Ballad of a Cluster Bomb

Propaganda by omission is powerful stuff. I've heard the words "cluster munitions" more on National Pentagon Radio in the past few days than I have in the past few decades. If they are indeed being used by the Russian Army, this is, of course, completely appalling.

 
But I keep waiting for them to mention that although it is true they are now banned, this ban only came about in 2008. I've been involved with campaigns to ban cluster bombs since I was a child, when American cluster bombs were slaughtering the children of Vietnam.

The American version of these bombs are made of brightly-colored plastic. Children love to play with them. Then they explode, and thousands of shards of plastic pierce the bodies of the victims. They usually die, but if not, the plastic is extremely difficult to remove.

They intentionally make the bombs out of plastic so that they overwhelm the hospitals in the countries being destroyed from the air by the US Air Force, like Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Iraq were, with cluster bombs used extensively in all cases.

Cluster bombs are designed to kill every living thing, completely indiscriminately, in a given area where they are dropped. Early versions of them were first used in 1943 by the Nazis in England, though most English people don't know that because of press censorship at the time.

The cluster bombs that the US left behind all over the countries destroyed by the world's biggest military force -- the US -- are still killing children on a regular basis, when kids find the pretty plastic balls scattered in the forests of many US-invaded Asian countries today.

In 2002 I recorded this song, called "Ballad of a Cluster Bomb," in an effort to educate the public about these indiscriminate civilian-killing bombs the US has used so much. There have been so many more Mariupols. Hue, Fallujah, so many more.