Gideon Polya, ”Children of Lesser God. MWC News and Gideon Polya #1 for thou shalt not kill children”, MWC News, 15 January 2008.
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Article revised and updated, January 2010.
Children of Lesser God. MWC News & Gideon Polya World #1 for “thou shalt not kill children”
If you Google the phrase “thou shalt not kill children” you will find only 11,000 URLs (on Sunday 31 January 2010). Of the articles listed, many are by Gideon Polya, notably “Mass infanticide by US state terrorism – thou shalt not kill children”: http://thoushaltnotkillchildren.blogspot.com/2008/01/mass-infanticide-by-us-state-terrorism.html and and an article in MWC News “US mass infanticide. 4 million reasons why Hillary Clinton is unfit to be President”: http://sites.google.com/site/afghanistangenocideessays/us-mass-infanticide .
To summarize the latter article, Hillary Clinton supported the Sanctions against Iraq, the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War. From UN Population Division data (see: http://esa.un.org/unpp/
) it can be calculated that Indigenous under-5 infant deaths totalled 1.2 million (Sanctions War against Iraq, 1990-2003), 0.9 million (Iraq War 2003-2010) and 2.4 million (Afghanistan War, 2001-2010), a grand total of 4.5 million under-5 year old infant deaths in these US-violated territories, 90% avoidable (i.e. 3.6 million avoidable infant deaths) and largely due to gross US war crimes in gross violation of the Geneva Convention and indeed of what Catholic theologians call the Natural Law, specifically “thou shalt not kill children”.
Social primates such as Man, Monkeys and Apes have a behavioural trait of “allomothering” (or “aunt behaviour” for females) that involves care and affection for the children of Others and the conclusion of my article was blunt: “In such horrible disregard for the fundamental primate injunction “thou shalt not kill children”, Hillary Clinton has crossed the line separating decent humanity and chimpanzees and other social primates from the Primate Unthinkable. There are roughly 4 million reasons why Hillary Clinton is unfit to be President of the United States of America.”
Further analysis of the results from “Googling” the phrase “thou shalt not kill children” reveals that of the 23 articles cited in the Search result, 13 involve commentary by Gideon Polya (57%), 3 relate to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 (13%) and there are 7 other articles (30%).
This extraordinarily paltry world concern about the proposition “thou shalt not kill children” is in stark contrast the enormous number of URLs one obtains from a Google Search for the utterly obscene phrases “nuke Iran” (100,000) and “bomb Iran” (360,000) or even “save the whale” (56,000).
Decent, anti-racist humanitarians should be appalled by this disparity, especially in the light of the 3.6 million avoidable under-5 infant deaths associated with US imperialism (democratic imperialism democratic tyranny, democratic Nazism, US state terrorism) in Iraq and Afghanistan. However the overall, global Infant Mortality Holocaust is vastly greater – 1950-2005 under-5 infant deaths total 0.88 billion for the World, 0.85 billion for the non-European World and about 0.4 billion for the Muslim World. Currently (2003 figures) 10.6 million under-5 year old infants die each year, 10.4 million in the non-European World and about 90% avoidably. Thus about 9.5 million under-5 year old infants die avoidably each year on Spaceship Earth with the First World in charge of the flight deck (see “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”).
One can well ask what has the Holy Father the Pope to say about this carnage of the innocents, or for that matter the Archbishop of Canterbury and other eminent religious leaders around the world. It is surely extraordinary that the “world number one” for saying “thou shalt not kill children” should be an agnostic humanist scientist from one of the remotest places on earth (as a child I would play in the foothills of Mount Wellington that towers over Hobart, Tasmania, the island state of Australia - from my “Sacred Spot” in the bush on a hill called Knocklofty above Hobart there would be thousands of utterly uninhabited kilometres if you travelled west to Southern Africa, South to Antarctica or East to South America).
In an outstanding interview (see “The History Makers. A Discussion with legendary anti-war activist Daniel Ellsberg” on MWC News), MWC News editor Shahram Vahdany specifically asked Dr Ellsberg about this problem of “ignoring innocent death”: “Dr. Gideon Polya, MWC's political editor, has recently published a book, “Body Count," for which he has done extensive work and research in access to death mortalities over the past 50 years, including the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to him, more than a million have been killed only in Iraq in the past five years. However, it seems that almost all US high-level politicians, whether Republicans or Democrats, or even media who are anti-war, their main focus is US military casualties, and there is hardly any mention of Iraqi civilian deaths, if at all.”
Dr Ellsberg’s response (in part) was as follows: “No, you are right about that and it is very sad. Let me address why perhaps that happens … There is no question that we have inflicted a lot of innocent deaths in the last sixty years. So is it peculiarly an American depravity? I am prepared to call it depravity, because it does not live up at all to my sense what we humans should do or should be like. And that's true of my colleagues in the antiwar movement, we are shocked by it. But in terms of the way humans behave throughout history—not only Americans and not only capitalists--I am forced to conclude that this relative unconcern for “strangers, outsiders, enemies” outside our own tribe or nation is a human characteristic: one which is of utmost importance for us to try to recognize and transcend. We need somehow to gain a greater concern for people outside of our own language group, our own nation, our own religion, our own country, than humans have generally demonstrated over the years. That is urgent above all in the nuclear era. People who would not like to see humans bring about the extinction of our own species and many others have to be committed to changing that human unconcern about people outside their own nation or ethnic group and readiness to slaughter them.”
The biological reality is that we humans have evolved through natural selection to have altruism towards members of our IMMEDIATE group. Indeed our very close relatives the chimpanzees appear to be hard-wired for lethal hostility towards strangers of their own species. However evolutionary biologist Professor Richard Dawkins (author of “The God Delusion”) has stated how we can overcome our inheritance of hard-wired, DNA-based “genes” by accepting humane, socially-transmitted ideas or “memes” such as “love thy neighbour as thyself”, “all men are created equal and have an unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, “thou shalt not kill” and “thou shalt not kill children”.
Thus the final sentences of Richard Dawkins’ seminal book “The Selfish Gene” expound the hope for humanity: “We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators”.
Of course while MWC News and Gideon Polya may get a nice warm feeling from knowing that they are “world #1” for saying “thou shalt not kill children”, it quite obviously is nowhere near good enough. We have failed. About 10 million infants continue to die avoidably each year on Spaceship Earth with deranged, lying, racist, mass murdering, religious right, neo-con fanatics in charge of the flight deck.
However there are OTHER ways of getting the message across. Thus the recent book “My Brother’s Keeper” (editor Alessandra Mauro, Contrasto, Turin, Italy; see MWC News: http://sites.google.com/site/bookreviewsbydrgideonpolya/mauro-allessandra-editor ) demonstrates the power of photography in the hands of great humanitarian photographic artists. Similar moving photographic essay books also published by Contrasto are “Luigi Criglio Portraits in Prisons” (edited by Hripsimé Visser and Dario Volktolini) and “David Goldblatt Photographs” (black and white photographs dealing with South Africa during and after Apartheid).
Quite shocking images of the physical impact of war on Iraqi children are provided by the UK charity, Children of Iraq Association (COIA: http://www.coia.org.uk/ ). MWC News writer Bob Boldt has made an extraordinarily moving anti-war movie called “Kindertotenlied” (“song about the death of children” inspired by the songs of the same name set to music by Gustav Mahler). “Kindertotenlied” is a powerful and succinct visual and musical statement about the Bush War on Terror which in horrible actuality is a War on Women and Children, and more specifically a cowardly and racist War on Arab Women and Children, a War on Muslim Women and Children, a War on Asian Women and Children, a War on Non-European Women and Children and a War on INDIGENOUS Women and Children.
As for myself, I have taken the advice of my Mother to “say it in pictures” and have painted huge paintings for Peace and respect for Mother and Child. Shahram Vahdany has exhibited many of these paintings on MWC News, of which the most arresting are “Qana”, , “Manhattan Madonna”, “Sydney Madonna”, and “Jerusalem Madonna” (for images see Flikr).
However the active and passive killing of infants continues – utterly ignored by the racist, lying, holocaust-ignoring, holocaust-denying Mainstream media of the American Murdochracy and the other Western Murdochracies. Perhaps the best MWC News and Gideon Polya can hope for is that our position as world’s #1 for saying “thou shalt not kill children” will be extremely temporary, and that millions of indignant people will take up the cry in the Alternative and Mainstream media, demanding that clerics, politicians and citizens act NOW to stop the active and passive mass murder of the innocents. Please do your bit and tell everyone you can in the mass infanticidal, mass paedocidal, mass child-killing US Alliance countries that, whether actively or passively, “thou shalt not kill children”.