The Ripping Away of Children From Their Parents Is a Crime Against Humanity and Must Stop NOW !

Updated June 18, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Right now, as you read this, your government is ripping terrified children from the arms of their parents on the border with Mexico. In some cases, they have actually torn babies from the breasts of their mothers. They are putting some of these children in cells so cold they are nicknamed “the icebox.” They are putting others in massive camps. Imagine the terror of the child. Imagine the anguish and pain of the parent. Imagine the trauma.

And of course, the Trump/Pence regime justifies this with references to the Bible. There you have it: A regime that commits CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY slamming into place a Christian fascist theocracy.

NO! This must STOP. The line must be drawn here.

This is part of a whole fascist offensive against immigrants. This regime has demonized and slandered them, terrorized and arrested them, brutalized and deported them. And this offensive in turn is the linchpin and battering ram of this whole fascist offensive.

The outrage against this crime must continue. But that outrage must be transformed into actions against this that grow in mass and force until this STOPS. And these actions must be built into a movement to drive this fascist—yes, fascist, face it for what it really is—regime from power.

They have come for the immigrants—now what are YOU going to do?

American History 101: The Kidnapping, Exploitation, Abuse, and Murder of Children

But the attack on children is nothing new for America. Nor is it only happening on the border.

The wealth of America was founded on the kidnapping of millions of people from Africa, many of them children and infants, and the lifelong enslavement of these children. As America grew richer, the selling of enslaved Black children away from their parents became a major feature, a typical scene, of the “American way of life.” Imagine the horror and the heartbreak for those forced into such scenes, decade after decade, stamped on the psyches of human beings for generations.

There’s more. After America stole nearly every last piece of land from the Native people, after America had slaughtered or killed through disease the vast majority of those who lived here before the European invasion, the U.S. government sent many of the children of the survivors to “boarding schools.” These boarding schools—prisons or concentration camps would be better words—stripped the children of their names, their language, and their very sense of self. Again, imagine the terror. Imagine the trauma. Imagine your child kidnapped in such a way, and returned home to you a stranger.

Today: A World of Horror for Children and a Worldwide System That Must Be Taken Down

Today the U.S. system of mass incarceration imprisons tens of thousands of children each year, some locked up with adults. Children like Kalief Browder, who spent three years in a New York jail awaiting trial, most of it in solitary confinement (which international law considers to be torture), for refusing to confess to a petty theft he did not commit. So damaged was he by this that two years after his release, he committed suicide. Multiply him by the tens of thousands of juveniles in the maws of the prison system, many of them abused by sadistic prison guards. But think too of what he felt, and what the tens of thousands today feel, each night as the cell doors clang shut.

Nor is this attack something the U.S. only does at home. In the Vietnam War, they were not heroes but baby killers. These soldiers we are now ordered to revere? In war after war—from Korea to Iraq—they have been part of a machine that killed the children of those they attacked, whether as “collateral damage” or with sick intention.

Today, imagine the children in Yemen. At least 5,000 of them have been murdered by U.S.-supplied planes and bombs, flown by America’s Saudi Arabian proxies (but refueled in the air by the U.S. Air Force). More than eight million people in Yemen, the vast majority of whom are children, are now at risk of starvation due to this U.S.-supported war. And this very weekend the Saudis and their allies are undertaking an offensive that will put many at even greater risk—an offensive that the U.S. refuses to condemn and (and in fact supports behind the scenes).

Or imagine the millions of children of Bangladesh or Pakistan or Cambodia or anywhere else American products are “outsourced.” Imagine their lives each day, working from can’t see in the morning till can’t see at night, grinding their lives away in dangerous factories to produce the clothes we wear on our backs. Or the millions more—yes, millions—who die of preventable disease every single year because it is not profitable for this capitalist-imperialist system to put resources into stopping that.

There is absolutely no need for any of this, it could all be stopped very quickly, except for the fact that this system stands as a barrier to stopping it.

A poet once compared America to the biblical god Moloch, who demanded the sacrifice of children. But this system is no mythical god from a lost age—it is the all too real system of capitalism-imperialism, and it consumes children all over this planet, every single day.

We Need a Revolution

This system cannot be reformed. IT MUST BE OVERTHROWN. To do that, we need a revolution. As we have said before, revolution does not mean some minor changes within this system. Revolution means the actual overthrow—yes, overthrow—of this system, through actually defeating its armed forces of oppression and repression, when the necessary conditions (a revolutionary situation and a revolutionary people in the millions) have been brought into being. This revolution will dismantle the institutions of this capitalist-imperialist system and build a whole new society on a radically different economic and political basis, as embodied in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America.

There is a strategy for this revolution in HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution. There is the leadership to do this in Bob Avakian—who has brought forward a NEW COMMUNISM, a way to understand and transform the whole world—and in the party he leads, the Revolutionary Communist Party. There is a way to fight the power today as you learn more about and get ready for this revolution, in the Revolution Club.

Join—enlist in—this revolution. Be part of putting an end to the horror that the system means for hundreds of millions of children worldwide. Be part of bringing in a future where these horrors really are no more.