Barack Obama's Tears For The Children Of Newtown Are In Stark Contrast To His Silence Over The Children Murdered By His Drones
The title of this post is the title of an op-ed linked to at the bottom of this post. I wanted to make a few more remarks on the topic of social violence in our nation since the mainstream press has become pliant lemmings for the state in its efforts at restricting our liberties at every turn.
The outcome of the recent social violence in our nation is no different than the 9/11 attacks in the regard that the state uses any opportunity to increase its grip of power at the expense of our liberties. Why is there never a debate on the sources of systemic social violence in our nation? Instead all we hear about are the symptoms of that violence including murder and what band-aids to put on the symptoms. All while the patient’s condition continues to deteriorate.
I would like to have someone explain to me how the recent Fast and Furious gun-running scandal by the ATF is any different than any of the social violence in this nation? The state commissioned the sale of military-grade weapons to drug dealers; clearly a very serious crime that should be investigated. Essentially, the state commissioned murder in some Orwellian effort to infiltrate drug cartels. The actions of the state in this ludicrous scheme resulted in untold numbers of deaths of innocent Mexican civilians. By some accounts, hundreds of innocent Mexican’s deaths have been tied back to the weapons handed to drug cartels by the state. The total killed by this fiasco is far more than any random act of violence ever perpetrated in the U.S. Where is the accountability? Where is the outrage by the politicians who endorsed Fast and Furious? Or, how about the Iran-Contra death squad crimes; what I believe may be one of the most blatant examples of political disregard for the rule of law and human life that our country has seen in the last fifty years. And, if Reagan didn’t know about it, it was almost certainly consciously decided by his inner circle and possibly by Reagan himself in order to hide behind plausible deniability.
It is wildly dystopian that Washington politicians choose to ridicule Americans for their love of guns. Our political, social and economic cultures are all incredibly violent and encourage-reward aggression. Washington politicians and their corporate masters have created our political, social and economic cultures. The United States military-industrial complex has killed or imprisoned more people on this earth than any other force of man in the last fifty years except maybe for communist China. We export more weapons than any other nation on earth. Those weapons are most often sold to American-backed thugs and dictators to spy on, imprison, torture and ultimately murder millions of people. American financial “aid” to the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein and Hosni Mubarak to name just three, was then used to load up on American weapons, American military advisors and American know-how to then spy on, torture, murder and imprison millions of people. We surely can’t stop there. Our endless undeclared and unconstitutional wars have obliterated parts of the world and given rise to complete chaos in Central and South America, Southeast Asia and Africa. In the last decade alone some estimates are as high as one million deaths directly attributable to the undeclared and unconstitutional American wars. And there are countless more casualties including physical and emotional trauma, physical impairment, diaspora, etc. The number dead is dwarfed by the lives directly and indirectly impacted by these dynamics. Millions alone have fled the violence in Iraq. 99% of these people, victimized by the military-industrial complex, never did anything to anyone in the United States. And we now have a president who leads weekly conference calls on who to murder next, including American citizens. We don’t know who these targets are or what the evidence is against them because the law has been trampled upon. Forty years ago, who ever could have envisioned a day when the supposed leader of the “free” world would leak propaganda to the New York Times about how murder hit lists were virtuous and noble? The secret intelligence used to determine who will be murdered is based on the same type of “secret” intelligence that told us Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. This dystopian “intelligence” is most likely secret because it is spotty at best and useless at worst. And, public knowledge of that intelligence, much of it exposed as farcical by Wikileaks, would likely result in demands for criminal investigations of lawless politicians.
Our “modern” society is dealing with unprecedented mental illness, unprecedented levels of physical and emotional sickness, unprecedented levels of emotional distress, unprecedented levels of addiction, unprecedented levels of poverty, unprecedented levels of illiteracy and unprecedented levels of imprisonment. These are all outcomes of acts of violence perpetrated by the corporate state. And, the projection of the corporate state’s power overseas results in the same dynamics elsewhere. All of these crises have been enabled by corporate state politicians through their various efforts at rigging the system, destroying the rule of law, for their corporate masters.
The world is on fire. And, the vast majority of it is simply a manifestation of illegitimate authority and self-granted rule of man created by the state. It’s almost hilarious for the state to ridicule Americans for their love of guns when its actions of violence lead the way for accepted aggression, predation and violence in our political, social and economic systems.
If anyone thinks some attempt at banning assault weapons is going to change anything, I’ll take that bet all day long. The war on drugs, the war on illiteracy, the war on poverty, the war on terrorism, the war on crime thirty years ago, the war on alcohol eighty years ago……. were all massive failures. Hate begets hate. Violence begets violence. Toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate.. War begets war whether that is acrimonious and violent political policy of the corporate state or the literal act of murder endorsed by the state. The war on guns will be no different.
The state’s ability to control social and economic manifestations of its violence cannot and will not ever work. Yes gun laws and legitimate background checks are often ridiculous in this nation. But what is even more ridiculous is the inherently violent society we live in. A society whose values were created, endorsed. practiced and perfected by the corporate state. What we see is simply symptomatic of corporate state culture. And, you don’t cure the patient by putting band-aids on its symptoms. The corporate state and free market, deregulated, private, for-profit capital, a hallmark of the corporate state, is the source of modern society collapse.
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