Warning: The following piece is about war crimes against children.
As I have been saying privately for two years and writing publicly for a few months, we are in a Silent War. Western governments and their oligarch owners have declared war on free peoples and in all wars there are senseless causalities, and sometimes these are innocent children. When we are done mourning and grieving and celebrating their beautiful yet brief lives we must call them collectively by the names of the corporation and government agency (controlled by that corporation) that killed them – the Children of Pfizer or the Children of the FDA.
November 9, 2021 – Araranguá, Brazil
Vanessa Martins Figueiredo receives her first Pfizer shot. The next day she develops Bell’s Palsy. She suffers for a month before her condition deteriorates. She has trouble breathing and is put on oxygen. On January 2, 2022 she is taken by ambulance to the hospital where her condition worsens. Eight days later she dies age 13.1 There will be thousands more just like her because too many good people are standing by doing nothing. There will be many Children of Pfizer.
January 12, 2022 – Poland
Five minutes after reading Vanessa’s tragic story I passed by a bag filled with books in my hallway. The top book staring at me was The Fates of the Children of Lidice. I pulled it out of the bag and dusted off the cover and thought about all the Vanessas in the world who will needlessly suffer and their families too. I looked at the still bronze faces of the little Children of Lidice on the book cover. I thought about my young niece and nephew and the world that awaits them and then I almost lost it.
March, 2007 – Prague, Czech Republic
I moved into a modest apartment in a run down building near the Russian embassy in Prague. It was the former home of my Czech girlfriend’s parents, and before that it was home to her grandparents. Her parents had since moved to their farmhouse near Plzen so we took it over, a third generation. Every other weekend her retired father would stay with us while he played horn in the Friday and Saturday night shows with a local New Orleans style ragtime jazz band to make some extra cash. He was a short fella with a limp who didn’t speak much English. He drank his warm beer out of the bottle, ate his goulash and pretty much kept to himself. We got on splendidly.
His wife was short too and also disabled. She held her left forearm with her right hand. They had met many years earlier in a communist hospital. His lover died in the motorcycle accident he was in. Her lover died in the motorcycle accident she was in, both on the same day on different sides of town. Tragedy brought them together behind the iron curtain after many surgeries and then physical rehab. They lost their first son in infancy to poisoned medicine, something common in the communist bloc. No lawyers. No compensation. No culpability from the state, only mourning. After that they waited and had a son and at a pretty late stage in life they were blessed with a daughter.
One Saturday night when they were both in Prague they brought me to the apartment living room window overlooking the boulevard and explained how in 1968 Soviet tanks filled the streets with Russian soldiers shooting down the ‘Prague Spring’ protests that had enflamed the city. There were curfews and you needed papers to do anything. Food was rationed. It was hell.
Another weekend we were on a walk in a part of town where he was gimping along trying to keep up with his daughter and I and he stopped us and pointed to an intersection where an allied crate dropped by parachute had landed when he was a young boy. He and his friends rushed to open it before it was seized by the Nazi occupiers. There were papers (allied propaganda leaflets) and chocolate. It was the first time he ever had chocolate.
On another walk he stopped us and pointed to an intersection that lead off to the highway exit toward Dresden. My girlfriend translated the story of how Czech resistance fighters attacked a Nazi motorcar at that very intersection in 1942, killing an important SS man and enraging Hitler. Then her father mentioned Lidice but wouldn’t continue. It was too morbid he said. “What’s Lidice?” I asked. He wouldn’t say. His daughter didn’t know. The next day we got on a bus to go see the village just outside Prague.
