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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 1/12/16

Gun Culture and the American Nightmare of Violence

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As violence moves to the center of American life, it becomes an organizing principle of society, and further contributes to the unraveling of the fabric of a democracy. Under such circumstances, the United States begins to consider everyone a potential criminal, wages war with itself and begins to sacrifice its children and its future. The political stooges, who have become lapdogs of corporate and financial interests, and refuse out of narrow self- and financial interests to confront the conditions that create such violence, must be held accountable for the deaths taking place in a toxic culture of gun violence. The condemnation of violence cannot be limited to police brutality. Violence does not just come from the police. In the United States, there are other dangers emanating from state power that punishes whistleblowers, intelligence agencies that encourage the arrests of those who protest against the abuse of corporate and state power, and a corporate-controlled media that trades in ignorance, lies and falsehoods, all the while demanding and generally "receiving unwavering support from their citizens," as Teju Cole has pointed out in The New Yorker.

Yet, the only reforms we hear about are for safer gun policies, mandatory body-worn cameras for the police and more background checks. These may be well-intentioned reforms, but they do not get to the root of the problem, which is a social and economic system that trades in death in order to accumulate profits. What we don't hear about are the people who trade their conscience for supporting the gun lobby, particularly the NRA. These are the politicians in Congress who create the conditions for mass shootings and gun violence because they have been bought and sold by the apostles of the death industry. These are the same politicians who support the militarization of everyday life, who trade in torture, who bow down slavishly to the arms industries and who wallow in the handouts provided by the military-industrial-academic complex.

These utterly corrupted politicians are killers in suits whose test of courage and toughness was captured in one of the recent Republican presidential debates, when candidate Ben Carson was asked by Hugh Hewitt, a reactionary right-wing talk show host, if he would be willing to kill thousands of children in the name of exercising tough leadership. As if killing innocent children is a legitimate test for leadership. This is what the warmongering politics of hysterical fear with its unbridled focus on terrorism has come to - a future that will be defined by moral and political zombies who represent the real face of terrorism, domestic and otherwise.

Clearly, the cause of violence in the United States will not stop by merely holding the politicians responsible. What is needed is a mass political movement willing to challenge and replace a broken system that gives corrupt and warmongering politicians excessive political and economic power. Democracy and justice are on life support and the challenge is to bring them back to life not by reforming the system but by replacing it. This will only take place with the development of a politics in which the obligation to justice is matched by an endless responsibility to collective struggle.

Note: Parts of this article were drawn from an earlier version published at CounterPunch.

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Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and dis the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books are America's Addiction to Terrorism (Monthly Review Press, 2016), and America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2017). He is also a contributing editor to a number of journals, includingTikkun, (more...)
 

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