President Joe Biden

Dear Joe,

I would wish you a Happy New Year; but it seems trite and banal, given all the challenges and troubles you and our country face in 2024 – some inherited from previous administrations, others of your own making.

Americans are 10 times more likely to be shot to death than people in other wealthy countries, with homicides, suicides and mass shootings on the increase.  For the past four years, mass murders have skyrocketed into the 600s per year, breaking all past records.  Since 2020 more children and teens are killed by firearms than any other cause. 

Don’t these sound like war statistics?

Yes, you have established the first White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.  But it is rare to find anyone in your administration making the connection between our country’s record-breaking gun violence at home and our country’s record-breaking military weapons sales across the world, to democracies and autocracies alike, having grown dramatically over the past 5 years.  To re-state, isn’t it possible that the US global culture of weapons and militarism with nearly 100 military bases ringing the world, and our long and persistent history of war (nearly 40 in your and my lifetime), rebounds back to infect our violent culture here at home? 

The US pledged $17.5 million to a loss and damage fund for poor countries vulnerable to extreme climate damage (for which the US is more responsible than any other country) at the 2023 UN climate conference while doling out over $100 billion in weapons and military aid in the same year to feed and fuel wars in Gaza and Ukraine, wars that destroy and contaminate, likely irreparably, the homeland and ecosystems of those peoples who survive these wars and genocide in the case of Gaza.  Crumbs for climate crisis and ruined ecosystems fall from the Master’s table, while feasts of weapons abound. 

Our habit of war “has yielded a host of perverse results here at home,” writes war veteran and noted historian of American military history, Andrew Bacevich.  Neither have our wars brought about “peace [or democracy] by even the loosest definition of the word… the opposite in most case.”  His wise counsel: discard militarism in favor of “prudence and pragmatism.”

You often state proudly that we are the strongest military in the world, as if it is a crown of excellence, when in fact it is a crown of thorns on our country, which hangs on a cross of iron.

As Eisenhower memorably said in 1953: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” What felonious theft our military budget is from the 140 million or 40% of US citizens poor and low-income American people, for whom the crucial Poor People’s Campaign advocates.   Forty-four million Americans “struggled with hunger” in 2022, according to USDA. Diseases of despair are rampant. 

“Missile Theft,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ Dreamland v. 3/ IbisPaint, 2023

Our life expectancy – a critical marker of people’s overall health – is lower than all comparable wealthy countries, and many other countries including China and Cuba.  Recall Dr. Martin Luther King’s warning: “If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to hell.” 

I do wish that that you had read the other Catholic president John F Kennedy’s 1963 peace speech at American University before you met recently in San Francisco with Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China.  At the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the Cuban Missile crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev opened a line of communication and held many secret talks, despite monumental political differences, for the sake of moving away from imminent nuclear war. 

In his 1963 address at American University, Kennedy, after stating his abhorrence of Communism, praised Russia’s key role in saving Europe from Nazism while losing 20 million citizens, and he foregrounded the two countries shared humanity.  “If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”  In many diplomatic private talks and communications, also involving Pope John the XXIII, Kennedy and Khrushchev laid the groundwork for ending above ground nuclear weapons testing with the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons and forging a more peaceful country-to-country relationship.  Within 6 1/2 months President Kennedy was assassinated.

Xi’s remarks to a gathering of business leaders, following your more private meeting with him last November, has some resemblances with JFK’s speech.  He displayed respect for our country’s accomplishments (even if for self-serving reasons) and advocated the two countries accept political diversity in a multi-polar world.  Joe, you did not employ the same tact when you replied at a press conference to a reporter’s provocation, Yes, I think Xi is a dictator –a gratuitous remark that does little to advance your stated goals of working together to avoid war and address the climate crisis and to live in a multipolar, diverse world.  You are generous with weapons; but dismissive of dialogue where it is most needed.

My wish for you in 2024 is to imbibe this wisdom and act on it:  What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the core of the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran and other religious traditions.  Make it your own, end the US addiction to war, and save your country’s soul and your own.

That pace, of course, would only speed up with the launching of the war on terror and the disastrous conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. And yet, even then, triumphalism remained the note of the day in Washington, as this country poured ever more tax dollars into the Pentagon budget (a phenomenon that even the debt-ceiling dispute has hardly affected).

But don’t think that nobody noticed. To my mind, the most striking thing about Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign was the slogan that’s become such an acronym (MAGA) that no one even thinks about what it stands for anymore. Trump, I suspect, won that year in large part because of that slogan, Make America Great Again! (yes, with that very exclamation point attached!), which caught the mood of all too many Americans, even if no other politician would then admit that America was no longer “great.”

As I wrote in April 2016 in a piece I headlined “Has the American Age of Decline Begun?”:

“With that ‘again,’ Donald Trump crossed a line in American politics that… represented a kind of psychological taboo for politicians of any stripe, of either party, including presidents and potential candidates for that position. He is the first American leader or potential leader of recent times not to feel the need or obligation to insist that the United States, the ‘sole’ superpower of Planet Earth, is an ‘exceptional’ nation, an ‘indispensable’ country… Donald Trump, in other words, is the first person to run openly and without apology on a platform of American decline.”

Now, after his own decline, he’s once again running for president, this time under the unspoken slogan MTGA! (Make Trump Great Again!). With that in mind, let Astore bring us up to date on just where on the downhill slope this increasingly chaotic country now finds itself. Tom

Clinging Bitterly to Guns and Religion

The End Stage of American Empire

By William J. Astore

All around us things are falling apart. Collectively, Americans are experiencing national and imperial decline. Can America save itself? Is this country, as presently constituted, even worth saving?

For me, that last question is radical indeed. From my early years, I believed deeply in the idea of America. I knew this country wasn’t perfect, of course, not even close. Long before the 1619 Project, I was aware of the “original sin” of slavery and how central it was to our history. I also knew about the genocide of Native Americans. (As a teenager, my favorite movie — and so it remains — was Little Big Man, which pulled no punches when it came to the white man and his insatiably murderous greed.)

Nevertheless, America still promised much, or so I believed in the 1970s and 1980s. Life here was simply better, hands down, than in places like the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China. That’s why we had to “contain” communism — to keep them over there, so they could never invade our country and extinguish our lamp of liberty. And that’s why I joined America’s Cold War military, serving in the Air Force from the presidency of Ronald Reagan to that of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. And believe me, it proved quite a ride. It taught this retired lieutenant colonel that the sky’s anything but the limit.

In the end, 20 years in the Air Force led me to turn away from empire, militarism, and nationalism. I found myself seeking instead some antidote to the mainstream media’s celebrations of American exceptionalism and the exaggerated version of victory culture that went with it (long after victory itself was in short supply). I started writing against the empire and its disastrous wars and found likeminded people at TomDispatch — former imperial operatives turned incisive critics like Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich, along with sharp-eyed journalist Nick Turse and, of course, the irreplaceable Tom Engelhardt, the founder of those “tomgrams” meant to alert America and the world to the dangerous folly of repeated U.S. global military interventions.

But this isn’t a plug for TomDispatch. It’s a plug for freeing your mind as much as possible from the thoroughly militarized matrix that pervades America. That matrix drives imperialism, waste, war, and global instability to the point where, in the context of the conflict in Ukraine, the risk of nuclear Armageddon could imaginably approach that of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. As wars — proxy or otherwise — continue, America’s global network of 750-odd military bases never seems to decline. Despite upcoming cuts to domestic spending, just about no one in Washington imagines Pentagon budgets doing anything but growing, even soaring toward the trillion-dollar level, with militarized programs accounting for 62% of federal discretionary spending in 2023.

Indeed, an engorged Pentagon — its budget for 2024 is expected to rise to $886 billion in the bipartisan debt-ceiling deal reached by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — guarantees one thing: a speedier fall for the American empire. Chalmers Johnson predicted it; Andrew Bacevich analyzed it. The biggest reason is simple enough: incessant, repetitive, disastrous wars and costly preparations for more of the same have been sapping America’s physical and mental reserves, as past wars did the reserves of previous empires throughout history. (Think of the short-lived Napoleonic empire, for example.)

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Known as “the arsenal of democracy” during World War II, America has now simply become an arsenal, with a military-industrial-congressional complex intent on forging and feeding wars rather than seeking to starve and stop them. The result: a precipitous decline in the country’s standing globally, while at home Americans pay a steep price of accelerating violence (2023 will easily set a record for mass shootings) and “carnage” (Donald Trump’s word) in a once proud but now much-bloodied “homeland.”

Lessons from History on Imperial Decline

I’m a historian, so please allow me to share a few basic lessons I’ve learned. When I taught World War I to cadets at the Air Force Academy, I would explain how the horrific costs of that war contributed to the collapse of four empires: Czarist Russia, the German Second Reich, the Ottoman empire, and the Austro-Hungarian empire of the Habsburgs. Yet even the “winners,” like the French and British empires, were also weakened by the enormity of what was, above all, a brutal European civil war, even if it spilled over into Africa, Asia, and indeed the Americas.

And yet after that war ended in 1918, peace proved elusive indeed, despite the Treaty of Versailles, among other abortive agreements. There was too much unfinished business, too much belief in the power of militarism, especially in an emergent Third Reich in Germany and in Japan, which had embraced ruthless European military methods to create its own Asiatic sphere of dominance. Scores needed to be settled, so the Germans and Japanese believed, and military offensives were the way to do it.

As a result, civil war in Europe continued with World War II, even as Japan showed that Asiatic powers could similarly embrace and deploy the unwisdom of unchecked militarism and war. The result: 75 million dead and more empires shattered, including Mussolini’s “New Rome,” a “thousand-year” German Reich that barely lasted 12 of them before being utterly destroyed, and an Imperial Japan that was starved, burnt out, and finally nuked. China, devastated by war with Japan, also found itself ripped apart by internal struggles between nationalists and communists.

As with its prequel, even most of the “winners” of World War II emerged in a weakened state. In defeating Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union had lost 25 to 30 million people. Its response was to erect, in Winston Churchill’s phrase, an “Iron Curtain” behind which it could exploit the peoples of Eastern Europe in a militarized empire that ultimately collapsed due to its wars and its own internal divisions. Yet the USSR lasted longer than the post-war French and British empires. France, humiliated by its rapid capitulation to the Germans in 1940, fought to reclaim wealth and glory in “French” Indochina, only to be severely humbled at Dien Bien Phu. Great Britain, exhausted from its victory, quickly lost India, that “jewel” in its imperial crown, and then Egypt in the Suez debacle.

There was, in fact, only one country, one empire, that truly “won” World War II: the United States, which had been the least touched (Pearl Harbor aside) by war and all its horrors. That seemingly never-ending European civil war from 1914 to 1945, along with Japan’s immolation and China’s implosion, left the U.S. virtually unchallenged globally. America emerged from those wars as a superpower precisely because its government had astutely backed the winning side twice, tipping the scales in the process, while paying a relatively low price in blood and treasure compared to allies like the Soviet Union, France, and Britain.

History’s lesson for America’s leaders should have been all too clear: when you wage war long, especially when you devote significant parts of your resources — financial, material, and especially personal — to it, you wage it wrong. Not for nothing is war depicted in the Bible as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. France had lost its empire in World War II; it just took later military catastrophes in Algeria and Indochina to make it obvious. That was similarly true of Britain’s humiliations in India, Egypt, and elsewhere, while the Soviet Union, which had lost much of its imperial vigor in that war, would take decades of slow rot and overstretch in places like Afghanistan to implode.

Meanwhile, the United States hummed along, denying it was an empire at all, even as it adopted so many of the trappings of one. In fact, in the wake of the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington’s leaders would declare America the exceptional “superpower,” a new and far more enlightened Rome and “the indispensable nation” on planet Earth. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, its leaders would confidently launch what they termed a Global War on Terror and begin waging wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, as in the previous century they had in Vietnam. (No learning curve there, it seems.) In the process, its leaders imagined a country that would remain untouched by war’s ravages, which was we now know — or do we? — the height of imperial hubris and folly.

For whether you call it fascism, as with Nazi Germany, communism, as with Stalin’s Soviet Union, or democracy, as with the United States, empires built on dominance achieved through a powerful, expansionist military necessarily become ever more authoritarian, corrupt, and dysfunctional. Ultimately, they are fated to fail. No surprise there, since whatever else such empires may serve, they don’t serve their own people. Their operatives protect themselves at any cost, while attacking efforts at retrenchment or demilitarization as dangerously misguided, if not seditiously disloyal.

That’s why those like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Hale, who shined a light on the empire’s militarized crimes and corruption, found themselves imprisoned, forced into exile, or otherwise silenced. Even foreign journalists like Julian Assange can be caught up in the empire’s dragnet and imprisoned if they dare expose its war crimes. The empire knows how to strike back and will readily betray its own justice system (most notably in the case of Assange), including the hallowed principles of free speech and the press, to do so.

Perhaps he will eventually be freed, likely as not when the empire judges he’s approaching death’s door. His jailing and torture have already served their purpose. Journalists know that to expose America’s bloodied tools of empire brings only harsh punishment, not plush rewards. Best to look away or mince one’s words rather than risk prison — or worse.

Yet you can’t fully hide the reality that this country’s failed wars have added trillions of dollars to its national debt, even as military spending continues to explode in the most wasteful ways imaginable, while the social infrastructure crumbles.

Clinging Bitterly to Guns and Religion

Today, America clings ever more bitterly to guns and religion. If that phrase sounds familiar, it might be because Barack Obama used it in the 2008 presidential campaign to describe the reactionary conservatism of mostly rural voters in Pennsylvania. Disillusioned by politics, betrayed by their putative betters, those voters, claimed the then-presidential candidate, clung to their guns and religion for solace. I lived in rural Pennsylvania at the time and recall a response from a fellow resident who basically agreed with Obama, for what else was there left to cling to in an empire that had abandoned its own rural working-class citizens?

Something similar is true of America writ large today. As an imperial power, we cling bitterly to guns and religion. By “guns,” I mean all the weaponry America’s merchants of death sell to the Pentagon and across the world. Indeed, weaponry is perhaps this country’s most influential global export, devastatingly so. From 2018 to 2022, the U.S. alone accounted for 40% of global arms exports, a figure that’s only risen dramatically with military aid to Ukraine. And by “religion,” I mean a persistent belief in American exceptionalism (despite all evidence to the contrary), which increasingly draws sustenance from a militant Christianity that denies the very spirit of Christ and His teachings.

Yet history appears to confirm that empires, in their dying stages, do exactly that: they exalt violence, continue to pursue war, and insist on their own greatness until their fall can neither be denied nor reversed. It’s a tragic reality that the journalist Chris Hedges has written about with considerable urgency.

The problem suggests its own solution (not that any powerful figure in Washington is likely to pursue it). America must stop clinging bitterly to its guns — and here I don’t even mean the nearly 400 million weapons in private hands in this country, including all those AR-15 semi-automatic rifles. By “guns,” I mean all the militarized trappings of empire, including America’s vast structure of overseas military bases and its staggering commitments to weaponry of all sorts, including world-ending nuclear ones. As for clinging bitterly to religion — and by “religion” I mean the belief in America’s own righteousness, regardless of the millions of people it’s killed globally from the Vietnam era to the present moment — that, too, would have to stop.

History’s lessons can be brutal. Empires rarely die well. After it became an empire, Rome never returned to being a republic and eventually fell to barbarian invasions. The collapse of Germany’s Second Reich bred a third one of greater virulence, even if it was of shorter duration. Only its utter defeat in 1945 finally convinced Germans that God didn’t march with their soldiers into battle.

What will it take to convince Americans to turn their backs on empire and war before it’s too late? When will we conclude that Christ wasn’t joking when He blessed the peacemakers rather than the warmongers?

As an iron curtain descends on a failing American imperial state, one thing we won’t be able to say is that we weren’t warned.

Copyright 2023 William J. Astore

Via Tomdispatch.com

By: Ross Williams – 

( Georgia Recorder ) – Georgia college students can continue to bring their handgun to class after the Supreme Court of Georgia upheld a lower court’s decision to dismiss a challenge to the state’s campus carry law from a group of five professors.

The law, which went into effect in 2017, requires the university system’s 26 universities to allow lawful gun owners to carry concealed handguns at school buildings with a few exceptions, such as in on-campus childcare centers, in classes in which high school students are enrolled or in administrative offices where disciplinary proceedings are held. Last year’s constitutional carry law further eliminated license requirements to carry in colleges and elsewhere.

The law was controversial when created. Former Republican Gov. Nathan Deal vetoed a version of the law in 2016 before signing another version  with more exceptions the following year. After that, the Board of Regents, which oversees the state’s public universities, changed its policy to comply with the law.

The five professors behind the lawsuit said being forced to allow guns into their classrooms puts them at risk. Some said they run laboratories with chemicals or machinery that could be extremely dangerous if damaged by a firearm.

Photo by Jisoo Park on Unsplash

They argued that Georgia universities disallowed guns on campuses for over two centuries and the Legislature overstepped its bounds by changing their rules.

But in a unanimous ruling, the justices found that the Board of Regents adopted the rule change on their own initiative, and it was the Regents’ policy, not anything that passed the Legislature, that resulted in the alleged harms the professors hoped to redress.

“In determining that this action by the Board moots the professors’ challenge to the 2017 amendment, we do not concern ourselves with why the Board took this action,” wrote Justice John J. Ellington in Tuesday’s decision. “We do not look behind the exercise of government power to determine the subjective reasons—legal, political, or otherwise—for a particular action, so long as the action was within the government actor’s authority.”

Ellington added that doing as the professors asked and declaring that the campus carry law constituted a separation of powers violation would not have eliminated the issues caused by the university system’s gun policy.

Matthew Boedy, a professor at the University of North Georgia and state chapter president of the American Association of University Professors, said the ruling reaffirms the independence of Georgia’s higher education system, and he hopes the Regents will use that independence to re-ban firearms.

“While the law allowing guns on campus was supported by a GOP-led legislature and signed by a GOP governor, the court made clear it was actions by the Board of Regents in revising its own policy that pushed this dangerous law on students, faculty, and staff,” Boedy said. “The court then implied the Regents can act independently and ban guns from campus. The Regents should do so. I applaud the professors for standing up for the safety of all on campus. I continue to ask the Regents to do the same. Guns on campus are an affront to education.”

Ross Williams

Before joining the Georgia Recorder, Ross Williams covered local and state government for the Marietta Daily Journal. His work earned recognition from the Georgia Associated Press Media Editors and the Georgia Press Association, including beat reporting, business writing and non-deadline reporting.

 

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Via Georgia Recorder

The suspect, Anderson Lee Aldrich, is a known gun nut who was arrested a little over a year ago in a suburb of Colorado Springs for threatening to blow up his mother — “threatening to cause harm to her with a homemade bomb, multiple weapons, and ammunition.” He does not appear to have been convicted of any crime in the incident, during which the police had to evacuate the neighborhood. That’s right. A man arrested in the summer of 2021 for menacing his mother with multiple weapons and a homemade bomb was allowed to continue to keep long guns to shoot down gay people with. It is nice to be white.

The Club Q massacre was the six hundredth mass shooting of 2022.

Club Q owner Nic Grzecka told The Colorado Springs Indy in 2020 that his establishment sought to emulate and compete with successful LGBTQ clubs that “were gay as hell. They had go-go dancers and drag queens and bartenders in jockstraps. We knew we had to be gay as hell (to survive).”

Sarah Kay Ellis of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation said, according to The Denver Post, “You can draw a straight line from the false and vile rhetoric about LGBTQ people spread by extremists and amplified across social media, to the nearly 300 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced this year, to the dozens of attacks on our community like this one,”

The three hundred anti-gay pieces of proposed legislation and the rhetoric against gay people have largely come from Republican lawmakers, who therefore bear some of the blame for whipping up this kind of hate.

Examples:

1. Republicans in the Tennessee legislature have introduced bills to ban drag shows and gender-affirming health care for transgender teens. Ban drag shows? Now RuPaul is the equivalent of the Communist Manifesto for these loons? I think the first amendment may have something to say about that.

2. Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t say Gay” law is intended to whip up anxiety among parents that public schools are turning their children gay by talking to them about the full range of sexual identities. There is no evidence that children’s sexual identities are affected by such information. The point of the law isn’t children, it is to imply to parents that Democrats are tinkering with the identity of their children and so to make them angry. The anger inevitably falls in part on gay teachers in the schools, who are thus having their basic human rights withdrawn. DeSantis’s tactic is particularly sinister in its potential for provoking anti-gay hatred, since straight parents are being encouraged to experience anxiety about their own children’s sexuality in the presence of even the mention of a gay person.

3. Republicans in Congress want to emulate DeSantis by passing a national “don’t say gay” bill.

4. Republicans such as Ted Cruz, Josh “Insurrectionist Fist Bump” Hawley and John Cornyn have signaled that they want to overturn the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell that found a right to marry for gay persons.

5. Tennessee and Wisconsin have proposed bills that would forbid towns and counties from protecting gay rights more extensively than does state law.

6. Kimberly Kindy at the Washington Post writes, “About 75 of the new bills call for bans or severe restrictions on classroom discussions, curriculum and library books that mention LGBTQ issues, mostly but not exclusively in primary grades.”

( Waging Nonviolence) – Given the almost inconceivable tragedy that has been visited on our schools — and believing that no democracy can survive without a viable education and a safe space for children — Michael Nagler spoke with career teacher, peace activist and Metta Center board member Francesca Po to get her perspective.

Michael: Francesca, as we are all grieving over the shooting of children and terrified that it seems to go on and on, I’m wondering what your feelings are.  First of all, what drew you to the noble profession of teaching?

Francesca: The actual teaching itself is why I am an educator and why it’s meaningful work for me.  I teach in the department of religious studies in a high school and thrive on discussing “the big questions” about the universe and existence with teenagers.  I believe this is the age when these questions are most influential in life and it’s a privilege to be able to be the one to introduce these concepts to them.

Michael: With the dreadful rise in school shootings, how has that affected the mental states of your students, classroom, and the school in general?  Are students more afraid, or grieving?  What about teachers, and school staff? 

Francesca: Everyone’s mental and emotional states have absolutely been negatively affected by the rise in school shootings.

To put this all in perspective, firstly, know that my school is a well-funded, private high school, and boasts a population of the top 5 percent of the county.  We have our own private security team, 24-hour surveillance of campus, and we are enclosed by two security gates: one on the outside perimeter of campus, and another inner gate on the actual school grounds.  Of all schools, it should feel safe and secure.

However, just this past month, before Uvalde, we had a “non-credible” shooter threat which resulted in: 1. having local police officers on campus, 2. multiple students getting pulled off campus by their guardians and 3. a number of faculty and staff excusing themselves and going home for their own peace of mind.

A week after Uvalde, as if tensions weren’t high enough, our school received a “credible” threat, we had to evacuate campus halfway through the school day and shut down all operations on campus for the remainder of the week.  The school has been reopened since, but many are on the verge of tears — if not completely in tears — yet having to move forward in an atmosphere of fear. 

Michael: They sense what we have lost.

Francesca: I trust that our administration is doing everything they can to keep us safe, and really just taking extra precautions considering the landscape of our country, but considering the troubling statistics of school shootings in the U.S. compared to all other developed countries in the world, it seems rational to be fearing for our lives. Again, this is the level of tension at a very privileged school — I can’t even imagine how others feel at more under-served schools.”

Michael: Gun violence, horrific as it is, is a symptom of something even larger that’s gone awry.  What are some of the underlying issues you see contributing to this kind of violence? 

Francesca: First and foremost, gun safety laws: They are evidently much too lenient on a national level.  We need more reasonable laws so guns don’t get into the hands of those who abuse them.

Second, the culture of policing. Studies demonstrate that campuses that have a focus on policing and punishment actually have an opposite effect from the very thing that it’s trying to do: It brings about a culture of tension and fear, resulting in more reactive and aggressive behavior in students and staff alike. The evidence-based alternative would be a focus on counseling, mental health and restorative justice.

Michael: Do you see any role that nonviolence can play in addressing these underlying causes, and any role that teachers and administrators can play? 

Francesca: I think the second point above is the most obvious nonviolence tactic we can employ in the field of education at the moment.  However, this should go hand-in-hand with the first point – pressuring civil authorities to develop gun laws immediately.  With the lives lost already, and that we’re losing every day, we should waste no more time and take action.

——

Michael Nagler is Professor emeritus of Classics and Comparative Literature at UC, Berkeley, where he co-founded the Peace and Conflict Studies Program. He is also the founder of the Metta Center for Nonviolence and author of the award-winning Search for a Nonviolent Future. His latest book is “The Third Harmony: Nonviolence & the New Story of Human Nature.”

Francesca Po, DPhil (Oxon), is a scholar of religion specializing in contemporary religion and nonreligion. She is currently a member of the Board of Directors at the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, CA, USA, and an educator at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, CA, USA. She previously served in the US Peace Corps as well as a high school campus minister, and is the co-editor of “The Study of Ministry” (2019) and “The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Peace” (2022).

Via Waging Nonviolence

(The Conversation) – Republican Eric Greitens, a candidate for Missouri’s open U.S. Senate seat, shocked viewers with a new online political ad in June 2022 that encouraged his supporters to go “RINO hunting.”

Appearing with a shotgun and a smirk, Greitens leads the hunt for RINOs, shorthand for the derisive “Republicans In Name Only.” Along with armed soldiers, Greitens is storming a house under the cover of a smoke grenade.

“Join the MAGA crew,” Greitens says in the video. “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”

The ad comes from from a candidate who has repeatedly found himself in controversy, having resigned as Missouri’s governor amid accusations of sexual assault and allegations of improper campaign financing that sparked an 18-month investigation that eventually cleared him of any legal wrongdoing.

The political ad was also launched – and quickly removed – from Facebook and flagged by Twitter at a time when the nation is still coming to terms with the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and reeling from mass shootings in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Uvalde, Texas, Buffalo, New York and Highland Park, Illinois.

The ad continues to circulate on YouTube via various news sources.

Greitens’s call to political arms is hardly new.

In his 2016 gubernatorial ads, Greitens appeared firing a Gatling-style machine gun into the air and using an M4 rifle to create an explosion in a field to demonstrate his resistance to the Obama administration.

What Greitens’ ad represents, in our view, is the evolution of the use of guns in political ads as a coded appeal for white voters.

While they might have been a bit more ambiguous in the past, candidates are increasingly making these appeals appear more militant in their culture war against ideas and politicians they oppose.

Guns as a symbol of whiteness

As communication scholars, we have studied the ways that white masculinity has influenced contemporary conservative populism.

We have also examined the ways that racial appeals to white voters have evolved under the GOP’s Southern strategy, the long game that conservatives have played since the 1960s to weaken the Democratic Party in the South by exploiting racial animus.

In some of our latest work, we have examined the ways that guns have been used in campaign ads to represent white identity politics, or what political scientist Ashley Jardina has explained as the way that white racial solidarity and fears of marginalization have manifested in a political movement.

Symbolically, guns in the U.S. have historically been linked to defending the interests of white people.

In her book “Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment,” historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz documents how America’s Founding Fathers originally conceived of the Second Amendment as protection for white frontier militias in their efforts to subdue and exterminate Indigenous people. The Second Amendment was also designed to safeguard Southern slave owners who feared revolts.

As a result, the right to bear arms was never imagined by the founders to be an individual liberty held by Indigenous people and people of color.

As illustrated in Richard Slotkin’s book “Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America,” the popular film and literary genre of the Western glamorized white, hypermasculine cowboys and gunslingers “civilizing” the wild frontier to make it safe for white homesteaders.

Drawing from this lore, contemporary gun culture romanticizes the “good guy with a gun” as the patriotic protector of the peace and a bulwark against government overreach.

Contemporary gun laws reflect a historic racial disparity concerning who is authorized and under what circumstances individuals are allowed to use lethal force.

For example, so-called “stand your ground” laws have been used historically to justify the killing of Black men, most notably in the Trayvon Martin case.

Gun control advocates Everytown for Gun Safety have found that homicides resulting from white shooters killing Black victims are “deemed justifiable five times more frequently than when the shooter is Black and the victim is white.”

Militant white identity politics

Featuring a gun in a political ad has become an easy way to get attention, but our research has found that its meaning has shifted in recent years.

In a 2010 race for Alabama agriculture commissioner, Dale Peterson was featured in an ad holding a gun, wearing a cowboy hat and talking in a deep Southern drawl about the need to challenge the “thugs and criminals” in government.

His style proved entertaining.

Though Peterson placed third in his race, political analysts like Time magazine’s Dan Fletcher raved that he created one of the best campaign ads ever.

In the same year, Arizona Republican Pam Gorman ran for U.S. Congress.

She took the use of guns in political ads even further by appearing at a backyard range and firing a machine gun, pistol, AR-15 and a revolver in the same ad.

Though she gained attention for her provocative tactics, Gorman eventually lost to Ben Quayle, son of former Vice President Dan Quayle, in a 10-candidate primary.

Aside from the shock value, guns in ads became a symbol of opposition to the Obama administration.

For instance, in 2014, U.S. congressional candidate Will Brooke of Alabama ran an online ad in a Republican primary showing him loading a copy of the Obamacare legislation into a truck, driving it into the woods and shooting it with a handgun, rifle and assault rifle.

Not done, the remains of the copy were then thrown into a wood chipper. Although Brooke lost the seven-way primary, his ad received national attention.

The call to defend a conservative way of life got increasingly bizarre – and became a common tactic for GOP candidates.

Well before Greitens, U.S. congressional candidate Kay Daly from North Carolina fired a shotgun at the end of an ad during her unsuccessful campaign in 2015 asking supporters to join her in hunting RINOs.

The ad attacked her primary opponent, incumbent Rep. Renee Elmers, a Republican from North Carolina, for funding Obamacare, “Planned Butcherhood” and protecting rights of “illegal alien child molesters.”

Before he drew the ire of Trump, Brian Kemp climbed the polls in Georgia’s race for governor in 2018 with an ad titled “Jake” in which he interviewed his daughter’s boyfriend.

Holding a shotgun in his lap as he sat in a chair, Kemp portrayed himself as a conservative outsider ready to take a “chainsaw to government regulations” and demanding respect as his family’s patriarch.

The ads of the most recent cycle build on this development of the gun as a symbol of white resistance.

Conservative GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, from Georgia, ran an ad for a gun giveaway in 2021 that she made in response to what she claimed was Biden’s arming of Islamic terrorists as well as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s allegedly sneaking the Green New Deal and other liberal legislation into a budget proposal.

Firing a weapon from a truck, she announced she would “blow away the Democrats’ socialist agenda.”

The culture wars continue

Surrounding himself with soldiers, Greitens goes further than those before him in this latest iteration of the Republican use of guns.

But his strategy is not out of the ordinary for a party that has increasingly relied on provocative images of violent resistance to speak to white voters.

Despite the violence of Jan. 6, conservatives are still digging their own trenches.

Ryan Neville-Shepard, Associate Professor of Communication, University of Arkansas and Casey Ryan Kelly, Professor of Communication Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured image:
Eric Greitens poses with a high-powered rifle and commandos in a political ad.
Eric Greitens

The Republicans in Congress, beholden to campaign money from gun companies, and the Trump Supreme Court, have both put insuperable obstacles in the way of sensible gun safety laws. It isn’t even a matter of gun control, just basic safety. Countries that don’t allow everybody and his uncle to just buy semi-automatic weapons at a department store don’t have mass shootings of the size and frequency of those in the US.

The Supreme Court just struck down a century-old requirement in New York state that if you are going to carry a concealed gun, you should explain to the state why that would be necessary. The law is in accord with English common law going back to medieval times. But this Supreme Court, being far right wing nuts, struck it down.

I wrote about this madness elsewhere:

We are peculiar. When it comes to gun violence, the United States is less like France, Britain, Italy and Japan, other members of the G7 industrialized democracies, and more like Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia. Competition for scarce resources in poor countries and weak governments drive gun violence in the latter three. But the US at least on the surface is wealthy and has a strong government.

Italy has violent criminal organizations in places like Sicily and Florence, but its rate of death from firearms is 1.31 per 100,000 residents. In 2021 793 people died in gun violence in Italy. That would be like 4,435 people dying of gun violence annually in the United States.

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KHOU 11: “Suspect in custody after deadly Highland Park July Fourth parade shooting”

The actual statistic? In 2021 45,009 Americans died of gunshot wounds, with 20,919 of those being homicides. The rest were suicides. This year’s rate is 12.21 per 100K. 1,560 of these deaths were children or teens, more than twice as many deaths by gunshot, proportionally, as were suffered by the entire UK in 2021 even when we account for the difference in its population and that of the US.

In absolute numbers, 155 people were killed by guns in 2021 in Great Britain. We polish off nearly that number of people every day with guns, in absolute numbers.

Turkey has absorbed something like 3.5 million Syrian refugees fleeing a civil war, and has endemic Turkish-Kurdish violence, suffering also from ISIL terrorism. The country is middle income but not wealthy, with a nominal per capita GDP per year of $9,539. In the US it is $63,000. Turkey’s rate of gun deaths per 100k is 1.95. In absolute numbers, people with guns killed 1,626 people last year, equivalent to 6,362 dead Americans because Turkey is only about a fourth as populous as we are.

Here’s the list of the top countries so far in 2022 by gun deaths per 100,000 residents:

Honduras 60
Venezuela 49.22
El Salvador 45.6
Eswatini 37.16
Guatemala 34.1
Jamaica 30.72
Brazil 21.9
Colombia 18.65
Panama 15.11 14.36
United States 12.21

So, you know, Swaziland and El Salvador are strange company for the United States on a key social statistic.

Iraq, including the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) confederacy, is also awash in weapons, and has been for decades. The 8.5 years of U.S. occupation if anything accelerated gun ownership. US weapons made their way into the black market, as did the guns of former Baath soldiers in the million-man army of deposed dictator Saddam Hussein. The new Iraqi army that the U.S.attempted to stand up after the Bush administration dissolved the old one was corrupt and saw substantial salary arrears, leading many soldiers to sell their weapons.

In other words, the US shaped post-Saddam Hussein Iraq in its own image. Most of Iraq’s guns have been bought on the black market and are not officially registered. In the US, people can buy guns at gun shows and privately from other individuals without a background check.

In the three northern Kurdish-majority provinces of Erbil, Dohuk and Sulaimaniyya, 70% of the residents own firearms. In the US, about a third of Americans say they own a gun, and most guns are owned by only 3% of the population.

After a rash of high-profile murders, KRG President Masrour Barzani has ordered the closing of all gun shops in Iraqi Kurdistan and the confiscation of all firearms that are not registered with the ministry of the interior, which is to say, virtually all of them.

The Kurdistan Regional Government, which rules 6-7 million people in Iraq’s northeast, had passed a law in 2019 demanding that all gun owners register their weapons within six months, after which they would become illegal. Nobody much appears to have paid attention to the law.

Safa’ al-Kubaisi at al-`Arabi al-Jadid (The New Arab) that the KRG security forces have begun implementing a campaign to confiscate all unregistered firearms and to close gun shops after President Barzani made his announcement.

On Tuesday, two professors were shot dead in Erbil by one of their students, who bought an illegal handgun on Facebook. (Does this sound familiar?)

Barzani called on courts to stop ignoring or neglecting the 2019 law, asking them to help implement the new anti-gun measures.

It is a good thing his courts are not like the US Supreme Court, or they would just tell him he can’t intervene to stop mass shootings.

Barzani said, “We will never make the security of our people and our country a victim of saboteurs, smugglers and opportunists.” He asked citizens “to turn in their unlicensed weapons to the government, and to participate in the operation to cleanse Kurdistan from these weapons.”

The ministry of interior ordered its agents “to take action to close all gun shops, and to confiscate any unlicensed weapons, so that they do not constitute a threat to the life of the citizen.”

On Friday, the governor of Sulaimaniyya closed all shops and markets selling firearms throughout that province, saying that his security forces had set up checkpoints to inspect for unlicensed weapons in cities and outside of them, so as to confiscate them. He said that every illegal firearm in shops and markets would be confiscated immediately.

An anonymous security officer told al-Arabi al-Jadid that citizens who surrendered their guns were told they would not be punished for having had them. Those, however, who refused to part with their unlicensed firearms would be hauled into court.

The Kurdistan news service Rudaw reports that even members of the Peshmerga paramilitary that serves the KRG in the place of the Iraqi national army (which is not ordinarily allowed into the confederacy) will have to surrender their weapons to an organized depot from now on when they go off-duty, rather than taking them home.

Increasing numbers of us, however, respond to the growing extremity of the moment by avoiding the latest headlines and civic engagement, fearful that some trauma will befall us, even by witnessing “the news.” As a psychotherapist who works with veterans and military families, I often speak with folks who have decided to limit their news intake or have stopped following the news altogether. Repeated mass shootings in places ranging from schools to houses of worship combined with the increased visibility and influence of militias at theoretically peaceful demonstrations can be more scarring than the wounds soldiers once sustained in combat zones.

I must admit that my family and I have sometimes practiced a similar form of political avoidance. Recently, I considered taking my two young children to the March for Our Lives gun-control event on the National Mall in Washington. However, my spouse, an active duty servicemember, urged me to reconsider. If extremists showed up, it might prove difficult for me alone to get our children out of danger. I thought better of it and stayed home.

In a country where a Republican senatorial candidate can run an ad featuring himself with an armed military tactical unit on a residential street, urging Americans to hunt “RINOS” — Republicans in Name Only, or those who criticize Trump — without widespread censure from his party, I believe my family’s fears are well founded.

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The question “What if something happens?” at a protest would never have occurred to either my spouse or me when we first met more than a decade ago.

As a human rights activist who spent years working in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, I can say that I’m now more afraid of the hair-trigger responses of right-wing Americans than I was of that Kremlin strongman’s far more carefully targeted violence. I guess the memory of the January 6th Capitol riot, insurrection, coup attempt (or any descriptor of your choice) by a mob of angry Trump supporters still weighs heavily on me.

The Devil’s in the Details

These days, it’s the mundane stuff like Republican Party meetings that contain the details we’d do well to notice. Such proceedings reveal a new level of combativeness as party leaders attempt to shape state and local laws and policies to their ever less democratic desires. For instance, Politico recently obtained recordings of Republican National Committee (RNC) operatives training thousands of volunteer poll watchers to disrupt future elections in Democratic districts of swing states like Michigan by actively challenging the eligibility of voters.

The RNC and its affiliates are linking those poll watchers to hotlines and websites that list party-friendly lawyers, police officers, and district attorneys who might be ready to stage real-time interventions during voting and vote counts. For example, district attorneys recruited by the right-wing organization the Amistad Project will be able to start investigations and issue subpoenas ever more quickly.

Of course, the RNC initiative at the polls is rooted in the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. That committee’s identification with such a lie should instantly debunk any idea that such would-be poll watchers could act fairly. The very roles of poll watcher and poll challenger are supposed to be legally different, with only poll challengers authorized to interfere in the voting process in most states, including Michigan – and then only based on facts.

Yet we’re clearly in a world where Republican leaders have begun to treat our polls as war zones. In the spirit of this moment, an RNC election-integrity officer for Michigan, Matthew Seifried, described his future poll volunteers and the public officials supporting them this way: “It’s going to be an army.” He added that his party is “going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?”

Seifried and his Michigan colleagues are anything but alone in their combative rhetoric. Such militarized language and imagery are now all-too-regularly part of our political DNA. Only recently, the Texas Republican Party released a statement refusing to recognize the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. All too typically, it also called for that state’s Republicans to “go on offense and win the fight for our country!”

In Texas and beyond, individuals expressing such anger (and sometimes a vision of a future white ethno-state as well) are gaining elected office. Surprising numbers of Republican candidates and public officials who share the view that the 2020 election was stolen also regularly echo the white racist Great Replacement Theory. Meanwhile, across the country, multiple electoral bills are being considered by Republican-controlled state legislatures that would, in the future, enable them to overturn elections.

According to the International Center for Not for Profit Law, 45 state legislatures have considered 230 bills that would criminalize the “threat” of violent leftist or Black protests. And sadly enough, far-right activists are anything but a “fringe minority” movement as they challenge the very idea of peaceful elections and public protests (that aren’t theirs).

To be sure, left-wing violence and combative rhetoric is a thing in this country, albeit a small one. The shooting of a Trump supporter by an Antifa protester in Portland, Oregon, during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in August 2020 is the lone example of a lethal attack by that left-wing group or other anti-fascists over the past 25 years. Of 450 murders by political extremists during the last decade, approximately 4% of them were committed by left-wing groups and about 75% by right-wing (white supremacist, anti-government) ones.

In my own extended family of parents, siblings, aunts, and uncles, most of whom support Trump, about half have stopped speaking to me, while some have called me “weak” and a “coward” on social media because of the ideas I discuss in essays like this, where I’ve openly criticized the U.S. government and its military. (Of note, my immediate military family and friends accept our differences far more gracefully.)

Saving Democracy

So, what are we to do? As a start, given where the Trumpist movement and much of the Republican Party seems to be heading, we really need to do something — almost anything. As Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, pointed out, facing the growing crisis on the right, “I have seen no significant increase in support from national party leaders than what we experienced in 2018” when party vigilance was significant enough but not nearly what was needed.

A headline of an article in the satirical online newspaper The Onion caught the mood of the moment among progressives: “Left Wing Group Too Disorganized for FBI Agents to Infiltrate.” In it, a fictional FBI agent says, “These people don’t ever do anything violent — they don’t ever do anything at all.”

Recently, a local Democratic candidate in Maryland knocked on my door seeking my name and contact information as a possible volunteer for his campaign. It turned out, however, he wasn’t even carrying a pen or paper. That seemed to capture the problem I often note in progressive activism these days. I gave him a couple of our first grader’s overdue library slips to write on and a marker we had lying around. And it’s sadly true that Democrats and progressives more generally lack a concerted response to right-wing anger and violence.

Ironically, one government institution that has at least made a nod toward countering right-wing violence is our military. Since the January 6th attacks, the Department of Defense under Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has acknowledged an increase in domestic extremist violence carried out by active-duty or reserve service members. In response, he initiated a multipronged strategy to screen new recruits, educate military personnel about extremism, and begin investigating extremist activity within the ranks.

While I’ve encountered my share of bigoted remarks in the five duty stations where we’ve served, I’ve also met far more people in those military communities than in civilian ones who are willing to form friendships with those of different ideological leanings. When you depend on one another for companionship and even survival, at home or abroad, you can’t be too choosy about the beliefs of your companions.

As partisan rhetoric heats up in this country, I’d say progressives are guilty of focusing too hard on the most politicized identity issues, however valuable, or even whatever asinine behavior ignites our airwaves at a given moment, be it Trump’s QAnon-style conspiracy-mongering or ex-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s groping. The problem is that, as the Trumpists ramp up their anger, if progressives don’t find a unifying message of community and love, and find it soon, the guns already out there may be put to use in unspeakable ways.

Progressives would do well to step back and think about the genuine big-tent issues like how to show everyone from white suburban women to rural farmers to Black single parents that they have so much to lose in life if we don’t have a government willing to continue regulating health care and doing so in a far better fashion. They would gain so much if, in this all-too-angry country of ours, they could refocus our attention on the importance of childcare for every family who needs it.

Above all, if they could focus in an intense way on the ever more dangerous world we’re living in, that would be a positive. Whether or not we agree on what’s causing global warming, it’s hard not to agree right now that we’re living in an ever hotter, ever more drought-stricken, ever more extreme America. Who can’t agree that it’s already damn hot and the summer’s just beginning?

Something needs to be done — and soon — to mitigate the effects of climate change, but no political campaign has yet emerged that captures the urgency and extremity (and for once I’m not thinking about Donald Trump!) of this moment. Most immediately, those of us who favor democracy and a better planet would do well to support the criminal prosecution of former President Trump because if he becomes this country’s leader again, we could find ourselves in trouble too deep to ever get out of.

And yes, on so many issues, many of us may not agree with Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, the top Republican on the House committee investigating the January 6th attacks, or even former Vice President Mike Pence, who risked his own life and his family’s to certify Joe Biden’s victory. But I agree with Democratic Representative Jaimie Raskin that they’re among the Republican heroes of this Trumpian moment (who are few and far between). As the Russian novelist and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote, “The line separating good and evil passes right through the human heart.”

Occupying the hearts of many Americans, however, is Donald Trump, a damaged man who personifies our basest instincts. He needs to be identified forcefully by leaders of all stripes as the threat to democracy he is. (Hurry up, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and bring charges against him!)

Meanwhile, we should all seek opportunities to find common ground among ideological opposites. Invite over a neighbor for dinner, even though you know he listens to conservative radio on his way to work. Help another family with childcare even though the political signs on their lawn aren’t ones you agree with. Just try to avoid the angry, armed ones or have them check their guns at the door. They’re the ones who need to change their tactics. Otherwise, judging by the flight of tens of thousands of highly skilled Russian professionals from Vladimir Putin’s war-mongering regime, I’m sure he has a few job openings for them.

If only their hatred had no place here. It’s time to be less angry and far more focused.

Copyright 2022 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com