The Weaponization of Children « The Thinking Housewife

The Weaponization of Children

October 1, 2019

IN a timely article in Culture Wars magazine about the children’s author Jacqueline Wilson, Sean Naughton analyzes the use of children (think Greta Thunberg) as cultural revolutionaries:

The destruction of adult authority has very deep roots. Whether you take the Reformation’s rejection of the motherhood of the Church and the fatherhood of the priest, or the Enlightenment rejection of tradition and authority, the evolutionists’ exaltation of the latest as the greatest, or the myth of the authoritarian personality, the sexual revolution hammered the last nails into the coffin of adult authority. After all, if sex is just glorified masturbation, men forever will be boys and women forever will be toys.

The third change follows inevitably as a result of the second. If the adult is no longer the figure of authority, somebody must be in charge. Father and mother and teacher and preacher have been dethroned. Who is to rule us now? Jacqueline Wilson gives us the answer: “I’m Tracy Beaker. Mark the name. I’ll be famous one day.”28 The tyrannical child had finally been born. The age of the child had finally come. The gospel of child-centredness was taking over the world. Jacqueline Wilson had found her true calling.

The weaponization of children as revolutionaries is not as new as Dame Jacqueline might have thought, or as novel as Tracy Beaker fans might have imagined. It involves an inversion of the call by Jesus Christ that we “turn and become like children” (Matthew 18:3). Rather than imitating the perfections of the child – purity, innocence, dependence, trust in the goodness of others and in the goodness of God – the revolutionary uses the child as an image of himself through whom his own revolutionary gospel is proclaimed to the world as a thing of purity, innocence and goodness. Rousseau, who so loved the purity and innocence of his own children that he sent all five of them to the foundling hospital as soon as they were born, took the ideal of childhood pointed to by Christ, and used this as evidence of his own innocence and inherent goodness, and as a justification for undermining the Church, the family and the school. His influence endures and his ideas have penetrated ever more deeply into the culture. One of the great lies of the Enlightenment is that we are all innocent children, naturally good, and that all the evil in the world comes exclusively from the injustice without rather than the malice within. Evolutionary fervor reassured us that we are all just animals anyway, and if an animal is brutish, it’s because he’s abused or he’s hungry. If we get rid of the abuser – the father, the priest, the teacher – and if we make sure that there’s plenty to eat, then everything will be fine. Mind you, you would need an ego even more monstrous than Rousseau’s to stand up and proclaim yourself as the innocent one. But you could take the child on your knee – as we imagine The Innocent One did – and you could get the child to say it for you. This is the evil at the heart of child-centredness. The child is seduced into telling the lie that you are too ashamed to speak with your own lips. For you parents who are asking, “Why is my child always coming home from school and preaching to me about too much fat in our diet or too much plastic in the ocean or too much certainty about what it means to be boy or a girl?” you may thank the three wise John’s – Rousseau, Stuart-Mill and Dewey – for their uninvited and enduring help. Jean Jacques lives on in his faithful disciple Jacqueline.

The Bolsheviks knew that the revolutionary child was the indispensable weapon which must be deployed in order to bring about and to sustain the revolution. The Tracy Beaker phenomenon – turning an unwanted foster-home child into an agent of revolution – is well documented by Lisa Kirschenbaum, who examines how “children in the new soviet state embodied both pressing practical problems and revolutionary dreams.”