Children in 50 countries are currently growing up in the midst of war or its ugly aftermath.

Childhood is the happiest, most carefree of times. That is, unless your country has been torn apart by war.
The United Nations estimates that children in 50 countries are currently growing up in the midst of war or its ugly aftermath. In the past decades, 2 million children have been killed and 6 million injured in war-torn places. And 23 million children have been forced from their homes.
According to LiveScience , most kids live through the brutality of war, but even those who do come out the other side have a whole new moral outlook.
Roberto Posada and Cecilia Wainryb of the University of Utah were concerned about the fact that “more and more of the world’s children are being sucked into a bleak moral vacuum--a psychological space devoid of basic human rights and values,“ and they wondered how those children would develop a sense of right and wrong given the bleak condition of their lives.
And so they decided to ask the kids. Colombian children were appropriate subjects for Posada and Wainryb’s question because Colombia has been engaged in civil war for 50 years; children in that country have been exposed to homicide, theft and physical violence on a daily basis.
They gathered 96 children and adolescents who had been displaced from their homes and were currently living in poverty, most of them without parents, and questioned them about the morality of stealing or harming someone.
Surprisingly, these very damaged kids all said that stealing and harming others was wrong, morally wrong, even if everybody did it. Their ability to hold on to what is right and wrong speaks to the very depth of a moral character that is universal in all humans, no matter what happens. And this makes sense -- social animals such as humans must share some common rules to make a society function, and even in anarchy, those rules hold.
But the researchers also found that the children had a very different view of right and wrong within the context of revenge. Most of the kids didn’t think it was so bad to steal or harm if the idea was to get back at someone.
That moral frame shift is not just discouraging, it also speaks of the roots of most human conflict. Fights, terrorism and all-out conflict are often based in real or imagined scenarios where each side complains they have been ripped off or harmed.
And then comes the justification of revenge. You take something of mine, I have the right to take something of yours. You have harmed me or those I love, so I can righteously harm you and yours.
People may be naturally moral, and instinctively know right from wrong, but set into the social context of tit-for-tat, all notions of good and bad go out the window. Revenge is also so much part of our make-up that it, too, must have some deep moral value, albeit a twisted one, that works for human societies. We project our own. We hurt for them, we steal for them, we are together, no matter what, which probably helps our genes survive.
No one should be surprised if those Colombian kids grow up and continue in the violence of war. They have, after all, been dragged into the complex network of revenge justice, a system that by its very nature is handed down from generation to generation.

Menachem Begin

A pamphlet warning Britons to leave the Middle East or face death has come to light in a stash of illicit propaganda.
It was found in Haifa, about 60 years ago, and was issued by the underground group led by Menachem Begin -- the future prime minister of Israel.
The document, which surfaced at an auction house this week, is addressed to “the soldiers of the occupation army“ and aimed at British soldiers serving in Palestine, then under the British Mandate, preceding the establishment of Israel in 1948. The print has faded and the paper has discolored since it was unearthed from a grove of trees in Haifa in the summer of 1947. Yet the language and the concerns remain current.
Bombings and murders by underground groups, such as Begin’s Irgun, hastened the British withdrawal and the United Nations declaration that led to the founding of Israel, the Times reported.
Irgun propaganda targeted the British Army’s wavering morale, already dented by the bomb attack on the Mandate’s headquarters-- the King David Hotel in Beit-ul Moqaddas---which killed 91 people.
In the document, Irgun tells British troops: “It is unavoidable that many Jewish soldiers and many British soldiers should fall. And it is only fair that these people know at least why they may be killed.“
It adds: “Most of you have been in this country for quite a long time. You have learned what the word ’terrorist’ means, some of you may even have come into direct contact with them (and heartily desire not to repeat the experience). But what do you know about them? Why does a young man go underground?“
It then draws a parallel with what would have happened if, seven years earlier, Britain had been overrun by Nazi Germany. “Remember 1940. Then it seemed quite possible that your island country would be conquered and subjugated by Hitler hordes . . . what would you have done? Would you have gone underground?“ The pamphlet says that the occupation is “illegal and immoral“ and “parallel to the mass assassination of a whole people“, in language that echoes that used on a note pinned to the booby-trapped bodies of two British intelligence officers executed by Irgun that same summer.

Terrorist Manifesto
The pamphlet came from a stash confiscated and burnt by cyptographers from the Royal Signals regiment. Corporal Raymond Smith found them buried in a secluded grove marked by a white Star of David and was ordered to destroy them, but took one as a memento. A collector acquired the document from Corporal Smith, and brought it to Mullock’s auctioneers in Shropshire.
Richard Westwood-Brookes, Mullock’s historical documents specialist, said the pamphlet was a remarkable find, which “amounted to a manifesto for terrorist action“. He added: “It also raises the question as to who are ’terrorists’ and who are ’freedom fighters’. It’s a debate which raged through the troubles of Northern Ireland and continues in the Middle East.“
Begin’s Irgun set aside its differences with Haganah, a rival underground Jewish group led by David Ben Gurion Ð the first Prime Minister of Israel, who once likened Begin to Adolf Hitler.
Begin forged a political career as a hardliner, but, after becoming Prime Minister, signed the Camp David agreement with Egypt in 1979.
The pamphlet, which is expected to fetch about £500, goes on sale at Mullock’s, in Shropshire, on August 6.