On Childhood Innocence

and the creation of Zionist Karens

I received a question after posting about Grave of the Fireflies:

Hi, white australian parent here. Been thinking about this lately after a palestine protest "die in" and a parent telling his kids not to look as he put them in his nearby parked car....

Did it stuff you up to be exposed so early or do you think its ok and conprehensible to children without being overwhelming?

Prohibition creates desire. 

I never thought the film stuffed me up being exposed to it so early. The concept of childhood innocence emerged from John Locke, whose theory of tabula rasa (blank slate), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that children are born pure and innocent. 

It is a romanticized view of childhood that coincided with the rise of the bourgeoisie in Europe—with industrialization, which hoped to keep wealthy and middle-class families out of the workforce, worked in conjunction with it. The “protected” child became a symbol of bourgeois values—leisure, education and moral upbringing. 

Childhood innocence served to reinforce division. It is also the same racist division that reinforces the idea of civilized/nature (uncivilized), settler/Indigenous divide, cultured/uncultured, and protected/traumatized. 

To shield one’s eyes becomes a marker for the ability to look away, in fear of being “tainted." In the empire, the settler children were framed as innocent and in need of protection, while the colonized were excluded from this protection. It is a paternalistic relationship, which provides the self-rationale for white supremacy’s mission to dominate. 

Childhood innocence is part and parcel of the Christian Victorian value that children were “born into sin,” intertwined with the Christian morality that we must attempt to preserve the soul of the child from sin, temptation and corruption. This, in turn, serves the interest of State control to justify social discipline. It is through framing (some) children vulnerable and in need of guidance that family life intervention, education, and behavior discipline are warranted. 

From this, Freud observed the creation of conflicts that rose from the problematic romantic view of childhood as a period of innocence, which brings us our inner conflicts and anxieties.

As for Foucault, it is from childhood that this innocence is the site of surveillance and control, where the adults exercise power by defining the boundaries of innocence and ensuring children conform to social “norms.” Much like the innocence in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, we can ask, whom does this serve? Who are the innocent, and for what purpose?

Is it any wonder that we see adults whom society labels “Karens”? These are the leftovers of the “protected” handmaids, past their “purpose” of procreation. They no longer serve the system but have never been treated with mature dignity and respect outside of childish innocence within the Christendom patriarchy. Suddenly, they find themselves with the world majority but are utterly unprepared for the harsh realities of life.

Contrast this with the story of Siddhartha Gautama, who would become a Buddha. Contrast this with the Western Christian concept of childhood protectionism. Siddhartha was a prince who was shielded from the world by his father, a king. His father feared Siddhartha would take the spiritual path, so the king constructed a life of opulence and luxury to shield him from suffering and imperfections. Siddartha’s life was free from the harshness of the world, manufactured innocence, and built on ignorance of the world’s suffering, resulting in his fragility. 

When he finally ventured out of the palace gates, he saw four sights for the first time: an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a wandering ascetic. They represented the four encounters of suffering—aging, sickness, death and the pursuit of spiritual liberation—that shocked and overwhelmed Siddartha. White people are stuck at this stage of Siddhartha, locked in the golden cage of innocence, unable to see the pain and suffering of their deeds, protected by the iron dome of their ideology. 

Consumer capitalism creates a neoliberal traumaphobic society, which blurs the problems it caused to only then sell you a promise to solve the issue it created temporarily. The category of children is a question of privilege and control. It reinforces for everyone who gets to look away, who must look away, who cannot look away, and who must bear the burden for everyone. Education is not child abuse. Locking the child in a parked car because the parent is a genocide denialist is. 

But children are not stupid. This isn’t about ethics but rather the function of ideology. As Žižek has pointed out, when people ask adults if they believe in Christmas, the parents say, of course not! It is for the child! But when people ask the children, do you believe in Christmas? They respond, of course not! It was for our parents so that we could get the presents! So the better question is, for whom are we pretending that the genocide is not happening?

So, for the white parents, your fantasy for the “Western Enlightenment” is revealing its skeletons. Every ideology eventually reveals its cracks. If we are to survive as a species, we must come clean. Don’t be afraid of overwhelm; be fearful of eternal resentment from future generations caused by your infantilization and lies. 

What are we saying to our children when we give Israel $24.5 billion to bomb those kids, but you should close your eyes?