that there are many perfectly legitimate national service requirements out there that are not the Hitler Youth. Israel’s comes to mind, for example. The assessment of this one will turn, I suspect, on the degree to which:

1. it provides a diverse range of options for fulfillment and enables young people to choose among them (or at least apply according to personal preferences), and
2. any educational component adheres to the vision of just those in power (indoctrination) versus the time-tested principles that under-gird our union.

For example, requiring all 25-year-olds to pass a test on the Constitution and the high points of American history before becoming eligible for government perks strikes me as an extremely useful adaptation. I’m not holding my breath.