Suffer the Children

I meant to speak of the suffering of mankind generally, but we had better confine ourselves to the sufferings of the children. That reduces the scope of my argument to a tenth of what it would be. Still, we'd better keep to the children, though it does weaken my case. But, in the first place, children can be loved even at close quarters, even when they are dirty, even when they are ugly (I fancy, though, children never are ugly). The second reason why I won't speak of grown-up people is that, besides being disgusting and unworthy of love, they have a compensation- they've eaten the apple and know good and evil, and they have become 'like gods.' They go on eating it still.

But the children haven't eaten anything, and are so far innocent. Are you fond of children, Alyosha? I know you are, and you will understand why I prefer to speak of them. If they, too, suffer horribly on earth, they must suffer for their fathers' sins, they must be punished for their fathers, who have eaten the apple; but that reasoning is of the other world and is incomprehensible for the heart of man here on earth. The innocent must not suffer for another's sins, and especially such innocents!

- The Brothers Karamazov

On July 22, 2011, a Norwegian by the name of Anders Breivik used a homemade police uniform and a forged identification to gain access to a youth event facilitated by the Norwegian Labor Party. Upon arriving, he then opened fire on the children in attendance, ruthlessly slaughtering 69 by the time the rampage concluded. Like many terrorists, he wrote a sprawling manifesto of 1500 pages outlining his ideology. In it, he showed his disdain for Islam, Multiculturalism and, strangely enough, also had radically pro-Israel views. He saw the shooting as a statement, geared at eliminating the next generation of party leaders he thought would destroy the country.

While grotesque, he earned a cult following in radical right-wing circles, the blasphemous St. Breivik meme gaining wide circulation, making him out as a folk hero protecting his people against a corrupt elite class. The fact his victims were children didn't matter, as the children of the enemy would likely grow to have the same values as their parents, and tearing it down by the root was a legitimate tactic in these trying times in their eyes. When it’s a matter of survival, no quarter can be given.

This isn’t something unique to radical right-wing politics, as just recently we witnessed the infamous Nashville shooter, Audrey Hale. Filled with vicious hatred for Christianity, seeing it as a threat to her way of life, like Breivik, she chose the extreme option of killing as many as possible before they could grow up to be her adult oppressors. Also similar to Breivik, there were fringe elements in progressive circles who justified her rampage, along with a complicit media that tried to downplay the tragedy as much as possible.

It’s been known for ages that the most effective way to wipe out a people is to destroy their children. In ancient times of tribal war, tribes would disappear as the men and children were slaughtered and the women taken away as war brides. The cultural artifacts of the vanquished civilizations would be gone forever, the old tribal traditions forever lost to the winds and in the seeping blood of the vanquished as no progeny lived to carry them on.

Other civilizations would forcefully kidnap the children of minorities in their domain and indoctrinate them or use them as prostitutes. An infamous example of this during the Middle-Ages were the Janissaries, where Muslims stole the children of Christian parents, schooled them in radical Islam, and unleashed them as brainwashed adults to conquer their own people.

Sometimes a slightly more civilized approach was used, where the defeated men that weren’t wiped out by the war would be “born” into the new tribe through a rite of passage. The children were also inoculated to the new tribe and, with time, forget the old ways. While some of the old tribe survives, none of what gave them identity did as they become wholly assimilated and lost all unique distinctions.

Throughout history the family has rarely been an isolated unit, dependent on an extended tribe for support and protection. With the growth of the modern nation-state, powerful leaders with an incentive to create a cohesive, uniform populace have used radically new communication technologies to coordinate propaganda to their subjects. Through compulsory education, entertainment, and mild repression they broke older traditions of more non-conformist communities and homogenized their children into general society. Families with a rich tapestry of old customs found their progeny eschewing their birthright in favor of the fads and ideas of the new elites.

The philosophy of such tactics is grotesque but deeply rational, with the implicit understanding that the children of your enemy will, one day, likely be your children’s enemy. Destroying these future combatants, either through indoctrination or murder, ensures the security of the next generation.

On the other side, there’s an inner revulsion, a sense of injustice at such brutal measures. Not only does such a mindset ensure a sense of total war between peoples, but also creates untold suffering on a fundamentally innocent cohort. Most Westerners have an understanding of the rights of parents to raise their children as they see fit within very loose bounds. Parents understand the protective urge, whether they are looking at mothers in a far-off tribe in Africa or their neighbor down the street. There’s a sense of universalism in the instinct to build a family and to build a legacy, and most Western people want others, even if from a different culture, to have the same opportunities they have.

This sense of justice has now been manipulated for exploitive purposes. The famous photo of a drowned Syrian child rang the alarm bells that insisted everyone of good character had to accept these poor, mistreated refugees into one’s home country. We were told it was monstrous that we would turn our backs to these needy children, and those who would turn their backs on refugee ships had blood on their hands. In the Mexican border countless children crossed without any older guardian, causing a humanitarian disaster as there was often no way to contact any family or relatives, with many falling through the cracks.

Throughout it all, treasuries of countless nations are being bled dry to support these new families entering the West, and any consideration of the moral hazard this has created as migrants illegally cross and are rewarded with financial aid, paid for by the natives who also have children to feed, is ignored. Pictures of crying children pop up at any sight of resistance, the powers that be pointing an accusatory finger and exclaiming that how dare you add to this poor child’s misery.

This dynamic hit home for me in a personal way in the last couple of months with an incident with one of the old ladies in my parish. It was a cold night in December, and the old woman was at home when she heard a knock on the door. She opened it to see a black man and his three very young children at the door in tattered clothes. He looked at her and said, “we are homeless, and I need you to take care of my kids.”

It would seem like the perfect story for Christian charity. The man explained that he was a refugee from Africa who was afraid of being murdered by an opposing tribe. He got a work visa in the United States and was trying to reset his life. She believed him, and they talked for a while longer. God bless her, in the end she agreed and kept the three children with her. After all, how could you say no to freezing and starving children?

When this story was first relayed, I was upset at the whole debacle, largely from the fact the story made no sense and there was absolutely no reason this man needed to fly all the way to the United States to be protected, even if the story was true. I got a good whiff of scolding and chiding for my lack of compassion, but as more details emerged the situation proved to be ugly.

It ends up being that they did have a home that his wife lived in, but he deemed her not mentally competent to watch the kids. There was no detail as to what mentally incompetent entailed, but that didn’t stop him from getting her pregnant again. Later we glimpsed a picture of the mother, wearing Western garb and smiling through her thick lipstick hanging out at a bar. The old lady would take the kids over to visit the parents every week, all decked out with fresh clothes she bought, and they would come back with the old rags of clothes the parents originally had for them.

It was clear the nice old lady was being exploited, but by this time she had grown to love the children. I saw pictures of one of the kids in a high chair, making a mess out of the ice cream he was eating. I saw them laughing and playing outside. I saw them smiling playing with their toys on the floor. She had little income and asked for help in giving them Christmas presents, with many of the parishioners now deeply skeptical of the entire situation and more than a few washing their hands of the entire thing after their initial support.

Then the man came over and said that he got his oldest son a scholarship to a school, a Muslim school. He wanted her to drive the child there when it began in the fall. For any Catholic, this should clearly be a red line. Not only was her time and resources being consumed on a foreign person’s child, but not she was being asked to facilitate the child being educated outside of her faith. At this point I stopped getting updates, and for my sanity that’s likely for the best.

I want to make clear that I have nothing but compassion for this old lady. God Bless her, her natural love and maternal instincts are something to be commended as opposed to ridiculed, regardless of how ill-placed it is here. To demand a lady like that put her foot down and take the kids back to the parents, to a life far worse than what she was giving them, is about as practical as demanding an earthworm learn to fly. It’s simply not in her nature.

It’s not the children’s fault their parents are lousy by exploiting Western civil norms for their own benefit. Not is it the children’s fault the parents want to raise them in a violent ideology, likely training them later in life to see the old lady who gave them shelter as nothing more than a chump. Then again, maybe the experience will engrain a seed that will grow, letting these young people see the beauty of the world, witnessing Christian love up close and personal and letting it enter into their hearts.

For this particular incident we will never know, but what is certain is if such exploitation happens at a mass scale, you are sacrificing your children’s future for the sake of strangers who have no compunction to show you the same respect. This is more or less the story of the West now, as countless migrants enter the country to live a better life, get state-funded schooling and benefits, paid on the backs of tax-paying citizens, one’s own people saying it is a moral imperative to put strangers over one’s own people. The exploitation of this well-meaning old lady is the story of our current civilization, but through the barrel of a gun.

There’s no chance these newcomers are going to be impressed without our Christian charity, and if anything will exemplify how weak and decrepit our civilization has become. Instead of the mother and father standing in front of their crying children to protect them from threats, the children are thrown to the front, their stomachs empty, their bodies weak, used as a cudgel to exploit our compassion. Instead of the promise of building a better future for their children, our refugee programs have created some of the worst moral hazards the world has ever known.

Probably nothing else comes close to the heaviness of our fallen world than the suffering of children. While many a religious man can utter platitudes about why it has to be this way, that we’re all stained through the sin of Adam, it falls on deaf ears when you see their true despair up close. I don’t wish suffering on any child, whether my own or my worst enemy’s, yet the capriciousness of our ruling class has created a situation where harsh measures that once wouldn’t have been necessary have now become our only option, and we are forced to remigrate millions of families out of the country, destroying the hopes of their children living in a country of prosperity forever. Yet, if we allow this to continue, our own children will be oppressed minorities in our own homeland.

Through it all, we can’t be sentimental fools, giving away our children’s birthright. Nor can we, in our anger, turn into Breivik and let anger and bloodlust destroy our humanity. Even in these gut-wrenching times, Heaven belongs to those like children.

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