“Why is the World Silent?” – Chaim Kaplan
Humanity has endured self-inflicted savagery for all its history. Modern civilizations have apparently transcended above the primal savagery of ancient barbarity, yet despite technology allowing us to peer in with a voyeur’s fascination, the world is mostly silent while children are slaughtered. The children of Gaza are dying in large numbers; they are the victims of a state policy so bent on vengeance that the wider world is absent in any true condemnation or action. A child in the West Bank may as well be a Biafran baby or a Yemeni girl or a boy from Laos or perhaps any child stuffed into the ovens of Bergen-Belsen or Auschwitz.
The world is divided into two camps; those who see individuals and the collectivists. Many claim to understand that the planet is made up of millions of human individuals, until nationalism or a tribal bias emerges. The past decade’s culture war has been one of stereotype and slur, a tug and pull of identity politics and reactionary populism that has led to alliances that otherwise are unhealthy on a fundamental level. Though thankfully it was a war mostly waged online, on screens and in the mostly already alien government/corporate world.
The attitude and simplification of hatred and division of such a “war” is not new. To burn a child beneath an atomic blast, to blow their limbs to pieces with land mines, to starve, drown or suffocate them, is now a civilized wisdom so long as government does it. It is the accepted conduct of great and pariah nations alike; both the terrorist’s vulgarity and a professional military’s sophisticated exceptionalism. After all, things happen in war, right? Despite centuries of learning and improvements in the science of killing, children are still targeted or suffer regardless of such advanced weapon systems.
We are told that the enemy, which ever one it happens to be, uses children as shields or hides behind them and yet time and time again we have seen children suffer regardless whether this is true or not. In the case of Gaza, a small city filled with mostly children, it would be hard for them not to be near any “terrorist.” That is assuming the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were trying to be precise in their attacks on the city. Is a government building a legitimate target? And if so, does that mean should one attack it and kill children, then it is those who used the government building rather than the killers who is at fault? Is that not the rationale of terrorists?
To blow up school buses full of children with complicated weapons, as the Saudi military did in Yemen, or to starve a nation knowing that the children will be the first to die, as was the case from World War I up to the war on Iraq, is the conduct of government. Repeat the mantra: Things happen in war, right? To be savage, brutal, to have no or little mercy, is somehow an allowable necessity so long as victory is obtained. The balance between good and evil dangles according to kill counts. Regardless, children are murdered.
For a time, many in the liberty and antiwar movement claimed that conservatives were natural allies, good enough on certain issues. Partisan Americans pushed this line during the culture war and the COVID times. Liberal interventionists a very real threat, but conservatives wage war too. Conservatives censor and lock down as well, despite their rhetoric. It is still the government.
And so we saw the blood lust and theological disorder to wage a crusade against Palestinian children return after the October terror attacks in Israel. Suddenly, the energy of the Bush era neoconservatives were revived among particular pundits and supposed “friends” of individual liberty. The need to support an “ally,” to kill and hate was ever apparent. Or, the need to down play the death of the innocent and ignore dead children.
On the flip side, some with certain beliefs instantly conflated Jews with the Israeli government, much the same way that ISIS or Al Qaeda or even Hamas had become attached to all of Islam. The collectivist instinct to remove individuals from their responsibility and identity is always near the surface so long as the excitement of war scratches it free. To punish any demographic based on the actions of individuals is immoral. It’s akin to punishing American, Australian, or Iraqi civilians because of the actions of the government that imposes itself upon them. Yet, this is the way of government and collectivist ideologies.
In the book Through Our Eyes, Itzhak Tatelbaum compiles the words of the young who witnessed and experienced the Holocaust through deportation, enslavement, experimentation, extermination, and eventually freedom for the few who survived. The words are universally human, individual children forced to suffer beneath the vileness of government. They were victims of legalized murder and torture, when professionals and conscripts alike participated in the wholesale brutality against children.
No pedophile ring has come close to destroying the lives of so many children as most governments in time of war, and yet, for some reason government is loved regardless of its many victims. Those directly and indirectly involved in such an exploitation ring would be understood to be vile, yet when it comes to the professional child killers, they are often thanked for their service and those who participated in such an entity rewarded and adored. The little bodies of their victims are buried beneath dirt so that they may enjoy pensions and benefits. Even when the killers weep into suicide and addiction from moral injury, countless little bodies are still buried beneath, soaked in tears,
“Never shall I forget the faces of the children whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.”- Elie, a little girl condemned to die.
For those on the outside, looking at the cement dust covered babies, blood and tears caking the powder over their broken faces, the inhumanity is in the distance that separates. Some look at the child and claim, “They brought it upon themselves.” Others may sigh, “Oh dear,” and still there are more who will refuse to look, and pretend that it does not matter. The cries for help are distant, too far to care, and it’s none of their business.
Perhaps the Tom Waits song, “Misery is the River of the World,” is true but it need not be. Why must some suffer such misery so that others may profit or satisfy their bias? What does it say about those who enable the governments or terrorists for that matter? Those in distant lands, who eagerly tinker with kill machines for pay so that mass murderers can execute policies of death? Those who cheer without regard for the pain? Those who ejaculate with excitement while they watch the pornography of warfare with a disconnect to the outcomes? For all the centuries of learned experience and apparent wisdom of institutions and individuals, is the world to forever sail on the blood of the innocent?
“In the child we can find the natural human characteristics before they are spoiled by the harmful influences of society.”- Aline D. Wolf, Peaceful Children, Peaceful World
Is the violent foreign policy that damns children with torment and death something learned, or innate? Is this learned in the highest academic institutions, or a requisite of the sociopathic conditions to succeed in government? To have a toddler in Yemen whimper in tears while his parent’s entrails stick to him; a Laotian girl with her legs blown free because of government bombs dropped decades earlier; a Palestinian baby crushed beneath rubble so that all remains is grey clothing and the dark paste of innocence; is this the compassionate wisdom of governance?
Maybe there is no answer, no solution other than to condemn, shame, and decry what is being done. The powerful, with their eager killers and enablers, will always have the ability to destroy. The ideology of government is to promise utopia or a civilization absent of barbarity, yet coercion and collectivism is at its very heart. As an entity, it is brutal violence that also bribes. Only compliance and acceptance prevents blood from spilling, except often abroad. The alien, the different, the pariah apparently has no innocence; their children are forfeited, their blood is less than water.
Perhaps we should stop embracing collectivists as friends, or anyone who would condemn a child to be killed with the swipe of their hand. What common ground can be reached with those who would kill a child? Those who would support it and those who claim it a necessity? It’s simplistic to call child killers monsters; they are very much human. And a human being it seems is the most frightening monster ever imagined. Despite the murder and mayhem, many seem to love the killers regardless. Then again, maybe I am being simplistic and childlike since killing children for policy is the realm of the sophisticated, educated, and righteous.
Shame on them all.
“A Little Garden,
fragrant and full of roses.
the path is narrow
and a little boy walks along it.
A little boy, a sweet boy,
like that growing blossom.
When the blossom comes to bloom,
the little boy will be no more.”
-Franta Bass, murdered in Auschwitz at the age of 14.
