A Hierarchy of Innocence

Abstract

The shift in warfare and in geopolitics since the Cold War has made it difficult for Americans to identify the “good guys” and the “bad guys” in international affairs. The “Evil Empire” is no longer reflexively the Soviet Union or its proxies, for example. Without a clear sense of who needs protection, the media and other political actors have tried to identify who is innocent. In many cases, children have been portrayed as the only “pure” victims. For many conflicts and crises, children, seen generically, have filled up the American empathy vacuum—that void that used to be taken up by the Natan Sharanskys, the Alexander Solzhenitsyns, the Jacobo Timmermans, the Nelson Mandelas: men, typically, who stood for the values of democracy, equality, and freedom. Now, often, conflicts are depicted in the media less as political confrontations than as brutal and ideologically senseless battles, and how better to communicate that than to show a damaged child?