Violence Begets Violence

“Americans have been told that their government is keeping them safe by preventing and prosecuting terrorism inside the US… But take a closer look and you realize that many of these people would never have committed a crime if not for law enforcement encouraging, pressuring, and sometimes paying them to commit terrorist acts.”—Human Rights Watch

We can rail against ISIS, hate crimes, terror threats, Islamic radicalization, gun control and national security. We can blame Muslims, lax gun laws, a homophobic culture and a toxic politic environmental. We can even use the Orlando shooting as fodder for this year’s presidential campaigns.

But until we start addressing the U.S. government’s part in creating, cultivating and abetting domestic and global terrorism—and hold agencies such as the FBI and Defense Department accountable for importing and exporting violence, breeding extremism and generating blowback, which then gets turned loose on an unsuspecting American populace—we’ll be no closer to putting an end to the violence that claimed 50 lives at an Orlando nightclub on June 12, 2016, than we were 15 years ago when nearly 3,000 individuals were killed on Sept. 11, 2001. on our leaders.

The Orlando attacks may well do away with what little Fourth Amendment protections remain to us in the face of aggressive government surveillance.

Thus, whether you’re talking about a mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub, a bombing at the Boston Marathon, or hijacked planes being flown into the World Trade Center, the government’s spin machine is still operating from the same playbook they used post-9/11. Just invoke the specter of terrorism, trot out the right bogeyman (extremist Muslims, homophobes, racists, etc.), sentimentalize the victims enough, and most Americans will fall in line and patriotically support the government in its fight against the “enemy.”

Likewise, the government’s response to each crisis follows the same tune: a) the terrorists did it, b) the government is hard at work fighting the war on terror, and c) Americans need to “help” the government by relinquishing some of their freedoms.

So where does that leave us?

Chalmers Johnson, who died in 2010, believed that the answer is to bring our rampant militarism under control. As he concluded in an essay for The Nation:

From George Washington’s “farewell address” to Dwight Eisenhower’s invention of the phrase “military-industrial complex,” American leaders have warned about the dangers of a bloated, permanent, expensive military establishment that has lost its relationship to the country because service in it is no longer an obligation of citizenship. Our military operates the biggest arms sales operation on earth; it rapes girls, women and schoolchildren in Okinawa; it cuts ski-lift cables in Italy, killing twenty vacationers, and dismisses what its insubordinate pilots have done as a “training accident”; it allows its nuclear attack submarines to be used for joy rides for wealthy civilian supporters and then covers up the negligence that caused the sinking of a Japanese high school training ship; it propagandizes the nation with Hollywood films glorifying military service (Pearl Harbor); and it manipulates the political process to get more carrier task forces, antimissile missiles, nuclear weapons, stealth bombers and other expensive gadgets for which we have no conceivable use. Two of the most influential federal institutions are not in Washington but on the south side of the Potomac River–the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. Given their influence today, one must conclude that the government outlined in the Constitution of 1787 no longer bears much relationship to the government that actually rules from Washington. Until that is corrected, we should probably stop talking about “democracy” and “human rights.”

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