August 1, 2011
Peace Corps a Way of Neutralizing Activists I am a former Peace Corps volunteer and I agree with your article, "Peace Corps Puts Volunteers in Danger."
The village I was put in had notoriously lacked a volunteer for some time because the one before me had been forced to leave abruptly after the elder father of the town's mayor (the mayor also being the husband of the cooperating teacher and go-to person for the volunteer) had locked her in a room and attempted to sexually assault her.
I later learned that a fellow volunteer had been sexually assaulted and relocated. I also heard of many, many more instances. I would agree that the PC totally plays this down and does a horrible job, placing women in isolated areas.
Of course, early on, Peace Corps served as a cover for the CIA. I have also seen USAID (most definitely CIA cover) out where I was placed as well as World Vision (which some say is a CIA cover, but I have yet to see any definitive proof on that). The latter had given $80,000 to build a children's dormitory, very useful.
A key report to read in understanding more fully the Peace Corps program, and one reason I become disillusioned with the organization, would be the Report from Iron Mountain (online at http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_ironmountain0.htm#contents).
Here is a quote from the report:
"Most proposals that address themselves, explicitly or otherwise, to the postwar problem of controlling the socially alienated turn to some variant of the Peace Corps or the so-called Job Corps for a solution. The socially disaffected, the economically unprepared, the psychologically unconformable, the hard-core "delinquents," the incorrigible "subversives," and the rest of the unemployable are seen as somehow transformed by the disciplines of a service modeled on military precedent into more or less dedicated social service workers."
Peace Corps would be the economic substitute for war; a giant "social-welfare program." They actually wrote that it would serve as the model of a "sociological control function (sophisticated form of slavery)."
Last I checked, it costs $35,000 per year to support a volunteer. Imagine how much further that money would go by giving it to a local organization!
The idea of Peace Corps is nice, but considering the hidden agenda which includes the Westernization of the Third World as well as massive waste of resources and the danger it poses to volunteers, it's well to be highly critical of it.
There is a couple, former PC volunteers that realized this waste in resources and went back to start a local NGO that did much better than anything PC could do. I know of one volunteer in my time who actually was placed in a facility and did absolutely nothing!
Remember, despite all the great things JFK did in his "turning" (read JFK & the Unspeakable by James Douglass), he was a Fabian socialist that did believe in world government.
Henry Makow is the author of A Long Way to go for a Date. He received his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Toronto. He welcomes your feedback and ideas at
