In the past, I have argued that – along with the other substantive parts of a more effective strategy to deal with fanatical, religious-based terror that attacked or threatened us – we also needed to “pray for the children.”
The various radical Middle East religious factions will always kill each other without regard to the international rules of the law of war, or the more formalized law of armed conflict, and have done so for centuries based on their interpretations of the same Islamic texts. Most of these radical factions are trapped in a religious time warp, and are at a stage that most of the rest of the world passed in the 12th century. However, we must also understand that their radical teachings are simply pure evil, and that thousands of young kids born after 9/11 are already indoctrinated to blow themselves up and kill us all, because they have been programmed to believe that we are the “Great Satan.” Sorry, but if there is any “Great Satan” in the world, it’s these pseudo-religious and factional terrorist leaders who teach 10-year-olds to blow themselves up and shoot young girls for going to school.
This, as the age of religiously indoctrinated kids made to die in various perverted suicides for their respective causes gets lower and lower – age six or seven seems the latest sadistic number for this most tragic of all human sacrifice.
Then, if that isn’t outrageous enough, we see the latest pictures of a kid about that age carrying a decapitated human head by its hair, leading a bunch of other kids as they gleefully celebrate the hideous death of an “enemy” of whatever sect their evil religious and/or political indoctrinators taught them to hate so much.
In this same tragic, but historical context, we should also remember the sickening propaganda films of Tojo’s Japan of the 30’s and 40’s, documenting the thousands of similarly aged children swearing blind allegiance and to fight to the death for the emperor. It also happened in Nazi Germany with very young kids rendering the stiff-armed salute to Hitler.
And, most tragically, the literal and systematic extermination of millions of people went hand in hand with these past evil regimes: “It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese.” “The Looting of Asia”, a book review by Chalmers Johnson.
Two conclusions are inescapable from this: 1) there remains such a thing as pure evil, whether religiously or politically centered or both, and 2) a fanatical government or religious doctrine [often the same] takes over the primary role of parenting – too often with the tacit consent of the parents.
It is also instructive to study how these worst modern world “evils” have been neutralized in the past – and, to note that it has most always been by the combined forces of “good” over evil, however one chooses to configure or describe them historically.
After fighting the Japanese for just four years in the Pacific, and dealing with their unimaginable atrocities, and after determining that they would never give up and also inflict millions more casualties on us to finally occupy their mainland and defeat them, Harry Truman ordered the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese surrendered.
Many thousand Japanese “innocents” were killed in these attacks while only several hundred Japanese regime leaders were later tried and imprisoned or executed, and many committed suicide.
Likewise, Germany was overrun by the combined forces of many nations, primarily the United States and Russia, and was divided, socially reconfigured and politically redirected.
The Nazis, at least the leadership, were killed off or tried and executed post war, as the country was “occupied” by the victorious allies for many years thereafter.
Sure, both Japan and Germany suffered in the post war period, but they eventually recovered with massive amounts of foreign – mostly US – Marshall Plan type capital and foreign aid, and both became economic powerhouses. In short, it took them about 30 years to socially transform themselves from pure evil killing machines into politically rational, prosperous and responsible nations.
It’s unimaginable to think how the world would look today had we not put Tojo’s Japan and Hitler’s Germany to literal death in the 1940’s. For example, had we been deterred to engage the Japanese expansionism in the Pacific – as the Japanese’s had expected the result of their attack on Pearl harbor to be – what would that part of the world look like today? They would literally own the Pacific and would have killed off millions more to do it. Likewise, all of Europe, much of Eurasia and Africa would be a huge Nazi enclave, and they would have systematically killed off millions more “non-Arians” in the process.
So, when confronted again with yet another kind of pure evil on an international scale, this time accompanied by decapitations, massive rapes and killing of young girls and women, massive executions by firing squads and other unthinkable and barbaric acts, what – ultimately – will we have to do?
We simply may have to kill them all, at least center on those who are the purveyors of the evil – it would not be the first time we have had do it. However, will “innocents” be killed in the process? For sure – as they always have been in the past – but many of these would also be willing suicide bombers and/or be celebrating the decapitation of a “non- believer”, whoever and wherever that might be.
So while we might still “pray for the children” thousands, perhaps millions of them, have already been lost in these various perverted battles with roots in the 12th century. At the very minimum, we in the West need to decrease (or eliminate) our concerns about “collateral damage” in the targeting of those who are a threat to us. Many, if not most, of the “innocents” who are also there are already “lost”, and many, perhaps even most of them born since 9/11, would gladly die as martyrs. That sad reality will – and unfortunately – likely be the only way this latest world war against pure evil will ever be won. Harry Truman was right about this one as well – sad but true.
