|
A Culture of Violence
By Stephen Lendman
09/26/07 "ICH" -- -- 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.
Native peoples were its earlier victim. Puritans saw them as
"brutes, devils" and "devil-worshippers" in a godless, howling
wilderness filled with evil spirits and "dangerous wild beasts."
They were targeted for removal as settlers moved west. They
cleansed the land through violence, bloodletting and 40 Native
Indian wars from 1622 - 1900 to win the West, North and South.
Wars became our national pastime, and we've waged them like
sport ever since in an endless unbroken cycle.
We fought four imperial ones as well from 1689 to 1763 with
England, France, Spain and Holland. Throughout the period,
numerous settler outbreaks and insurrections arose that were
also put down along with dozens of riots. Then there were the
major wars we know by name. First was the American War of
Independence (or Revolutionary War) from 1775 - 83. A minority
of colonists supported it, little changed, and the outcome
repackaged Crown rule under new management.
The so-called War of 1812 (to early 1815) was more about
American expansionism than Brits impressing our seamen.
"Manifest Destiny" then became a catch phrase when Jacksonian
Democrats proclaimed it in 1845 as the nation's "destiny" for
all the land "from sea to shining sea." It was packaged as a
noble mission, propagated as ruling orthodoxy, and used to
justify other acquisitions.
We then headed south of the border from 1846 - 1848 in what
Mexicans called "la invasion estadounidense" that easily
self-translates as the US invasion. It was our Mexican War that
began after the annexation of Texas and ended with the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo. It forced Mexico to cede half its country to
avoid losing it all in what's now Texas, California, Arizona,
New Mexico, Nevada, and parts of Wyoming and Utah. The country
is still cursed the way former Mexican dictator, Porfirio Diaz,
meant when he said: "Poor Mexico, so far from God, and so close
to the United States." Today that holds for all nations with a
rogue superpower on the march and liberty and justice nowhere in
sight.
Nor was it earlier when wars had similar aims as now with one
exception. The Civil War from 1861 - 1865 was sort of a family
squabble. Some squabble. Before it ended, it was our bloodiest
ever. Three million were in it and over 600,000 died at a time
the total population was 31 million, including 4 million slaves.
That was double the battle deaths from WW II when 12 million
fought from a population of 132 million, and if the same
proportionate number had perished it would have been around 2.5
million.
Next came the Spanish-American War against Spain. In 1897,
Theodore Roosevelt (as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and later
1906 Nobel Peace Prize laureate) wrote a friend...."I should
welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one," and
the next year it began. We won, they lost and America had its
coming out party on a world stage. A half century later, we
control much of it, want the rest, and plan, as a birthright, to
take it as disdainfully as our forefathers.
The war with Spain was quick and little more than a skirmish for
three and a half months. It was our first offshore imperial
foray netting us control of Cuba as a de facto colony for
starters. Following the war, Congress passed the Platt Amendment
in 1901. It granted us jurisdictional right to intervene freely
in Cuban affairs and ceded Guantanamo Bay (as a coaling or naval
station only) to the US in perpetuity (provided annual rent is
paid) unless later terminated by mutual consent of both
countries. It was just the beginning.
We also took the Philippines (slaughtering 200,000 of its
people), Hawaii, Haiti, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Dominican
Republic, Samoa, assorted other territories later and the Canal
Zone from Colombia to fulfill Theodore Roosevelt's dream to link
the Atlantic and Pacific with a canal across its isthmus.
Woodrow Wilson was reelected in 1916 on a campaign promise: "He
Kept Us Out of War." He lied. He wanted war and established the
Committee on Public Information under George Creel in 1917 to
get it. It turned a pacifist nation into raging German-haters,
America declared war in April, 1917 and was in it until it ended
in November, 1918. This writer's dad fought in France and
returned unharmed. The US empire was on a roll.
Today, mainstream historians perceive Wilson as a liberal
Democrat. He was quite opposite, and his imperial record alone
proves it. He occupied Haiti in 1915 beginning 20 hellish years
for its people until Franklin Roosevelt withdraw US forces in
1934. He sent US troops to Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic,
and in 1914 invaded Mexico, occupying its main seaport city of
Veracruz. It was a dress rehearsal for WW I and might have
become a full-scale war had Wilson not pulled US forces out
ahead of the greater conflict he aimed for in Europe.
The defining event of the 20th century was WW II from which the
US emerged the only dominant nation left standing. We became the
world's unchallengeable superpower as though we planned it that
way, which we did. From it emerged our "imperial grand strategy"
under the Truman Doctrine as well as a plan for US global
military and economic dominance. The Cold War began with
"containment" the policy. The US empire was on a roll and would
never look back.
US Imperialism Post-WW II
When the Cold War ended in 1991, George HW Bush's Defense
Secretary Dick Cheney and undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz were
tasked to shape a new strategy that emerged in 1992 as the
Defense Planning Guidance or Wolfowitz Doctrine. It was so
extreme, it was kept under wraps, but not for long. It was
leaked to the New York Times causing uproar enough for the elder
Bush to shelve it until the neoconservative think tank Project
for a New American Century (PNAC) revived it in a document
called "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and
Resources for a New Century." It was an imperial plan for global
dominance for well into the future to be enforced with
unchallengeable military power. It became the blueprint for the
"war on terror" and all the hot ones planned to wage it.
WW II was more a beginning than an end to war. The US kept Korea
and Vietnam divided and targeted independent-minded leaders. It
was part of our imperial designs on East Asia that included
containing Soviet Russia as well as China. It led us to incite
civil wars in Korea and Vietnam expecting both times to prevail
but were stalemated in one and lost the other.
North Korea's Fatherland Liberation War began June 25, 1950 when
the DPRK retaliated in force following months of US influenced
Republic of Korean (ROK) provocations. It ended in an uneasy
cease-fire July 27, 1953 and is still unresolved to this day.
The North and South are technically at war, the US refuses to
negotiate an honorable peace, and 57 years later 37,000 American
forces are in the South with no intention to leave.
Korea taught us nothing. Vietnam was next, and now we're
embroiled in Iraq and Afghanistan with a potentially disastrous
war looming against Iran. It proves Ben Franklin right that "The
definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over,
expecting different results." Adventurism in Vietnam began under
Truman and Eisenhower supporting France. It expanded full-blown
under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon before ending in a
humiliating final pullout from the US Saigon Embassy rooftop
April 30, 1975.
The 1980s brought more conflict with Ronald Reagan's war against
"international terrorism." He invaded tiny Grenada in 1983
against a left-leaning regime for a pro-western one we
installed. Scorched earth proxy wars then upped the stakes in
Central America, Afghanistan, Africa and the Middle East. We
tread lightly nowhere, and these conflicts left hundreds of
thousands dead and immiserated in the name of democracy,
humanitarian intervention, and the benefits of western
civilization by our method of choice - gun barrels blazing.
GHW Bush then followed with Panama his prey. He deposed its
leader, then targeted Saddam for the only crime that mattered -
disobeying the lord and master of the universe and its rules of
imperial management, especially Rule No. 1: We're boss, and what
we say goes.
The Gulf war followed with 12 crushing years of sanctions its
legacy. They left 1.5 million Iraqis dead and the living
devastated. The current cycle of permanent wars began post-9/11
in October, 2001. First came the Taliban with Iraq ahead as the
prime target of choice. It's huge oil reserves made it the most
sought after real estate on earth with a plan to seize them
simple at its core - a bold new experiment to erase a nation and
create a new one by invasion, occupation and reconstruction for
pillage. It would transform Iraq into a fully privatized free
market paradise with blank check public funding for profit but
none for Iraqis for essential needs, a sustainable economy or
critical local infrastructure.
It's been a disaster with the toll on Iraqis horrific - an
inferno of uncontrolled violence throughout the country with new
British O.R.B. independent polling data estimating 1.2 million
Iraqi deaths since March, 2003 on top of the 1.5 million others
since 1990. The war is now longer in duration than WWs I or II
and will likely exceed the latter one in inflation-adjusted cost
before it ends. It's not in sight thanks to a complicit
Democrat-led Congress that's long on theater but short on action
it can take but won't. Allied with the administration, it
flaunts public demands to end the war, bring home the troops,
and will shortly accede to another Bush supplemental request for
billions more in funding.
Public sentiment might be stronger if Jeff Nygaard's June, 2007
Z Magazine article titled "The Secret Air Wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan" got wider play, so here's hoping this article gives
it some. He explained US Central Command Air Forces (CENTAF)
posts its daily "airpower summaries" online that makes for
horrifying reading "aside (from) the blatant propaganda."
Nygaard explained "relentless" air attacks against Iran and
Afghanistan have gone on for years - on average 75 - 100 each
day against both countries. It's a huge unreported story in the
dominant media. The death toll is unknown, he says, "but a
reasonable estimate" is between 100,000 - 150,000 in Iraq alone,
and it's anyone's guess in Afghanistan. That's on top of all
other war-related deaths estimated in both countries.
Further, these attacks exclude "guided missiles and unguided
rockets fired....cannon rounds (and) munitions used by some
Marine Corps and other 'coalition' aircraft or any of the Army's
helicopter gunships (plus) munitions used by the armed
helicopters of the many 'private (mercenary hired gun) security
contractors' flying their own missions in Iraq." If the true
human toll were known, it might be shockingly above the most
gruesome current estimates and growing daily.
The public has a right to know this, and Congress is obligated
to find out, tell them, cut off all funding and end two illegal
wars of aggression. Instead, Democrats and Republicans back a
further administration aggression against Iran in spite of
silenced high level opposition to it. It may come from two large
nuclear-armed US carrier strike groups conducting provocative
exercises near Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf and Eastern
Medditerranean.
Washington makes no secret it wants regime change in Iran, and
time is running out for the Bush administration to get it. For
months, covert black operations have been ongoing inside the
country. It's aimed to incite internal ethnic and political
opposition, and CIA operatives have also been sending Baluchi
tribal warriors from neighboring Pakistan on terror raids into
neighboring Iranian areas. Now 350 British forces have been
provocatively sent from Basra to the volatile Iranian border,
and the Pentagon announced it's building a US base and fortified
checkpoints nearby as well. General Petraeus also implied to
Congress he'll act inside Iranian territory to stop its "proxy
war" against US Iraqi forces. In the meantime, Iran claims
Washington backs Israeli-trained Kurdish Party for Free Life
(PJAK) as well as Arab, Azeri and Baluchi incursions inside
their territory to undermine its leadership, provoke a response,
and provide cover for a US attack.
Without a touch of irony, US Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Iranian
Ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qumi held four hours of face-to-face
talks in Baghdad in May that was the first official bilateral
meeting between the countries in almost three decades. It
amounted to nothing more than the usual US duplicity that
pointed to what's now happening and likely to escalate. Earlier,
George Bush demanded and will soon get harsher US-imposed
sanctions through the Iran Counter-Proliferation Act of 2007
that's designed to strangle the country economically. He earlier
signed off on a commitment of economic destabilization through
media-driven propaganda, now heightened, as well as manipulation
of Iran's currency and international transactions. That, in
turn, just prompted Tehran in response to demand foreign energy
companies do business in euros and yen.
So far, it's anyone's guess what's ahead with war a real
possibility. The Bush administration is pounding Iran with
menacing claims of meddling in Iraq and covertly advancing a
nuclear weapons program despite having no proof of either.
Whatever's planned could be devastating to the region (and world
economy if oil shipments are disrupted), and the kinds of
options being considered may cause dire unintended consequences
if the worst of them involving nuclear weapons are used.
Bill Clinton's 1990s Balkan wars took their toll earlier at a
time most people shamefully bought the US-led NATO propaganda of
a good war against a demonized enemy and a well-intentioned
intervention to remove him. It divided and destroyed a country
under the guise of humanitarian intervention that provided cover
for naked imperialism. Most observers on the left got it wrong
and still don't know NATO (meaning the US) committed illegal
aggression to expand into Central and Eastern Europe.
The Balkan wars kept predatory capitalism on a roll for more new
markets, resources and cheap exploitable labor by the same ugly
methods of choice - wars, subversion or coercion with
"uncooperative" leaders like Slobadon Milosevic playing fall
guy. He ended up abducted to the Hague and hung out to dry by
the ICTY US-run kangaroo court that silenced him (like Saddam in
Baghdad) so his secrets went to the grave with him.
So much for democracy in a nation stained by a near-unblemished
record of illegal aggression throughout its history and in every
post-WW II conflict fought. The only exception was the so-called
1991 Gulf war. It was authorized, as required, by the Security
Council but only through bribes and coercion. The US public
opposed it until a lot of Kuwaiti government PR massaging turned
it around, and the rest is history.
The Harmful Effects of Imperialism at Home
The price at home has been high as well with democracy here just
as fake as wherever we leave our imperial footprint. Ordinary
Americans are the losers. Repressive laws and crumbling social
services are their reward for patriotism. Then there's the
military and what's diverted to fund it. Annual Pentagon budgets
are soaring with the FY 2008 DOD one calling for an astonishing
$648.8 billion plus an additional $147.5 billion war
supplemental and around $50 billion or more now requested. The
final total will likely top out over $850 billion with the usual
pork factored in and Congress ready to authorize whatever more
is needed.
Then come the 16 US spy agencies and their secret off-the-books
budgets. CIA, NSA and the others get tens of billions more
without accountability. The CIA is an especially out-of-control,
rogue agency accountable only to the President. Post-WW II, it
began intervening throughout the world covertly and overtly. No
dirty trick is off the table, and CIA invented their fair share
of them. It uses them spying, fomenting and supporting wars,
deposing foreign heads of state, and now they're in play on US
soil against American citizens. Noted academic and
administration critic, Chalmers Johnson, calls the agency "the
president's private army" serving in the same capacity as
imperial Rome's praetorian guard.
The agency is secret and lawless, unaccountable to the public,
Congress or the courts with intelligence gathering a sideline
operation at most. Since it was created in 1947, but especially
now, CIA has an appalling record of toppling democratically
elected governments, assassinating foreign heads of state and
other key officials, propping up friendly dictators, and now
snatching targeted individuals for "extraordinary rendition" to
secret torture-prison hellholes from which many won't emerge or
ever get justice.
It takes lots of cover-up and myth-building to create the
illusion America wants peace, is "beautiful," and respects the
law and rights of people everywhere. The truth is quite opposite
abroad and at home where essential needs go unmet and violence
is a way of life.
It recently showed up in the newly launched Global Peace Index's
(GPI) ranking of 121 nations. It was prepared by the Economist
Intelligence Unit, an international panel of peace experts from
peace institutes and think tanks, and the Centre for Peace and
Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. It aims
to "highlight the relationship between Global Peace and
Sustainability (stressing) unless we can achieve" a peaceful
world, humanity's major challenges won't be solved. GPI ranked
nations by their relative internal and external "peacefulness"
using 24 indicators. They include its:
-- military expenditures as a percent of GDP and number of armed
service personnel per 100,000 population;
-- number of external and internal wars including the estimated
number of deaths from them externally and internally;
-- relations with other countries;
-- respect for human rights;
-- potential for terrorist acts;
-- number of homicides per 100,000 population including
infanticide;
-- level of violent crime;
-- aggregate number of heavy weapons per 100,000 population and
ease of access to small arms and light weapons;
-- number of jailed population per 100,000 population; and
-- number of internal security officers and police per 100,000
population.
The US was a shocking 96th in the overall rankings - to the
naive and innocent, that is. Norway, New Zealand and Denmark
scored best in that order while Iraq ranked lowest followed by
Sudan and Israel, that should be a wake-up call for its
supporters.
Violence in America - A Way of Life at Home and Abroad
This article began with a snapshot account of our violent
history and culture. So much is in our communities and homes
that it's easy selling foreign wars to people used to settling
disputes confrontationally, not calmly. It may start with bloody
noses in school yards or playgrounds. It's then made to seem
commonplace in films and on prime time TV where assaults,
violent crime, murder and even torture are everyday forms of
entertainment. Then there's sports. The most popular ones
involve contact, often brutal, with one played on ice once
described as a fight with occasional hockey breaking out.
Television features sports of all kinds, the more violent the
better. Studies show nearly every home has at least one TV set,
and 54% of children have their own in their bedrooms. They spend
28 hours a week on average watching, double the time spent in
school, so they learn more about life through the media than
anywhere else. Before age 18, the average American child sees
200,000 acts of violence on TV including 16,000 murders, and
studies show homicide rates doubled 10 - 15 years after
television was introduced.
They also link the following potential adverse effects to
excessive media exposure:
-- increased violent behavior;
-- impaired school performance;
-- increased sexual activity and use of tobacco and alcohol; and
-- decreased family communication among other negative
influences unrelated to violence.
A National Television Violence Study showed two-thirds of
children's programming had violence, three-fourths of it went
unpunished, and most often victims weren't shown experiencing
pain. Even more disturbing, the study identified nearly half the
violence children see is in TV cartoons. They're most often
portrayed in humor with victims hardly ever experiencing
long-term consequences. There's more:
-- Unsurprisingly, it's no different on the big screen as film
studios produce entertainment for theater viewing and at home.
-- There's a great, but unmeasurable, amount of different types
of violence online, including pedophile cyber-seduction on
unsuspecting, vulnerable children leading to sexual assaults.
-- Studies show violent video games like Doom, Wolfenstein 3D
and Mortal Kombat can increase aggressive thoughts, beliefs and
behavior both in laboratory settings and real life. They're even
worse than TV or films because they're interactive and
engrossing. They get players to identify with aggressors since
they act like them while playing. These games teach violence.
Many young people play them often and parents allow it. It's no
wonder they become aggressive and continue the same behavior
later as adults for real.
-- Music also teaches violence. The Parents Music Resource
Center reports teenagers hear an estimated 10,500 hours of rock
music between grades 7 and 12 alone or nearly as much time as
they spend in school. Entertainment Monitor reported
three-fourths of popular CDs sold in 1995 included profanity or
lyrics about drugs, violence and sex with some popular rap
artists' music glorifying guns, rape and murder.
With this as backdrop after 500 years of belligerency, it's no
wonder violence in the country and attitudes toward it are out
of control. The record includes harsh private and government
homeland crackdowns against dissidents, labor, minorities,
street protesters, rioters, ethnic or religious groups and
others plus all the one-on-one confrontations as well. For
centuries, violence was monstrous against our Native peoples and
nearly exterminated them all. It was used against black slaves
as well with whippings, other beatings, rapes, mutilations,
forced family separations and even amputations as punishment for
runaways. Post-slavery, the pattern continued, mostly in the
South, under forced Jim Crow segregation that enforced white
supremacy over blacks that played out violently for those
"stepping out of line."
A snapshot of recent data on violent crimes provides more
evidence. It comes from the Department of Justice (DOJ), other
sources, and shows the following:
-- 960,000 violent acts against a current or former spouse,
boyfriend or girlfriend and up to three million women physically
abused by their husband, male partner or boyfriend annually;
-- in 2001, more than half a million American women (588,490)
were victims of nonfatal violence committed by an intimate
partner;
-- intimate violence is mainly a crime against women accounting
for 85% of these incidences;
-- women are up to eight times more likely than men to be
victimized by an intimate partner;
-- in 2001, 20% of violent crimes against women were by intimate
partners;
-- up to 324,000 women experience intimate partner violence
during pregnancy;
-- women of all races are about equally vulnerable to intimate
partner violence;
-- women are up to 14 times more likely than men to report
suffering severe physical assaults from an intimate partner;
-- 20% of female high school students report being physically
and/or sexually abused by a dating partner and 40% of 14 - 17
year old girls report knowing someone their age struck or beaten
by a boyfriend;
-- in a national survey of 6000 American families, 50% of the
men who frequently assaulted their wives also abused their
children;
-- studies show up to 10 million children witness some form of
domestic violence annually;
-- over half a million women report being stalked annually by an
intimate partner while 80% stalked by former husbands are
physically assaulted and 30% sexually assaulted by that partner;
-- the FBI divides violent crime into four categories: "murder
and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and
aggravated assault." It uses the International Association of
Chiefs of Police Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program's
definition of violent crime as involving force or threat of
force. The annual data show these crimes topped one million in
1975 and from the mid-1980s ranged from around 1.5 - 1.9 million
annually;
-- since 1975, annual violent crimes of murder and reported rape
ranged from around 100,000 - 130,000;
-- Every year over the past century, 10% or more of all crimes
committed were violent ones; and
-- More Americans killed other Americans at home than the total
death toll from all foreign wars in our history combined.
Violence, of course, becomes ingrained in the culture. It leads
to crackdowns against society's least "worthy" victims of
state-sponsored repression. It made America the incarceration
capital of the world with over 2.2 million in our homeland
"gulag" prison system today, a greater number than in China with
four times our population and a history of governments not known
for gentleness toward those breaking its rules. Here 1000 new
inmates weekly join others locked in cages, most for non-violent
offenses. They're brutalized by prison guards and other inmates
while there and become more likely to exact revenge on release
for society's unjust treatment. Many, in fact, do and end up
back in prison for longer sentences.
This kind of information and our national predilection for
violence isn't taught in schools or explained in the media.
Instead we accept the illusion of "American exceptionalism,"
moral superiority, and innate goodness in a nation chosen by the
Almighy to lead the world. That's provided it's by rules made in
Washington with people everywhere told accept them, or else.
Going to war, we're told, is a last resort choice and one never
taken lightly. It's to liberate the oppressed, bring democracy
when we arrive, and target "national security" threats too great
to ignore. It takes powerful propaganda persuasion convincing
people to accept this, but it's made easier if they're already
predisposed to violence and receptive to more of it.
Five centuries at home and abroad add up to potent conditioning,
but the dangers were less threatening earlier than now. Today's
super-weapons make older ones look like toys. They leave no
margin of error, and if we slip up we'll endanger what Noam
Chomsky calls "biology's only experiment with higher
intelligence." Unless we confront the threat to our survival
from foreign wars and a violent culture accustomed to them, we
face what Albert Einstein and philosopher Bertrand Russell
warned 50 years ago saying: "Shall we put an end to the human
race, or shall mankind renounce war" and a culture of violence
and live in peace because no other way is possible.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at
lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also, visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen
to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on
TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.
Click
on "comments" below to
read or post comments
Comment
Guidelines
Be succinct, constructive and
relevant to the story.
We
encourage engaging, diverse and
meaningful commentary. Do not
include personal information such
as names, addresses, phone
numbers and emails. Comments
falling outside our guidelines
– those including personal
attacks and profanity – are
not permitted.
See our complete
Comment
Policy and
use
this link to notify us if you
have concerns about a comment.
We’ll promptly review and
remove any inappropriate
postings.
Send Page To a Friend
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
|
