[“Speaking Truth To Empower]
Colin Benjamin: “Unfortunately, many who are now decrying the crisis in domestic gun violence have been either woefully unaware—or don’t care when American killing machines are hurting people elsewhere.”
Photo: YouTube
The most racist president of our lifetime is now being widely vilified in the wake of the deadly mass murder that left 22 people dead in El Paso, Texas, last weekend by White supremacist Patrick Crusius.
Donald Trump’s race-baiting incitement and invectives against Mexican immigrants—whom he characterizes as murderers, rapists, and drug-dealers—is emboldening White nationalists to act violently on their bigotry. Trump’s racist rhetoric is now “a clear and present danger” to America.
In 2020, we must excise this cancer from the White House.
But the odious racism Trump spews was around long before he crawled out of the sewer. Moreover, the gun violence that took the lives of 22 humans in El Paso, Texas; and 9 victims in Dayton, Ohio; stem from a deep psychosis within the sick psyche of many White American men.
Therefore, if we’re to have a deeper thoughtful discussion on American gun violence, we must admit the country has a more fundamental problem: the unhealthy glorification of guns, and violence. To honestly address this, it is essential we dispel lies and myths ingrained in the foundation of this nation.
Trump, in his Monday teleprompter speech, blamed video games and the “dark recesses of the Internet” for the recent mass murders. The “dark recesses” of the minds of certain White men, not video games, is what we should be concerned with. Aren’t our violent video games, cartoons, movies, etc., but a reflection of our glorification of violence?
The awful truth is the glorification of violence—along with attendant rabid racism—is a signature feature of American history.
From the very beginning, violence and racism have been central components of America. Violence was used to massacre Native Americans so White Europeans could control their land. Violence was then used to exploit the labor of Black Africans to make America economically great. And gun violence was indispensable in suppressing Native Americans and in oppressing Black slaves.
Here we need to slaughter one of America’s sacred cows: the cherished Second Amendment.
Americans are taught the Founding Fathers bestowed the Second Amendment upon them as citizens who have a “right to bear arms.” This is dangerously false.
Although the Second Amendment was first written in 1789, its quick ratification on December 15, 1791, seems to have been a clear response to the Haitian slave uprising that erupted during the hot, bloody, August summer of 1791. The slave-owning Founding Fathers were apparently worried the Haitian Revolution would ignite slave rebellions here. The adoption of the Second Amendment helped institutionalize and normalize the arming of average White men to protect, among other things, the slave property of plantation owners. The “well-regulated militia” the Second Amendment’s opening clause talks about often served a dual function as Slave Patrols.
Those who think the Second Amendment was about granting individual gun rights to Americans, should answer this question: why is the word people not capitalized, in the phraseology of the Second Amendment—while the words Militia, State and Arms are?
Opportunistically, the NRA, and the merchants of murder and mayhem, in the military-industrial complex, hide behind fictitious misunderstandings regarding the Second Amendment, because the glorification of violence has made them very wealthy. Political hustlers especially, but not exclusively within the Republican Party, hide behind the “sanctity of the Second Amendment” to serve their donor-daddies in the NRA.
America’s deadly love affair with guns was used to expropriate the land, and resources, of others often in our nation’s early history—laying the groundwork for the importance of weapons manufacturers.
After the subjugation of Native Americans, and while White American elites were becoming rich by exploiting Black Africans in America, Latin American and Caribbean countries then became targets of American imperialism. And as America’s military might mushroomed, this allowed it to also exploit our Latin American and Caribbean neighbors using policies like the Monroe Doctrine.
What is now not being discussed is how America’s Latin American foreign policy created much of the economic misery that causes Latinos to seek a better life here.
“Manifest Destiny” led our country to mass murder many Mexicans and take those parts of America that now makeup: Arizona, California, Colorado, Kansas, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming.
This is ironic given all the talk now about people invading America from the Mexican border. One can only wonder what Indigenous Americans think when they hear White Americans complaining about an invasion. In the South Pacific, in places like Hawaii and the Philippines, the native people there surely have their own tales to tell about who invaded their countries.
Many Americans are now rightly outraged by the murderous actions of El Paso gunman Patrick Crusius and by Dayton killer Connor Betts. But Crusius, and Betts, are far from anomalies.
Repeatedly, across the country, we witness White men resorting to violence and murder when things aren’t going their way. Whose fault is it so many White men believe gun violence is the best way to settle conflicts?
Which leads us to this: hasn’t violence always been the primary form of conflict resolution for White American males?
Many politicians are now denouncing the violence that have left so many Americans dead. But many of these politicians remain silent about the violence that is often sanctioned by American foreign policy. Our get-tough politicians are often threatening to bomb some country “back to the stone age.” Those advocating diplomacy are often characterized as weak.
There are many non-White people from so-called “Second World” and “Third World” countries who have been massacred and terrorized by the American Military, or, by weapons of war labeled “made in America.” Even worse, we have an unwholesome habit of giving high honors, praise and medals to our soldiers for killing people “over there,”—without thinking of the message this sends to young American men here.
Timothy McVeigh was denounced for committing the worst act of domestic terrorism when he killed 168 people on April 19, 1995, in Oklahoma. But what is often omitted is that Sgt. McVeigh received several medals, including a Bronze Star, for killing people when he served in the Army, during the Gulf War.
America has approximately 800 military bases around the world, in about 70 countries. Are all these bases necessary, or, does it allow the military-industrial complex to maintain their monetary gain from endless wars? Interestingly, because of the greed of our war-profiteers, they are always looking for new markets for their surplus of “kill-man” machinery.
Ironically, this means that the carnage American foreign policy has caused abroad is now blowing back domestically, because of avarice. Unfortunately, many who are now decrying the domestic gun violence crisis have been either woefully unaware—or don’t care when American killing machines are hurting people elsewhere.
Also, why is there far less outrage about the slow genocide being committed against Black America because of racial policing? Why doesn’t that animate most of the Democrats who are now decrying gun violence in the aftermath of El Paso and Dayton?
Why aren’t they speaking about the “Ghost Skin” White supremacists—that the FBI tells us are infiltrating police departments?
The mass murders in El Paso, and Dayton, make it very easy to denounce gun violence and a racist reprobate like Donald Trump. But racism and gun violence have always been a blight on the soul of White America.
Sadly, Trump’s Presidency is encouraging, domestically, more of the racist terrorism that African-Americans, and non-White countries, have always suffered from the bloody hands of White American males.
