Terrorists Are Us: Arizona, U.S.A. | ||
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The BBC radio host and non-American guests wanted to sound civil, objective, as they discussed another shooting rampage in the U.S. The Wild Wild West. Arizona. The OK Corral! John Wayne and Gary Cooper. The host and guests stumbled over the contradictions - the 2nd Amendment, the right to bare arms and shocked and grieving Americans, holding candles, placing flowers at a makeshift memorial to the dead and wounded. The U.S. media has perfected its marketing of “Black violence” to the world behind the guise of white innocence, but this marketing strategy worked for only so long, however. The world is wiser. Even before Hollywood chronicled chivalry’s expansion from the South to the West and labeled the “frontier” gun-battles the “western” and packaged this product for the world to see with pride, the historians told of defeat in the south. Who and what was defeated? Terror removed indigenous peoples from their land, terror kidnapped and enslaved African and assisted in exploiting their labor. There is no need to look to the Nazis or to Al Qaeda. It is here, has always been here in the blood as it has been about blood. Miscegenation. Impurity. The “very creation of the Ku-Klux Klan, looking primarily, of course, to efficient action, perhaps had in it always some lingering will to the retention of such control as normally inheres in semi-military organization”, W.J. Cash writes in The Mind of the South. It was always first and foremost about the blood, fear of contamination that drove poor tenant farmers, not only to forego his/her own interests, but also to turn his weapons on the “escaped” enslaved and later the “freed” enslaved Black. “Yeoman and cracker turned to the planter, waited eagerly upon his signal as to what to think and do” [and Americans ask: why did the average German submit to Nazism?] because he [the planter] was their obvious indicated captain in the great common cause.” Even before the South’s defeat, visitors to the South equated the plantation to “little camp[s]” where the Master behaved as a “victorious warrior over a vanquished foe” (John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 1800-1861). Franklin continues, “…the connection between slavery and the martial spirit was almost universally recognized.” Actual organized, militarized terrorism preceded the FBI’s narratives of terrorism on U.S. soil. “Freedom,” consequently, “for the slave ‘would have virtually destroyed the institution’” of slavery,’” cites Franklin. But “freedom” for the planters and tenant farmers from fear was also unthinkable. The enforcement of terrorism was as normal as drinking water, here in the U.S. What was defeated in the Civil War? What is defeated in any war the U.S. has engaged in? Nothing! After the Civil War, the practice of terrorism had a different look. Instead of scarred Black backs scattered in cotton fields, strange fruits hung from hundreds of trees. The U.S. Calvary packed their weapons and headed West - slaughtering indigenous men, women, and children along the way. In just one mass attack against indigenous people, 200 men, women, and children were killed at the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 and Americans celebrated the victory of the killers. Maybe, some still do. American “heroes” became “heroes” in their use of violence, as did Teddy Roosevelt, who exported the American Brand of terrorism to other lands where the “discovery” of impure blood, along with material resources, institutionalized the idea of Manifest Destiny among the U.S. citizenry. “At the very time that imperialism was sweeping the country, the doctrine of racism reached a crest of acceptability and popularity among respectable scholarly and intellectual circles,” (C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow). When has white terrorism not been the norm, the necessary violence needed in the world to control the violence of all challengers? Bush Jr. and Cheney unmasked the marketing strategy. Who was surprised when 22-year old Jarred Loughner appeared at that supermarket in Tucson, Arizona, on Saturday, January 8, 2011 with a 9mm Glock handgun? Who cannot recognize the American brand of homegrown terrorism? The exporting of American fear of the impure prevents Americans from recognizing their own “impurity.” Here, citizens are arrested for attempting to leave bottle water for migrants along the southwest border. Here, military invasions into other lands to effect regime change and procure resources and cheap labor. Here, the incarceration of Black and Brown citizens makes the U.S. the prison capital of the world while, according to the National Rifle Association, a most favored association here in the U.S., 250 million citizens own handguns, more than any other nation (cited in Bill Quigley’s “Serious Guns and White Terrorism: Two Unasked Questions in Tucson Mass Murder”). Here is a nation that will torture men and women and murder children aboard as it has and continues to do here. Its export of weaponry and war is its claim to fame and its narrative of violence is documented in its films and popular music. It pays more money to contract killers than it does to teachers or nurses. Who was surprised that yet another young white took up the battle cry and went firing at a Congress woman for whom former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s website marked in the symbol of a rifle’s crosshairs? What democrat recently called for the death of Julian Assange who has been openly called the “enemy” of the U.S.? America is “the greatest purveyor of violence,” Dr. Martin L. King Jr. said over for 40 years ago. Violence has never been defeated in any war the U.S. has waged; violence only proliferates thanks to the U.S.’s indulgence in its use. Terrorism in the U.S. is not limited to “right-wingers” or those who call themselves democrats or moderates; it is the inheritance of the U.S. citizenry - only whites in the U.S. see themselves as “innocent” as the young Loughner saw himself when he picked up his 9mm Glock and left for the supermarket that Saturday morning. Taxpayers pay for terrorism, so what does that make each taxpayer? Is each taxpayer guilty of adding and abetting terrorists who order and strategize ways of maiming and killing people? Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s “extremists” are those Muslims strapped to explosives but not a superpower nation strapped to racial fantasies of the “other” as the “enemy.” Whatever the political party, politicians and the media here in the U.S. endorse taxpayers’ belief in their innocence, and hence, they are the last to know that terrorism is an American tradition, like apple pie - “innocent”! The incendiary language of media propagandists such as Limbaugh and O’Reilly or of Democratic and Republican politicians such as Palin or Obama (in his defense of Israel’s terrorist policies against the Palestinians, for example) is the outcome of a denied and covered up history of violence. By the way, verbal statements can be violent if statements such as those uttered by the Catholic Church proclaiming the inhumanity of Africans results in genocide or enslavement. And what do you call it when a people are weakened through deliberate institutional neglect and misinformation that results in the repression of their history and spirit to resist tyranny? On any given morning in the United States, Wall Street keeps watch over its profit margins, Lockheed Martin orders the shipment of another fighter plane, a military recruiting office celebrates reaching its enlistment quota, teachers, innocent teachers, omit the uncomfortable from the history lesson for the day, and a bullet, a drone, or a bomb made in the U.S.A. makes its way to the “enemy” - and the nation will not stop to mourn these deaths. BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels. |
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Terrorism is NOT a tactic limited to swarthy brown people of the Islamic faith who speak Persian or Arabic
