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Reprinted from the Black Agenda Report
Freedom Rider: Killing Children
If America fails to finally find compassion for the legions of "other people's" children it has killed, then it will never comprehend why its own, internal massacres occur with such frequency. "Indiscriminate violence made America what it is today."
Freedom Rider: Killing Children
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
"It was a horrible scene and I would not let my Company fire. It looked too hard for me to see little children begging for their lives, have their brains beat out like dogs." -- Capt. Silas Soule, witness to 1864 Sand Creek Massacre.
" Did we just kill a kid?" -- Brandon Bryant, drone operator .
" America has a long history of killing little children."
Americans love to think of themselves as innocents. As a result, when they are victimized they are not just in a state of mourning, but one of total disbelief when finding themselves on the receiving end of barbarity. In the moment of bereavement and shock the well documented acts of barbarity that have been and still are committed by their country are conveniently forgotten.
The reactions to the killing of 28 people, 20 of them children, at a school in Newtown, Connecticut are understandable. It is difficult to imagine not being saddened and angered by the news of the senseless slaughter, particularly the killings of children only six and seven years of age.
Yet it is wrong to behave as if little children have never before been targeted for death in this country. While president Obama may shed a tear at a press conference and take on the role of mourner in chief, he has ordered drone attacks which have killed young children. Between 2004 and 2012, 176 children in Pakistan were killed by American drone strikes. According to the president's staff, he personally oversees the assassination "kill list," which means he ordered the killing of 16 year old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki after having done the same to his father, Anwar al-Awlaki.
" It is wrong to behave as if little children have never before been targeted for death in this country."
Of course, America has a long history of killing little children. Hundreds of thousands of children were taken from Africa to be enslaved in America, little children were lynching victims and children are now killed by drones, sanctions, and the other aggressions that this country meets out to the rest of the world. Israel, America's client state, kills children in Lebanon or Gaza or wherever it feels the desire to carry out its evil intent. Entire families have been wiped out in Gaza, but the president who so solemnly mourns the loss of life in Connecticut, defends the carnage when his ally is the perpetrator.
America has a long history of state supported killing and the killings didn't exclude children. Indian children were victimized from the moment the first Europeans arrived in their land. The British, Spanish and French all brought disease, enslavement and outright slaughter to the first American nations. On November 29, 1864, Colorado militia troops killed over 200 Arapaho and Cheyenne at Sand Creek . The victims were almost all women, children and old men. Eyewitness accounts told of children being shot, a fetus removed from its mother and scalped, and mutilations of many victims such as the Cheyenne chief White Antelope. " Besides scalping him the soldiers cut off his nose, ears, and testicles -- the last for a tobacco pouch ..."
" If Adam Lanza had been wearing a police officer or soldier's uniform, he could have killed anyone he wanted without fear of punishment."
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