Unearthing the 70,000 Peruvians killed by the US counterinsurgency

Americans don’t like to look at their bloody history, their bloody leaders, their bloody genocides. In fact, many liberals think it their calling to ask for even more bloody military interventions, all in the name of our supposed national goodness.

Instead of building a real Movement to end US militarism, they tell us the problem is that we merely need to make our interventionism ‘humanitarian’ oriented, as if that would be a solution to the world poverty, misery, and chaos our corporate, government, and military leaders preside over! They forget about places like Peru, Chile, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Vietnam, to name just a few locales that we as a people have helped our elites torture and occupy.

Over at the local idiotic Justice and Peace Commission’s HQ, the paid staff and preacher jefe on top are all busy with building something they call a summer ‘Peace Camp’ for children (Vacation Bible School). There, they plan to preach the mantra they call ‘nonviolence’ to a very select few kids. This is inactivity they substitute for real activism, where they would have to talk to the general public about places like Somalia, Iran, Pakistan, Lebanon, and Haiti. There at ‘Bible School’, the kids will never hear of places like Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Peru, sites of bloody US atrocity and torture. The liberal ‘peace’ salaried workers will help blab on to the kids about turning the other cheek, etc.

Why won’t the Peace and Justice group tell the kids the real story? Why won’t they tell the kids about the unearthing of thousands of graves of other children, all murdered by a US campaign to terrorize an entire country… Peru? What a moral failure these ‘peace’ people are! They not only do not speak truth to power, they do not even speak truth to their own kids!

Yes, the US government-Peruvian government killed tens of thousands in the ’80s. Yes, Kids, your moms and dads paid the taxes for these massacres to happen, and voted for the Democrats and Republicans that authorized it. The blood of these dead kids, just like the dead kids of Gaza, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq are your responsibility, and the responsibility of your sheep-like parents. Are you going to let these atrocities continue without trying to do something to stop them?

Peruvians seek relatives in mass grave Our tax dollars should go to help these people find their relatives killed by the Pentagon. Shame on us as a society for playing dumb all the time.

And shame on the liberal Democratic Party voters for being some of the worst offenders in that regard. You know that your party is a war party alongside the Republicans, yet all the time you mouth to us the necessity of voting for them. Shame on you. Shame on you for demobilizing the protests against The War. These Peruvian graves are your fault, just as much as they are the fault of all those who vote Republcian. Iraq is your fault, the Clinton’s fault, Al Gore’s fault. You have blood on your voting hands.

Do 700,000 dead kids mean anything?

Do you have feelings one way or another about your friends in the media business? It’s easy, I realize, if you’re not particularly activated about the war, to have no opinion about what the media is or is not telling you. It’s easy to remain apolitical if the news you hear doesn’t resonate with any alarm. You ask: “Everyone is against the war, why belabor the point?”

Some weapons involved the deliberate targeting of childrenLet me put it to you this way. Let’s say that over the hill, on the other side of the world, 700,000 Iraqi children were being murdered. You may or may not know that, I excuse you for not knowing, 700,000 is a rough estimate extrapolated from the Johns Hopkins calculation that 1.2 million Iraqis have been killed since the US invasion. We know that over half of the population are children. I can forgive you not knowing, but I have a harder time forgiving those who do know, and don’t want to tell you.

You’d think the death of 700,000 children would be cause for alarm.

Do you think if you knew about 700,000 children being killed, and that your fellow citizens knew, that you might be able to raise an objection, collectively, and prevail against your elected representatives to have the killing stopped? Perhaps we disagree on whether you could make a difference or not, or would be moved to make that difference. But I’m pretty damned sure that seeing 700,000 kids burned, strafed, sniped, exploded, starved, poisoned or run over, would prompt a universal humanitarian outcry, your voice included, and eventually the perpetrators would have to relent. That’s a likely reason, I believe, why you and others are not being shown the killing.

They watch 700,000 Iraqi kids die so you don’t have to.

Now what do you think of the people in the position to know, atop the hill, with an overview and the best analysts to deduce the horror being masked by military spokesmen? What do you think about those news people deciding not to tell you about it? The only people with the power to spread the word, with the power to save the children by alerting the rest of the world to the continuing slaughter; what is your opinion of those people?

Now it’s true, they have bosses who are beholden to the corporations that earn a ton from selling the weapons used to kill the kids. There’s oil afoot, and huge contracts, and all sort of profit to reap, and hell, an anti-capitalism spiritual belief system to tamp down. The corporate media have their reasons, and the newscasters are but people like you and me trying to hang on to their jobs. But 700,000 children. Should you begrudge the bastards 700,000 Iraqi children?

I’ve called them bastards, those with the means to cry out the alarm for the next 700,000 children who’ll die by the hands of our soldiers, our administrators, or our neglect. They won’t tell you about it, and you’ll profess your ignorance and meanwhile resent all attempts at intercession. I say those newsmen are bastards who would cover up for the crime of 700,000 murdered children. In what kind of regard do you hold them?