By Elizabeth Keyes

February 05, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -   In Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller, Shadow of a Doubt, spunky, recent high school grad Teresa Wright discovers her beloved uncle is a serial killer.

Wright’s subsequent efforts to protect herself and others from psychopathic Joseph Cotten are continually frustrated by the extraordinary denial of her family and her community lost in the “thrall” of the worldly, smooth-talking Uncle Charlie.

Heartbroken and distraught, she must contend with her uncle’s violent agenda while being obstructed by a naive and vulnerable community of his enablers and/or soon to be victims.

Wright’s horrifying predicament resonates as I witness my – our – psychopathic uncle – UNCLE SAM, the U.S. government – perpetrate violent crime upon crime against humanity enabled by a maddening, morally mute, over-trusting, under-informed and/or indifferent citizenry.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully wrap my mind or heart around the profound lack of outrage and empathy among government leaders from both corporate parties, the corporate media, as well as the vast majority of my fellow citizens at the ongoing atrocities of the Global War on Terror (more accurately, the “US Global War of Terror”) and the “regime change” covert and/or overt operations initially and sinisterly described as “humanitarian interventions.”

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 seemingly justified a “gloves off” bloodlust defiance by the political and military “guardians” of America of the legal and moral pillars of our democracy.  All these years since, the mandates for constitutional and moral justice “for all” have gone unheeded.

The Iraq war was launched illegally and with manipulative lies.  Bush’s torture program was in total opposition to constitutional, international and moral law.  Its perpetrators deserved serious prosecution.

The Geneva Conventions were ratified once upon a time by a U.S. Congress.  Habeas corpus, in place since 1679, so cavalierly suspended with the GWOT’s “anything goes” rationale.

When such gobsmacking evil manifests on such a collective and global level for such a sustained amount of time, it deserves a serious analysis by those of us still spiritually awake enough to protest it.

At this point in my concerned citizenship, I am moving beyond anger into an awe of the scope of the – well – I call it downright and seriously unchallenged EVIL. Looking for a more clinical term than that?  How about patriarchal psychopathology?