Child Soldiers of Sierra Leone

When trying to explain to people the immorality of what is being taught in the three Departments of Military Sciences at Marquette I often say they teach reflexive killing, Killing without Conscience. I picked up this term from a West Point ethics professor in the movie Soldiers of Conscience. Yet often persons do not fully understand the moral implications of what is being taught at Marquette.

Last week at the Marquette conference on World Religions and Nonviolence I asked each of the seven experts if, in their faith tradition it was morally justifiable to teach killing without conscience or conditioning people to kill. For an example, I used the child soldiers of Sierra Leone that were conditioned to kill during the civil war. I know some about this type of training to kill from my friend, Mathias, who was a political exile from Sierra Leone for trying to free child soldiers. Child soldiers were so traumatized by the experience of being conditioned to kill reflexively that when they were freed from the experience they could barely talk about their atrocities but expressed feelings in drawing pictures. This type of conditioned killing is wildly condemned but it is similar to what our soldiers are trained to do in military training.

No one from Marquette Administration or the military has ever denied this type of training takes place in at the university. In fact, the military even brags about it and how using it has increased the rate of soldiers firing weapons at the enemy from 25% in World War II to 95% in the modern day wars. The military ethic professor at West Point says, when explaining to military personnel, why they need to teach this type of killing is morally justified: “Modern combat training conditions soldiers to act reflexively to stimuli—such as fire commands, enemy contact, or the sudden appearance of a “target”—and this maximizes soldiers’ lethality, but it does so by bypassing their moral autonomy. Soldiers are conditioned to act without considering the moral repercussions of their actions; they are enabled to kill without making the conscious decision to do so. (January 27–28, 2000 by CPT Pete Kilner, instructor at the U.S. Military Academy) “Military Leaders’ Obligation to Justify Killing in War”)

So from now on I am better saying that what Marquette teaches in the school of the Army on campus is conditioned killing, killing without conscience, killing like the child soldiers of Africa are taught. In fact when you think about it by video games, TV, Movies easy access to guns and encouragement to use them we all are being conditioned to kill.

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