A Culture of Violence (peace)

What do you call a country that glorifies wars and violence in the name of peace.One that’s been at war every year in its history against one or more adversaries. It has the highest homicide rate of all western nations and a passion for owning guns, yet the two seem oddly unconnected. Violent films are some of its most popular, and similar video games crowd out the simpler, more innocent street play of generations earlier. Prescription and illicit drug use is out of control as well when tobacco, alcohol and other legal ones are included.
It get’s worse. It’s society is called a “rape culture” with data showing:
— one-fourth of its adult women victims of forcible rape sometime in their lives, often by someone they know, including family members;
— one-third of them are victims of sexual abuse by a husband or boyfriend;

— 30% of people in the country say they know a woman who’s been physically abused by her husband or boyfriend in the past year;
— one in four of its women report being sexually molested in childhood, usually repeatedly over extended periods by a family member or other close relative;
— its women overall experience extreme levels of violence; an astonishing 75% of them are victims of some form of it in their lifetimes;
–domestic violence is their leading cause of injury and second leading cause of death;
— statistically, homes are their most dangerous place if men are in them as millions experience battering by husbands, male partners or fathers;
— for most women with children, there’s no escape for lack of means and because male assailants pursue them causing greater harm;
— adding further injury, its society is often unsupportive; it affords women second class status, privileges and redress when they’re abused so many suffer in silence fearing coming forward may cause more harm than help;
— its children are abused as well; millions suffer serious neglect, physical mistreatment and/or sexual abuse; many get relief only through escape to dangerous streets; they end up alone, more vulnerable and at greater danger away than at home where there, too, families act more like strangers or predators forcing young kids to flee in the first place.
What country is it where things like these are normal and commonplace; where peace, tranquility and safety are illusions; where they’re crowded out by foreign wars and violence at home in communities, neighborhoods, schools, throughout the media and in core families.
What kind of country glorifies mass killing, assaults and abuse; one that looks down on pacifist non-violence as sissy or unpatriotic, yet claims to be peace loving. It’s not in the third world, under dictatorship or controlled by religious extremists. It’s the “land of the free and home of the brave, America the Beautiful” where human rights, civil liberties, common dignity and personal safety are more illusion than fact. More on this below.
War As “the Ultimate Economic Shock Therapy”
Mahdi Nazemroaya writes in his August 29 “War and the ‘New World Order’ ” article on Global Research.ca that war is “the ultimate (and most effective) economic shock therapy (that can) change societies and reshape nations,” and that America today is embarked on achieving a long-standing vision for “global ascendancy” and supremacy. For the Trilateral Commission of “powerful” US, EU and Japanese “elites,” its operative 1973 founding goal was a “New International Economic Order.” For George HW Bush it became the “New World Order,” and for GW Bush a permanent state of war for global hegemony.
Nazemroaya writes America’s “foreign policy is based on economic interests” with military might used to enforce them. He states various US administrations have pursued “An (unbroken) agenda of perpetual warfare and violence (for) global domination through economic means.” George Bush’s current “war on terrorism” in the Middle East and Central Asia are just “stepping stones” toward that “global order” unipolar Pax Americana vision under which no nation is exempt.
It’s nearly always been this way in a nation addicted to war and a culture of violence that’s as commonplace at home as in foreign conflicts. It’s in our DNA, our schools and reinforced through the media with seductive symbols and slogans glorifying wars for peace, their warriors, and righteousness of waging them. They’re packaged as liberating ones, promoting democracy, and spreading the benefits of western civilization.
We’re taught our essential goodness and what Edward Herman calls our status as an “indispensable state” that lets us do what no other nation may – wage perpetual wars for an elusive peace in the name of freedom and justice for all we preach but don’t practice. We manipulate false notions of exceptionalism and moral superiority giving us the right to spread our ways to others while hiding our darker imperial side delivered through the barrel of a gun. It shames the notion of a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
Expansionism and Militarism: An American Tradition
Expansionism has always been our way and militarism our method. It’s been since winning the West meant taking it from the millions there thousands of years earlier. No matter. “Manifest Destiny” meant a divine right for settlers only to enjoy the nation’s “spacious skies….amber waves of grain….and purple mountain majesties….from sea to shining sea.” Others already there had to go, and mass slaughter was the method.
Our forefathers loathed Native Indians, and George Washington showed it in his language. He called them “red savages,” compared them to wolves and “beasts of prey,” and aimed to exterminate the Onieda people who aided him in his darkest hours at Valley Forge. He also dispatched General John Sullivan and 5000 troops against the noncombatant Onondaga people with orders to destroy their villages, homes, fields, food supplies, cattle herds, orchards and then annihilate them and seize their land.
Hitler modeled his “Final Solution” on the “American Holocaust.” He targeted Untermenschen (subhumans) and Slavs he called “redskins.” We know what happened. Raphael Lemkin called it “genocide” as he first defined it in 1944 to mean:
“the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group” that corresponds to other terms like “tyrannicide, homocide, infanticide, etc.” Genocide “does not necessarily mean the….destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings….It is intended….to signify a coordinated plan (to destroy the) the essential foundations of the life of national groups” with intent to destroy them. Genocidal plans involve the disintegration of….political and social institutions, culture, language, national feelings, religion….economic existence, personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and” human lives.
Throughout our history, it’s been our way, and since 1990, three US Presidents waged genocidal war in Iraq to erase the “cradle of civilization” and remake it in our own image. Two and a half million are dead and counting from it, the country is plagued by out-of-control violence, one-third of its people need emergency aid, millions go hungry, and a once prosperous nation is now a surreal lawless occupied wasteland with few or no essential services like electricity, clean water, medical care, fuel and most everything else needed for sustenance and survival. That’s the ugly face of “genocide” in real time.