Thursday, January 31, 2013

As seen on Baden-Powell's bookshelf

This refers back to a 2004 Christopher Hitchens article on the "mildly Fascist" Baden-Powell.  If I had read it before, I had forgotten this bit:
If Baden-Powell had had his way, the Boy Scouts might have formed close ties with the Hitler Youth. In 1937, he told the Scouts' international commissioner that the Nazis were "most anxious that the Scouts should come into closer touch with the youth movement in Germany." Baden-Powell met with the German ambassador in London and was invited to meet the Führer himself, though the war prevented him from visiting the Third Reich. But he continued to admire Hitler's values, writing in a 1939 diary entry that Mein Kampf was "a wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organisation etc."

As Hitchens reports, Baden-Powell also seemed to tacitly approve of the Nazi attitude toward homosexuality. When the head of his international bureau told him that a German scout leader had been sent to a concentration camp, Baden-Powell dismissed it by saying the scoutmaster had been taken away for "homosexual tendencies."
I know that the scout movement still contains some learning about their founder's life and good deeds.  They seem to skip over what was on his bookshelf, though.

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