We are murdering children

Yes. Unfortunately, this is indeed the case.

I'm not sure exactly how long it's been, or how many of us have forgotten, but we are now as a nation not only endorsing, but actively participating in the murder of innocent children, through the use and implementation of pyrotechnics and explosives.

I am, of course, speaking of the airstrikes in Syria.

Every day on my facebook feed, I'm greeted with the screaming faces of children hit by chemical weapons attacks during church, fragmentation bombs during school, and incendiary devices during dinner. I've seen parents hunched over the tiny, inanimate bodies of their dead children - their murdered children - in the streets of Syrian cities.

Murdered by our bombs. By Russian bombs. By American bombs.

Murdered.

You know why, though, don't you? Because ISIL are so great a threat we've decided to start blowing children limb from limb in an effort to-

Well actually, this literally could not possibly be doing anything positive for us.

 Look at it like this;

They hate us because we bomb them, and destroy their lives, their infrastructure, and their homes. That's just the Iraq war etc, by the way, I haven't even gotten to present day yet.

So what do they do? Well they do what any people who hate people do.

They bomb them. By which I mean they bomb us. Which is wrong. It is horrendously wrong and at no point am I saying that they are in the right for doing that, but you've got to understand that we are by no means doing any different from them - if anything we're doing it on a larger scale.

Which makes us hate them.

And now that they've bombed us - in the name of ISIL, see? - we feel the need to bomb them again.

So we bomb them and make them hate us more.

So they try to bomb us and start massacring innocents who would rather we were in power, while we start bombing them and massacring the innocents who couldn't get away from them - whilst managing every time to conspicuously miss their commanding officers, oddly enough (no conspiracy theory here, I just think it's weirdly incompetent of us) - and then we also start refusing refugees.

The Far Right starts to gain popularity over here, just as it basically already has over there, and soon everyone is up in a nationalistic rage, just begging to be allowed to kill their 'enemy''s men, rape their women, and enslave their children.

Which actually, has already started happening.

What was it, around 100K refugee children around Europe have gone missing? It's suspected (which is a word the police occasionally use for 'known, but we can't stomach facing it' when something is really, really grim) that they've been abducted and sold either into some form of drug labour, or the forced sex trade.

Yeah.

And actually, that one's on us, guys. I don't doubt that people in positions of power do some pretty terrible shit to the children they have power over, but we've now seen the disappearances of 100K innocent, war-fleeing children on our own soil, and actually I can't see anyone doing all that much about it.

You know what? I'll be honest here, and it's not because I want to invoke the good old 'all that is required for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing' crap on you.

We are becoming monsters.

Utter monsters.

You know, I was in central London today, too, and I passed a homeless guy on the street, begging.

And he apologised to me when I said 'sorry mate, I don't have anything' because I didn't have anything.

He said sorry... to me?

There are people who will say we shouldn't take refugees because we need to worry about our own, but they're so blatantly not worrying about our own that you've got to wonder whether they even believe that anyone still believes them when they lie like that.

Because this guy apologised to me.

Why? Because he took less than ten seconds out of my day to ask for help to survive?

I bet those kids are apologisiing too you know. To their new masters and mistresses. Their white, European, moneyed masters and mistresses.

Their owners.

See, we say that we've abolished slavery, but really we've just pushed it to the back of our minds, haven't we? Because we totally allowed this to happen. We, in Europe, totally let this happen.

We did not deploy the police to protect the vulnerable from hatred and manipulation. We did not deploy the correct avenue of application of military force to start resolving these problems at their sources. We did not act on moral intelligence, and we instead acted on our childish desire for more, more, more money and power and oil and people to lord it over.

Those 100K children did not need to end up in lives of abuse, rape, and torture.

That poor, apologetic man who, as I write this, could very well be freezing to death on the cold streets of London, did not need to end up in a life of poverty and dirt.

And we, the people, do not need to end up in lives of regret for having allowed this to continue.


I like my optimism, ladies and gents. I do. I think humanity is going to end up some place nice.

But fuck, are we going to have to work for it right now.

~ Baxster Brand