Yesterday, a friend sent me a link containing a report about children and war, written by some UN bureaucrats about the scourge of young people whose lives have been traumatized by war [1]. The involvement of children in war is a very powerful moral issue, but being bloodless bureaucrats rather than ordinary flesh and blood people, the obvious moral issues are clouded by immensely dense diplomatic jargon and largely ignore the deeper moral issues at stake, as well as their connection with a generally consistent moral worldview.

It ought to be obvious to anyone who reads my blog that I do not have a high degree of respect for the incompetent poseurs of the international community (especially of the United Nations and African Union) who behave in highly political and biased ways while maintaining an air of rationality and civilization behind their corrupt behavior. The combination of such incompetence and such arrogance is generally the fastest way to infuriate me on a deeply personal level.

Therefore, I thought it worthwhile to examine the issue of children and war in such a way as exposed both the incredible moral hypocrisy of the UN and its bureaucrats as well as some of the deeper connections between children and warfare that the morally insensitive naifs of the United Nations are not morally sensitive enough to recognize, for those readers of mine who are. In particular, I would like to look at a few issues, such as the moral framework of discussions about children’s rights, the relationship between children’s rights and larger societal issues, the relationship between education and the military, and the troublesome nature of the arbitrary nature of UN standards. I am taking these issues out of the order they are discussed in the UN report and seeking to analyze them in a deeper context.

More than halfway through the report, the UN Institute for Disarmament Research deals with the real fundamental question at the heart of discussions of the relationship between children and war. The debate is a pseudodebate between the perspectives of cultural relativism and moral universalism. At the outset I should note that my own firm conviction is in moral absolutism. I believe there is one moral standard that applies to all, a standard of universal justice from which there is particular mercy. This is not the perspective of the UNIDR, which tries to ameliorate the concerns of both sides by adopting a typically verbose and muddled non-position that seeks to gain the moral rectitude of moral universalism while adopting the cowardly and corrupt approach of cultural relativism, in essence arguing that the postmodern Western view of warfare as particularly abhorrent for children is valid for the rest of the world without necessarily looking to argue for Western superiority on moral grounds. In short, the position is muddled and inconsistent.

There is an obvious reason, though, why the United Nations did not want to argue a consistent position of moral universalism, for the simple reason that such an external standard would be applicable to their own behavior as well, and would then lead to a recognition of societies that most closely followed that consistent moral standard as being more righteous than those who did not. In addition, a consistent moral standard would make it impossible for the UN to play favorites for or against particular nations and regions, which is what all top-down statist (or supranational) solutions require for their own internal politics.

Indeed, the report argues rather strongly that children are holders of international rights, and one of these rights includes the rights not to be victims of war. Unfortunately, despite the nobility of the language used to describe the often-ignored rights of children, the entire approach of the UN as a whole (and many of the states, like Russia, that contributed funds to the UNIDR) contains high degrees of naivete as well as hypocrisy, an unpleasant and troublesome mixture.

Let us deal with the naivete first. It is immensely naive to assume that a society that is engaged in warfare is going to hinder the primary aim of its operations (and that is victory) in order to protect children, particularly those who are viewed as being on the “other side.” Then again, bloodless and spineless bureaucrats don’t enough very much about warfare or reality. The first task of a force engaged in warfare is victory by whatever means are possible and necessary, and then to worry about the aftermath after the victory. If that means killing large amounts of people, denying territory through scorched-earth tactics, marshaling massive alliances with wildly different postwar agendas, and wiping out peoples who cannot and will not live peacefully, it is done. A successful military does not shackle its armed forces by burdensome and unilateral rules of engagement that preserve the lives of enemies to fight another day while putting its own forces in harm’s way. Rather, a successful military wins the war by whatever means necessary, and then mourns and repents later on after achieving victory, including (if necessary) by rebuilding what it has destroyed, as the United States has traditionally done after its successful wars. Then again, the mostly European bureaucrats who write UN reports don’t know very much about successful wars, as they are too busy cowardly allowing bullies to engage in terrorism and ethnic cleansing while paying lip service to international ideals while seeking hypocritically to attack the behavior of Americans and Israelis.

It is the hypocrisy of the UN as a body that is the most galling though. Certain pet “nations” like the Palestinians and South Sudanese, with horribly malfunctioning economic and political systems are favored with a fast track to nationhood while nations that have been successful de facto nations for decades like Northern Cyprus and Somaliland can’t get a fair hearing or a recognized plebiscite for their own independence bids. All too often it seems like the international community, instead of being a mature forum for the discussion of serious and universal moral issues, is instead like some elitist high school full of snobbery and moral positioning with lots of writing and lengthy reports that mask immensely immoral behavior, rather like my own high school experience.

A particularly troubling aspect of that hypocrisy is the fact that there are some serious implications for children being holders of universal human rights. We must ask, if we concede (as I fully grant) that children are fully human and fully worthy of human rights, when precisely childhood begins. Is it immoral and unjust for an army to forcibly abort the unborn children of hostile populations? If so, is it wrong because it violates the rights of the women to have their children or because it violates the human rights of the unborn themselves, who have no say in the matter? If the unborn in war zones have rights, as the UN’s report implies through its desire to protect the dignity of women, then it is an immoral act for a nation to wage undeclared war on its own unborn, as a vast majority of the nations of the West have done for decades now. And, as the UN has claimed that those who are victims of war have the right to redress, including compensation, for their hurts, there are a lot of victims who have a very serious UN precedent for their own lawsuits against abortionists on war crimes grounds.

More troubling problems exist from the position of the UNIDR on the relationship between civilians and the military when it comes to education. The UN claims that it is a right for children to have universal compulsory primary education (and universal access to secondary education), presumably paid for by the taxpayers of those nations, but that it is immoral for those schools to be used by the military in any fashion. Apparently the state has to tax for both military and educational purposes but cannot use those public schools for public defense, despite the fact that schools are often made to be very defensible buildings. Again, this is example of more naivete and incompetence when it comes to the bureaucrats of the United Nations, as if a state is commanded to provide resources for education (including free lunches, it would seem, in India) but is strictly forbidden from using those assets for any military purpose even after school hours or during school vacation time. This sort of behavior comes from an unfair a priori demonization and delegitimization of the position and needs of a state’s military establishment, which is automatically assumed to be hostile to the interests of the people. This may be true, often, but it cannot be assumed as such, but rather proven. We assume innocence rather than guilt in courts of law, even “international” law, after all.

Additionally, the prejudicial mindset of the people behind the UNIDR appear to have never known (or forgotten, perhaps intentionally) the long and beneficial relationship between militaries and education. After all, in some nations (like the United States), higher education as a whole sprang from either a desire to educate preachers or because militaries needed well-trained engineers. As it would happen, I am evidence of both of those trends, given my interests in religious studies, civil engineering, and military history (including having received a Master’s of Arts in Military History from the first private engineering school in the United States, Norwich University). Without the military (and religious) interest in education on both moral and utilitarian grounds, education would be far worse in the United States, something that is often forgotten by those university educated people today in the UN and other places who regularly make ad hominem attacks on the military.

In addition, the worldview of the UN and its self-righteous bureaucrats is highly arbitrary, not only in which nations and sides are favored in given conflicts, apart from any just and fair application of universal moral standards, but in the placing of arbitrary standards in the first place. And the UN does this rather brazenly, showing its bias as morally relativistic despite its desire to receive the benefits of universalism (including a clear conscience). Perhaps the most obvious way this is done is in the strict enforcement of the “straight 18” standard which forbids African nations from voluntarily enlisting military troops under the age of 18 on pain of prosecutions for human rights violations. My grandfather enlisted in the Coast Guard at 17, freely, despite not yet being an adult. If such a standard were applied to the United States, then someone could have been tried in the Hague by some bloodless and corrupt Eurotrash for human rights violations. That is entirely unacceptable from a consistent moral perspective–and the fact that Africa is both militarily and economically weak and prone to conflicts does not justify the imposition of an arbitrary external standard such as that on its miltiaries, whatever their sins.

In summation, it is not difficult at all to recognize that the United Nations and its various think tanks desire to be seen as the moral arbiters of international justice, but fail woefully in providing a morally consistent worldview to start out with, a recognition of the full implications of children as holders of a universal standard of human rights, and a consistent application of international law that reflects both an accurate understanding of the relationship between the military and civilian populations, and a just assumption of the legitimacy of militaries and their behavior, by which illegitimacy must be proven and not assumed [2]. By failing first the realm of moral philosophy and then compounding that failure through bias and naivete and application, the UNIDR report fails spectacularly in providing a moral judgment of military behavior throughout the world, despite its arrogant presumption and best intentions.

[1] http://www.unidir.org/pdf/articles/pdf-art3135.pdf

[2] For example, if a given law is passed that violates constitutional protections within a given country, such a law is assumed illegitimate because it places civilians under military jurisdiction without just cause, even if the military as a whole is considered automatically to be legitimate. Likewise, atrocities against a civilian population by its military must be proven, not merely assumed to be the case, in a situation where elements of the population are engaged in a state of uprising against their government.