The democratic potential of scouting
While I was an activist in different revolutionary groups, I met several times with people who were also scouts in their youth. And each time, this question kept coming back to me: how come so many scouts end up being activists? Although it brings together 170,000 young people in France, scouting remains confined to a few percent of the population. One might think that the answer lies in the social environment from which most of these children come, who often grow up in families marked by a left-wing political culture. But we must not hide the importance that scout camps have had in the politicization of many young people. This politicization is due to the history of resistance carried by the different scout movements around the world, but also to the experiences/relationships with the world that we develop during the camps, or even thanks to the different tools of collective life put in place. In this article we will look at this in more detail through the experiences of scouts from France, Germany and Italy.
The resistance of scouts in Germany
Rituals accompany us across a threshold, from the old into the new. They are both a farewell and a welcome. Songs are often integrated into everyday life as rituals, for example bedtime songs that gently accompany us from day to night. From light into darkness, from wakefulness into sleep. From consciousness to the unconscious. Rituals bind us into the cycle of life.
So there is a spiritual meaning in singing a song that gives us the strength and courage to move on to something new and uncertain. If we encourage ourselves by singing, we also encourage ourselves in our plans and make a promise to walk the path together. Action follows from our words. This is how broad youth movements developed during fascism in Europe, which had a deeper and more meaningful understanding of life than the system wanted to offer them. We can take an example from this today: The deeper we learn to feel and understand life, the less we allow ourselves to be taken in by a superficial image of the system.
Making music is a Scout virtue. Thousands of years ago, we humans sat around a fire, sang and danced to warm ourselves and celebrate our community. Here we communicate in a different way: we give each other songs, melodies, share sadness, anger and happiness while the flickering light envelops us. Songs are also a way of passing on experiences from old generations over the years. As children we get to know the strange sounds and songs, learn to love them and later teach them to our loved ones. Whether from the heart and head or with a book and guitar, we embark on the shared memory of people and stories we never knew. We teach each other foreign languages and deep friendships are formed at endless camps that are never meant to end.
Scouting in Europe can be understood internationally. Work songs, children's songs and wandering songs from all countries are carried across national borders. When industrialization in Western Europe led to misery in many large cities, the first youth movements emerged that wanted to return to nature. They demonstrated their self-determined and communal lifestyle by living it. Through the wailing of neighbouring peoples, they were able to give us a glimpse into the future, an analysis of how the world would develop. They did not allow themselves to be lured by the offers of capitalism, because they knew the exploitation that went hand in hand with it.
The pain drove them into the woods. And there they became, how the German meaning of the word scout (Pfadfinder) suggests, “finder of paths”.
Each country has its own continuation of our traditions, which are all close to music and nature. In countries where fascism wanted to occupy every corner of the earth, it was still unable to reach the hearts of the Scouts. He broke up their alliances and replaced them with youth organizations in which unity meant hatred and death. Scouting is a thorn in his side because he cannot manipulate young minds there. Those who practise true community and have an awareness of life are always one step ahead of fascism. During National Socialism, many scouts in Germany went underground because they were persecuted as members of banned independent or even communist organizations. Others allowed themselves to be transferred to the Hitler Youth. Stories of scouts who resisted have come down to us from Germany, France and Poland in particular. In units of just a few young people, they spied on the occupying forces, stole their flags and tracked down their weapons caches. They infiltrated fascist youth groups and organized anti-fascist education underground. In these stories, it was particularly young women who courageously took up the fight. They passed on information, cared for the wounded and kept their culture and tradition alive.
After the Second World War, the first organizations slowly began to re-establish themselves and rebuild organisations of Scouting on the ruins. Through the student movement in the 1960s, they gained political awareness. Since then, they have been involved in anti-nuclear protests, peace marches and ecological movements.
If you join the campfire circles today, you will hear songs about families who have been travelling in wagons all their lives, or about ancient tribes that can still be found in Europe today. Their songs are an inspiration and a spark of resistance for young scouts. They all carry a longing for a free life. In the 21st century, young scouts live by their own rules: They want to counteract the consumerism of Western capitalism and live in harmony with each other, with themselves and with nature. They organize themselves under worldwide umbrella associations and have an international outlook. But the resistance of the scouts is still necessary, because liberalism is also spreading its ideas and the forests are getting each day a little more gray.
So let's keep on singing!
The life of scouts in Italy
“Fly with me, my little star.
A red still animate us,
If you stay with me you will know
Many flames, fire of stars.”
Around the fire we are singing together the song of our ward, which some young leaders wrote a few years ago as a remembrance of their passage. Above us the deep blue sky dotted with stars, which every night act as our sentinels. Around us the mountain peaks, the stream in which we wash and the tents of the camp.
We are a group of young scouts at camp in the mountains, the one in which each department (ages 12 to 16) experiences as an adventure each summer.
The leaders are older, between 20 and 30 years old, and they accompany boys and girls on their journey of growth, self-discovery and how to live together in simplicity. The first principle is that we educate each other, and the youth are in charge of the decisions of how to organize themselves, to a greater extent as they grow. The leaders and youth who help them have the role of giving them the tools, motivating them and bringing out the best in them. They can see beyond the “hands in their pockets” and indifference, or the brash and disrespectful behaviours. They see beyond the influence of social media and families in which they grow up. And finally, leaders must be coherent to be credible and to deserve the trust of boys and girls.
In the midst of capitalist Western society, Scout life is a niche that is based on other democratic and libertarian values. Or at any rate it can be, where it’s lived with consistency and deepness. In Italy's liberal society, young people are bombarded by digital media, and they drown their creativity in video games and on Tiktok. In Scout life, however, it is done differently. Outdoor, playful living is at the heart of the time we spend together, and we value it as the truest way. It is here that many people have found the purest friendships. Not because of magic, but because you go deeply into it, and we grow together smiling and singing throughout difficulties. This is what Lucia recounted on the last night of the camp: “each of you made me realize that you don't need that stupid mask that society forces us to put on to be yourself”.
It was on these values and methods that during the 20-year fascist period the scouts opposed the fascist laws in various ways, during that time the scout organization was dissolved and replaced with the Balilla youth. The kerchief of the group we are part of nowadays, has the same colours as the one of the Stray Eagles, a group formed by young people from the Milan, Monza and Parma groups who continued their activities clandestinely. And when there was an opportunity, some of them founded the OSCAR (Scout Organization - later replaced by Soccorso - Collocamento Assistenza Ricercati), which in the years 1943 - 45 saved the lives of more than 2,000 Jews, dissidents and former prisoners by making them escape to Switzerland on mountain trails. It was the spirit of brotherhood that moved them to risk their lives.
This is what unites Scouts around the world, across all boundaries. And it could also unite every person on this planet. We see how much we need it in the current situation of World War III, and we are aware of how this depends first of all on us and how much we put into it. So we also invite all other Scouts to do their best and deepen these talks about politics in the sense of how to live together in freedom from oppression. Committing to serve others gives meaning to life, and this could be the solution to society's loss of values.
There is so much to be done in this context, as of constant bombardment by the civilization of profit they want to take these values away from us, and the conservatism and dogmatism of the Church drive young people away from a spiritual faith that could be genuine and could unite rather than divide. The individualistic and classist mentality pushes us to let go when it becomes challenging or when it comes to welcoming those who come from more difficult social and family backgrounds.
The road, the trail is one of the main symbols of Scout life. In every moment of life the journey to improve oneself and the way of being together. It is in fatigue, in walking with a backpack on one's shoulders, that you understand one's own and others' deep needs. And it is in living in nature that we connect with those who walk with us. That's what it takes to keep going.
That shooting star is a dream
And that nothingness
- a pebble of a few inches -
that makes us travel with our minds
And tells us: hold on
Stay under this sky a little longer.
- “Fuoco di stelle” Department
Finding ourselves through scouting in France
Living in a community over a period of several weeks makes the camp a special moment in which our individualities merge into something bigger. We learn to live together, take decisions together, share common experiences and we develop a relationship with the group that gives us more freedom than it deprives us of. The organization of the group is reinforced by team life, a smaller group (5-6 people) with whom we share the tent, some meals and tasks. The latter are distributed fairly between all the teams, following a rotation that allows everyone to know what they have to do each day for the proper functioning of the group, and therefore to function in a very horizontal way and to share the mental load of cooking, washing dishes, filling water, etc.
Another mechanism of politicization is the team council. Held every day at snack time, this is a time when each person is invited to express how they feel about the atmosphere of the camp, the relationship with the leaders, the quality of the proposed activities, etc. The team council is a tool for developing the critical thinking of young people and their imagination by inviting them to propose alternatives. The spokespersons then pass on the criticisms through a council of spokespersons. Politically, it is a way of inviting them to be a democratic counter-power to the decisions of the leaders, questioning the rules in order to understand them or go beyond them. I am only talking here about certain things that have marked me in my political construction. But there are others that are just as important, such as the choice of the themes that will guide all the activities of the camp, the importance given to commitment, responsibility, or the focus on services provided to people outside the camp.
Many people, when they arrived in their first education with the Kurdistan Liberation Movement, had the impression of reliving the scout camps of their youth. There is something strong, collective, that brings these experiences together, and distances us from the meaningless existence that capitalist modernity offers us, bringing us closer to a true experience of life and collective freedom. All scout movements share the characteristic of offering a fundamentally anti-liberal experience. However, the fight against liberalism can also be appropriated by reactionary forces, thus remaining within a centralizing and reactionary mentality of capitalist modernity. It is therefore up to us to seize this tool, reconnect it to its democratic history, and turn it into a genuine means of building the Democratic Confederalism of the Youth.
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