The Burden our Children Bear

by Hannes Wessels

We live in a world obsessed with the safety and general welfare of our children. This is laudable. I was fortunate to be born into a loving and stable family and attended fine schools where I was blessed with a very sound education but all along the way, it must be said, discipline was emphasised and corporal punishment was an integral part of the system and the culture.

Team sports, particularly rugby for boys and hockey for girls were encouraged and played in a robust way where winning was important but so was sportsmanship. Having said that the ethos of the time was a bruising one in that physical pain and possible injury was considered an integral part of the development process.

Today the world has veered sharply away from that approach to one of almost paranoid protectiveness aimed at eradicating all forms of risk of harm to body or mind. (The Head of St Paul’s School for Girls in London calls this ‘snowploughing’ and says it is harmful to children.) To the point where, in many schools children are encouraged to believe that we all, at the end of the day, are ‘winners’ so the pursuit of being victorious in sporting and to some extent, academic endeavours is discouraged. The thinking being, that mental harm follows failure so the young must develop under the false notion that losing doesn’t matter. Nice, were it true, it’s a fantasy that does the youth no favours but it’s the politically correct approach and seldom queried.

The point being made is that we are told today, by authorities, academics, the media and politicians that any action or process that harms children, mentally or physically, is absolutely prohibited and in some cases, such as administering a caning, criminal prosecution may follow. This would be tough to criticise were it the case but a very large exception is being made to this approach and it’s deeply troubling.

If you happen to be a child of European descent, and heaven forbid, a child bred of parents who lived in African countries when there was rule by ‘white minority’ government, then all the normal rules do not apply. These children, through absolutely no fault of their own, are allowed to be mentally abused in arguably the worst possible way; through inculcating a potent and debilitating sense of guilt in their minds.

In an article in the ‘New Scientist’ research showed that curiosity, toughness, determination, social awareness, optimism and enthusiasm are essential ingredients in preparing children to be successful in adulthood. This makes plenty of sense and it is being denied to children of European ancestry who are unlikely to be too curious about certain subjects because discussion of some topics, particularly anything to do with race, is taboo and optimism and enthusiasm is at best dampened if not eliminated by the sense of guilt they are being encumbered with.

From an early age, through a vast array of propaganda and polemic masquerading as education ‘white’ children are being taught that their ancestors, starting with their immediate forebears, are responsible for the vast majority of what is wrong with this world we live in. This is a serious and deliberate distortion of the truth.

While, there is no doubt the Europeans have much to explain and answer for, surely someone can find the gumption to admit they are not alone in the mistakes of the past. Our children are being taught with relentless intensity that racism, colonialism, slavery and unbridled capitalism leading to unjustified enrichment are the sole domain of the European. So they, as the offspring of this abhorrent breed of people, must hang their heads in perpetual shame, lament their ancestry and repent evermore.

No mention of the blindingly obvious fact that Africa has not exactly prospered since the departure of the very people who are being vilified. The message they hear is one of almost unconditional praise for all who opposed, or purported to oppose the arrival of the colonists. An airbrushed picture of a tropical paradise emerges where all the inhabitants were blissful in their benign, original state only to have their utopia smashed by arrogant, avaricious invaders from Europe.

Whether the European was an unwelcome interloper or not, many of them, particularly the missionaries, were well intentioned. They were shocked by the endemic savagery they encountered and were convinced that Christianity would provide Africans with a platform for the betterment of their lives. Most of them also endeavoured, very bravely, to stop the slave trade which was mostly Arab-run and many of them died grisly deaths in the process.

While Africa certainly produced personalities of note, most were not quite the noble and humble defenders of their domains that our children are led to believe. In South Africa, Chaka, of the Zulus has an airport named after him and is handed iconic status as an example of African military brilliance and greatness. Chaka well deserves a place in history but to be fair to the truth, surely there should be some mention of the fact the man was a tyrant, who ruled by terror, who killed, displaced and impoverished hundreds of thousands of fellow Africans. And the same could be said of most tribal leaders of the time when ‘right’ was quite simply a product of ‘might’ in an utterly lawless world where basic human rights had never been heard of. Of course this is ignored along with the fact that there probably would not have been a slave trade had it not been for African chiefs and their vassals queuing at the harbours with their captive subjects waiting to profit from the sale of their own kith and kin.

Little or nothing appears to be said about the benefits wrought by imperialism, nor that the British abolished slavery, or that the Arabs were by far the harshest and most energetic slavers, or that the Europeans have constructed some of the greatest civilisations in history, or of the incredible progress in science, medicine and technology that was sown and developed in the ‘West’ by their much loathed progenitors. In short, these children have an enormous amount to be justifiably proud of but they are being denied the knowledge to support that potentially healthy state of mind. Psychologically, they are being injected with an undeserved sense of shame and this is a cross they are expected to bear for the rest of their lives. Not only is this malicious and pitiless on the part of those who orchestrate it, it is counterproductive in the quest to make nations better places, because these progeny, carrying the emotional baggage foisted upon them by their peers will inevitable lack the confidence needed to be assertive and therefore successful.

The eventual effects of this indoctrinatory approach are clearly evident in the UK of today where most Britons have been very effectively softened by excessive ‘molly-coddling’ in schools and brainwashed to the point that they believe they are collectively to blame for the spread of most of the world’s ills. This obviously includes racism, the greatest evil of modern times, which they have been taught was, in no small way, spawned of the British Empire. This false but incredibly powerful message has led to the lowering of the country’s morale, the dissipation of national pride and with that the end of the country as a vibrant, competitive country and a world power.

To assuage this misplaced guilt the UK ‘natives’ are well on track to the ‘diversification’ of the country’s cultural matrix which includes the ‘Islamification’ of some cities and the emergence of a very different society. This, they believe is welcome change based on the premise that Britons can learn to improve from people who hail from places like Nigeria, the Caribbean and Pakistan. Well maybe they know something I don’t but I do beg to differ and I suspect many of them do too but they are too terrified to question the local wisdom.

Lenin famously said, “Give me just one generation of youth and I’ll transform the world.” He was absolutely right. Sadly it looks like the transformation is not making much of the world a better place.