On Killing Children (and Others)

LAWRENCE DAVIDSON writes,

The domestic death toll caused by America’s civilian propensity to act out moments of power through violence is but a pittance compared to the carnage the U.S. produces through the projection of military and other forms of force abroad.  Using guns, mechanized weapons, and chemical agents in Vietnam the United States demonstrated its power and managed to kill anywhere between 500,000 to 2 million civilians.  it is not possible to know how many of these were children, but the number must run at least into the tens of thousands.

In Iraq, the U.S. developed a new official weapon that has proved particularly fatal to children.  This is the weapon of sanctions. Such sanctions demonstrate that the U.S. has the power to manipulate most of the world’s economy to the detriment of it’s enemies.  In the case of Iraq, sanctions functioned as a sort of economic Agent Orange.  They defoliated that country’s societal infrastructure over a thirteen year period.  Sanctions were Imposed in 1990 as a consequence of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and maintained after the conclusion of the First Gulf War.   As a consequence of these sanctions,  important medicines, vital repair parts for water purification and sewage systems and  other necessary items were not allowed to be imported into Iraq.  The deaths of some 350,000 Iraqi children (the low end estimated number), most under five years of age, can be  directly or indirectly tied to this sanctions regime. The sanctions were only removed in 2003 when the U.S. invaded the country.

Then came the weapons-related deaths as a result of the Second Gulf War (2003 to 2011) launched on false pretenses by the Bush Jr. administration.  Realistic estimates range from 600,000 to one million additional Iraqi deaths (adults and children) in this stage of operations.

The Latest Target

Now there are reports that Washington is once more, through the weapon of sanctions, creating the conditions for the deaths of the young and vulnerable.  This time the target is Iran. According to Trita Parsi, President of the National Iranian American Council, U.S. sanctions are starting to impact the health of innocent Iranian citizens. Iran’s ability to purchase some medicines and hospital equipment has been impaired by U.S. sanctions and people have already died as a result.

Nonetheless, American lawmakers such as Robert Menendez (D-NJ) have successfully sponsored ever more sanctions for Iran.  “It seems to me we have to completely exhaust all the tools in our sanctions arsenal, and do so quickly, before Iran finds a way to navigate out of its current crisis.”

Why is Menendez and his fellows in Congress doing this?  Because of some alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program?  No.  The Iran sanctions, growing slowly in intensity, predate that concern.  Since the fall of the Shah in 1979 Washington has conceived of Iran as an enemy and therefore a legitimate target against which to demonstrate our power.  It is reasonable to assume that Menendez knows what such policies means in human terms.  But, like former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright referring to the disastrous consequences of the Iraq sanctions, he seems to believe that the horror of it all is worth it.

Many Americans are dismayed, as they surely should be, by the domestic massacres of their children.  These are the deaths closest to home and the ones they are forced to face up to due to media attention. They are also confused about what to do because, for so many, guns and freedom are synonymous.  All the other instances of violence:  the nightly murders in poor districts of cities and towns across the nation, the piled up bodies of adults and children in places like Vietnam and Iraq, are largely hidden from the citizenry.  And certainly the consequences  for the average of citizen of Iran of the U.S. government acting out in a powerful way,  will be kept remote enough so as to avoid all empathy.

Whether Americans are paying attention or not, their government, their elected officials, continue to make sure that the U.S. remains out and about across the globe, projecting the nation’s power via guns and sanctions, and thereby helping to lower the world’s burgeoning population in the most negative of all possible ways.

The politicians who initiate these murderous policies may hardly know, in any fully analyzed way,  why they do so. But they know it feels culturally comfortable to persist.  They have their superficial ideological conviction that there must be an evil enemy to fight and, in juxtaposition to that enemy, they are always the good guys.  

Via: "CounterPunch"

It’s Not A Sudden Madness

It’s Not A Sudden Madness, But A Long History Of Mass Murder Come Full Circle.

By Glen Ford,
Courtesy Of "Black Agenda Report"

As a native-born American, I grew up watching cowboy and Indian shoot-em-ups in which the highlight of the movie was when the white guys in the circled wagon train shot the Indians off their horses until all the red men were dead, and very silent. Indians didn’t do a lot of screaming in pain when they were shot; they just expired.

 Same thing with buck-toothed Japanese, line after line of them, charging into U.S. machine guns, falling instantly silent and dead. It was somehow quite clean, almost antiseptic, these cinematic rituals of death, all staged for the broadest popular consumption to demonstrate the inevitability - and cosmic justice - of ultimate white victory over the darker races.

This was mother’s milk to the white American nation - which is why Richard Pryor and kids like me rooted for the Indians. Mass murder is at the core of the American national religion, which is a celebration of a genocidal march across a continent filled with other, doomed human beings.

America’s contribution to European culture was to invite “all the nations of Europe” to come to these shores and become fellow “white” citizens, whose status was defined by the enforced inferiority of Blacks and the remnants of the Indians. Ritual burnings of Blacks were organized as great public festivals, attended by thousands, staged in order to affirm whites’ collective right to commit murder. This monopoly on violence was what made them white Americans.

U.S. foreign policy reflects the nation’s origins and ghastly evolution into a globe-strutting mob, that empowers itself to kill at will.

A million dead Filipinos at the turn of the 20th century; aerial bombing of Haitian villages less than a generation later; the totally unwarranted nuclear annihilation of two cities at the very end of World War Two; two million dead Koreans shortly thereafter; three million dead Vietnamese in the next decade,; and, since 1996, six million Congolese - all, and many, many more, slaughtered in the name of U.S. civilizational superiority - the ghastly opiate of the white American masses.

What kind of human beings does such a culture produce? To paraphrase the Bible, “By their massacres, ye shall know them.” The modern mass American murder is overwhelmingly a white phenomenon. Yet few whites ask the question, “What’s wrong with white America?” It is seems that white America lacks the capacity for self-examination. It cannot grasp the simple truth, that a culture that celebrates the annihilation of whole peoples, casually and without guilt or introspection, is devoid of human values at its very core.

In the end, it turns against itself. That is the simple lesson of Newtown, and Columbine, and Aurora. The same cultural deformity creates a huge market for games like the very popular Assassin’s Creed, whose latest version integrates individual and group murder with events of the American Revolutionary War. American kids can simulate mass murder all day long, and feel patriotic and smart while doing it. Assassin’s Creed features an inter-racial cast of killers - possibly in deference to the brown guy in the White House who owns the ultimate Kill List. It’s the modern equivalent of the cowboys and Indians movies of my youth. The same sickness.

We Are A Country Drenched In Bloodshed

There are many causes of violence in our culture, but the least understood is the heavy influence of media.

By Don Hazen, Jan Frel
Courtesy Of "Alter-Net"

The horrific massacre of schoolchildren and their teachers in Newtown, Connecticut, has unleashed an unprecedented debate about how to address the problem of mass violence in our country. There is an increasing sense that American society is incapable of protecting its citizens, including young children, the most vulnerable among us.

Yes, it's important to focus attention on the increase in the size andsavagery of the murders: Six of the 12 most deadly shootings in our history have occurred within the past five years. The vast majority of the world's worst mass shootings have taken place in the United States. And there have been 65 mass shootings since Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot in 2009. Still, despite their horror, mass murders like Newtown are thankfully rare. So we must pay attention to the daily violence, too. Nearly 13,000 homicides were committed in theU.S. in 2010, 8,775 with firearms. So in addition to the most heartbreaking, large-scale killings, the problem is pervasive and the bloodshed overwhelming.

What About Violence in the Media? 

It's revealing, that amidst the millions of written words, TV discussions and proposed solutions, regulating the violence that pervades mass media -- movies, TV, the toy industry, gaming, and the Internet -- is not often seen as a productive avenue for reform of our violent culture. This seems especially true of liberals and progressives. We invest a great deal of energy pushing strongly for gun control, which is more concrete and tangible, with clearly defined targets and enemies. But we stop short of going after purveyors of violence in the media. Traditionally, this has been more of a priority for conservatives. 

But when we looked into the impact of violence in the media, we were shocked at what we found. We, like many people we know, and perhaps you reading this, had a series of wrong-headed notions about the nature of the problem. We found that the issue has been studied for well over 40 years, and has been the subject of over 1,000 studies -- including reports from the Surgeon General's office in 1972, and the National Institute of Mental Health. The studies "point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children," according to theAmerican Academy of Pediatrics.  

We were especially surprised to learn that researchers, as summarized by the French Canadian media activist andresearcher Jacques Brodeur, claim to have proven that "the effect of media violence is bigger than the effect of exposure to lead on children’s brain activity, bigger than the effect of calcium intake on bone mass, bigger than the effect of homework on academic achievement, bigger than the effect of asbestos exposure on cancer, bigger than the effect of exposure to secondhand smoke on lung cancer." 

Are you surprised? We certainly were. If you are like us, you probably think that the research linking steady exposure to violence in the media to anti-social attitudes and acts has not been proven, which of course, is what the entertainment industry has insisted over and over again.

In line with arguments made by the entertainment industry, you might also have bought into the notion that violence in the media simply reflects the violence in society -- even though that is patently absurd when you look at the numbers. Or, because the First Amendment is sacred, expressions of violence, no matter how unrealistic, inaccurate or gruesome, are protected or should be protected.

But most media violence is a commercial creation, designed to addict people to violence and make billions of dollars. This has almost nothing to do with free speech.

Multitudinous Causes in the Mix

Before we go any further we want to stipulate that there is no one cause, or small number of causes, behind the culture of violence in America. There are many culprits but especially culpable are alcohol abuse, which often leads to violence; the war on drugs, which make drugs hugely valuable, increasing the violence (though much of the worst violence takes place in Mexico); the return of hundreds of thousands of soldiers from two long and brutal wars, many trained killers, many with PTSD; the militarization of police departments, with heavy surveillance technology designed to make even a normal person paranoid; mass incarceration in prisons run frequently by companies trying to make a lot of profit off crime, and where for inmates, prison is often a graduate course in more advanced crime, especially since there are no jobs and almost zero help in integrating ex-cons into productive lives after they leave prison; and high levels of unemployment, especially among the working class and those without college diplomas.

Certainly, the political climate over the past five years, with the emergence of the gun-toting Tea Party, has raised the specter of violence. There has been a marked increase in militia groups and right-wing extremists. Threats upon the president's life have increased, likely stoked by the relentless and aggressive lies about President Obama's birthplace, his roots and his intentions. Attacks on Obama get huge attention in the media, exacerbating divisions and frustrations. There have been powerful propaganda campaigns by the NRA to scare people into stockpiling massive amounts of ammo, based on the completely out-of-touch-with-reality notion that the Obama administration is going to take away their guns and ammo. (Actually, President Obama has increased the rights of gun owners, and articulated an aggressive interpretation of the Second Amendment.) It's hard to measure the levels of paranoia and fear that cloud the judgments of millions of Americans, enhanced by a number of conspiracy theories and the presence of media idiots like Donald Trump to give them exposure. That too must be factored in when it comes to understanding the ingredients of the violence. 

Then there is what is often called the "masculinity crisis." The changing roles of men, inspiring feelings of uselessness; the growing success and prominence of women and the increased maladaptiveness of many masculine traits, which are not so useful in day-to-day life in America in 2013 as they have been in the past. The end result, for whatever combination of reasons, is that virtually all the violence in America is executed by men.  

 What About Mental Illness?

Notice that mental illness is not on the above list of the most obvious causes of violence. While people who commit mass murder and suicide are obviously ill, Dr. Richard Friedman,writing in theNY Times, explains that only 4% of the violence in the U.S. can be attributed to mental illness -- and that the lifetime prevalence of violence among people with very serious illnesses is only 16% compared to 7% of people with no mental illness. Friedman adds that people who abuse alcohol and/or drugs were nearly seven times as likely as those without substance abuse problem to commit violent acts. And then, the mass murderers are not predictable: expert and psychiatrist Dr. Michael Stone at Columbia says, "Most of these killers are young men who are not floridly psychotic. They tend to be paranoid loners who hold a grudge and are full of rage."

Add Guns and Media to the Mix

Add to this gnarly mix of causes 300 million handguns in a third of American homes -- and you have a ticking time bomb. Then, you place all of the elements in the context of the pervasive violence in media, so prevalent that it's almost like the air we breathe. It starts with "killer" toys aimed at toddlers, moves to the most violent video games imaginable, then to films and television shows with numerous acts of violence, seen daily by hundreds of millions of people. Many of these depictions glorify brutishness, macho insensitivity, misogyny, racism, and barbaric behavior. According toSophie Janicke of Florida State University, who references the National Television Study (1998), two out of three TV programs contain violence, amounting to six violent acts an hour. The majority of this content is shown in children's programming (69%). It has been estimated that by the age of 18, the American youth will have seen 16,000 murders, and 200,000 acts of violence only on television."  

The end result is the mess we are in as a society. And there is no easy way out.

Because the problem of violence is so omnipresent, clouding many people's daily lives with fear, real or imagined, distorting relationships and many aspects of human interaction, we must start to seriously look at the prevalence of media violence and try to imagine how we might make it better. We must acknowledge that the media adds to the dangerous brew of violence in our culture.

Gun Control or Gun Safety

The rush for some kind of symbolic or even modestly substantive gun control legislation is understandable. There is no question that reducing the number of guns in the country, especially making them harder to access when someone has the urge to kill, will result in fewer violent deaths. However, gun control is not a quick, easy or comprehensive solution to the problem of perpetual violence. The battle for gun safety -- given the political realities and the pervasiveness of guns -- won't even begin to address the massive, interlocking and mutually reinforcing violent aspects of our culture.

Future generations may benefit from whatever we are able to accomplish now in terms of gun reforms. But there are many other factors to tackle, and solely focusing on gun control is not enough.

A Reflection of Society

You may wonder, as the heads of the Motion Picture Association have told us over and over, doesn't media simply reflect the society we live in?

The notion that media merely holds a mirror to society is easily disproven. Iowa State'sBrad J. Bushman and Craig A. Anderson explain: 

"Even in reality-based TV programs, violence is grossly overemphasized. For example, one study compared the frequency of crimes occurring in the real world with the frequency of crimes occurring in the following reality-based police TV programs: America's Most Wanted, Cops, Top Cops, FBI, The Untold Story, and  American Detective (Oliver, 1994). The real-world crime rates were obtained from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI; 1951-1999) Uniform Crime Reports, which divide seven major types of crimes into two categories, violent and nonviolent. About 87% of the crimes occurring in the real world are nonviolent crimes, whereas only 13% of crimes occurring in reality-based TV programs are nonviolent crimes. The largest discrepancy between the real world and the world depicted on television is for murder, the most violent crime of all. Only 0.2% of the crimes reported by the FBI are murders, whereas about 50% of the crimes shown in reality-based TV programs are murders."

What About the First Amendment?

As you might expect, given the huge dollars involved, any attempt to constrain big media, entertainment, video game and toy manufacturers, will result in screaming about "freedom of expression." And it is true that the FCC regulates indecency and offensive speech but not violence, because content regulation can be construed as a First Amendment concern as much as a matter of commerce.

However, the First Amendment, like the Second Amendment, has been substantially altered by powerful forces influencing the courts over time. As Adam Gopnick writes intheNew Yorker:

"…..  the blood lobby still blares out its certainties, including the pretense that the Second Amendment—despite the clear grammar of its first sentence—is designed not to protect citizen militias but to make sure that no lunatic goes unarmed. (Jill Lepore wrote about the history of the Second Amendment in the New Yorker recently.) Make sure that guns designed for no reason save to kill people are freely available to anyone who wants one—and that is, and remains, the essential American condition—and then be shocked when children are killed."

To many, the Second Amendment now means the freedom to carry a concealed handgun almost anywhere, including schools.

Over time, the First Amendment -- the right to free speech -- has also been distorted to serve the interests of the corporations that in dominating our media are never at a loss for the right to speak. It's not unlike the infamousCitizens United Supreme Court decision, where the courts have expanded corporations' rights to expression to include investing unlimited money in political campaigns, without even identifying themselves, and at the expense of the individual person's rights.

According to Mary Megee,in the U.S., "most cultural messages are strained through a commercial filter which uses gratuitous violence as an industrial ingredient to keep viewers tuned in, ratings high and profits up."

For corporations, the law of commerce and the market is the ultimate rule. In their highly sophisticated propaganda efforts, media corporations try to obscure the fact that they operate on the public airwaves, with licenses. The government intervenes if a swear word is uttered on air, or when Janet Jackson's nipple was exposed for a brief moment during a Super Bowl show. But the most gratuitous, destructive, dehumanizing violence is not considered worthy of focus, because of the power of the media to shape reality, as well as significantly affect the careers of elected officials and the "fear" associated with tangling with the First Amendment.

It's ironic that parents who push for less violence on TV are labeled "pro-censorship," when in fact the omnipresence of programming filled with violence often displaces more constructive material from the air. "The preference for violence, is made by somebody, elected by nobody, prisoner of a toxic culture," who knows that whomever is in charge expects them "to give priority to cruelty, aggression and hatred," writes Jacques Brodeur. 

The tobacco industry offers a relevant analogy. Tobacco companies (along with the ACLU), in the face of overwhelming negative health data about tar in cigarettes, insisted that the regulation of cigarettes, and the advertising for them, interfered with free expression. It took many years to marginalize the cigarette industry. Twenty percent of the population still smokes,falling by half from 1965 when 42% of adults smoked.  

Changing behavior and fighting corporate power is a long and arduous process, but it's possible.

Isn't Violence Going Down?

We do face a paradox in society where the hugely visible mass murders are increasing, while violence as a whole, as measured by crime statistics, has gone down -- great news. For example, violent crime in Los Angeles is four times lower than it was in 1992. The interesting thing is that no one can explain exactly why. Of course, there is no end of politicians and police officials who take credit for it. The high number of people in jail may be a contributing factor, although many are in jail for non-violent crimes, mostly drug offenses. The high number of police in some cities like New York may contribute to less crime. On the other hand, in Chicago, where the high ratio of police to citizens is second only to New York, crime appears to be out of control.

Nevertheless, it's important to keep in mind how the U.S., despite drops in crime, still dwarfs all developed countries in the number of guns, level of violence, number of mass murders, and number of people in jail and under supervision by the criminal justice system. The fact that violent crime has dropped is certainly good news. But we made the bar so high that we still have epidemics of violence, bloodshed and murder in our society. 

It's worth noting that in the wake of the Newtown massacre in Connecticut, TV and film executives purposefully avoided broadcasting violent programming. TheNew York Times noted thatUSA Today stopped broadcasting violent police and detective shows; Quentin Tarantino's gory new film had its red carpet event scaled back; previews of Tom Cruise's new film were canceled; and "Hollywood’s power lunches have been filled in recent days with conversations about hypocrisy."

History tells us that this momentary moral pang will dissipate and the hunt for profit through violence will continue. If we want to get serious and confront this issue, we will have to establish a framework for regulating media violence made by businesses seeking to sell tickets, ads and products to the American public. 

Time to Put TV Under Scrutiny

The ultimate trouble we face as a society is the powerlessness of most people in the face of corporate dominance. We lack responsive democratic institutions to leverage change in policy to make us less vulnerable to domination by corporate interests. The pervasive and accurate feelings that the political system is bought and sold, that most elected officials belong primarily to the "money party" or their "future million-dollar job" party in whatever industry they choose to specialize, leave many people in despair, and in some cases angry and violent. 

In a political system as out-of-whack as ours, where billionaires pour untold millions into elections to seal their outcomes, where corporations spend billions on lobbyists who promote their interests, building on citizen outrage and turning it into change is a difficult challenge. 

AsBrodeur writes, over the past 40 years there were industries polluting our air, water and food, while the entertainment industry "increasingly poisoned children's cultural environment with violence carried by TV programs, movies and video games. While society agreed to regulate the pollution of air, water, food, governments have been unable to regulate use of violence in entertainment products for children."

The executives of a handful of big media conglomerates think they own the freedom of the press and it's their right to decide what will be aired to children (and adults) in the global market. Of course, not all TV is toxic; some of it's often inspiring, but a lot of it is the opposite. 

Still we have to face the music. We need to challenge our assumptions about why our society is so violent. Yes, there are many reasons, and it's often next to impossible to separate them, as they do feed on each other. But that is no excuse for not trying to address all of the causes and not spend all our political capital on gun control and fighting the NRA. There is no avoiding that violence in the media, for children and adults, which along with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is central to our society being drenched in violence.

Television, quintessentially American, may very well be our biggest culprit. Brandon Centerwall argues thatresearch demonstrates "that crime rates more than double within 10 to 15 years of the introduction of television to any society." He points out that homicide doubled in the US after the introduction of TV in the 1950s andthat the relationship is causal. 

It's time to take a closer look at the dark side of the ubiquitous and beloved television, and ask what television programming contributes to a very imperfect society. Is your TV making you less safe? 

Sanctions Against A Country Is Not An Alternative To War, But A Form Of War

By Murtaza Hussain,

After over three decades of service with the United Nations, working across the world on development and humanitarian assistance projects, in 1998 the UN Chief Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq Denis Halliday turned in his resignation to the organisation. Upon spending years in Iraq and bearing witness to the results of the draconian sanctions regime which had turned a modern society into one of the most impoverished on the planet, Halliday wrote that he could no longer continue administering a programme which he said "satisfied the legal definition of genocide".

In later interviews he further explained his rationale for resigning from the organisation to which he had given over three decades of his life, and about the horrors that economic sanctions had visited upon the civilian population of Iraq:

"My innate sense of justice was and still is outraged by the violence that UN sanctions have brought upon and continues to bring upon, the lives of children, families - the extended families, the loved ones of Iraq. There is no justification for killing the young people of Iraq, not the aged, not the sick, not the rich, not the poor. Some will tell you that the leadership is punishing the Iraqi people. That is not my perception, or experience from living in Baghdad. And were that to be the case - how can that possibly justify further punishment, in fact collective punishment, by the United Nations?"

Today as the United States continues to intensify its international economic sanctions programme against Iran, it is worth revisiting the catastrophic harm which a previous sanctions campaign against Saddam Hussein's Iraq had upon that country. While the sanctions failed to remove Saddam from power and by many accounts helped him solidify his grip on the country by keeping the overwhelming majority of the population focused purely on subsistence, they took a calculatedly devastating toll on Iraqi civilians.

Between 1989 and 1996 per capita income in the country dropped from $3,510 to below $450, a drop caused primarily by the rapid currency depreciation of the Iraq dinar due to financial sanctions against the country’s central bank. Prices of basic commodities soared, with staples such as wheat, sugar and rice increasing several hundred-fold in a matter of months. From having a relatively modern economy fuelled primarily by oil income, by the year 2000 over 60 per cent of Iraqis were reliant on food rations for their daily sustenance. 

Inside Story - Iraq moving forward?

Financial Sanctions In Iraq

Over the course of 10 years of financial sanctions the Iraqi dinar suffered catastrophic collapse, falling from four dinars to one US dollar in 1991 to over 2,100 dinars to the dollar by 2001. As the Director of the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UNCHS) said at the time: 

"In the 1980s, the dinar was strong, families were okay. Now, people live on ten USD per month salaries. People are selling jewellery, carpets, air conditioners.The middle class is in poverty now; they have had to sell their houses, apartments, etc." 

The rapidly deteriorating economic environment due to sanctions had the necessary side-effect of severely undermining the Iraqi education system, which had been funded through oil revenues and had heretofore succeeded inproducing historically high literacy rates among both the male and female populations. 

According to a study published just before the beginning of the second Iraq War, an estimated one in five Iraqi children stopped attending school between the years 1990 and 1998, and the phenomena of child labour became widely prevalent despite being virtually non-existent just a decade prior. As families were forced into destitution by the country's faltering currency, the development gains of the previous decades were lost and as the report described it, "Iraqi society was put back by 50 years". 

Compounding the devastation to the economy and to general human development within the country, the Iraqi healthcare system, at one time considered to be the best in the Middle East, was shattered by an embargo on medical supplies to the country. Infant mortality more than quadrupled, as doctors were rendered unable to provide care for easily treatable childhood illnesses.

Once-controlled diseases such as typhoid and malaria ran rampant as the healthcare system continued its collapse due to an acute and pervasive shortage of resources and equipment. The strain upon the collapsing Iraqi healthcare system was exacerbated as simultaneous sanctions against water treatment equipment resulted in the breakdown and shuttering of desalinisation plants across the country.

A UNICEF study published in 2000 showed that over half of all children in the country under the age of five suffered from diarrhoea due to contaminated water, a situation which proved fatal for huge numbers due to the closing of paediatric care facilities across the country. Indeed, it has been widely estimated that the sanctions programmes directly resulted in the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children over its first five years alone, a death toll which then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated was "worth it" in a now infamous 60 Minutes interview given in 1996.

Indeed the harmful effects of all these sanctions took a disproportionate toll on the young by simple virtue of the fact that the young comprised a disproportionate number among Iraqi society, with an estimated 45 per cent of Iraqis being under the age of 14 by the year 2000.

In a bipartisan letter arguing for sanctions removal that year, former House Democratic Whip David Bonior characterised the sanctions regime as being "infanticide masquerading as policy", while Denis Halliday's immediate successor at the United Nations tendered his resignation in protest of the sanctions while describing them as "a true human tragedy". 

Empire - Targeting Iran - Video: Iran, Israel and the US

Fast forward a decade to the present and it would seem that that tragedy is being willfully replayed, only this time the target is the population of Iran. 

Intensifying sanctions against the country have sent the Iran's rial into an unprecedented free-fall, causing it to plummet in value by75 per cent since the start of the year; and, stunningly,almost 60 per cent in the past week alone.

Ordinary Iranians completely unconnected to the government have had their lives effectively ground to a halt as the sudden and unprecedented collapse of the financial system has rendered any meaningful form of commerce effectively impossible. In recent weeks, the price of staples such as rice and cooking oil have skyrocketedand once ubiquitous foods such as chicken have been rendered completely out of the reach of the average citizen. 

Decimation Of The Middle Class

The effects of months of steadily tightening sanctions have also begun to take their toll on the Iranian healthcare system; and as in any case of warfare, economic or otherwise, it is the poorest citizens who have borne the brunt of the suffering. Iranian doctors have already begun to report shortages in essential medicines such as those used for cancer, heart and multiple sclerosis patients, and the situation is forecasted to get worse as financial sanctions make the purchasing pharmaceuticals from abroad an effective impossibility.

In the disbelieving words of one Iranian woman, a mother to 12-year-old boy with haemophilia who is now facing the amputation of his left leg and whose life doctors' say is threatened by continuous nosebleeds due to an acute national shortage of anti-clotting drugs, regarding sanctions: "no human beings can be so brutal to patients". 

However, it would seem that far from being unforeseen externalities these impacts upon ordinary Iranian civilians are exactly what sanctions advocates had been hoping to engineer. In the words of a leading advocate and architect of the policy, Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL), the goal of the sanctions should explicitly be to "take the food out of the mouths of the [Iranian] citizens". 

"Iranian doctors have already begun to report shortages in essential medicines... the situation is forecasted to get worse as financial sanctions make the purchasing pharmaceuticals from abroad an effective impossibility."

Another leading proponent, House Representative Brad Sherman (D-CA), has said "Critics of sanctions argue that these measures will hurt the Iranian people. Quite frankly, we need to do just that." Kirk has also stated his position that the objective of the sanctions should be to collapse the Iranian economy until it "becomes like North Korea", where millions have starved to death in recent years due to crippling food shortages and the breakdown of national infrastructure. 

It would thus be readily apparent that the major proponents and advocates of sanctions against Iran are not wary of repeating the "mistakes" of Iraq, but rather see the devastating consequences which that country suffered as the ideally anticipated outcome for Iran.

In seeking to replicate a policy which its own UN administrator at the time characterised as "effectively genocidal", those implementing and advocating for intensified and far-ranging sanctions against Iran are waging an indiscriminate war against the Iranian people, despite the broad consensus and observable historical track record that sanctions only serve to immiserate innocent civilians while consolidating the hold on society of the governing regime.

If, as many US officials have publically said, the goal of sanctions are to forcibly coerce Iranians to rise up and overthrow their government, the decimation of the Iranian middle class through the collapse of the economy will have only the opposite effect. The people of Iran will suffer potentially catastrophic harm as Iraqis did a decade earlier, while their state grows increasingly repressive and empowered relative to a poor and destitute population - a natural outcome within a command economy such as Iran's.

It is incumbent upon all those concerned that the grotesque crimes of the past not be repeated, and that the blanket, indiscriminate economic war against the Iranian people not continue in the name of political expediency. The blunt instrument of untargeted sanctions against a country are not an alternative to war but a form of war in and of themselves, even more pernicious in that the victims are always necessarily the weakest and most vulnerable of society.

If the millions who had their lives destroyed and ended in Iraq were not to have died in vain, the same crime against humanity which they suffered must not be repeated today against the people of Iran.

Via: "Al-Jazeera"

Life Is A Blessing, Cherish Every Moment & Be Thankful

“I was shown how fragile life was on Saturday. I saw the terror on bystanders’ faces. I saw the victims of a senseless crime. I saw lives change. I was reminded that we don’t know when or where our time on Earth will end. When or where we will breathe our last breath. For one man, it was in the middle of a busy food court on a Saturday evening.

I say all the time that every moment we have to live our life is a blessing. So often I have found myself taking it for granted. Every hug from a family member. Every laugh we share with friends. Even the times of solitude are all blessings. Every second of every day is a gift. After Saturday evening, I know I truly understand how blessed I am for each second I am given.

I feel like I am overreacting about what I experienced. But I can’t help but be thankful for whatever caused me to make the choices that I made that day. My mind keeps replaying what I saw over in my head. I hope the victims make a full recovery. I wish I could shake this odd feeling from my chest. The feeling that’s reminding me how blessed I am. The same feeling that made me leave the Eaton Center. The feeling that may have potentially saved my life.”
Jessica Redfield was shot and killed last night at a midnight screening of ‘The Dark Knight Rises,’ along with 11 others when a gunman opened fire in a theater. The above is from her blog, written in June, after she narrowly escaped another senseless shooting at a mall in Toronto.

Quote via: "Newsweek"

Jessica's photo is via: "Twitter"

The Grim Reaper

By Robert C. Koehler
Published on Thursday, May 31, 2012
Courtesy Of "Common Dreams"

The poison seeps slowly into the future. No one notices.

“The Obama administration,” the Wall Street Journal informs us, “plans to arm Italy’s fleet of Reaper drone aircraft, a move that could open the door for sales of advanced hunter-killer drone technology to other allies . . .”

I can’t quite get beyond the name: Reaper drones?

“The Predator’s manufacturer, General Atomics, later developed the larger Reaper,” John Sifton wrote last February in The Nation, “a moniker implying that the United States was fate itself, cutting down enemies who were destined to die. That the drones’ payloads were called Hellfire missiles, invoking the punishment of the afterlife, added to a sense of righteousness.”

Early on, George Bush called his invasion of the Middle East “a crusade” and declared that “God is not neutral” in the war on terror. The rightist spin was that we had engaged “a clash of civilizations”; and Ann Coulter, articulating the unrestrained righteousness that 9/11 had unleashed in America, declared: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

When we murder by drone, we may be both perpetuating an inhuman, bureaucratic control over random enemies and, at the same time, satisfying an age-old lust to play god. We’re using the most advanced technology we possess to engage in behavior of shocking moral stagnancy.

As the war on terror moved from righteousness to quagmire, the inflammatory religious rhetoric was reined in, supplanted by far more politically correct propaganda: looking for weapons of mass destruction, promoting democracy and women’s rights, etc. Church and state were neatly separated and the war went on.

But not only did we justify the war on terror with a multitude of lies, we never really excised the religious, or “crusading,” fervor behind it. 

Evangelical Christianity has made huge incursions into the U.S. military in recent years, thus helping to unite apocalyptic, 12th-century, true-believer passions with the soulless neutrality of ultra-high-tech weaponry. 

The vengeful God lives! And he’s found common cause with robot technology, or so I surmise as I read the Wall Street Journal’s unquestioning business report on the administration’s decision to sell Hellfire missile technology to Italy, thus advancing a new, insidious form of warfare deeper into the 21st century.

My concern is the advancement of drone technology, not what we call it. But if in our terminology we’re summoning pre-rational mythological forces and equating the American military with supernatural beings — the Grim Reaper and a vengeful, punishment-spewing God that has no moral qualms about mass murder (or torture, which is the purpose of hell) — knowing this may be relevant to understanding what’s actually going on.

In other words, is the nation, at least at a subconscious level, being driven by the worst of old-time religion?

While drones represent the quintessence of soulless modernism, dehumanizing violence and making bureaucratic murder a technological reality — computer operators several thousand miles from the action, in Nevada or Ohio, California or Missouri, can take out “insurgents” in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Yemen with no more risk than gamers face as they pursue their fantasy conquest of evildoers — drones also indulge a dark yearning to acquire godlike power, to attain omnipotence.

When we murder by drone, we may be both perpetuating an inhuman, bureaucratic control over random enemies and, at the same time, satisfying an age-old lust to play god. We’re using the most advanced technology we possess to engage in behavior of shocking moral stagnancy.

What this prefigures is the future of war. Drones, wrote Richard Falk in an essay for Foreign Policy Journal, “seem destined to be central to operational planning for future military undertakings of the United States, with sharply escalating appropriations to support both the purchase of increasing numbers and varieties of drone.”

And Ed Kinane, writing at Voices for Creative Nonviolence about the remarkable utility of drones, lamented: “Such distancing and such unaccountability almost guarantee mission creep. Mission creep means an easy slide into perpetual warfare. How juicy for General Atomics and the other corporate war profiteers!”

This is part of the grim, dark future the Reaper brings us — perhaps more disturbing, Falk writes, even than nuclear weaponry, whose “catastrophic quality . . . operates as an inhibitor of uncertain reliability, while with drones their comparative inexpensiveness and non-apocalyptic character makes it much easier to drift mindlessly until an unanticipated day of reckoning occurs by which time all possibilities of control will have been long lost.”

He adds: “As with nuclear weaponry, climate change, and respect for the carrying capacity of the earth, we who are alive at present may be the last who have even the possibility of upholding the life prospects of future generations.”

Such urgency can bring with it an unbearable pessimism. I insist on believing that the worst of human instincts are precariously balanced by the best. A passionate rejection of violence and economic injustice is spreading globally and manifesting politically, even if it remains beyond the awareness of the U.S. corporate media to grasp and report. That shouldn’t be a reason for giving up.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.