When adults with a political agenda realize that children can and often do believe in fairy tales, they should resist the urge to use children to advance their cause. Just because it is easy to convince a youngster that something is true, . . .whether it is, in fact, true or not, . . . does not mean that one should employ this advantage.
And the propaganda in which the children are exploited to achieve political goals is inevitably more an appeal to the viewers’ emotions rather than to their intellect.
But more importantly, the indoctrination of children for political purposes seldom works out well, . . . for the children. This is especially true when they are used to disseminate hateful propaganda.
There are historical precedents.
Item i.
An important goal of Communist propaganda in the early years of the Soviet Union was to create a new man. Schools and the Communist youth organizations, like Soviet pioneers and Komsomol, served to remove children from the "petit-bourgeois" family and indoctrinate the next generation into the collective way of life. The idea that the upbringing of children was the concern of their parents was explicitly rejected.
One schooling theorist stated: “We must make the young into a generation of Communists. Children, like soft wax, are very malleable and they should be moulded into good Communists... We must rescue children from the harmful influence of the family... We must nationalize them. From the earliest days of their little lives, they must find themselves under the beneficent influence of Communist schools... To oblige the mother to give her child to the Soviet state – that is our task.”
Ref: The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, by Orlando Figes 2007
That didn't go well.
Item ii.
By 1945 Reichsjugendführer Artur Axmann was drafting 12-year-old Hitlerjugend members into the Volkssturm national Militia. During the Battle of Berlin, Axmann's Hitlerjugend formed a major part of the last line of German defense, and were reportedly among the fiercest fighters. Although the City Commander, General Helmuth Weidling, ordered Axmann to disband the Hitlerjugend combat formations, in the confusion this order was never carried out. The remnants of the youth brigade took heavy casualties from the advancing Russian forces; only two survived.
Ref: Hitler Youth
That didn't go well at all.
item iii.
On January 15, a video surfaced on the Internet that depicted a 10-year-old Kazakh boy using a gun to execute two Russian members of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) who had been accused of being spies. ISIS claimed ownership of the video, although it has not yet been authenticated. Only a few days earlier, twin suicide bombings rocked northern Nigeria, involving three girls, who appeared to have been only 10 years old, all wearing explosives that may have been remotely detonated by members of Boko Haram. A year before, a nine-year-old girl named Spozhmai, who is the sibling of an Afghan Taliban commander, was detained at a border checkpoint in Kandahar. Rather than go through with her mission, she confessed to the authorities that she had been forced to wear a suicide belt.
Ref: Young Faces at the Front Lines
That is unfortunate.
Meanwhile back in America, . . . .
“I want to be a voice for America’s children.”
__H. Clinton, 1973
Apparently, today Secretary Clinton wants America’s children to be a voice for her, regardless of the consequences to the children.
Those consequences are unlikely to be positive.
DonDiego hopes the fate of the HillaryYouth is more gentle than that of the Hitlerjugend of Berlin.
Disclaimer
i. DonDiego recognizes the reader may consider his post hyperbole. Nonetheless DonDiego enjoyed composing it, . . . and isn't that what life is all about.
ii. DonDiego recognizes his post may invoke Godwin's Law. DonDiego doesn't care.
iii. After all, it's for the children.
