When Killing Kids is Just A-OK….

The murder of children is quite rightly seen as one of the most heinous crimes imaginable.  There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth this week over the abduction of the five-year-old April Jones, and the subsequent arrest and charging of Mark Bridger with her murder.  I guess I speak for many when I say I would happily take five minutes alone in a room with this alleged child murderer.  Nothing exercises the moral indignation of the British people more than those who set out to harm kids.  Unless, of course, those children happen to live in the Middle East.  In which case, we appear, at best, to be a bit ambiguous about the whole thing.

Just this week, far down the newsworthiness pecking order, was a report on the effect of sanctions on Iran.  It makes horrifying reading.  Not content with the reported 500,00 dead children as a result of sanctions on Iraq in the 1990’s, it would appear we are about to repeat the process in Iran.  The consequences of enforcing food and medicine shortages on a civilian population are predictable, and morally indefensible.  Yet there is no outpouring of grief or righteous fury over the fact that our government is embarking on a child killing spree abroad.

In an article in the Guardian, Philip Hammond, the UK Defence Secretary was reported to have said there would be “more pain on the streets“, and that –

“There is further tightening (of sanctions) we can do.”  He added: “We can definitely make the pain much greater.  Nobody wants to cause the Iranian people to suffer unnecessarily but this mad scheme to build a bomb has to be brought to an end.”

Read that again.  “Nobody wants the Iranian people to suffer unnecessarily but…..”
But, we are going to do just that nonetheless, make the Iranian people suffer “unnecessarily”.  This is Philip Hammond advocating a policy that will result in the deaths of untold numbers of children, from hunger and lack of basic medicine.  And he is justifying this on the LIE that Iran is building a nuclear bomb.  Maybe he should speak to his intelligence officials.  The only “mad scheme” here is that advanced by Hammond and his ilk, the one that thinks killing kids is ever a legitimate thing to do.  If “terrorism” means the use of violence aimed at civilians in order to force change from a government, what is it called when intense suffering is imposed on a  population in order to force change from their government?  It is also called terrorism, pure and simple.

American Democratic Representative Brad Sherman also justified the sanctions on Iran this way – “Critics of sanctions argue that these measures will hurt the Iranian people. Quite frankly, we need to do just that.”

These people disgust me.

Where is the outrage?  Where is the anger?  Is it cos they are brown that no-one turns a hair?  Is it because, as the barbarous Joseph Stalin once said, that the death of one person is a tragedy, but the deaths of a million is just a statistic?

Mark Bridger is not the only child killer needing brought to justice.

Further reading –

Iran Sanctions Now Causing Food Insecurity, Mass Suffering.

UK Warns Iran of More Sanctions Pain.

Iran Uranium Used For Exclusively Peaceful Means, Despite Propaganda of War-Mongers.

Effect of Sanctions on Iraq.

How I Became a Black Sheep.

I watched the film ‘Broken Arrow’ on television last night.  Despite the fact I went to see it at the cinema in 1996, I could remember nothing of it.  After watching it again I realized why – it is absolute garbage.  Still, the film did get me thinking.    It started me off on a nostalgia trip to my salad days, and in particular my life in 1996, and how it evolved over the following few years.

In 1996 I was 24 and earning VERY good money with British Gas as a service engineer.   I had a pension, and was also the regular recipient of dividend cheques from a multitude of shares that British Gas kept throwing my way.  I also had a £21,000 mortgage on a little flat on Castlegreen Street in Dumbarton.  Life seemed a complete doddle.

Broken Arrow was released in the UK during April of 1996, and it would have been there or thereabouts that I first saw it.  I remember going to see it with my then girlfriend Fiona, at the UCI multiplex in Clydebank.    I’ll admit now that it wasn’t one of my better ideas for a date.  Whether she had a thing for John Travolta I can’t recall, though I can’t imagine anyone fancying Travolta in that movie.  His girning alone would be enough to give any woman nightmares.

Life seemed so easy in those days.  The only clouds on my horizon were generally the product of my lovelife.  I had no real awareness of the wider world outside my own social circle, and had no thoughts or opinions on anything ‘political’.  My life revolved around work and beer, with increasing forays into dope, and guitar-generated rock and roll.

It was in about 1996 that I started to become a regular concert go-er.  Looking at my collection of ticket stubs, I can see how my musical tastes gradually changed.  In 1996 I was paying to see Bon Jovi, Oasis, Del Amitri, Reef, and Ocean Colour Scene.  By 1997 I was watching the Verve, Skunk Anansie, Live, Primal Scream, Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins, and Beck.

The late 90’s went on to become, for me, something akin to a ‘perfect storm’.   I had moved away from Dumbarton to live in Rothesay on the sunny Isle of Bute.   For the first time in my adult life the Labour Party had won election to Government.  My formerly apolitical nature had been eroded by exposure to the music of Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine.  And possibly most significant of all was the new time I found for reading.   I started reading broadsheet newspapers, particularly the Glasgow Herald, and a new work colleague was introducing me to the works of Noam Chomsky, Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Waits, and Hunter Thompson.  I developed strong views on nuclear weapons, on the 1998 Gulf War, and the 1999 Kosovo bombing.  Almost despite myself, I was slowly turning into some kind of political black sheep.

And suddenly life seemed not so simple.   I saw in the millenium listening to Godspeed You Black Emperor and Mogwai.

Before long I was resigning from British Gas and getting arrested in front of nuclear submarine bases.

I wish I’d never saw that damn film 😉