The US Empire Is A Self-Reinforcing Trauma
Factory
By Caitlin Johnstone
May 28, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - American corporate media are having a field day
with a rise in violent crime across the country,
seizing on the opportunity to declare that it proves
last year’s calls to defund police have been
thoroughly invalidated. They’ve been making these
claims despite the absence of any evidence that
these two things are connected, and despite the fact
that no actual police departments have been
meaningfully defunded at all.
“Defund
the police encounters resistance as violent crime
spikes” blares a new headline from CNN, which
then admits that “One year since a nationwide
movement sparked calls for slashing police funding
in favor of other nontraditional forms of public
safety, it’s not clear whether any city achieved
anything resembling what protesters demanded:
massively defunded or abolished police departments.”
“There has not been a universal defund movement
across major cities,” executive director of the
Major Cities Chiefs Association Laura Cooper says
later in the article. “I think there was a little
bit of retooling of the department budgets, but I
can’t say that defund has actually played out.”
The complete and total absence of any evidentiary
basis for the claim that defunding police
departments caused a spike in violent crime hasn’t
stopped Murdoch outlets Fox News and Sky News from
airing
segment after
segment after
segment after
segment advancing that exact claim, while
The New York Times tells us in an article
titled “A Year
After George Floyd: Pressure to Add Police Amid
Rising Crime” that “The surge is prompting
cities whose leaders embraced the values of the
movement last year to reassess how far they are
willing to go to reimagine public safety and divert
money away from the police and toward social
services.”
Right guys. Violent crime can only be the result
of this imaginary alternate reality in which there
are fewer
worthless police officers patrolling American
streets. Couldn’t possibly have anything to do with
the fact that this is a nation with
the worst income inequality in the developed
world, where people are being squeezed harder than
ever in a pandemic which the government did
virtually nothing to help them through financially.
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Violent crime has a
direct causal relationship with childhood
trauma; not everyone with childhood trauma is a
violent criminal, but violent criminals are
overwhelmingly victims of childhood trauma. Growing
up in crushing poverty
is inherently traumatizing; spending your
formative years saturating in an environment of
lack, stress, desperation and difficulty coping
causes deep psychological scarring that takes a lot
of inner work to heal, inner work that most people
in poverty simply don’t have the luxury of time and
energy for.
The US status quo is inherently traumatizing,
because a status quo which maintains a permanent
underclass working for
slave wages 100 percent guarantees generation
after generation of highly traumatized people. This
in turn guarantees more violent crime, which in turn
has led to the
largest prison population on the planet. Prison
is itself an
inherently traumatizing place to be. They
traumatize each new generation, guaranteeing more
and more cops and more and more prisons year after
year.
Hurt people hurt people, and the US status quo is
like a factory conveyor belt churning out generation
after generation of hurt people. Those who support
the status quo politics of the Democratic Party or
the Republican Party are choosing to support this
abusive dynamic.
And that’s just domestic policy. Every aspect of
the US-centralized empire is inherently
traumatizing, and it gets a lot worse outside US
borders. If growing up poor in America is
traumatizing, think how it must be for children who
are deliberately
starved by US sanctions in Venezuela or
US-backed blockades in Yemen. Think how it must
be for the children in Gaza as US-sponsored
explosives
kill their family members. Think how it must be
for survivors of America’s “war on terror” in the
Middle East and Africa.
The trauma inflicted by the “war on terror” is a
self-reinforcing feedback loop which creates more
extremism which in turn is used to justify more
bombings and more military expansionism in those
regions. Suicide bombings have been unequivocally
shown to be almost entirely the result of
western interventionism; they were simply a
non-issue in Iraq and Afghanistan prior to US
invasions there for example. The “war on terror” is
not only terrorism itself, it is an established fact
that it
actually creates more of the type of terrorism it
purports to eliminate.
And why wouldn’t it? Why wouldn’t destroying and
destabilizing entire nations cause people to want to
fight back against you? It is self-evident that it
would, just using your own empathy and understanding
of human nature. As Jonathan Marshall wrote
for Consortium News in 2017:
The most authoritative new study of the
sources of terrorism and insurgency on the
continent,Journey
to Extremism in Africa (September
2017), finds that what triggers many individuals
to join violent groups are incidents of
government-sponsored violence, such as “killing
of a family member or friend” or “arrest of a
family member or friend.”
“These findings throw into stark relief the
question of how counter-terrorism and wider
security functions of governments in at-risk
environments conduct themselves with regard to
human rights and due process,” concludes the
report, based on interviews with more than 500
former members of militant organizations.
“State security-actor conduct is revealed as
a prominent accelerator of recruitment, rather
than the reverse. . . These findings suggest
that a dramatic reappraisal of state
security-focused interventions is urgently
required.”
Numerous other experts have drawn similar
conclusions from conflict zones in the Middle
East and Asia. In 2008, a RAND Corporation
report on Lessons
for Countering al-Qa’ida warned the
U.S. military to “resist being drawn into combat
operations in Muslim societies, since its
presence is likely to increase terrorist
recruitment. . . . Military force usually has
the opposite effect from what is intended: It is
often overused, alienates the local population
by its heavy-handed nature, and provides a
window of opportunity for terrorist-group
recruitment.”
Similarly, theStimson
Task Force on U.S. Drone Policy,
composed of former senior officials of the CIA,
Defense Department and State Department, warned
in 2014 that U.S. strikes had strengthened
radical Islamic groups in the Middle East,
Africa and South Asia.
Tens Of Millions Of People Displaced By The ‘War On Terror’, The Greatest Scam Ever Invented
A new report has found that at least 37 million people (a conservative estimate) have been displaced as a result of America's so-called “war on terror” since 9/11https://t.co/MsFul5zf7L
The status quo of the US empire guarantees that
there will always be new offenders to imprison, new
extremists to bomb, new justifications for
blockades, sanctions and apartheid oppression. Every
aspect of it creates traumatized people, whose
resultant behavior is then cited to justify the
existence of the power structure which caused their
trauma in the first place.
And then Hollywood goes and makes movies about
the heroic cops arresting the violent criminals,
about the brave soldiers killing the evil
terrorists, while in real life the criminals and
terrorists only exist because of the trauma
inflicted upon them by the same force that pays the
cops and soldiers, and
Hollywood is a US propaganda operation.
And those who support all this, those who support
Democrats and Republicans and believe what the
mainstream news media tell them, are called
“moderates”. Supporters of a self-reinforcing trauma
generation machine, with all its wars, starvation
sanctions, nuclear brinkmanship, economic
oppression, corporate exploitation, and ecocide for
profit, are “moderates”, looking down their noses at
traumatized populations and hoping the armed goon
squads arrive in time to put them away
or put them down.
The US empire is evil. The status quo is evil. We
must end these evil things before they end us.
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