Our children need to be carefully taught . . . to hate their true enemies

Back in the 1950s, after WWII and as America grappled with Jim Crow, Oscar Hammerstein wrote about the way in which people have to be “carefully taught” to hate:

You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

That may have been true then, but we’ve gone too far the other way. Our children are being carefully taught that there are no enemies.  I take issue with that at American Thinker:

Back in 1991, during the First Gulf War, the media was awash with profiles of American troops expressing sympathy for the pathetic Iraqi soldiers Saddam Hussein had placed in the desert opposite American tanks. The stories definitely showed off American magnanimity, but my parents were still horrified. Each time one of those profiles came on, one of them would holler out, “You have to hate your enemy to win a war.”

My parents knew what they were talking about. My Dad was a refuge from Germany and, once in the British military, fought the Germans all over Southern Europe and North Africa. He survived the evacuation at Crete and made a stand at El Alamein. My mother spent her war years interned in a Japanese concentration camp.

Aside from native fortitude and the blessing of youth, the one thing that drove my parents them to fight and survive was hatred. They truly and deeply hated their enemy. Compassion was not a part of the equation.

Read the rest here.