[R-G] A Culture of Violence

[Tim Murphy]

26 September 2007
Steve Lendman Blog
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/


A Culture of Violence

by 

Stephen Lendman


What do you call a country that glorifies wars and violence in the name of
peace. One that's been at war every year in its history against one or more
adversaries. It has the highest homicide rate of all western nations and a
passion for owning guns, yet the two seem oddly unconnected. Violent films
are some of its most popular, and similar video games crowd out the simpler,
more innocent street play of generations earlier. Prescription and illicit
drug use is out of control as well when tobacco, alcohol and other legal
ones are included.

It get's worse. It's society is called a "rape culture" with data showing:

-- one-fourth of its adult women victims of forcible rape sometime in their
lives, often by someone they know, including family members;

-- one-third of them are victims of sexual abuse by a husband or boyfriend;

-- 30% of people in the country say they know a woman who's been physically
abused by her husband or boyfriend in the past year;

-- one in four of its women report being sexually molested in childhood,
usually repeatedly over extended periods by a family member or other close
relative; 

-- its women overall experience extreme levels of violence; an astonishing
75% of them are victims of some form of it in their lifetimes;

--domestic violence is their leading cause of injury and second leading
cause of death;

-- statistically, homes are their most dangerous place if men are in them as
millions experience battering by husbands, male partners or fathers; 

-- for most women with children, there's no escape for lack of means and
because male assailants pursue them causing greater harm;

-- adding further injury, its society is often unsupportive; it affords
women second class status, privileges and redress when they're abused so
many suffer in silence fearing coming forward may cause more harm than help;

-- its children are abused as well; millions suffer serious neglect,
physical mistreatment and/or sexual abuse; many get relief only through
escape to dangerous streets; they end up alone, more vulnerable and at
greater danger away than at home where there, too, families act more like
strangers or predators forcing young kids to flee in the first place.

What country is it where things like these are normal and commonplace; where
peace, tranquility and safety are illusions; where they're crowded out by
foreign wars and violence at home in communities, neighborhoods, schools,
throughout the media and in core families. 
What kind of country glorifies mass killing, assaults and abuse; one that
looks down on pacifist non-violence as sissy or unpatriotic, yet claims to
be peace loving. It's not in the third world, under dictatorship or
controlled by religious extremists. It's the "land of the free and home of
the brave, America the Beautiful" where human rights, civil liberties,
common dignity and personal safety are more illusion than fact. More on this
below.

War As "the Ultimate Economic Shock Therapy"

Mahdi Nazemroaya writes in his August 29 "War and the 'New World Order' "
article on Global Research.ca that war is "the ultimate (and most effective)
economic shock therapy (that can) change societies and reshape nations," and
that America today is embarked on achieving a long-standing vision for
"global ascendancy" and supremacy. For the Trilateral Commission of
"powerful" US, EU and Japanese "elites," its operative 1973 founding goal
was a "New International Economic Order." For George HW Bush it became the
"New World Order," and for GW Bush a permanent state of war for global
hegemony.

Nazemroaya writes America's "foreign policy is based on economic interests"
with military might used to enforce them. He states various US
administrations have pursued "An (unbroken) agenda of perpetual warfare and
violence (for) global domination through economic means." George Bush's
current "war on terrorism" in the Middle East and Central Asia are just
"stepping stones" toward that "global order" unipolar Pax Americana vision
under which no nation is exempt.

It's nearly always been this way in a nation addicted to war and a culture
of violence that's as commonplace at home as in foreign conflicts. It's in
our DNA, our schools and reinforced through the media with seductive symbols
and slogans glorifying wars for peace, their warriors, and righteousness of
waging them. They're packaged as liberating ones, promoting democracy, and
spreading the benefits of western civilization. 

We're taught our essential goodness and what Edward Herman calls our status
as an "indispensable state" that lets us do what no other nation may - wage
perpetual wars for an elusive peace in the name of freedom and justice for
all we preach but don't practice. We manipulate false notions of
exceptionalism and moral superiority giving us the right to spread our ways
to others while hiding our darker imperial side delivered through the barrel
of a gun. It shames the notion of a "government of the people, by the
people, for the people."

Expansionism and Militarism: An American Tradition 

Expansionism has always been our way and militarism our method. It's been
since winning the West meant taking it from the millions there thousands of
years earlier. No matter. "Manifest Destiny" meant a divine right for
settlers only to enjoy the nation's "spacious skies....amber waves of
grain....and purple mountain majesties....from sea to shining sea." Others
already there had to go, and mass slaughter was the method.

Our forefathers loathed Native Indians, and George Washington showed it in
his language. He called them "red savages," compared them to wolves and
"beasts of prey," and aimed to exterminate the Onieda people who aided him
in his darkest hours at Valley Forge. He also dispatched General John
Sullivan and 5000 troops against the noncombatant Onondaga people with
orders to destroy their villages, homes, fields, food supplies, cattle
herds, orchards and then annihilate them and seize their land. 

Hitler modeled his "Final Solution" on the "American Holocaust." He targeted
Untermenschen (subhumans) and Slavs he called "redskins." We know what
happened. Raphael Lemkin called it "genocide" as he first defined it in 1944
to mean:

"the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group" that corresponds to
other terms like "tyrannicide, homocide, infanticide, etc." Genocide "does
not necessarily mean the....destruction of a nation, except when
accomplished by mass killings....It is intended....to signify a coordinated
plan (to destroy the) the essential foundations of the life of national
groups" with intent to destroy them. Genocidal plans involve the
disintegration of....political and social institutions, culture, language,
national feelings, religion....economic existence, personal security,
liberty, health, dignity, and" human lives.

Throughout our history, it's been our way, and since 1990, three US
Presidents waged genocidal war in Iraq to erase the "cradle of civilization"
and remake it in our own image. Two and a half million are dead and counting
from it, the country is plagued by out-of-control violence, one-third of its
people need emergency aid, millions go hungry, and a once prosperous nation
is now a surreal lawless occupied wasteland with few or no essential
services like electricity, clean water, medical care, fuel and most
everything else needed for sustenance and survival. That's the ugly face of
"genocide" in real time.

Native peoples were its earlier victim. Puritans saw them as "brutes,
devils" and "devil-worshippers" in a godless, howling wilderness filled with
evil spirits and "dangerous wild beasts." They were targeted for removal as
settlers moved west. They cleansed the land through violence, bloodletting
and 40 Native Indian wars from 1622 - 1900 to win the West, North and South.
Wars became our national pastime, and we've waged them like sport ever since
in an endless unbroken cycle.

We fought four imperial ones as well from 1689 to 1763 with England, France,
Spain and Holland. Throughout the period, numerous settler outbreaks and
insurrections arose that were also put down along with dozens of riots. Then
there were the major wars we know by name. First was the American War of
Independence (or Revolutionary War) from 1775 - 83. A minority of colonists
supported it, little changed, and the outcome repackaged Crown rule under
new management. 

The so-called War of 1812 (to early 1815) was more about American
expansionism than Brits impressing our seamen. "Manifest Destiny" then
became a catch phrase when Jacksonian Democrats proclaimed it in 1845 as the
nation's "destiny" for all the land "from sea to shining sea." It was
packaged as a noble mission, propagated as ruling orthodoxy, and used to
justify other acquisitions. 

We then headed south of the border from 1846 - 1848 in what Mexicans called
"la invasion estadounidense" that easily self-translates as the US invasion.
It was our Mexican War that began after the annexation of Texas and ended
with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It forced Mexico to cede half its
country to avoid losing it all in what's now Texas, California, Arizona, New
Mexico, Nevada, and parts of Wyoming and Utah. The country is still cursed
the way former Mexican dictator, Porfirio Diaz, meant when he said: "Poor
Mexico, so far from God, and so close to the United States." Today that
holds for all nations with a rogue superpower on the march and liberty and
justice nowhere in sight.

Nor was it earlier when wars had similar aims as now with one exception. The
Civil War from 1861 - 1865 was sort of a family squabble. Some squabble.
Before it ended, it was our bloodiest ever. Three million were in it and
over 600,000 died at a time the total population was 31 million, including 4
million slaves. That was double the battle deaths from WW II when 12 million
fought from a population of 132 million, and if the same proportionate
number had perished it would have been around 2.5 million.

Next came the Spanish-American War against Spain. In 1897, Theodore
Roosevelt (as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and later 1906 Nobel Peace
Prize laureate) wrote a friend...."I should welcome almost any war, for I
think this country needs one," and the next year it began. We won, they lost
and America had its coming out party on a world stage. A half century later,
we control much of it, want the rest, and plan, as a birthright, to take it
as disdainfully as our forefathers. 

The war with Spain was quick and little more than a skirmish for three and a
half months. It was our first offshore imperial foray netting us control of
Cuba as a de facto colony for starters. Following the war, Congress passed
the Platt Amendment in 1901. It granted us jurisdictional right to intervene
freely in Cuban affairs and ceded Guantanamo Bay (as a coaling or naval
station only) to the US in perpetuity (provided annual rent is paid) unless
later terminated by mutual consent of both countries. It was just the
beginning.

We also took the Philippines (slaughtering 200,000 of its people), Hawaii,
Haiti, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Samoa, assorted other
territories later and the Canal Zone from Colombia to fulfill Theodore
Roosevelt's dream to link the Atlantic and Pacific with a canal across its
isthmus.

Woodrow Wilson was reelected in 1916 on a campaign promise: "He Kept Us Out
of War." He lied. He wanted war and established the Committee on Public
Information under George Creel in 1917 to get it. It turned a pacifist
nation into raging German-haters, America declared war in April, 1917 and
was in it until it ended in November, 1918. This writer's dad fought in
France and returned unharmed. The US empire was on a roll. 

Today, mainstream historians perceive Wilson as a liberal Democrat. He was
quite opposite, and his imperial record alone proves it. He occupied Haiti
in 1915 beginning 20 hellish years for its people until Franklin Roosevelt
withdraw US forces in 1934. He sent US troops to Nicaragua, the Dominican
Republic, and in 1914 invaded Mexico, occupying its main seaport city of
Veracruz. It was a dress rehearsal for WW I and might have become a
full-scale war had Wilson not pulled US forces out ahead of the greater
conflict he aimed for in Europe.

The defining event of the 20th century was WW II from which the US emerged
the only dominant nation left standing. We became the world's
unchallengeable superpower as though we planned it that way, which we did.