What might Senior Devil Screwtape (of C. S. Lewis’s famous Letters) say to his protégé Wormwood about ‘Children’s Rights’?
My Dear Wormwood,
I was delighted to learn of your recent promotion. Years of diligent casework with individual patients have prepared you well for your new role as Cross-Party Under-Deceiver at the British Parliament. And you are right: the work there is very well established. You will have much to learn on the job from more seasoned deceiving spirits.
These days our Westminster delegation (like those at Holyrood, Cardiff, and Stormont) is dominated by spirits of language manipulation and moral degradation. It has been many years since brutal repression and bloody persecution were our watchwords in political operations, but these strategies are working marvellously elsewhere, and we may try them again soon in the UK.
For now, I will highlight just one area in which your deceptive efforts will be richly repaid: ‘Children’s Rights’. I know it sounds odd, but I want you to give yourself unsparingly, dear Wormwood, to the hearty promotion of ‘Children’s Rights’. You will soon see that there has rarely been a more fruitful field for mischief-making than the policies which purport to protect children.
Of course, focusing on ‘Children’s Rights’ will involve you most directly with the Department for Education. Naturally, the mere existence of a Department for Education in a human government is already a great triumph for us. The more centralised the systems for forming human beings are, the easier it will be for us to ‘roll out’ (beautiful phrase!) our programmes of mass indoctrination. The best kind of state, from our perspective, is a self-righteous pagan state with a sense of educational mission.
By encouraging ‘Children’s Rights’, we can appear to empower children, all the while handing real power to our preferred group of moral-but-lawless adults.
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