Blinkenkrieg? (Warning: Extreme Content)

 

Struggling to make some kind of sense of the war in Ukraine, the risks it entails, and the economic crisis it has supercharged?  Praying for peace?  Me too. 

I'm thinking the fighting could end sooner than some observers expect, sooner certainly than those who wish to profit from a protracted war would prefer.  There are some interesting pieces of analysis available.  How about that eye-opening interview by Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate at Greyzone with Col. Doug Macgregor.  Or this panel discussion at the end of which the moderator, the inimitable George Galloway, reveals himself to be an optimist!

In 1988, when I was an Officer of the University and a Harvard Extension School student, I took Prof. Donald Bell's course, Political Terrorism in Historical Perspective: The Case of Western Europe.  (Prestigious schools are only as good as the educators they employ, and you can still find talented, dedicated, and underpaid teachers at every school, college, and university in America.  As a student in America, the important thing is to suit up, show up prepared, and do your best.  Several years ago I updated my formal training in political terrorism studies in a course at a local community college here in Iowa as part of a legal assistant certificate program.  That course was taught by a professor who had conducted original research in the field among far-Right militia groups here in the States.  I will not mention his name here only because I don’t know where he is or what he is doing now.  I was delighted to find that his course, which had a broader historical and geographical focus, was at least as well planned and taught as the earlier Extension School course.  The future belongs to those who prepare for it. Learning never ends.) 

Busy preparing for a wedding and a honeymoon in Europe, I enrolled in Prof. Bell's course in non-credit status.  I attended class, did the required reading and more. but I did not write a term paper.  After returning from Switzerland, I took the class again the following semester for credit.  What a memorable classroom experience that was, more than half of the students being active duty US Army personnel who were stationed at Fort Devens just west of the Boston area.  Some of my classmates were just back from Europe, too, and others had only recently returned from Lebanon where the Lebanese Civil War was winding down.  Several had served in both Europe and the Middle East.  An interesting group that, with tales of Army life on the front lines of the Cold War in Europe and a hot war in the Middle East.  I read well beyond the required and suggested reading lists and earned an honor grade in the course.  Well, you know, I took the class twice. 

Soon thereafter, I left Harvard and relocated to West Germany with no definite plans to return to the USA.  (We fled, actually.  Resigned positions with the administrative equivalent of academic tenure.  Our home and my Harvard office had been burglarized.  My phone had been tapped.  A Harvard physician had falsely informed me that I had AIDS, but that's all part of a longer story for another time.)  Isn't the German government's recent decision to arm up for war with Russia disappointing?  Can you imagine anything more likely to alarm Russian leaders and bolster their determination to act to prevent yet another invasion from the West?  An unexpected sight greeted me at Frankfurt International when I stepped off the plane in the spring of 1990.  A graffiti artist with a wry sense of humor and a keen sense of history had scrawled on a newspaper vending box next to the USA Today logo: "Tomorrow the World."  (The phrase recalled Hitler's threat, "Today Germany, tomorrow the world.")  The most memorable bumper sticker I chanced to see during the seven months I spent working and traveling in Europe during 1990 was one that proclaimed, "Everyone is a foreigner, almost everywhere."  The graffiti and the bumper sticker were and are representative of a then not atypical European awareness of history and the wider world that still, today, far too few Americans are equipped to understand or appreciate.

I was working as a maintenance carpenter for a US military contractor at Sullivan Barracks near Viernheim, West Germany, on a US Army Europe Fifth Signal Corps compound when Iraq invaded Kuwait and what became known as the first Gulf War broke out.  I learned a good deal more ground level military history while playing cards at lunchtime with a diverse group of expat Army vets who had seen service all over the world.  The retired Master Sergeant I worked for had served in Germany after WWII, in Vietnam, and at Fort Leavenworth.  Among that group, service in Korea and every war and action to date then was represented.  It's amazing what you can learn if you pay attention.  In 1990, my wife and I drove on the autobahn across what was then still East Germany to West Berlin.  There were horse-drawn carts in the fields.  We  got our temporary visas from a thin-lipped, pasty-faced East German border guard at Checkpoint Charlie, and walked into East Berlin to see for ourselves the results of half a century of communist rule.  The obvious differences between East and West as represented in Germany in 1990 were startling, but processing the less obvious differences, the similarities, and developing a perspective that takes in the relevant history and appreciates nuance would take more time and study.  

I resumed my part time studies after we returned to the States, first in Knoxville, Tennessee, where I volunteered in the newsroom at WUOT-fm, the university's NPR-affiliate station.  Leveraging the name recognition the radio work afforded me, I founded the Knoxville Writers Guild.  Later I served as executive director of the Tennessee Writers Alliance and as project director for WDVX-fm, a community radio station, while taking classes at the local community college.  When the ADL Spy Scandal hit the headlines in the spring of 1993, I headed for the public library where I found Alex Cockburn's report on the FBI’s investigation of the ADL in his Beat the Devil column in The Nation magazine, along with a New York Times piece.  Realizing that I had long been one of many ADL psyops targets, I decided to focus my journalism studies on bias in media.  In 1996 we relocated to Ames, Iowa, where I continued my studies while serving on the Ames Interfaith Council.  From 1999, the year I finally completed my journalism degree, Kappa Tau Alpha at Iowa State University’s Greenlee School, until 2018 I wrote regularly for a national magazine founded, edited, and published by distinguished retired United States foreign service officers.  My editor there had retired as Chief Inspector of the United States Information Agency.  My publisher had retired after serving as the United States ambassador to Qatar.  Dick and Andy published everything I sent them, including this piece, and edited my work with a light hand.  It was Dick who first pointed out to me that Official Washington was, in his words, "a cesspool of special interest money and corruption."      

I have no illusions whatsoever about the former USSR, today's Russia, Vladimir Putin, or the invasion of and war in Ukraine.  Nor do I harbor fantasies about run amok late stage capitalism or the politicians and bureaucrats who broke their promises to Mikhail Gorbachev to refrain from expanding NATO eastward and who refused both Gorbachev's and Putin's requests to join NATO after the collapse of the USSR.  Our government could easily have had Russia as an ally.  Instead, a bunch of filthy rich arms makers chose profits over the promised "peace dividend" and have been selling weapons of war to Russia's neighbors ever since, thus driving Russia and China ever closer together as allies against a common competitor with a massive defense budget and an interventionist foreign policy.  What might have been? and where would we be today? had US leaders responded positively, or at least without deceit and evident disdain and contempt, to Russian leaders' expressed desires to Westernize, join NATO, or “interact with responsible and independent partners with whom we could work together in constructing a fair and democratic world order that would ensure security and prosperity not only for a select few, but for all,” are questions that goes unasked.  To ask them and seriously contemplate answers would reveal more starkly still Western leaders' obdurate commitment to a scheme of material conquest by force of arms and world hegemony at any cost, even at the real risk of a civilization-ending nuclear conflagration.

The US government, its NATO partners, and Israel are often thought of as "the West" though other nations far removed from the USA and Western Europe often participate in NATO operations.  The West's arms industry is a gravy train of mechanized death and destruction.  One of its laboratories is illegally-occupied Palestine, where Israel tests weapons and tactics on captive civilian populations routinely exploited as human lab rats, weapons and tactics that are exported to other repressive regimes around the globe.  With the enthusiastic assistance of major Western broadcast media moguls who control both what passes for a public discussion and the throttle of the US campaign finance gravy train-cum-powder train, the West's arms industry has in recent decades instigated, intervened in, supplied weapons for, and profited from wars in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere, wars that have killed millions and loosed a flood of refugees around the globe.  Before that it was the Iraq-Iran war (the West likes nothing better than inciting foreign wars and selling weapons to both sides).  Noteworthy, is it not, that Western media outlets now so outraged that Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine has put blond-haired, blue-eyed Ukrainians in harm's way have never expressed a remotely comparable level of concern about people of color, indigenous populations, dying and displaced in their millions under equally illegal and often more indiscriminate bombardment by NATO forces and weapons manufactured by Western arms makers?

Western corporate media news and opinion presenters breathe the rarified air of corporate boardrooms.  They are attuned to the expectations of the billionaire media moguls who hire them, provide their marching orders, and pay them salaries far, far in excess of the earnings of ordinary Americans, the hoi polloi, people like you and me.  We are where we are today in the USA largely because Big Media corporations, which have produced and profited from a bloody deluge of violent and hyper-violent media products like there was no tomorrow for half a century, are out of touch with America and view ordinary Americans as masses to be exploited and manipulated for profit and narrow political advantage.  Systematically conditioned for decades to suspend disbelief, to turn off their critical thinking faculties around fictional violence, gun violence glamorized and glorified in dramas freighted with political messaging, in order to experience pleasure through emotional catharsis, Americans have been divided against one another along political, racial, religious, and class lines.  Painfully evident and palpable is the death, destruction, pain, and suffering thus wrought, across the world and across the land.  Add to that the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic and more than 900,000 American lives lost.  Donald Trump, a reality TV show host, sociopath, and well-heeled con artist, tapped into that anger, confusion. and frustration ever so successfully and has exacerbated it in spades.  Corporate media made the most of the Trump White House show and the competing Democratic Party narratives and milked them both for all they were worth.

Now the West's arms makers and their hired politicians in Washington and other Western capitals are flirting with a nuclear holocaust, waltzing toward Armageddon.  One ethnic special interest group is busy whitewashing Ukraine's neo-Nazis and other White nationalist extremist groups.  We may all pay the ultimate price for the deceit, arrogance, greed, and stupidity of this rich man's proxy war against a major nuclear weapons power.  Who but those who are spiritually blind would dare to so presume upon divine mercy?
 
As Wendell Berry has observed, a corporation is "a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. ... the limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person.  It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart.  It cannot humble itself.  It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money."  That quote jumped off page 36 of the February 28 issue of The New Yorker.  The article, by Dorothy Wickenden, the magazine’s executive editor, is titled “Late Harvest.”  It is the most interesting magazine piece I’ve ever read about Wendell Berry and his work.  I’m still contemplating Wickenden’s artful exploration of social and technological change, community, and “a placed people” and their tools.  How many have thought to consider the custodians of our planet as “a placed people”? or wondered how they might respond when men provoke or blunder into a war with the potential to catastrophically interrupt the progress of human civilization?

I heard Wendell speak at Iowa State’s Memorial Hall in 2007.  After the lecture and panel discussion, I spoke with him briefly at the book table.  I thanked him for Jayber Crow.  And then, as he was signing Citizenship Papers for me, I blurted out, “God bless you, Wendell Berry!”  Feeling as foolish as a schoolboy who had called out to his classroom teacher, “Mother!” I blushed.  Wendell looked up, met my eyes with as genuine a smile as I have ever seen, and replied, “God bless you!” 

Because we have been blessed, we are able to bless each other.  Does that not come near to the essence of the ethic of reciprocity, the Golden Rule? 

We are here, on this world, to grow, to learn to be productive, to learn to love our neighbors as ourselves.  Our Creator gives us free will, and life presents us with challenges and opportunities to make decisions.  We choose to be either creative and constructive or destructive.  Some men mistake meekness for weakness.  I tell you in truth, Jesus spoke the truth.  Indeed he is the truth.  The meek shall inherit this earth.  Fac Recteneminem Time.  Our Creator may not have his way in the hearts of each and every one of his creatures, but he does not lose worlds.  But how do we bless those who know not the blessings and who reject out of hand the ethic of reciprocity?  Perhaps sometimes the best we can do is to restrain them.        

I no longer claim any political party allegiance.  Both major parties are utterly corrupt and have failed us.  Too often the only thing they can agree on is more money for more weapons and more wars.  Members of Veterans For Peace tend to understand these matters.  I look for fearless journalism and independent thinkers with little regard for whether they are deemed "liberal" or “conservative.”  Those terms have been rendered largely meaningless by war psychosis.  We live in the era of and under the administration of political spoilsmen; when their reign ends our lot will improve, if we have not too severely damaged the planet in the meantime.  I'm against war for intensely personal reasons, not least among them a pointless war that killed one dear friend and blighted the lives of several others.  Philip's name is on a black granite wall in Washington.  Others suffered longer and died later as a result of physical and emotional wounds they brought home after service in Southeast Asia.  Glen Ray devoted his life after his Army service to his family and to helping others as a substance abuse counselor.  He is memorialized by a facility named in his honor by his last employer.  Sam was a poet.  He served as a USMC combat radio operator.  He found solace in writing and reading poetry and in the love of his family.  It is one thing to die in battle and another to suffer for years with PTSD and debilitating physical disease. 

https://www.verywellmind.com/coping-with-ptsd-2797536

Philip, Glen Ray, Sam, and I grew up in the most corrupt and vice-ridden city in Texas when it was run by WWII veterans who suffered from undiagnosed and untreated PTSD.  As physicians and the general public come to better understand PTSD as a spectrum disorder, that is, one that is much more common than most realize, with psychological effects that have long gone largely unrecognized for what they are and undiagnosed, effects that subtly and not so subtly impact the perceptions and shape the attitudes of groups, nations, and peoples across generations, as well as individuals who become hateful and unhinged murderers (outliers actually), the thinking about war and militarism is changing. 

There are many, many ways to experience psychological trauma and suffer from PTSD, a range of severity and of symptoms directly related to an individual traumatic experience or experiences. Military personnel; people caught up in war, in organized crime, or trapped in domestic violence situations; law enforcement officers and other first responders; health care workers; journalists and others may repeatedly or even routinely experience psychological or physical trauma. War engenders group trauma dynamics that play out over time in society across generations. Because, to a child, God is in many ways a magnified father figure, a generation reared by a generation of combat veterans with undiagnosed and untreated PTSD experiences and sees the world differently than does a generation reared by those who have not known combat and the horrors and trauma of war. Even when women do not go to war, they may nonetheless suffer the trauma of separation and loss associated with war and the symptomatic behaviors that impact relationships later.

Historian Thomas Childers painted an entirely new, unsentimental, and compelling picture of the struggles of "the Greatest Generation" in the aftermath of World War II in America in his 2009 book, Soldier from the War Returning: The Greatest Generation's Troubled Homecoming from World War II.  Even Hollywood, in the critically-acclaimed 2019 crime epic The Irishman, hints broadly and graphically in a flashback to WWII at the role combat-related PTSD plays in later criminal activity and the terrible damage inflicted on family relationships over time.    

A nation, a people, a culture that experiences constant war over many generations, a culture in which war is systematically glorified for profit and political advantage, will be a nation, a people, a culture enmeshed in and blighted by individual and group violence, corruption, and the many associated psychological traumas and disorders.

Let me tell you about one experience that stands out in memory as having shaped my personal views on war.  In 1984, almost two years clean and sober, I was working as an erection foreman for General Dynamics Quincy (Massachusetts) Shipbuilding Division, the Fore River Yard.  I pushed a crew of 20 to 30 shipfitters installing, or erecting, prefabricated units on Military Prepositioning Ships, hulls under construction in drydock.  We worked around the clock and there was a lot of overtime and weekend work.  (At lunch one day, another erection foreman mentioned that his wife had informed him while pouring his morning coffee that his unintelligible shouts had awakened her in the early hours of the morning.  He had then, his wife had told him, suddenly sat bolt upright in bed, fired her, and ordered her off the ship.  He had no memory of any of it, he said.  His small audience laughed appreciatively.)  No heating or cooling on the ship, the work was often bitterly cold in the winter and hot in the summer.  Some hourly employees, at least as stressed and miserable as their foremen, required more supervision than others and, on occasion, assistance or a warning.  Late one summer morning I found myself searching for a missing shipfitter, a man new to my crew that day, who had wandered off seeking relief from the heat of the sun blazing down on steel decks hot enough to fry an egg.  Before turning away to avoid my gaze, another shipfitter would say only that the missing man was “around somewhere.”  I smelled him before I saw him, leaning against a bulkhead in the shade of an overhanging unit.  His shirt, soaked with sweat that reeked of whatever he’d been drinking the night before, hung on his thin frame.  His complexion was sallow.  He was a picture of late-stage alcoholism.  I sought to engage him in friendly conversation but in mood and manner he was listless.  When I segued into a sobriety pitch, he stopped me cold after a moment or two.  Looking at me with the deadest, emptiest eyes I’ve ever seen, he said with little emotion, “I’m going to drink until I die.  Nothing you can say will change that.  I fucked dead Gook women in ’Nam.  They’re better if you get ’em while they’re still warm.”  

I was stunned.  I had no answer for that.  My tool box at not yet two years clean and sober contained no useful reply.  I have not had to look into it for a response to a similar situation since.  Now, approaching 40 years one day at a time, I note that the conversation took place on a ship named for a USMC Medal of Honor recipient (posthumous), a ship that has seen service and is likely still in service.  Some people exhibit great and selfless courage under fire.  Others become completely demoralized.  For some, death in war is instantaneous and painless.  Others suffer for decades unto death.  In the Middle Ages, when mighty armies clashed, in fields not far away men might be at work tilling the soil.  Today, civilian populations are often targeted and modern weaponry kills indiscriminately, often without warning and in countless ways.  What will it take to persuade modern man to spend more time tilling the soil of the heart?           

I am against war as a matter of principle as well as for personal reasons, and unashamedly so.  Indeed, I have devoted my career as a journalist to bringing the views of antiwar, peace, and social justice advocates and activists to wider audiences.  War should always be a last resort, not a shop-worn excuse to further enrich politically influential warmongers so morally depraved and so lacking in creativity that they can imagine no better way to accumulate wealth and power than by killing people, poor people of color, subsistence farmers mostly, who live in poor countries far away or right next door and who represent no real threat to anyone.  If there is a good reason to cavalierly risk a civilization-destroying nuclear holocaust as the Washington foreign policy elite is doing now, it escapes me.  Ironically, what seems to have escaped White supremacist neocons and neo-Nazis bent on war is that the disaster they are courting, a major nuclear exchange between the West and Russia, if it did not end human life on this planet, would certainly reduce the number of White people in the mix even if it did not otherwise serve to speed up the admixture of the races.  Shouldn’t that tell you much of what you need to know about the mindset of White supremacist race warriors?

Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung had their differences, but regarding the most important topic, these two most influential psychoanalysts seem to have been very much in agreement despite their somewhat dissimilar approaches.

Freud wrote, "The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.  It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest.  Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man." (Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930)

Jung wrote, "We are living in what the Greeks called the Kαιpos – the right time – for a 'metamorphosis of the gods,' i.e., of the fundamental principles and symbols.  This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing.  Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science.  As at the beginning of the Christian Era, so again today we are faced with the problem of the moral backwardness which has failed to keep pace with our scientific, technical, and social developments.  So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of modern man.  Is he capable of resisting the temptation to use his power for the purpose of staging a world conflagration?  Is he conscious of the path that he is treading, and what the conclusions are that must be drawn from the present world situation and his own psychic situation?  Does he know that he is on the point of losing the life-preserving myth of the inner man, which Christianity has treasured up for him?  Does he realize what lies in store should this catastrophe ever befall him?  Is he even capable at all of realizing that this would be a catastrophe?  And finally, does the individual know that he is the makeweight that tips the scales?" (The Undiscovered Self, 1957)

Some say a new Cold War is on the near horizon.  Arms makers, bullet-headed generals, bent politicians, and the filthy rich media moguls who cheer them on while shaping and limiting the public discussion have brought us to the brink of war with nuclear-armed Russia.  A new Cold War would certainly be preferable to a nuclear holocaust, but it too would scuttle substantive climate change mitigation efforts, which are dependent upon international cooperation.  One wonders, was that part of the plan all along?

Consider the massive Western propaganda exercise in progress complete with censorship on an unprecedented scale.  It is working.  Russia is hated as never before in the West where its president, Putin, is widely compared to Hitler (never mind that he lost an older brother he never knew in the siege of Leningrad where his mother almost died of starvation).  Ukraine's President Zelensky, lauded as I write by NPR’s On Point as the West’s newest heroic Jewish head of state, leads a puppet government riddled with neo-Nazis and other militant White nationalists.  That government, set up for the purpose of enrolling Ukraine in NATO and putting US missiles on Russia's front porch, was initially installed by the NED and the US government, which in subsequent years spared no effort to incite and subsidize violence against Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the eastern provinces.  War hysteria/psychosis is now a bi-partisan effort in Official Washington.  Even Robert Reich is now openly promoting anti-Russian feeling as the sentiment that will at last bring Americans together.  Readers who wish to respond to Bob's pro-war pandering on his site must pay for the privilege.  I found it easier, if less satisfying, to unsubscribe. 

A close examination of news reports reveals that Israeli PM Bennett has been to Moscow and met with Putin in an attempt to mediate the crisis precipitated by Washington’s persistent provocations and Zelensky’s neo-Nazis’s attacks on Russian-speaking Ukrainians. US Secretary of State Blinken is reported to have expressed appreciation for the Israeli efforts.  A subsequent Jerusalem Post report indicated that "Bennett is pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to accept Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demands to end the war."  Both the Israeli and Ukrainian governments promptly denied that report.

Then came the news from Haaretz that "A representative of Defense Minister Benny Gantz’s Kahol Lavan party raised an initiative last week to purchase islands in Greece using money from the Jewish National Fund 'for the good of the Jewish people.'

"Avri Steiner – Kahol Lavan’s representative on the board of directors of Himnuta, a company owned by the Jewish national fund – brought the unusual proposal to the board last Thursday. According to several sources who were present at the meeting, Steiner, who was appointed to the board by Gantz, argued that the islands should be purchased 'to create a haven for the Jewish People in case of emergency, as a place for Jewish refugees in times of war.'"

One wonders, given the trauma attendant upon tragic loss of some six million Jews who perished in the Nazi holocaust, still within living memory if only just, and the far-reaching effects of that terrible loss and trauma, should the West have paid a bit more attention to the trauma associated with the loss of some 26 million Russians who perished in the USSR's successful effort to defeat the Nazi war machine?  United States dead in all theaters as a result of WWII hostilities numbered less than one-half million.  Has Gantz looked into Russian eyes and perceived there an unflinching resolve that unnerved the Israeli defense minister?  Is Gantz the only player in an incredibly dangerous scheme of material conquest by force of arms who is having doubts about the supposed wisdom of setting up and lionizing a Jewish Ukrainian comedian as the head of a puppet government tasked with poking the nuclear-armed Russian bear in the eye with a neo-Nazi tipped spear?

How unfortunate that Official Washington seems never to have seen an off ramp it did not wish to block.

Some people assume that the worst can’t happen.  It can, and it is more likely to happen if our leaders, presuming on divine mercy, persist in reckless brinkmanship.  The world of the cross is a decimal planet.  Despite the best efforts of our guardians, accidents can and do occur.

Heaven help us all.

The NRA, the Entertainment Industry, the Israel Lobby, and Gun Massacres in the USA

by Michael Gillespie - 2/24/2018

Our country is in deep, deep trouble. 

Our president has been corrupted and captured by the National Rifle Association and the Zionist political and media machine.  Worse, President Trump and his dangerous delusions, many of which are apparently shared by a majority of Republican leaders, and many of which have been ignored or condoned by equally corrupt Democrats, enjoy significant public support.
  

One might reasonably speculate that the Zionist political and media machine is exploiting the most recent school shooting massacre, a traumatic event that has once again seared the nation's psyche, in order to advance Israel's and its powerful lobby's narrow political agenda.  On Friday, only days after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and with national news coverage still focused on the tragedy and a national discussion in response to this and so many other such massacres, the Trump administration announced that its controversial decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem may come to fruition as early as Israel’s Independence Day in mid-May.  Is the Zionist political and media machine racing against time and Special Counsel Robert Mueller's on-going investigation of the 2016 general election to get the embassy relocated to Jerusalem before indictments can potentially derail the plan?  Undoubtedly.  Is President Trump desperately currying favor with the nation's two most powerful special interest groups in the hope of avoiding personal political catastrophe?  Undoubtedly.  Is the far-Right noise machine doing everything possible to politicize the investigation and keep a Republican president in office?  Again, undoubtedly.

This is what happens when, for decades, a powerful gun manufacturers' lobby is allowed to buy and own politicians, and our elected leaders, our legislators, and our courts allow popular culture to be informed, shaped, and limited by powerful Jewish-owned and -operated broadcast media corporations that profit directly from lucrative, socially-destabilizing violent and hyperviolent entertainment product, a raging river of blood and gore heavily freighted with gun ads and political messaging that sluices through screens large and small into American popular culture 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  

The Parkland, Florida shooter is but the latest example of a mentally-disturbed young man who was obsessed with violent video games, who had ready access to a semi-automatic weapon of war, and who ultimately acted out his deep, dark, deadly revenge fantasies in a public venue, in this latest incident, a public school.  Was Nikolas Cruz's four-minute school shooting rampage merely incidental to his obsessive use of hyper-violent video games?  Or was Cruz specifically targeted and manipulated by cyber warfare operatives?  That is an open question and one that is unlikely ever to be either widely posed or satisfactorily answered. 

From the Miami Herald, an article by Julie K. Brown dated Feb. 17: Neighbor and family friend Paul "Gold said that Cruz escaped his misery by playing video games for eight, 12, even 15 hours a day.  Gold, who owns a film and video production company, sometimes would play a game or two with them.  'It was kill, kill, kill, blow up something, and kill some more, all day,' he said."

Who benefits economically and politically from the deadly combination of easy, virtually unlimited access to firearms and the unrestricted availability of violent and hyper-violent entertainment product?  Gun manufacturers and their lobby, the NRA, and the entertainment industry and its various lobbying organizations.  And, of course, the politicians who accept their campaign contributions and parrot their talking points.  But don't take my word for it, follow the money. 

The USA is in the grip of gun mania, a deadly and peculiarly American form of mass psychosis.  This massive and intractable social problem did not develop accidentally.  Gun makers and the entertainment industry have long had interests in common.  The entertainment industry's most lucrative business model, violence as entertainment, typically features the latest and deadliest products on offer by arms makers.  For decades, the two industries have colluded.  Entertainment industry executives have been happy to insert paid advertisements for guns and gunmakers into their most violent products, products that are heavily freighted with socially divisive and often overtly racist themes.  Here is but one example, from a 1983 film produced by, directed by, and starring Clint Eastwood.  Sudden Impact, reported to have grossed $67,642,693, is ranked as the seventh most profitable film of that year of memorable motion pictures.

After high-profile gun massacre murders, Hollywood scrambles to protect its lucrative business model by controlling negative publicity while its well-heeled media gatekeepers work at preventing any substantive public discussion about the role of media violence in gun massacres . The video game industry spends millions on lobbyists to ensure that Congress passes no legislation that might restrict its ability to peddle socially-destabilizing violence freighted with pro-war, pro-gun, and often pro-Israel political messaging.

The NRA has often blamed the entertainment industry for mass shootings in a transparent effort to deflect public attention from its own role in these tragedies.  That said, multimillionaire NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre's criticisms of the entertainment industry are all too accurate and to the point, and they indicate just how desperate he is to shift blame away from the industry he has so aggressively represented.  This blame game has been going on for years without positive results.  It's just part of the heavily scripted and strictly limited public discussion permitted in media venues owned by entertainment industry conglomerates.  Most recently, LaPierre has also blamed the FBI for the Florida shooting, as if the FBI, which received 766,888 calls to its tip line in 2017, could conceivably prevent all or even most mass shootings in a nation of more than 326 million people awash in semiautomatic weapons and where violence is constantly and systematically glamorized and glorified in movies, in video games, and on television.

Our president, meanwhile, is pushing an absurd, unworkable, and dangerous NRA plan to arm school teachers.  Who could imagine that expecting school teachers to engage armed intruders in classrooms would be a reasonable way to prevent school shootings?  That, though, is characteristic of the kind of thinking that is a result of decades of Hollywood's lucrative business model based on socially-destabilizing violent and hyper-violent media product, and the NRA's pathological promotion of guns, gun rights, and gun sales at any cost. The Trump administration, the NRA, the Israel lobby, and the entertainment industry seem to be determined to turn our country into an armed camp, a huge garrison state with a wall on its southern border, everyone inside armed to the teeth and ready to shoot to kill, a giant American version of Israel replete, perhaps, with opportunities for terror tourism.

The Hollywood culture that protected accused sexual predators Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Kevin Spacey, Charlie Rose and others for decades peddles violent entertainment product that contributes directly to a psychological, cultural, and political environment conducive to violence against women. Troubled young men who harbor resentments against women and who seek power and security in firearms are especially vulnerable to such incitement. Toxic masculinity is in large part a result of a toxic media culture that glamorizes and glorifies violence for profit and political advantage, provides male role models who routinely resort to gun violence to solve problems, and frequently features violence against women including the abuse and torture of women and girls.

Mentally and emotionally disturbed young male mass shooters need not have a history as domestic abusers. They need only be first-person-shooter video game addicts who feel that they have been unfairly rejected by girls and women. Young Nickolas Cruz apparently looked for inspiration to the Isla Vista/Santa Barbara mass murderer, Elliot Rodger, who was quite literally a child of the Hollywood culture and one who documented both his obsession with violent video games and his resentment of women, which was pathologically bitter and hateful. Women are demanding change in a media culture, and by extension a popular culture, long saturated with violence as entertainment. In the aftermath of the most recent school shooting, young people are demanding that adults finally address the problem of mass shootings.  American women and children deserve the active support and the assistance of every American man who hopes for a brighter future.  

  

Fifty Dead in Orlando

Fifty dead in Orlando, Florida, in a horrific gun massacre at the Pulse, an LGBT nightclub where a capacity crowd was dancing to Latin music on the main dance floor and another DJ was playing reggae music outside on the patio. The mass shooting came on the heels of the murder of a popular young singer, Christina Grimme, the night before, also in Orlando. Grimme, who came to fame during appearances on NBC's The Voice, was shot dead as she was signing autographs after a performance at The Plaza Live, a music venue, formerly a theater and a cinema.

Why are entertainment venues becoming shooting galleries and why are entertainment industry figures and their audiences becoming targets of heavily armed mass murderers? The nation's expensively-coiffed talking heads won't be asking that question any time soon, certainly not in broadcast media venues. In a nation in which popular culture is constantly marinated in violence as entertainment by the most influential media, why would anyone be surprised by mass murders? Yet even after high-profile shootings in movie theaters in Colorado in July 2012 and Louisiana in July 2015, even after the live, on-air murder of a local CBS affiliate news crew in Virginia, in late August 2015, Americans have heard little or no useful public discussion about the role of the entertainment industry and its subsidiary news organizations in gun violence generally or gun massacres in particular.

In the wake of the nation's worst mass killing by a single shooter, because the crime was committed by a Muslim, corporate news outlets have focused primarily the killer's presumed ties to Islamic terrorism while minimizing if not excluding other possible contributing factors including questions about the shooter's mental health and his sexual orientation. That the killer, Omar Mateen, was Muslim, a U.S. citizen born in this country of Afghan immigrant parents, is convenient for the entertainment industry and its controlled Broadcast Media news organizations, which are in reality little more than propaganda outlets. Though violent crime rates are down, mass murders have increased in frequency in recent decades. Many law enforcement agencies are at least as concerned about home-grown White supremacist terrorism as they are about Islamic terrorism in the USA. Until the recent mass murder in Orlando, studies showed that White supremacist terrorism was by far the deadlier threat. Of course, most Americans would be surprised to learn that, given the heavy emphasis on Islamic terrorism in Big Broadcast Media entertainment fare and news reports.

Most gun massacres in the USA are committed by shooters with mental health issues. Indeed, the act of gun massacre murder is, in and of itself, prima facie evidence of mental instability or mental defect of one kind or another. Decades of social science research, literally thousands of studies, point directly to violent and hyper-violent entertainment product as harmful to the mental and emotional health of regular viewers, especially young viewers, and as a contributing or causative factor in real world violence and criminality. Yet, despite all of the research, all of the evidence, and the dozens of high-profile gun massacres committed by shooters habituated to violent and hyper-violent entertainment product, meaningful discussion of the role of violent entertainment product is effectively banned or strictly limited by mass media corporation gatekeepers. At the same time,research on gun violence under the auspices of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is effectively prohibited, blocked since 1996 by members of Congress in thrall to the National Rifle Association (NRA). Hollywood and the NRA seem to be determined to keep Americans armed, ignorant, and paranoid.

One can almost feel sorry for poor Tom Brokaw. Even the éminence grise of NBC News is forced to tiptoe around the rogue elephant in his living room. On NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, Brokaw was free to express outrage that "we don't have any dialog going on in America about all of these mass shootings," but even he dares not try to explain why there is no meaningful, productive public discussion about gun violence and gun safety legislation. Brokaw is in the employ of a major Big Broadcast Media corporation that profits directly from lucrative, socially-destabilizing violence as entertainment product, a corporation that rakes in billions by sensationalizing, glamorizing, and glorifying gun violence with criminal abandon, for profit and for political advantage. So, in NBC's news programming, as in all other Big Broadcast Media news venues, there can be no meaningful public discussion of the causative role of violent Big Media entertainment product in real world violence. Any such discussion would be harmful to the Big Broadcast Media business model, which profits directly socially-destabilizing violent and hyper-violent entertainment product. Because Big Broadcast Media news programs dominate, limit, and shape what passes for a public discussion in the USA, there is a great deal of political propaganda but very little informative, meaningful, productive public discussion, period. This has been true for decades, as Carl Sagan once observed.

Strict control of the public discussion by Big Media gatekeepers regarding mass shootings has been standard operating procedure for decades. Not coincidentally, the other issues that are as strictly controlled are U.S. Middle East foreign policy, relations with Israel, the power and influence of the pro-Israel lobby, and Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine. As gun massacres have become increasingly frequent and the numbers of the dead have risen with the advent and proliferation of extremely lucrative, hyper-violent video games, which gun massacre murderers have often used as training aids, rigid control of the public discussion has become all the more imperative for Big Broadcast Media corporations. Only rarely does any truly useful information about the risks and dangers associated with violent media product slip through in Big Broadcast Media programming.

Even a former Pennsylvania governor and the first Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security was rudely interrupted when he attempted to speak about the role of media violence in mass shootings on NBC's Meet the Press. The Big Media mob's gatekeepers shut Tom Ridge down quick and dismissed his statements out of hand, with David Brooks substituting patently false entertainment media talking points, aka lies, damned lies, and phony statistics, that fly in the face of decades of social science research. This less than 48 hours after a young, mentally unstable video game addict, Adam Lanza, murdered 20 first graders and six adult school teachers and administrators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in December 2012!

In 2014, a 22-year-old Hollywood director's son, Elliot Rodger, killed six, stabbing three and shooting three others before shooting himself as police were closing in on him after his killing spree in Santa Barbara, California. Rodger left behind a 141-page manifesto in which he proclaimed his hatred of women and detailed his decade-long obsession with violent and hyper-violent video games. Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown described Rodger's killing spree as "obviously the work of a madman" and said it was "very, very apparent that he was severely mentally disturbed."

Why would it surprise anyone that entertainment industry venues, entertainers, and their audiences are increasingly involved directly in gun violence? In so many ways, the entertainment industry's finger prints are all over America's epidemic of gun massacre murders. The lucrative, socially destabilizing violence that Hollywood and the predatory video game industrypeddle so relentlessly as entertainment is coming home to roost. The motion picture industry has been embedding ads for firearms in its products for decades, and much of that material is extremely violent, patently racist, often misogynistic, inherently irreligious (ungodly), and socially divisive and destabilizing. The notion that one can separate the surfeit of that kind of poisonous entertainment fare from the gun massacres that plague the USA is utter nonsense.

Will Americans learn, eventually, that the two violent lunatics who, in separate and apparently unrelated incidents, killed 50 people in Orlando last week were habituated to violent and hyper-violent media product, as was Dylann Roof, who murdered nine members of a Bible study group in the basement of an historic African American church in Charleston, South Carolina, in what he said was an attempt to start a "race war," in 2015? If we do find out that these particular killers were regular users of violent or hyper-violent media product, it certainly won't be because Big Media corporations wish Americans to understand the contributing and causative roles their products so often play in mass murders. Rather, the Hollywood mob, which has a long and ugly history of vilifying Arabs, would much prefer that Americans remain focused on Big Media news organizations' favorite bogeyman, radical Islamic terrorism.

To ensure that they are able to continue profiting from the deluge of lucrative, socially-destabilizing violence they pump into American popular culture with criminal abandon, the entertainment industry aggressively lobbies not just state and federal lawmakers but a long list of federal agencies.

Scholars Jennifer M. Proffitt, Ph.D. and Margot A. Susca, Ph.D. of the Florida State University College of Communication and Information, writing in "Follow the Money: The Entertainment Software Association Attack on Video Game Regulation," point out that, "Lobbying reports from 2004-2011 outline how much ESA has spent and also explain further to which federal agencies and offices that money has gone. The legislative and federal agencies that have most frequently been the subject of the ESA’s lobbying efforts include: the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S Senate, the FCC, and the FTC. In 2010, ESA lobbied the National Security Council, the Office of the Trade Representative, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Justice, the Department of State, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Customs Service, the Department of Homeland Security, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. In 2008, the ESA spent roughly $3 million lobbying Congress and federal agencies. In 2007, records from the Center for Responsive Politics reveal similar patterns of multi-million dollar lobbying by ESA. That year, ESA spent $2.8 million lobbying Congress and all of the aforementioned named federal agencies and departments including the FTC. In 2005 and 2006, the years of substantial legislative action and Congressional inquiries into violent games, ESA spent more than $4.3 million combined lobbying Congress and other federal agencies and employed 38 lobbyists working on its behalf."

Profitt and Susca report that, "ESA has the power to flex its political muscle in all parts of the legislative process. In 2005, as state legislation in Illinois and Michigan was passed attempting to curb the sale of violent video games to minors, Hillary Clinton, then a New York senator, with Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman proposed the Family Entertainment Protection Act, SB 2126, in December. The federal law was intended to stop the sale of explicit games to minors, yet again, because of concerns about content and the ratings system. In a political move, [Douglas] Lowenstein and Steve Schnurr [sp?], an E[lectronic] A[rts] executive, hosted a $1,000-a-plate fundraiser for Clinton the year she and Lieberman crafted SB 2126 (“ESA Promotes,” 2008; Zeller, 2005). By early 2006, ESA had devoted $120,000 toward lobbying against the bill (“Lobbying,” 2006). In 2006, one year after the industry dinner, Clinton, with Lieberman, appeared with Lowenstein to announce a plan to keep the ratings system voluntary. One industry watcher said: 'It’s a fascinating turnabout for these two politicians, who have previously criticized the video game industry for making it too easy for minors to get Mature-rated games' (Cohen, 2006, para. 5). In 2008, Schnurr [sp?] gave $4,800 to Clinton’s presidential campaign (“ESA Promotes,” 2008). SB 2126 died in committee." One might speculate that the primary purpose of the proposed legislation was to elicit legal bribes from the Hollywood mob's well-heeled lobbyists.

The courts are prevented from protecting Americans against the entertainment industry's excesses by the U.S. Supreme Court's 2011 Brown v. Entertainment Marketing Association (EMA) decision. The 7-2 decision struck down a California law that banned the sale of violent video games to minors, thereby "effectively shielding the entertainment industry from any government effort to limit violent content." The majority opinion was authored by the late Justice Antonin Scalia. "His opinion voiced strong support for free speech even when children are the audience. But his support came with an exception established in cases four decades ago: The law can protect children from sex and pornography in the media, he said, but it cannot protect them from violence [emphasis added]. [Scalia] cited court precedents that exempted from the First Amendment 'obscenity' and pornography directed at children."

Why, one might ask, are Justices who would protect children from the attentions of those who target them with sexually explicit material so quick to throw the same children under the bus and allow them to be targeted by the purveyors of even the most disturbing, socially-destabilizing violent and hyper-violent media product, material having harmful effects documented by social science research? Is that not a reasonable question following the gun massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which came three years after the Brown v. EMA decision? The Supreme Court has the authority to overturn precedent. The Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision overturned the precedent known as "separate but equal" affirmed in 1896 by the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, thus effectively ending legal argument for racial segregation in American public schools. How many more must die in how many more gun massacres in America before the Justices reconsider violent and hyper-violent media product? America can't wait 58 years for the Court to revisit Brown v. EMA.

Pity both the law enforcement administrators who are tasked with preventing gun massacre murders and the first responders whose jobs require they go in harm's way to stop the carnage and get the victims of gun massacre violence to safety and to hospital. Powerful media organizations have stacked the deck against administrators, and the trauma first responders experience is always emotionally wrenching and too often psychologically debilitating.

With the nation's legislatures, courts, popular culture, the public discussion, and the rule of law so heavily influenced and thoroughly compromised by those who profit directly and indirectly from socially-destabilizing depictions of violence and bloodshed as entertainment freighted with political propaganda, it might seem that nothing short of providential intervention would suffice as remedy. Let us not presume upon divine mercies.