Upon former US Attorney Ramsey Clark's urging, this archival research peoples historian sat down to write about a despicably inhumane, stomach-turning beyond-words ghastly crime, namely, the programed, planned and for the most part made acceptable starvation of millions of children. While trying to write down something meaningful for the sake of those dying kids, damning self-indictments kept flashing into mind.
We have all seen eye rebounding videos or photos of a tiny child taken during its last days of life or even minutes before death. Eyes wide open, staring straight ahead unblinking without seeing, its head horribly misshapen, the top of the cranium ballooned outward, facial expression more like an ET than human, chest looking impossibly shrunken in, strikingly thin arms and legs of wrinkled skin covered bone, belly grotesquely swollen out.[1]
------ (Why! In God's name! Why! in our space age of instant world wide communication?)
How could someone stand making this video while the child is dying, instead of getting some nourishment to the dying child? Well, the tiny horribly deformed human being is probably no longer able to swallow anything, its body closed down except for a barely felt automatic, desperate and totally instinctive last ephemeral effort to bring that life sustaining minuscule minimum of breath of life in, in, almost imperceptibly in, until the remaining bit of functioning lung rests permanently. The mother will have stopped hearing its pleas for milk or food already an eternity ago. The photographer hopes to save others by getting this horror viewed by us.
-----(shaken, automatic reflex makes me say to myself in defense of my inaction, 'These videos will be widely seen, something will surely get done' From others I'll hear, 'This has been going on for years,' implying, 'No way to stop it.' The final rationalization heard, 'We all have to die sometime, just a question of luck or destiny that some us die at ninety-five and others before five.'
There is plenty of food in the world for everyone. The problem is that hungry people are trapped in severe poverty. They lack the money to buy enough food to nourish themselves. Being constantly malnourished, they become weaker and often sick. This makes them increasingly less able to work, which then makes them even poorer and hungrier. This downward spiral often continues until death for them and their families. Those who have entrapped them in severe poverty have committed genocide, a punishable crime. Though allowing a child to starve to death or die of malnutrition will bring a charge of homicide, in this world dominated by Western 'civilization,' allowing millions of children to starve to death will not bring a charge of genocide upon anyone. This appears to reflects a modern adage "Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god," [Jean Rostrand, Thoughts of a Biologist,1938]
Some of us, made aware of this unbearable situation, are moved to assuage conscience by arranging a monthly contribution to some charitable organization. A few of us become angry enough to talk or write about it in their extreme old age, as is the case of this writer. Most of us are busier with personal affairs and are quick to shut down attention and personal discomfort, and let their own personal preoccupations slam forward in priority.
Approximately every five seconds, a child dies of hunger, around 6 every minute, 720 every hour, 17,280 every day, 6,700,200 this year.[2] Multiplied by 60 the number of years since end of the Second World War the total is 378,432,000 children dead for lack of food, but since in past years the child death rate from hunger was higher, even when the total world population was lower, the actual number of children dead of hunger since WWII could easily be double that number and be more than twice or three times the total of deaths during WWII.
----- (Why is this unspeakable and massive tragedy of multi Holocaust proportions not in the headlines?)
It might be reasonable to expect that death and tragedy on this scale would be prime time headlines news, yet these issues only surface when there are global meetings of politicians, bankers and UN officials at the various G20 or G8 summits, or at fund raising concerts for charities.
This has to be a mainstream media cartel near blackout of news of children dying by the millions.[End Note [3] gives other examples of news and information blackouts meant to protect profitable genocide arranged by the criminally wealthy of the colonial-neocolonial First World.]
Since it's the money that is lacking to feed millions of our children, seems a question of world economics, but if we turn to the preeminently knowledgeable person in world economics, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, we find something chilling - as ghastly as looking at that dying child. In his Globalization And Its Discontents, Stiglitz confesses that during his time as Chief Economist of the World Bank, policies were genocidal. In the higher echelons of world economics, genocide figures in only as a " discontent. " And please note that Stiglitz has at least often battled against those who starve people for profit. He was fired by the World Bank for expressing dissent with its policies.[4]
Our guy Stiglitz, to this historians knowledge, has never called for investigation of World Bank polices as a genocidal crime. Though Stiglitz argues against starving people quite a bit,[5] they continue to die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.
If starving people is profitable, prosecution for genocide is the only way to stop it from being profitable in the future - the Ramsey Clark dictum is, 'If crime pays it will continue.'
At a UN food summit attended by dozens of world leaders in Rome, Jacques Diouf, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations said wealthier nations are doing little to help the developing world face the problem and were cutting back on agriculture programs for the world's poor and ignoring deforestation -- while spending billions on carbon markets, subsidies for farmers and biofuel production.
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