Murdering children — and seeing ourselves sanely

© 2018 Peter Free

 

16 February 2018

 

 

Let's hypothesize that writer Jeffrey St. Clair is sane . . .

 

. . . and further, that his perspective parallels that of space aliens examining US "civilization" for the first time.

 

After the mass murder Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Florida this week, St. Clair observed that:

 

 

Americans have a remarkable tolerance for child slaughter, especially the mass murders of the children of others. This emotional indifference manifested itself vividly after the disclosure of the My Lai Massacre, when dozens of Vietnamese infants and children were killed by the men of Charlie Company, their tiny, butchered corpses stacked in ditches. After the trial of Lt. William Calley, more than 70 percent of Americans believed his sentence was too severe. Most objected to any trial at all. In the end, Calley served less than 4 years under house arrest for his role in the execution of more than 500 Vietnamese villagers.

 

Twenty-five years later, American attitudes toward child deaths had coarsened even harder. When it was revealed that US sanctions on Iraq had caused the deaths of more than 500,000 Iraqi children, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, icily argued that the deaths were “worth it” to advance US policy in the Middle East.

 

[Domestically speaking] If the Columbine shooting was a tragedy, what word do you use to describe the 436th school shooting since then?

 

© 2018 Jeffrey St. Clair, American Carnage, CounterPunch (16 February 2018)

 

 

Note that St. Clair left out . . .

 

. . . the part about American drones and Special Operators also killing kids under the conveniently flown collateral damage banner.

 

 

The moral? — Living stateside, we lose sight of what we look like to people still capable of exercising objective judgment

 

Perhaps these social anomalies are more apparent to me, having recently returned from three years in Germany.

 

But even with that potential bias admitted, I do not doubt that if "terrorists" murdered our kids, we would gear up the Military Industrial Complex — and trillions of dollars — to do something about it.

 

Makes you wonder about American values, doesn't it?