Kids - Follow or Don't Follow Military Orders

Not too long ago, I was watching a Special Victims Unit (NBC) episode titled “Authority” guest starring Robin Williams as an engineer with authority issues. Steven began watching the program and I was explaining to him a famous psychology experiment they referred to in the episode I viewed on film when I was in college. It dawned on me we live in 2010 so I found the experiment on You Tube.

The Milgram experiment examined people willing to perform acts for authority figures in conflict with their conscience. This experiment was in response to the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal who was a key architect of the Holocaust. The experiment raises issues why people follow orders to commit violent acts such as the murder innocent people.

This led to a discussion of the Prussian General Friedrich Von Steuben who trained the soldiers of the American Revolutionary War in military drill and discipline beginning at Valley Forge. In the History Channel’s series “America, the Story of Us” they described how Von Steuben was impressed that while training German and French soldiers to do something they did it but with the Americans he had to explain why they should do something. The American soldiers were independent thinkers.



Americans are radical people in human history because we have formed a government not based upon the authority of one leader, kings or emperors or dictators such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin or Mao Tse Tung. Our government was formed upon Judeo-Christian values in the belief that our rights come from the Creator. Below is a passage from the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness”

A Nazi solider swore personal allegiance to Adolf Hitler. An American soldier swore allegiance to the United States Constitution which is our system of law of the people, by the people and for the people.

Below is a video clip of the Milgram experiment which is part of a series and quite long but interesting.



[Credits: Von Steuben image www.nps.gov, Milgram experiment video posted by GriefTourist (BBC TV May 2009)]