[Central African Republic / Lord's Resistance Army] - The Believing Self Kidnaps the Child to Feed a Phantom of Divine Army

Event Baseline: Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, remains at large after 20 years with recent attacks in eastern Central African Republic; the group is infamous for mass abductions of children.

The LRA is a pure expression of belief turned to butchery. The leader constructs a holy identity and drafts children into a phantom army. The brain of the child is overwritten with the program of vengeance. The child is no longer a child. It is a weapon for a god that exists only in the leader's head. This is the ultimate corruption of thought: inventing a divine command to erase innocence. The group continues to attack villages and abduct bodies. It feeds on the future to sustain a ghost. The self has no substance, so it steals the substance of others. Every child taken is a proof that the abstraction is more real than flesh. The leader cannot stop because the phantom demands blood. There is no negotiation with a hallucination. Until the belief in a supernatural army is seen as a program error, the region will remain a charnel house. The only cure is the death of the idea. No child should be drafted into a fantasy.