Children Make The Greatest Remorseless Killers And Revolutionaries
A living blank slate is more terrifying than any AI or robot
“Our children bring us up by showing us by imitation what we really are.”
— Will Durant, Fallen Leaves
In recent years, many prominent figures have rung the bell about the dangers of AI. Its current manifestation is drones. The robots we’re starting to see more of, which do simple chores, can do more than just housework. They can kill.
A recent example that almost broke the internet involved a robot dog. You may have seen them dance. But this dog had a fully automatic machine gun attached to its back and fired off countless blasts, unaided.
It’s startling. Mainly because there’s something twisted about turning a figure in the shape of “man’s best friend” into a soulless killing machine. But let’s take it a step further.
What if I could do something similar with flesh and blood? Imagine taking a living, breathing creature which is totally innocent — something you want to wrap your arms around and hug — and turning that into an emotionless killing machine.
Well, you don’t have to imagine. It’s been done frequently. Children have been favored by rebel groups, revolutionaries, and criminal organizations for years. In fact, they’re ideal in many ways.
Why? Well, there’s a logic to it, in a way. But we need to go down a bit of a dark road through history to understand it. Our first stop involves psychology.
Children Are Easily Indoctrinated
“Only children can purely serve the revolution and eliminate reactionism, since they are young, obedient, loyal, and active.”
— Ieng Thirith, Khmer Rouge Minister of Culture Via Facing Death in Cambodia by Peter Maguire
Kids by nature are young, dumb, and trusting. For instance, tell them a magic fat guy in a red suit can climb down a chimney, and they’ll believe it. They don’t have the experience, logic, or knowledge to challenge you.
Now, add ceremony, ideology, religion, or some mixture of the three, and you can magically charm children to do all kinds of unchildlike things.
But to make this happen, first you need to whisk them away from their parents, who can poke holes in the fantasy you create. You can do it either physically, mentally, or mix the two.
Mao Zedong used ideology. He sought out to destroy culture, turning children against their parents, so he could control them. He labeled it “the four olds”: old ideas, old habits, old culture, and old customs.
One of the all-to-catchy slogans of the revolution was “Father is close, mother is close, but neither as close as Chairman Mao.”
The Khmer Rouge did a bit of the same, but built off Mao’s platform. Peter Maguire in Facing Death in Cambodia, explains when the US military left Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge brought an army of children and youth to attack the government.
The Khmer Rouge separated children from their parents, breaking up the family unit. Maguire says they even tried to ban love itself. Soon everyone lived in fear, parents feared their children specifically. They’d been indoctrinated.
The Khmer Rouge made sure to conduct executions in front of children and supply them with a new history. It worked the same way with the Hitler Youth. Built from nature and hiking organizations, it got children away from their parents, so they could be reshaped.
Soon these children were taught to fight, and practiced against unaffiliated children’s groups, such as the boy scouts. By 1939, almost all non-Jewish children in Germany were part of the Hitler Youth, and they started at ten.
According to researchers Bernd Beber and Christopher Blattman of the Cambridge University Press, Joseph Kony took a bit of a different approach. He used religion and spiritualism. This “spirit medium” created the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda during the 1980s.
The LRA abducted children from local villages and turned them into soldiers fighting against Uganda’s government. Beber and Blattman say their ideal candidates were fourteen to sixteen. It’s believed in total they kidnapped between sixty to eighty thousand children.
Kony put them through a spiritual crash course of sorts. According to Beber and Blattman:
“Spiritual practices were also central to motivating recruits — an explicit attempt to create new social bonds and loyalty based on a shared cosmology…A spiritual initiation ceremony, typically featuring prayers and anointment with oil…was reported by the vast majority of those taken two weeks or longer.”
The new social bond also destroyed the old ones by design like Mao, the Khmer Rouge, and the Hitler Youth. Beber and Blattman go on to say:
“The LRA was highly structured, with detailed spiritual restrictions on personal conduct…These restrictions were couched in spiritual terms and were typically designed to establish fear and a new identity…After cleansing it’s believed that your relationship with anyone from your family was no more, such that when you meet them, and you are asked to kill them, you must do it because you are now someone new and have no relatives.”
Although easy indoctrination is only one aspect. Our next benefit is economic.
Children Are Cheap To Employ
In their study, Beber and Blattman ask a logical question about child soldiers. How’s it work economically? They’re weaker, not as smart, and less capable overall compared to adults. So, what’s the point?
Well, adults expect payment for working.
Joseph Kony never gave his child followers anything, except occasional extra rations. Similarly, the Hitler Youth didn’t get a paycheck. Their handlers may have given them medals or praise, but not money. Mao and the Khmer Rouge denounced money altogether.
The entire promise of all these groups was a future reward.
For example, Mao and the Khmer Rouge’s entire ideology focused on a fantastic future their revolution would create. Likewise, so did the Hitler Youth. Kony did the same.
The LRA promised its children government jobs and wealth as soon as the Ugandan government was overthrown. So, child soldiers or revolutionaries are cheap labor. They’re employed with promises.
But there’s also an organizational aspect that makes children a good fit. It’s easy to intimidate them.
Children Can Be Easily Controlled
According to The History Channel’s website, the Hitler Youth grew to millions of members because the Nazis banned all other youth organizations. Youth groups were very popular in Germany. And suddenly, they’re gone.
So, if kids wanted to do anything from sports or hiking, they had to join the Hitler Youth. In other words, there was nowhere else to go.
The LRA did something similar. They took their child captives far away from home, sometimes to training camps in a neighboring country. So, the kids couldn’t survive without Joseph Kony.
You can see the same method with the Khmer Rouge. After a family is separated, how can children survive, except through the generosity of their handlers. Therefore, children can be made to be dependent, which makes them vulnerable to manipulation.
Violence also works wonders.
The Khmer Rouge made sure children watched many get killed for disobedience. Usually by a club to the skull. Mao used public shaming and physical punishment, which children viewed. Likewise, the Nazis scared the kids in their youth group into obedience.
But to turn children into a killer drone, you need to do more than scare them. They must become desensitized to committing violence.
The LRA turned this into an artform. Half of the child soldiers were victims of violence, and more than half were forced to beat or kill others. According to Beber and Blattman:
“Extreme violence served to break down abductees’ psychological defenses and desensitize them to violence. More importantly, it bound them to the group, by raising the specter of family and community rejection if they were to flee.”
The two researchers explain that over eighty percent of the LRA’s child soldiers eventually escaped, after aging and figuring out the government would never be overthrown. Although exit interviews showed something startling.
While the former recruits didn’t believe Kony’s promises, they all still believed he had magic powers. They just had different opinions on their nature.
Now, that we’ve seen all this, let’s circle back into our initial foray into killer drones.
Flesh And Blood Drones
I had an interesting experience in college. During a Sociology class, a teacher told us his purpose was to show everything our parents taught us was B.S.
He’d show us the “truth.” We were given a very favorable explanation of Karl Marx, while he pointed out how everything around us was terrible. Instantly, my internal alarm went off.
Something was wrong. But I didn’t understand the Khmer Rouge, Mao, The Hitler Youth, or Joseph Kony at the time. Our teacher was separating us from our parents and indoctrinating us. I was older than many in the class, but I’d see their eighteen-year-old heads nod in agreement.
They didn’t have the experience, logic, or knowledge to challenge a college professor.
While AI and drones terrify many, something terrifies me much more: children turned into drones.
Our kids are at a much greater risk through our ever-present screens to be washed over with propaganda from various sources.
It can separate them from their parents with indoctrination
Scare them into submission
Make them feel like they have nowhere else to go
It’s the same recipe criminal gangs, radicals, and revolutionaries have always used, but pushed with a much stronger media. As historian Will Durant reminds us, children learn by imitation. So, what happens when they imitate radical revolutionaries or gang bangers?
Well, you get a flesh and blood version of the dancing-dog robot with a machine gun mounted on its back. It perverts innocence. And it turns what you most love into a weapon against you and everything you cherish.
Now, that terrifies me.
-Originally posted on Medium 11/7/22