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Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Shedding tears

More than likely as a result of the massacre that occurred in Connecticut it will be slightly more difficult to obtain firearms.

The World Socialist Movement is emphatically in favor of gun control.

 We want the arms trade to end. We want armies, navies and airforces to disappear. We want war to cease.  Americans mourn for the 26 in Newtown, Connecticut and indeed as do all the members of the World Socialist Movement but we also mourn for the nameless innocents in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan, killed by the US government of Barack Obama. Since World War II, the United States has engaged in over fifty military operations abroad killing some four million people (Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, the list goes on). The United States is perpetually at war. In 2011-2012 alone, the United States was killing people in nine different countries: Iraq and Afghanistan with troops, Libya with rockets, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen with drones, Honduras with raids against drug cartels, the Philippines with air support against insurgents, and most recently in Kenya as 150 Special forces started their operations. Instead of shedding a tear at a press photo-opportunity, perhaps the president can bring back the 400,000 armed killers presently positioned in over a 1000 world-wide bases.

 Instead of remembering just the victims of Sandy Hook school, will Obama and the media also remember the 35 children who died in Gaza this month from Israeli bombardments, the 168 children who have been killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan since 2006,  the 231 children killed in Afghanistan in the first 6 months of this year, the 921 children killed by US air strikes against insurgents in Iraq.

Will they remember the 400 other children in the US under the age of 15 who die from gunshot wounds each year and the 1,770 US children who die each year from child abuse and maltreatment.

And, most of all, will we all remember the 16,000 children who die each day around the world from hunger.

In Scotland there is a local saying "We're all Jock Tamson's bairns"

America is not protecting the children from poverty. The rate of child poverty keeps rising. America is not protecting the good health and well being of its children. Rates of child diabetes and asthma and obesity continue to climb. Treatment centers for the mentally ill are being closed down and  the pharmaceutical industry's chemical cosh is substituted insted of therapy. All to ensure the profit of a minority.

These tragedies must indeed end.

 Is SOYMB being callous for making politics out of the shootings in a school to say that it is not just to be viewed as another mindless act of a sad bad mad-man but a symptom of a very sick society called capitalism?

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