Living With Perpetual Violence

Living With Perpetual Violence

Jacob G. Hornberger

Notwithstanding the near-assassination of former President Trump, I could not help but find a bit of humor in the response of Republicans, Democrats, and mainstream-press commentators to the shooting — the response that says that there is no room for political violence in American society.

Are they kidding? How can any reasonable person not guffaw at that statement? Ever since the U.S. government was converted into a national-security state form of government after World War II, perpetual political violence — as well as the threat of political violence — has formed the basis of America’s governmental system.

It’s impossible to know exactly how many people that the U.S. government has killed in the last  75 years but it has to number in the millions. That’s nothing to scoff at. That’s a lot of dead people. When it comes to killing, there is no doubt that the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA have made America Number One.

Invasions, occupations, wars of aggression, undeclared wars, coups, state-sponsored assassinations, bombings, shootings, kidnappings, torture, indefinite detention, dark sites, Gitmo, inciting conflicts between other nations, alliances with and foreign aid to brutal regimes, the drug war, the war on immigrants, sanctions, embargoes, and more.

Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Iran, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Grenada, Congo, Chile, South America, the Cold War, Operation Condor, MKULTRA, Iraq 1, Afghanistan, Iraq 2, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, and much more. Everywhere one looks, one sees death. If we go back to the immediate prelude to the national-security state, we see Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And of course, it’s not just death. It’s also injuries and maiming, oftentimes permanent. And then there is the massive destruction of people’s homes and businesses, along with the infrastructure of their countries.

The idea the whole time has been that so long as the deaths are of people “over there,” the American people need not concern themselves or have to deal with their consciences here at home. Americans could continue living their normal lives, producing the wealth that could be taxed to continue funding the U.S. perpetual death machine over there.

There are also the U.S. sanctions and embargoes that target innocent people with death, economic impoverishment, and starvation as a way to achieve political goals. North Korea, Russia, Iran, and Cuba come to mind.

One might respond that the United States isn’t killing any foreigners today. But of course it is. The Pentagon and the CIA are killing Russian soldiers en masse by using Ukrainian soldiers as their proxy. Sure, it’s not American soldiers who are dying but it is Ukrainian soldiers who are dying in what is clearly a Pentagon/CIA war against Russia. Massive death, suffering, and destruction in Ukraine and Russia at the hands of the U.S. death machine.

Let’s not forget that assassination is still a tool that the Pentagon and the CIA resort to when they consider it necessary. It’s also worth recalling the recent ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court granting immunity to the president — and implicitly the Pentagon and the CIA — for state-sponsored assassinations of both Americans and foreigners.

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