Solzhenitsyn's Orphans

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” 

A.S.

Al Queda began as a gang of raggedy orphans in the Afghani outback. These were the mongrels of the Soviet occupation, children forced by the rockets and shells of the Red Army into madness and horror. They lost their parents, siblings, sometimes their entire families to rockets and shelling and bombs just big enough to blow an eight year old to pulp. They grew up swinging around on the torched skeletons of Migs and T-62 tanks wary all the while of the delayed fuse mines that had been fiendishly crafted into toys and fountain pens that had been scattered about by the Soviet gunships.  

Al Queda began as a nation of children forged on the anvil of high explosive. 

I wonder how many of those first jihadis had been whipped by the hand of semtex or C4? How many of them were (are) the owners of brains rattled and rewired by mild injuries? These kids were the inheritors of neuropathologies the western world is only beginning to understand. And we have them to thank for it, those blasted children. When we stepped onto the playground of carnage the Soviets built for these orphans they taught us about brain injuries. 

What we know now is that mild brain trauma can lead to a variety of crapped out connections in the three pound soul. In the brain, data flows like water, if one path is blocked, more will form. Nature will find a way to get you to think. 

Bomb blasts set the jelly of the fatty brain into a rippling, instantaneous dance. The flabby lobes of the apparatus shake like a fat man risking death on Wal Mart a trampoline, and the effect is infinitely more heinous. Should the frontal lobe slap wetly against the orbitofrontal cortex, pinging off of the dual chambers of the sinuses and the fourth wall of the forehead, traumas that darken all of the best parts of the soul result. Our soldiers are returning from the wars with damaged synapses and bottles of psychotropics. These poor youngsters are often confronted by a bleak road littered with unemployment, suicide and drug abuse here at home.

But this scarring goes doubly for children. Their young brains are so hungry for survival that they will actually heal and scar over the debris. The data that overflows the levees of their dark and broken neural anatomy cuts new and permanent channels that circumscribe all of the hardware needed to understand compassion and warmth. The afflicted individual is often ripped away from his own feelings. These souls are forever left standing outside the party of genuine human emotion. The self a phantom limb to the body of the world it inhabits. What we call psychopathology, with all of its bloody import, is one result of this of twisted neural healing.

Al Queda, orphans raised by the war and retrofitted with a sort of animal pathos in place of empathy. 

They  must have been ripe fruits for the zealots and the warlords. 

And now, twelve years later, a despot and a terminally ill pedagogue are dead. Hundreds of thousands are dead. Tens of thousands of bombs have been detonated along roadsides, in markets and dropped from the sky. Like the soviets before us, we have sewn thousands more orphans broken between the ears.

That place, between the ears of children, in the raceways of thought as it tumbles about between the front and the rest of those immature brains, that is the place we have struck Solzhenitsyn's line.