Child Soldiers: Smoke and Mirrors from the Political Class

One weapon of tyranny is to fool us with optical illusions. To see through them, we might start with the Palestinians and others like them.

Continuing my promise to serialize bits of my books, I present here an excerpt from The New Politics of Sex (Angelico Press, 2017) on “child soldiers”. This presents a textbook example of how we allow ourselves to be fooled, and therefore ruled, by the political class. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves."

This passage is unusual in that I rely mostly on one excellent existing book, David M. Rosen’s, Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005). Of course, this is my own spin, and Rosen might not necessarily agree with all of it. But I see his book as an example of fine scholarship, increasingly rare nowadays.

This is not a marginal issue. It has immediate relevance today, because it is the context for the Palestinian resistance. I plan to write an article soon on how this problem illuminates the current, apparently intractable standoff in the Middle East.

It also illustrates why we do need scholars — real ones and not the parlor intellectuals who populate most of our universities.

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I have emboldened some passages that I find especially striking.

Extended descriptions, reviews, and a button to buy the book are on my web page.

Please comment here or on the Amazon page and recirculate this.

From The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Government Power (Angelico, 2017), pp. 313-318.

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Child Soldiers

Child soldiering is another new hysteria connected to the deterioration of the family and the politicization of children.  The militarization of children is their politicization with a vengeance. 

But as with other family crimes, the real exploiters of children may not be the ones that appear at first glance or that the media are intent on demonizing.  Fortunately, David Rosen has cut through the sensationalism and critiqued this problem so effectively that we now have a fairly clear picture of what is taking place. Properly understood, we are presented with a phenomenon that is not only mindbogglingly cruel, but also tragically defiant of any hope of restoring justice and order.  Once again, we might start by dismounting our high horse of self-righteousness and considering our own role.

The dominant view of this problem as set forth by humanitarian and human rights groups like Child Soldiers International, is, as Rosen summarizes it, “that children should not bear arms and that the adults who recruit them should be held accountable and should be prosecuted for war crimes”.  Rosen questions this, pointing out that children have long served in armed conflict and that “the child soldier as an abused and exploited victim of war is a radically new concept”. 

At one time, there was nothing remarkable about adolescent boys serving in arms.  “For both working-class and upper-class boys, to be a boy soldier was to be part of a well-trained, highly skilled group to which society generally accorded honour and respect,” he points out.  “Children were part of virtually every partisan and resistance movement in World War II.”

With today’s new humanitarian sensitivity, we see precisely the opposite, yet another attempt to discredit traditional authority and criminalize masculine behavior.  “They are part of a tendency in the contemporary world to criminalize war and to paint the military and its associated cultural and social links with the brush of criminality or deviancy.”  Consistent with our theme, Rosen sees new complaints about child soldiers as part of “a global politics of age, of which the child soldier is only one part”.  His emphasis on “the ideological and political manipulation of the concepts of childhood, youth, and adulthood” is also consistent with what we have encountered elsewhere (emphasis added).

But to leave it at that is plainly inadequate.  Rosen himself and many others paint a grim picture of today’s child soldiering that certainly should not be dismissed.  Often both victims and perpetrators at once, armed children and youth both suffer and commit hideous and apparently gratuitous atrocities, far out of line with the traditional standards of just warfare.  Rosen’s scepticism makes his own accounts all the more credible:  “Youth set people on fire, burned down their houses, shot children, paraded citizens about naked and beat them, brought opponents before youth-run kangaroo courts, and hacked men and women to death with machetes.”

What is new about the current generation of child soldiers — and what does make this phenomenon grotesque — is not children serving as soldiers as such but how the warfare in which they are engaged is driven by radical political ideologies.  This is especially disturbing when one realizes how appealing such ideologies are to both boys and girls of adolescent age, especially in dismal political and social conditions that make those ideologies plausible and superficially “liberating.”  These ideologies are what have given to modern warfare its totalizing, unrestrained, and savage character — which is exacerbated when the warfare is waged by children.

It is evident from Rosen’s account and others that most child soldiers are not abducted, passive victims of unscrupulous adults.  They are far more likely to be politicized and radicalized adolescents who are recruited by others close to their own age whom we have “empowered” with the means to act out dreams of adolescent rebellion with deadly force.  Every case study Rosen examined involves a radicalized and militarized youth culture. 

This is fuelled in part by “a background of destroyed families and failed educational systems” which cut the youth loose from familial and local bonds to serve in militias and armies.  One recurring theme in Rosen’s account is how children find in soldiering “surrogate forms of family and kinship”.  (And what would bear further investigation is how much of this problem stems from family breakdown and why so many children are cut off from their parents and thus available to be recruited as soldiers.)  Potential recruits in Vilnius “were asked whether they could abandon their families and were rejected if they felt they could not”.

This is apparent in all the main case studies Rosen presents:  Jewish resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Europe, rebel insurgents in Sierra Leone, and Palestinian suicide bombers.  One can sympathize with these movements or condemn them, but the trend appears common to them all:  Modern war radicalizes youth, cutting them off from their families and encouraging them to take up radical and revolutionary politics. 

Jewish resistance fighters had backgrounds in socialist Zionism and “imagined themselves as a revolutionary vanguard”.  They were actively rebelling against not only the Nazis but their own elders.  It clearly involved an element of adolescent rebellion, which is rebellion for its own sake.  “We did everything that was forbidden because it was forbidden,” Rosen quotes one.  “That is how the resistance began.” The elders in turn saw the resistance as “childish”.

In Sierra Leone, students “began to dabble in revolutionary ideologies and politics” and acted out their violence as disciples of Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, Muammar al-Qadhafi, Marx, Lenin, and Castro.  “A murderous army cloaked in revolutionary ideology, the RUF [Revolutionary United Front] was drenched in the blood of the people for whom it claimed to be fighting.”  This army recruited “alienated and homeless children and youth,” in part because they had no families to protect and shelter them.

The militarization of Palestinian youths was also a product of their politicization, and their upbringings were saturated with ideology, often dominated by radicalized women.  “I was in a refugee camp in which everyone spoke about politics day and night,” one boy recounted, “and when my mother and grandmother spoke about politics how could I not speak?”   Another believed “the Palestinian youth were leading an intergenerational revolution as well as a war against Israel.”  “It’s a real social revolution.”  Suicide bombers present an especially grisly side of war, from the standpoint of both the youth and their victims.  “From the beginnings of the conflict, the conviction that young people have a duty to sacrifice themselves for the Palestinian cause has held a central place in militant forms of Palestinian political consciousness.”

Here too, Rosen is clear that this is a form of political radicalism, and that “the radicalization of the Palestinian population developed out of the radicalization of its youth.”  “The peoples’ committees in the villages are run by boys of fifteen, who are challenging the authority of old sheiks and imams.”  Contemporary descriptions were “not of a community exploiting its children, but of a community in ecstasy, enthralled by the power of youth.”  Reminiscent of other resistance fighters, Palestinian youth were later to look back with nostalgia on their struggle.  “I miss those days a lot,” Rosen quotes one.  “They were the most beautiful days of my life.”

These “child soldiers” are being doubly politicized and thereby doubly manipulated.  The more obvious is provided by their circumstances and by the intoxicating thrill of bearing arms for their liberation.  Beyond that however, they are made political pawns by the Western humanitarian culture that insists on casting them as victims of exploitation by yet more unnamed malefactors.  Here is another instance of  the openly political radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s — in this case, the movements for “national liberation” — giving way to the subtler sexual ideology, as the therapeutic culture increasingly transforms the UN’s mission to prevent armed aggression from a matter of diplomacy into a matter of social work:  “Charges of child abuse have . . . been levelled against Palestinian parents for their unwillingness or inability to police the behaviour of their children” in the intifada (emphasis added).

Child soldiering thus follows the other gender crimes we have examined:  Radical ideology first creates the problem of politicized and deracinated children and then complains about its effects, offering yet further radical solutions that lead to more problems.  The trend is embodied in the figures of Samora and Graca Machel.  Samora Machel was prominent in the anti-colonial wars of “national liberation,” leading the Marxist resistance to Portuguese rule in Mozambique and serving as that country’s first president.  His wife Graca Machel was an avid participant in those wars and then served as Mozambique’s education minister.  These liberation movements systematically recruited huge numbers of boys and youth as soldiers, and no objection was then raised by the humanitarian elites who sympathized with these movements.  Two generations later, similar practices, which are the legacy of those wars, are being classed as criminal child abuse, creating employment as social workers for the wives and daughters of the freedom fighters, with leaders sought for prosecution.  Especially as postcolonial regimes like the Machels’ are themselves confronted by insurgencies that challenge their own authority, they (in alliance with politicized humanitarian groups and the UN) are attempting to use indignation over child soldiers to criminalize precisely the practices that they themselves pioneered.  Graca Machel wrote the leading UN report, Impact of Armed Conflict on Children (1996), arguing for the criminalization of child soldiering.  Marxist freedom fighters have given way to feminist social work bureaucrats, who now build thriving careers on the turmoil created by their husbands and fathers.

Perhaps not surprisingly, female soldiers also seem to find the new military life “empowering and liberating”.  In the older and better-educated culture of the Jewish resistance, the demands of war seem to have led to a decided and self-imposed regimen of sexual “puritanism”.  Elsewhere however, sexual license appears more common.  “For these women [in Mozambique], revolutionary ideologies played an important role both in organizing the meaning system in which they operated as child combatants and in helping them create new roles and identities,” Rosen observes.  “Many of these women interpret their war experiences as freeing them not only from colonial rule but also from male structures of dominance in ‘traditional’ Mozambique society.”  Once unleashed, radical youth can fasten on any number of targets for destruction.

One is tempted to ask what do these young women want liberation for?  What do they want to be free to do that they could not do in traditional society?  The likely answer is have sex and children without “male structures of dominance” such as marriage — practices that have almost certainly contributed to the child soldier phenomenon in the first place.

As Rosen observes, the means these women employ to achieve liberation are, according to current orthodoxy about child soldiering, precisely what allow the humanitarian professionals to portray them as “victims.”  “Virtually every activity these girls participated in [to assist the fighters] . . . would nowadays be recast as criminal forms of child abuse under the humanitarian narrative,” he notes.  “None of these women regarded themselves as having been powerless or having been victimized.”

Sierra Leone’s experience is also a warning against uncritical acceptance of the “human trafficking” paradigm.  “Not every girl who joined the rebel ranks was a sex slave,” Rosen notes.  “Like boys, many joined because of the excitement, power, and material gain it offered.  Some of the most powerful and violent girls, the mammy queens, were expected to play a major part in fighting and acts of terrorism.”

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that child soldiering is largely the result of radical insurgency movements during de-colonialism and their Marxist ideology.  Until this politically incorrect truth is faced, this problem too will continue, abetted by the successors to these radical movements who have ensconced themselves in today’s international organizations, where they continue to promote in more subtle form the very neo-Marxist and radical feminist agendas that created the problem in the first place.