[Peace-discuss] NYT op-ed on shootings etc.

Mon Aug 5 19:16:33 UTC 2019

An article from an Officer of the Green Party in Austen, Texas:
Adrian Boutureira Sansberro<https://www.facebook.com/adrianboutureira?fref=gs&__tn__=%2CdC-R-R&eid=ARBlo0rRqkyKAwHbFwFOjZHtkbz2WCyyFAjEZHpQLuVvXMvdCWLe7oCyfJzqTZ83I_pfkW6tRg60VTYq&hc_ref=ART86nYAg18T6hg3V4X8rtVoiSadmN6IqpUVxtOaWMzChzFhEb0IlLQeGIOJw3-1xI4&dti=587432744659202&hc_location=group>
1 hr<https://www.facebook.com/groups/587432744659202/permalink/2404895539579571/>

Guns, Racism, Violence and the Consequences of Maintaining Empire

(Based on a piece I wrote at the time of the senseless mass killing of school children in Connecticut in 2012-I believe the essence of what I wrote is as true today as it was then).

By Adrian Boutureira Sansberro

We live in a society that glorifies and celebrates violence, It is justified and accepted in every aspect of our lives and it is exported to the rest of the world. We all weep today for the racist atrocity carried out in EL Paso, others have been weeping for years as our tax dollar funded guns and bombs kill thousands of children in Palestine, and others still weep remembering when thirteen cops put over 100 bullets into an unarmed black couple on a freeway overpass in Cleveland.

How could one not weep for such atrocities?Yet, we are a society, a nation, an economy, an Empire built and sustained by the atrocities perpetrated by racism, brutality and violence. The minds of our people are ill and poisoned far beyond our gun culture... We are ill because our illness is needed to sustain the madness of Empire. It always has depended on it, and as our civilization declines further and further into the pits of cultural self-deception, political corruption, economic demise and social decadence the consequences of having to maintain this permanent state of violent illness are bound to become more and more dire and closer and closer to home.

More than ever, we are today a culture where the line between imaginary and real death and destruction is intentionally being continuously linked, and made more and more blurred, not just by the media and entertainment industries, but by our government as well....Reality shows which are not real, video games which emulate war crimes, war crimes emulate video games, beautiful dead people walking, sexy FBI agents, death penalty prisoners given their death injections with sterilized needles, the deaths of countless thousands of innocent people a news blurb about collateral damage…real corpses or the suffering of surviving relatives ever seldom shown…Death is pretty, death does not exist, killing is sexy for the killers and the dead …

What is fighting for democracy and liberation and what is genocidal madness? What is reality and what is a pathetic spectacle of mass deception? We are all ill because we've allowed the madness of Empire to go on, we fuel its global racist barbarities and its pathetic home-theatre spectacles so that we can continue to not think, or see, or feel and instead just enjoy the ride of the unsustainable, destructive and selfish life style they've sold us as happiness...

Or did we sell it to ourselves? Who is Empire? Who are Trump, Obama, Reagan, or who was Andrew Jackson, the racist mass murdered, if not mere top tier exponents of the same sick and putrid racist imperialist culture and values we have too helped visualize, maintain and build?

The man who shot those people in El Paso was as ill as he needed to be, as a man growing up in this culture. If instead of crossing that now quickly disappearing social taboo and committing an act of criminal racist madness at home, he had instead been ordered to commit the same crime in some village in Iraq to protect the interests of global capital, he would have been called a soldier following orders to protect democracy and perhaps been even given a medal, not been called a racist and mad mass murderer...

He is, in a way, nothing more than a product. Popping up here as a civilian or there in uniform. He has to be prepared when prompted to appear and act at home and abroad. To embrace murderous violence as a viable option to solve personal or national conflicts, be it social, political, economic or otherwise... We've known all along this business of maintaining our youth always prepared to commit violence as a very dangerous game, and we've not just accepted that, but exploited it to benefit the violent and repressive state and for profiteering from it.

I therefore don't get the sense of shock or of surprise of so many.What surprises me, and something which I consider a huge sign of hope and credit to our remaining collective humanity, is that it doesn't happen more often. We live in a country and a culture where people are intentionally being driven to madness, desensitized, humiliated, exploited...and given ready access to fire arms. That is an intentional high risk game the state is more than willing to play .

Clearly, the roots of the cultural and social illness behind this and other similar acts, transcend the issues of gun control, or whatever one can fit on a liberal and politically opportunistic reductionist meme. Guns remain killing objects, without a doubt. Yet, to avoid addressing the root social, cultural and political causes for how we’ve become such a psychopathic, racist, homophobic,misogynist violent society, and instead choosing to focus solely on the question of gun control every time we go through something like this, simply seems like adding insult to injury to our intelligence, on top of the already egregious injury upon our shared humanity of the act itself.

On Aug 5, 2019, at 10:37, David Green <davidgreen50 at gmail.com<mailto:davidgreen50 at gmail.com>> wrote:

I do consider the gun culture and the easy availability of guns to be a relatively primary cause, co-terminus with USFP and the culture of militarism that goes along with it (many shooters got their training in the U.S. military.

On Mon, Aug 5, 2019 at 12:19 PM Brussel, Morton K <brussel at illinois.edu<mailto:brussel at illinois.edu>> wrote:
This is a complex issue. Belew is not all wrong. incidentally, she never alluded to Ruby Ridge or Waco in this piece. There certainly seems to be a thread of fear among some of our  (white) population that people of color are displacing the purity of “our” stock. Then there is the gun worshipping culture amongst our population. The domestic, seemingly mad violence, of the recent horrible events may be linked not only to our militarism and foreign policy, and from the noxious behavior of federal and state agencies, and even from notions of male toughness, but also from our myths of “cowboys and Indians” and the thrust for new frontiers. It seems to me that there is no single truth here. The reasons for why the U.S. is so exceptional in these matters relative other developed countries/populations needs to connect many “dots”.

On Aug 5, 2019, at 11:00 AM, David Green via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net<mailto:peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:

I read this historian's book a couple of times earlier this year, perplexed by her recognition that "the war comes home" but her lack of clear recognition that our warmaking and USFP are problematic for that reason. Thus, it's all about white nationalism. Her description of Ruby Ridge places no responsibility on our government's (FBI) aggressive policies. She had no particular critique of the FBI's criminal behavior at Waco, where many non-whites were killed by the government. Thus, her understanding of Timothy McVeigh is lacking; not that such an understanding serves in any way to excuse his crime. I fear that the foundational emphasis on white nationalism betrays a lack of analytical integrity, similar to the manner in which anti-semitism is used. While U.S. warmaking and general gun culture provide the context for mass shootings, not to mention the entire neoliberal disaster, our mainstream media and historians such as Belew seem much more fascinated by the perversities of ideology. That's how you make a name for yourself as an establishment historian in this political context, and get yourself published in the NYT.

The Right Way to Understand White Nationalist Terrorism
Attacks like that in El Paso are not an end in themselves. They are a call to arms, toward something much more frightening.
By Kathleen Belew
Dr. Belew is the author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.”
Aug. 4, 2019
Like a number of recent mass shootings, the one in El Paso on Saturday came with a manifesto. While authorities are still working to verify that this document explicitly was indeed written by the attacker, the evidence seems clear: It was posted to 8Chan minutes before the attack, by someone with the same name.
By manifesto, I mean a document laying out political and ideological reasons for the violence and connecting it to other acts of violence. We’re familiar with those. We can recite them. And yet our society still lacks a fundamental understanding of the nature of this violence and what it means.
Too many people still think of these attacks as single events, rather than interconnected actions carried out by domestic terrorists. We spend too much ink dividing them into anti-immigrant, racist, anti-Muslim or anti-Semitic attacks. True, they are these things. But they are also connected with one another through a broader white power ideology.
Likewise, too many people think that such shootings are the goal of fringe activism. They aren’t. They are planned to incite a much larger slaughter by “awakening” other people to join the movement.
The El Paso manifesto, if it is verified, ties the attacker into the mainstream of the white power movement, which came together after the Vietnam War and united Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead and other activists. That movement, comparable in size to the much better known John Birch Society, never faced a major prosecution or crackdown that hobbled its activity. As a result, it was able to sink deep roots into society, largely under the radar of most Americans.
This movement is often called white nationalist, but too many people misunderstand that moniker as simply overzealous patriotism, or as promoting whiteness within the nation. But the nation at the heart of white nationalism is not the United States. It is the Aryan nation, imagined as a transnational white polity with interests fundamentally opposed to the United States and, for many activists, bent on the overthrow of the federal government.
The white power movement imagines race war, incited by mass violence among other strategies. The core texts of this movement, like “The Turner Diaries” or “Camp of the Saints,” aren’t just quaint novels, but rather provide a road map to how such violence could succeed. To call them manuals is too simplistic: They provide the collective ideas and vision by which a fringe movement can attempt a violent confrontation that could lead to race war.
These ideas run from the earlier period directly into today’s manifestos. Dylann Roof’s document discussed his desire to provoke race war. The Christchurch manifesto used images and phrases from the earlier movement. In the El Paso manifesto, the anti-immigrant rhetoric is thoroughly ensconced in other white power ideas.
To be sure, mass attackers today have a new set of coded phrases, such as “replacement,” as a code for racial annihilation through intermarriage, immigration and demographic change. But the idea of that threat has been central to white power activism for decades.
To people in this movement, the impending demographic change understood by many commentators as a soft transformation — the moment when a town, a county, or a nation will no longer be majority-white — isn’t soft at all, but rather represents an apocalyptic threat.
In a decade of studying white power movement activism, I have learned that much of this follows a strategy. First, it claims a state of emergency and gives a rationale for the act of violence.
But critically, it also issues a call to action for others. The El Paso manifesto does so overtly, and offers tactical details about the attacker’s weapons, meant to instruct others. It has specific advice about how to choose targets. It has paragraphs that give rote gesture to not being white supremacist, even as the document invokes phrase after phrase, ideological marker after ideological marker, of the white power movement. These are all markers of the genre.
As horrible as the El Paso attack was, this movement is capable of even larger-scale violence. The Oklahoma City bombing, its most horrific act to date, was the largest mass murder on American soil between Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Not only do we still lack a widespread understanding of that bombing as an act of political violence, but we fail to reckon with the many activists that create shrines to Timothy McVeigh and hope to follow in his footsteps.
The history of the white power movement shows us that what seems new in El Paso is not new at all. This movement is not newly dangerous because of social media; it has been using the internet and its precursors in precisely this way since 1984.
Neither is this movement newly anti-immigrant, despite the current politics that have inflamed anti-immigrant fervor. White power activists have been mapping white homelands and attempting migrations to and defense of those spaces for decades.
What is new here is the widespread effectiveness of these actions, the technologies of killing that increase the body count and the frequency of mass violence.
It is not enough to dismiss mass shootings as horror beyond our comprehension. It is our duty to understand their meaning and confront the movement that relies upon them.
Kathleen Belew is a professor of history at the University of Chicago and the author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.”
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