April 9, 2010
Disturbing eye-rebounding videos and on-the-scene, cringing to watch or read, graphic reports of civilians dying at the hands of U.S. military in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan — resurfacing again on network and radio newscasts, in some newspapers and of course, as always, on the Internet.
As in the past, they bring a certain amount of world reaction in concern and condemnation with the more intense pain and outrage reserved for the children’s lives taken. The president of Afghanistan, elected under US military occupation, after years complaining and protesting uselessly, warns of his own possible defection over the "indiscriminate killing by foreign armed forces" among other issues.
How many Americans have been involved in the collateral slaying of children in America’s wars and bombings within defenseless populations of the so called underdeveloped world since the end of World War Two?
How much effort, by how many Americans, has gone into producing each child’s violent death during undeclared wars in Third World nations? Some innocent child made poor and disadvantaged for its country’s history of brutal colonial occupation and plunder by industrial powers that continue to exploit through neocolonialist financial oppression, killed by foreign invaders of American nationality.
The question might equally be asked regarding each dead Korean child or each Laotian, Vietnamese, Cambodian child, of each child who was killed in its own various Latin American or African country, and since 9/11, each Pakistani, Afghani, Iraqi, Somali, Sudanese, Yemeni, and Lebanese child, all so precious and lovely while they were alive during the time allotted to them by destiny and the military necessities of Americans.
Below are seven multiple answers to the question – how many Americans does it take to collaterally slaughter1 a child during an undeclared American war on some of each child’s countrymen?
1. Today, it can be said to take only one American sitting in a facility somewhere in the U.S. Mid-West or a pilot or gunner in a plane or helicopter looking at an electronic screen map of coordinates pressing the release button that fires a missile. Takes only one American finger to press a button on an American weapon of mass destruction to end a child’s life. During earlier wars, and even now, the finger might be on the trigger of a machine gun or bomb-sight.
2. It takes two Americans – one on the ground to call in the coordinates for a strike, the other in the air, or half a world away, to fix the cross hairs on the area where the child was – or is — before pressing the release button. Or in earlier wars, one to give the order and another to fire the shot to take down a child while aiming at one of his countrymen.
3. It takes hundreds of collaborating American servicemen and officers involved in a military presence or maneuver at some particular place and time that sets the stage for the calling in of a missile strike — in earlier times, to set the stage for the opening of a bombardment in which a child shall perish. Few will ever see the actually pitiful remains of each child that is no more. Often there is nothing but body parts only its family can recognize.
4. It takes hundreds of thousands of Americans overseas and at home engaged in the manufacture, transport and maintenance of weapons, some realizing their part in making the killing of children possible, but others shutting this out of mind, grateful for the money earned. Without these horrific high-tech devices, each child’s death would not be made possible or a reality by the military.
5. It takes a minimum of tens of millions of Americans openly supporting the killing in which each child’s slaughter is a part, convincing or intimidating hundreds of other millions to accept each child’s death as necessary to the preservation of American safety or to the maintenance of their own prerogatives, privileges and level of consumption. Without their cooperation, the war on each child’s countrymen would not be feasible.
6. It take generations of Americans frightened into silently accepting the dispatching of each child by command of mentally disadvantaged political leaders and the all-wars-promoting conglomerates of the information media cartel under the ownership of, and controlled by, the criminally insane power elite of the Financial-Military-Industrial-Complex . If the war on each child’s countrymen were, or had been, unacceptable to enough Americans, it could not have been waged and no dear child would have been destroyed over all these decades nor in this past week.
7. It has taken, and continues to take, a rather limited number of Americans in the entertainment and information industry working hard over half a century as network anchors, commentators, station managers, talk-show hosts, editors and reporters to bring about the activity of Americans described in each of the foregoing six answers to the query – how many Americans does it take to collaterally slaughter a child in a third world country? (Collaterally, of course, for what American is his or her right mind would go overseas for the sole purpose or intention of killing a child?).
Maybe consider turning off Network TV, Radio, and stop reading corporate owned newspapers and magazines, or better yet notice, and get angry about, their promotion of all past and every single possible future war in some way or another.
It is a rare occasion when a child’s death is begrudgingly reported on our privately licensed public air wave frequencies, for our American monopolized "free’ press and electronic media has prime criminal responsibility for each wonderful child’s brutal passing, and their employees are in some discomfort increasingly aware of their murderous roles.
1. "Slaughter," as in "manslaughter," defined as "the unlawful killing of a person, without malice or premeditation, there being no specific word for 'woman or child slaughter’ as they are understood within "manslaughter.’" [↩]
Jay Janson, spent eight years as Assistant Conductor of the Vietnam Symphony Orchestra in Hanoi and also toured, including with Dan Tai-son, who practiced in a Hanoi bomb shelter. The orchestra was founded by Ho Chi Minh,and it plays most of its concerts in the Opera House, a diminutive copy of the Paris Opera. In 1945, our ally Ho, from a balcony overlooking the large square and flanked by an American Major and a British Colonel, declared Vietnam independent. Everyone in the orchestra lost family, "killed by the Americans" they would mention simply, with Buddhist un-accusing acceptance. Jay can be reached at: firstname.lastname@example.org.