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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 2/20/17

On Killers and Bullshitters*

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Rather than use terms like "Mafia" or "organized crime," Volkov, a Cambridge-educated Russian sociologist at the European University at St. Petersburg, likes to use terms like "violence-managing agencies," "force wielding organizations," "protection enterprises" and "private enforcers." His book, he writes, "deals with an exclusively male world, where traditional male virtues associated with violent contest prevail." The tale he unfolds is one of the anarchic aftermath of the downfall of the Soviet Union noted for the "violent entrepreneurs" of the title and the countervailing impulse to create a State structure that would constitute a Hobbesian commonwealth. He writes that in 2001 newly elected President Vladimir Putin addressed the Russian legislature and conceded the state was coming up short in "protecting citizens from racketeers, bandits, and bribe-takers."

The Russian dance between state of nature anarchy and state protection is still a work-in-progress, something a truthful analysis of conditions in the United States would also have to concede. While the US may not be on an identical moral footing as Putin's Russia (in some instances we may be better, some worse) selective enforcement remains a very healthy institution in America. Local cops tell me individual officers always have the discretion to arrest or not to arrest. Prosecutors have the same discretion. Think sentencing for crack cocaine in the ghetto versus powder cocaine in Hollywood and the mass incarceration of African American males. The list is long and the legacy of selective enforcement is overdue for a major American dialogue.

One might argue that President Trump is trying to shift the Hobbesian reality away from a classically liberal commonwealth of protection for the poor and weak to a more robust state of nature and wealth- and power-friendly society where, like in Texas, "you're on your own." This may also help explain the mysterious affinity between Trump and Putin. It's like Russia and the United States are moving in opposite Hobbesian directions, and their current respective leaders -- Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump -- are meeting ideologically in the middle. Central to this struggle is the archetype of the killer, which is, as Volkov emphasizes, predominantly a male role. In the abstract world of Hobbes, the archetypal killer is a feature of the anarchic state of nature and a feature of the state's monopoly on violence.

Notwithstanding Hillary Clinton's evident shortcomings as a candidate, this may shed some light on why a liberal woman considered a fait-accompli failed to obtain the White House in 2016, a moment in history when the feminine, maternal and nurturing instincts associated with women would improve the American political character. But in a nation that has declared itself at war with crackpot elements of extremely violent, misogynous Muslims, the Rules Of Engagement among the winning Trump base may demand a countervailing violent male misogyny on our part. When you go to war with strange alien people, there's a certain intimacy that necessarily grows from such an intense experience. It's not exactly a case of If you can't lick 'em, join 'em; it's more like: If you fight someone long enough, you will assume some of their characteristics. The obverse must be true as well: in a natural learning curve, violent Muslims necessarily learn certain things from fighting westerners and Americans.

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I'm a 72-year-old American who served in Vietnam as a naive 19-year-old. From that moment on, I've been studying and re-thinking what US counter-insurgency war means. I live outside of Philadelphia, where I'm a writer, photographer and political (more...)
 

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