All the Baby Ps

by Sheilnagig November 17, 2008
This week a mother and two adult males living with her, were convicted of the horrifically abusive death of 17 month old Baby P. The citizens of Great Britain, outraged, are calling for the blood of the social service workers who were responsible for the monitoring of Baby P.
Children dead as a result of parental abuse is nothing new anywhere in the world: in 1986, the case of Eli Creekmore rocked the USA.

Back in 1986, while the Vezzutos were waiting for the child who never arrived, another human tragedy was unfolding 3,000 miles away in Everett, Wash., outside Seattle. Three-year-old Eli Creekmore was absorbing one beating after another from his father Darren, an ex-convict. There were repeated complaints to authorities by many people who knew -- Eli's grandmother, doctors, child protection workers, even a waitress who saw the boy bleeding from his mouth as he tried to eat ice cream. His day-care teachers said he screamed in fear when his father came to pick him up. Still, authorities placed him in foster care only for brief periods and then returned him time and again to his father and to new beatings. On Sept. 26, 1986, Darren, angry that Eli was crying, kicked him in the stomach, beat him with a belt and left him wedged in a toilet bowl with a ruptured lower intestine. Eli died the next day. Darren was later convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 60 years. Eli's mother Mary, who said she was too afraid of Darren to help, got 10 months.

This list of child deaths by their carers and others is desperately long; and it would serve no purpose to provide more details here. In many of these cases, a public uproar at the death of a single child has been deafening in developed countries,drowning all other news stories from view. People pour their outrage, condemnation, empathy and vengeance into protests of the savage torture and neglect of a single innocent, thereby cleansing themselves of responsibility and then sinking into the deep relief of catharthis, as they return to their daily lives. Nothing is unusual about this; most people are either mothers or fathers or someone's child and it is natural for people to feel visceral outrage and empathy when they hear of such things.

But there is a deep and sordid irony here.

Googling 'iraqi child fatalities' will yeild thousands of urls which decry the effects of suicide bombers on Iraqi children, child fatalities from UN sanctions, the disruption of education facilities for Iraqi children etc. But you will search far and wide to find the total count of children maimed, dead and missing due to the USA invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa or Palestine; or any of dozens of other countries where the USA and Great Britain has been complicit in bombing, starving or orphaning children to further their interests in controlling the oil resources and corridors of the world. Searching Google to obtain the number of children suffering because of USA and Great Britain imperialistic activities in the above countries will be a frustrating task; most media attention is directed at the loss of lives to the children of Westerners.

Perhaps the conclusion is this: if the media does not report the suffering of a child at the hands of adults, it does not exist and need not be thought of again. Or maybe a question is more appropriate: Why is maiming, bombing and starving children of the world to satisfy the voracious appetite of the USers for oil not child abuse? Does an Iraqi child whose arms are severed because of a US bomb qualify as less important than a child in Great Britain who dies because he is thumped in the head by the mother's 'evil' boyfriend?

The deaths of millions of children worldwide are financed by the outraged parents of the USA and Great Britain who object to the abuse of Baby P and Eli Creekmore, who pay taxes that are used to kill some other mother's child in a bid for imperial control of oil. Is this irony or am I just crazy? This sad contradiction is apparently lost on most Western folks; out of sight, out of mind.Moreover, it is a revelation of the extent to which Western people have become powerless over their own responsibilities as citizens of the world. If people can weep for Baby P, they need not weep for the maimed and orphaned children of Iraqi mothers.

Perhaps the neocons of Britain and the USA are correct: people are sheeple. Their compassion ends with their self-interest. Although the suffering of so many women and children, vanquished and permanently crippled, can be blamed on the leaders of superpowers, the irrational and inexcusable ignorance and denial of the masses to recognise these victims' of our tax monies used for war, must be laid squarely at the feet of the common person.

Until this happens, Westerners will be murdering hypocrites with the malleable minds of sheep; exactly what the Masters of the Universe think they are.

Countries that USA has bombed since the end of World War II:

• China 1945-46
  
• Korea 1950-53
• China 1950-53
• Guatemala 1954
• Indonesia 1958
• Cuba 1959-60
• Guatemala 1960
• Congo 1964
• Peru 1965
• Laos 1964-73
• Vietnam 1961-73
• Cambodia 1969-70
• Guatemala 1967-69
• Grenada 1983
  
• Libya 1986
  
• El Salvador 1980s
  
• Nicaragua 1980s
• Panama 1989
• Iraq 1991-99
• Sudan 1998
• Afghanistan 1998
• Yugoslavia 1999
• Iraq 2001