The Chris Moeller Archives

The long knives

Add Micah Johnson's name to the list of American Snipers that once plied their trade in the United States military. We've also had Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, Kelly David Bangle, another Fort Hood shooter, Aaron Alexis, who killed 12 inside the Washington Navy Yard, Sergio Valencia del Toro, the Wisconsin bridge shooter, Robert Stewart, the Carthage, North Carolina nursing home shooter, and Bradley William Stone, the killer of six, including his family, in Philadelphia.

Among the few online articles I could find on the topic, Texas officials say that at least ten percent of their shooting perpetrators since 2003 are military veterans or active-duty service members, and that number has grown higher since 2013. A 2012 study by the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology found that nine percent of veterans nationally had been arrested since returning from a military tour, 23 percent among those that suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, of which there have been more than 260,000 diagnosed in the U.S. after serving in conflict. Add these to the long list of "legal" shooters employed by municipal police departments that learned their first tactics of violent engagement while serving in the U.S. military. (Wow, it's much harder to find background information online on police shooters than it is civilian shooters.)

Studies are not easy to come by because nobody wants to admit in an imperialist state that our soldiers and ex-soldiers are "all messed up," but they clearly are. The Pentagon reported last week that, in the year 2014 alone, more than 7,300 veterans committed suicide. That translates to more than 20 a day. Absolutely staggering, though actually down slightly from 2010, when there was an average of 22 a day. These direct-line victims of the American war machine, and those lives that they impact at home, are not included in the casualty counts of our foreign conflicts.

When we are engaged in violent action abroad, and I include our aid of weaponry to rogue theocratic states such as Saudi Arabia and Israel, violence manifests itself more extensively at home. It's that simple. The cause is not guns, specifically, or mental illness, specifically. It's the hyper-militarized police state that we live in, the one Dr. King labeled the most violent on the planet, the only one with more guns than citizens. We publicly execute our criminals, a reality which places us in the exclusive company of dictatorial and ayatollah states. When mass shootings take place at home, politicians name the solution as committing more violence abroad, as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both did in the aftermath of the Orlando shootings.

Today's killers on the home front are a mirrored reflection of ourselves. That's why their photographed images are so fascinating to look at. In 2016, we're seeing the commercialized, capitalistic acceleration of a racist, violent culture, but it isn't new to either the current century or the last one. Slavery was an institution of death and violence and slave labor built the Empire. The ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples is a stain on the flag that cannot be washed clean. Eighteen Medals of Honor were awarded to the Seventh Cavalry for murdering women and children in flight at Wounded Knee in 1890. Today, the disproportionate incarceration rates for Native Americans in western states mirrors that of African-Americans. The reality of modern slavery finds that more African-Americans were killed by police in extrajudicial killings in 2015 (258) than were killed by lynching during the most deadly year of Jim Crow (161 in 1892). In police departments coast to coast, racism is openly tolerated. In supposedly-progressive San Francisco, 14 different police officers were found to have sent numerous racist, sexist, homophobic text messages to each other in 2012 and 2013, texts with messages like "all niggers must fucking hang," and they all kept their jobs. In the United States, major cities like St. Louis and Baltimore still have separate police unions for white and black officers. If online Tweets can be trusted, the race is competitive between whether we have more black people or KKK members employed by our municipal police departments.

After Dallas this week, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch proclaimed that "the answer is never violence," but her employer, the United States government, clearly believes quite the opposite. The result of our ongoing global policing policy is more corpses piled up within our borders and without. Right wing critics are correct when they say that lawlessness is the problem, but that lawlessness is actually an imperialist state that answers to no international law enforcement or court for the actions of its government against foreign peoples or its own citizenry.

posted by CM @ 12:25 PM