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Posted on 06/13/2002 5:50:36 AM PDT by SJackson
QUANTICO, Va A British military officer who became a psychological casualty after witnessing horrors involving child soldiers in West Africa warned his American counterparts that they had to prepare their troops for the worst and to ensure that they receive proper post-deployment care.
Mastering fear "is the easy bit," Royal Marine Major Jim Gray said at the U.S. Marine base Tuesday. "Eventually, you've got to come home. ... You have the duty to care for your guys, because it will destroy them if you don't."
Gray spoke at a seminar titled "Child Soldiers -- Implications for U.S. Forces," which was sponsored by the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities, a partnership between the U.S. Marine Corps and the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. In anarchic corners of the post-Cold War world, hundreds of thousands of children have been recruited or forced to fight in many open-ended wars.
The first American to die in Afghanistan was killed by a 14-year-old boy, and "shooters" in some conflicts are as young as 6 or 7. Even younger children carry ammunition, act as spies and serve as human shields. Many are sexually abused. In such places as Sierra Leone they are drugged, and part of their initiation is to be forced to kill or mutilate the helpless.
Peter W. Singer, a post-doctoral fellow at the Brookings Institution, warned that U.S. forces inevitably will have to engage child soldiers and of the psychological damage this will entail. He said that in 1945 U.S. soldiers with no doubt about the rightness of their cause, and on the brink of victory, nonetheless were severely affected by fighting the Hitler Youth.
Gray came under fire in West Africa, but he was not a combatant. For the first half of 1999, he was with the U.N. observer mission to Sierra Leone, where he saw child soldiers in action.
"I've seen them kill (civilians). I've seen them kill each other. I've seen reasonably normal (Nigerian) troops killing them. I've seen the aftermath," he said. "Heartbreaking stuff."
Gray made three points, and saved the most dramatic one for last. The first was that in some parts of the world, ethnocentric moral exhortation won't work. The attitude he encountered in Sierra Leone "is something we in the West can't really comprehend." He thinks that "preaching" to the leaders of child soldiers, and telling them that what they are doing is wrong, is ineffective. "You might as well be speaking Chinese."
The second point was that despite the brutality of their lives, it is a mistake to think that child soldiers are eager to escape. Child soldiers are effectively alienated from their home environment, he said. "Their ability to go home is completely removed by the fact that they're forced to commit atrocious and appalling acts."
Gray said he never met a child soldier who wanted to go home. In their environment someone who was fed, had a pair of boots and a gun was king. "They become hooked on the power to some extent." That coupled with the fact that almost no one was left alive between 18 and 40 meant that no child soldier was trying to escape. "They become a very useful commodity, and they are used extensively. There are an awful lot of them, and to some extent they are pretty effective."
They don't maneuver or provide supporting fire but fight in a disjointed way, he said. Gray cited the work of the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, who wrote that children are egocentric and develop morality in stages. Gray observed the amorality of child soldiers. Recalling his own playground experiences, he said children are harsh to each other. They have no mercy, he said, but follow their own needs. "If you give them an AK-47, the results are gruesome."
The major said on numerous occasions he entered situations where children on drugs had weapons and used them, "and it is terrifying. ... They operate as if they were in a playground.
"When I saw them attacked with any sort of consolidated effort by Nigerian troops, they fragment very, very quickly. They don't stick together," he said.
"I saw lots of bad stuff when I was in Sierra Leone," Gray said, "and literally six hours after I left Freetown I sat in my wife's car on the way back from Heathrow toward Somerset (County). Within 10 (hours), I sat in my little cottage in Southwest England with my cat and my wife having literally come out of the most appalling set of circumstances I can possibly imagine.
"But I was also sick and clearly quite stressed."
Gray's wife said: "Jim, I'm glad you're home because we need to get that spare room decorated, and we need to go shopping this afternoon."
"And I couldn't cope," the major said.
He started "feeling slightly strange about things." Then he went 13 days without sleeping for more than five minutes at a time. "And my ability to cope with normal stuff just broke down. I went into a pretty acute post-traumatic stress-type thing."
A bad case of malaria might have aggravated his condition. But he became deeply affected by things that didn't bother him much when they had occurred.
"It's like watching an eyeball operation on Discovery Channel. It's gruesome and it's horrible, but somehow you can't bring yourself to reach for that remote control." He found himself standing next to people saying, "Bloody hell. That guy just cut that girl's arm off. Did you see?"
Gray said to the military leaders gathered for the seminar, "We have a responsibility to our people in terms of preparing them for this kind of environment. ... But the real responsibility is the duty of care to guys when they come back from it." He said he was cared for very well by the British system.
Gray attributed the relatively few psychological casualties after the 1982 Falklands War to troops having two weeks to thrash things out among themselves aboard ship on the way back to England. "By the time they got home to their families, they'd been through the process of understanding what they had been exposed to."
Based on his experience, Gray said that a soldier -- after his initial shock of being fired upon by a child -- will pull the trigger. "They will do what they've got to do." The hard part is living with oneself afterward.
Peter Singer said that sooner or later, U.S. troops will be put into the position of having to fire upon a child for their own protection.
"Military leaders must anticipate this terrible dilemma and prepare their soldiers not only by providing strict guidelines for when to take this decision, but they also must be ready to deal with its psychological aftermath," he said.
"For this is an added way that child soldiers put professional forces at a disadvantage. Units that have been engaged in these encounters may require special post-conflict treatment akin to what many police organizations provide their own personnel after a shooting incident. Otherwise, the consequence of being forced to kill children may ultimately undermine the unit's cohesion and combat effectiveness.
"Engagement with child soldiers also has an important public affairs side," he said. "Images of children killed by American or allied forces will certainly be heartrending to the public. The added misfortune would be if these ex post media images were to undermine domestic or international support. If not carefully managed, this aspect of information warfare will be an easily lost one.
You can play silly games for all eternity if you want...
...But any "diety" that advocates murder, terror, torture, stoning people to death, the bashing of the heads of children on stones, slavery, chopping off hands and feet, the execution of rape victims, and other unspeakable atrocities--is not God.
And anyone who serves such a "diety" worships Satan--no matter what he may choose to call this "diety".
God will lead anyone who turns to Him. He will answer the call of anyone.
But anyone who is willing to follow Satan--and not God--will find Satan a very willing leader.
Those vile terrorists and murderers and others who commit blood-thirsty acts "in the name of God" are guilty of the ultimate blasphemy--and this includes those who advocate and commit torture, the stoning of people to death, the murder of children, et al.--whether they be "clerics", political leaders, "believers", or whatever--and regardless of the excuses and motives that they may profess--and regardless of the name they may choose to address their "diety" .
Those ultimate blasphemers who commit such unspeakable sins in the name of God know very well that their service is to Satan--and that their "diety" is Satan--and thus far more profound is their sin.
There you have the essence of verse tag. You can do it all day long just within the Bible itself. You can also do it within the Koran. It's easy to promote either as a book of hate or a book of good since they are so internally inconsistent.
Aside from that, yes, Islam is due for a serious purging of the fanatical elements. Luckily, the fanatical elements in Christianity no longer hold secular power, nor will the majority of its adherents, used to a modern society, allow some of what the fanatics are promoting (www.godhatesfags.com). The scariest thing Christians have is Pomise Keepers, which is for now relatively benign.
In contrast, most Muslims are living in relatively primitive societies, and their fanatical religious leaders hold great power over them, both secular and religious. I'll bet these leaders are doing whatever they can to keep the common man away from a Koran, just as Christian leaders did earlier. This is always a recipe for disaster: religious/secular power plus ingnorant masses.
A couple examples you gave of atrocities within Islam are banned or discouraged in the Koran. The killing of innocent Muslims (I'm sure some of those Kenyans were, and I'm sure there were some in the WTC) is a quick ticket to hell, and poor treatment of women is forbidden. Most of what you are seeing is people using their own warped, out of context interpretation of the Koran to allow them to do what they want to do, be it gaining political power or simply being an assh*le.
You can find much of that in the Bible too, all sanctioned by your god.
And anyone who serves such a "diety" worships Satan
Um, whatch out what you say. You just called all Christians Satanists.
Those vile terrorists and murderers and others who commit blood-thirsty acts "in the name of God" are guilty of the ultimate blasphemy
If you read the Koran without the whacked-out fanatical bent of these Muslim leaders, you can also see that these people are guilty of grave sins according to their own religion. They are going to their hell, not their heaven.
The only recent act I can remember that may be justified by the Koran under Jihad is the firefights some Palestinians had with Israeli troops. Jihad is a fair fight on the battlefield, not blowing up innocent people.
"You can find much of that in the Bible too, all sanctioned by your god."Oh, no. That's where you're wrong. Not my god.
And not The One True God.
You have jumped to conclusions--wrong conclusions--and a very absurd conclusion.
Such things are not sanctioned by God--that is, the One True God. Obviously, any "god" or "diety" that does sanction such things is not God.
I repeat:
Any "diety" that advocates murder, terror, torture, stoning people to death, the bashing of the heads of children on stones, slavery, chopping off hands and feet, the execution of rape victims, and other unspeakable atrocities--is not God.I don't care whether you call "him" Jehovah or Allah or Donald Duck--"he" is Satan and those who serve "him" are devil-worshippers.
Evil by any other name would smell as vile.And, frankly, I don't give a hoot in hell what text they use to justify their evil deeds either. They can blame them on the Koran or the Bible or anything they want. The blame is theirs and only theirs, and they cannot escape this.
Anyone who follows the devil--or makes a pact with the devil--knows exactly what he is doing, and he alone is responsible for the consequences. Trying to shift the blame to some ancient text won't let him off the hook.
"And anyone who serves such a "diety" worships Satan"Not at all. I did not call any Christians Satanists."Um, whatch out what you say. You just called all Christians Satanists. "
However, it is true that there are Satanists who call themselves Christians.
Anyone who serves a "diety" such as that described above is a devil-worshipper and is not a Christian--no matter what he may call himself. The fact remains.
Those vile terrorists and murderers and others who commit blood-thirsty acts "in the name of God" are guilty of the ultimate blasphemy.This statement is true.
To sin in the name of God is the ultimate blasphemy!
"If you read the Koran without the whacked-out fanatical bent of these Muslim leaders, you can also see that these people are guilty of grave sins according to their own religion. They are going to their hell, not their heaven. "I haven't read the Koran. I might sometime, but I really don't feel like reading it. It's waaaaaay down on my list.
But I frankly don't doubt that what you say is true.
It is clear that these people are guilty of grave sins. Whether or not this is true according to their own religion I couldn't say. You say so, and it is certainly possible. But, if so, those Muslims who fail to denounce them and to condemn their sinful acts and rhetoric, are complicit in their sin and have, at least, themselves committed serious sins of omission.
The world is listening--cupped hand to ear--for this denunciation and condemnation.
By the way--this Christian has just denounced and condemned such acts and rhetoric--vide supra--whether by anyone, be he Muslim, (faux-)Cristian, or what--in no uncertain terms.
"The only recent act I can remember that may be justified by the Koran..."Frankly, I don't give a damn what's justified by the Koran or the Bible or anything else.
Anyone can find justification for evil--or good or anything he wants justified--anywhere he might choose to look for it. But "justification" does not make anything true.
The cosmos is God's holy scripture. The truth is there for anyone to find.
You're starting to confuse me, but let's just say that many revered by Christians and considered righteous in the eyes of God (according to the Bible) did some horrible things in the name of God or by the command of God -- at least so they claimed (that could be your point?).
The blame is theirs and only theirs, and they cannot escape this .. Trying to shift the blame to some ancient text won't let him off the hook.
You know, except for the whole Devil thing, we're very much agreeing here. If you depersonify "Devil" into a concept of wrongness or evil, I'm right with you on this.
But, if so, those Muslims who fail to denounce them and to condemn their sinful acts and rhetoric, are complicit in their sin and have, at least, themselves committed serious sins of omission.
Oh yeah, we're definitely agreeing now.
Frankly, I don't give a damn what's justified by the Koran or the Bible or anything else.
In that case, I'm talking about plain war. Just as we are fighting on the battlefield to protect our country, there are the rare few Palestinians who have actually stood up and fought against Israeli troops for what they believe is their right to independence. The rest are just pure cowards who go around killing innocent people.
Anyone can find justification for evil--or good or anything he wants justified--anywhere he might choose to look for it.
If only they always looked for justification of good. Wouldn't that be nice? I guess doing good doesn't advance the agendas of the power-hungry elite.
"Aside from that, yes, Islam is due for a serious purging of the fanatical elements. Luckily, the fanatical elements in Christianity no longer hold secular power, nor will the majority of its adherents, used to a modern society, allow some of what the fanatics are promoting(www.godhatesfags.com)."Contemporary Christianity has been forged in the crucible of 2,000 years of Western Civilization. Islam unfortunately hasn't been.
The powerful energy in this clash of civilizations comes from the resistance of Islam to the influences of Western Civilization.
Christianity resisted the same influences--unsuccessfully. Islam also must not succeed.
One of the (fundamental) influences--for example--is the separation of church and state, which Muslim clerics passionately denounce--and with good reason, from their (unenlightened) point of view. To the Western mind, the substitution of the Koran for a national constitution is ridiculous. To Muslim fundamentalists it makes perfect sense. Western Civilization evolved beyond such foolishness some time ago--fortunately. Islamic civilization didn't.
Western Civilization has become world civilization. And it must prevail. It is the greatest accumulation of wisdom and benevolence the world has ever known (at least as far as history has recorded). The backward, unenlightened world of Islamic fundamentalism must either evolve as Christianity has, or become isolated (and neither the Muslims nor I think that this is possible), or be destroyed. Clearly evolution of Islam into something compatible with Western (i.e. World) Civilization is the most desirable and easiest of these alternatives.
The clash does not result from the intent of Westerners to destroy Islam or Islamic culture--or even to interfere with it. It is the inevitable result of the shrinking of the world, due primarily to Westerners and Western Civilization, and the consequent ubiquity of Western Civilization and its influences, which Islam simply cannot avoid.
Many of these influences are undesirable and despised by many Westerners.
But the fact is that Western Civilization is loaded with Truth, and the collision of Islam with Western Civilization will expose whatever in Islam is not the Truth. That's what Muslims fear and dread.
Just who is the "Great Satan" in this world, anyway?
An ounce of inaccuracy is worth a ton of explanation.Ultimate Truth exists. And it is possible for anyone to know it.
The concept of "God" is a symbol for Ultimate Truth. Or perhaps the concept of "Ultimate Truth" is a symbol for God.
We all interpret all concepts on many different levels at the same time.
It may be that the path to Ultimate Truth is asymptotic. (Or, maybe not.) Perhaps the finding of it is the Buddhist/Hindu concept of enlightenment.
But it seems to me that as one gets closer and closer to it, one passes through different levels. At one level is the world of duality. Beyond that is a level at which everything is paradoxical; this is a deeper or more profound truth. Beyond that is chaos--even deeper. I'm not even sure that anything beyond that can be put into words. But we are all living on all these levels now and forever and all levels at the same time.
The closer we get to Ultimate Truth, the harder it is to put things into words--to communicate--until ultimately we simply cannot.
"God" and "The Devil"--"good" and "evil"--these are symbols. All words are symbols. And these particular concepts are of the level of duality.
Unfortunately, it seems to me, Muslim and Christian fundamentalists are stuck at the (quite limited) level of duality. And as you have observed, they can be dangerous. They don't see beyond these limited concepts. They can. But their failure--or perhaps refusal--to do so is their "sin"--another religious symbol, but what the hell, we're talking about religion--which means that they will suffer dire consequences and that they and only they are to blame.
As far as I'm concerned, religious symbolism is about as good as any. We've got to have some means of communication--I suppose.
Its ironic that in the Sudan they use children after exhausting their supply of 18-40 year olds. The Palestinians use their children to preserve their supply of adults.
Good point.
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