After an assassination attempt against former US President Donald Trump on Saturday, the headline of a New York Times editorial read: “The Attack on Donald Trump Is Antithetical to America.”
In a similar vein, President Joe Biden gave a nationally televised speech in which he told Americans: “We debate and disagree. We compare and contrast the character of the candidates, the records, the issues, the agenda, the vision for America. But in America, we resolve our differences at the ballot box. You know, that’s how we do it, at the ballot box – not with bullets.”
One can perfectly understand such fine and refined, and entirely delusional, sentiments at a time of national strife, with the president aiming to settle nerves and restore calm, even as conspiracy theories and blame games heat up.
Delusions can be useful; even in Plato’s philosophy, myths and deceptions can assume the status of “noble lies”. But if Americans were to be honest with themselves, was this violent act targeting a political figure out of character and “antithetical to America” – or was it definitive to the entire history of the US, written, as it were, into the very DNA of its violent political culture?
On the very same day that Trump fortunately survived the assassination attempt with a minor injury to one ear, Israel, which has been supplied with thousands of American bombs, slaughtered at least 90 Palestinians in a “humanitarian zone” in Gaza.
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A record of sustained genocidal acts is, in fact, definitive to the US. What the New York Times editorial board seems incapable of understanding is that it no longer gets to define what “America” is about. That task has long since left the Times boardroom and gone elsewhere.
The survivors and descendants of the current Palestinian genocide, among myriad other victims of American and Israeli malignant militarism, get to define what “America” is about.
American delusions
What is astonishing to observe in this country is how pathologically blinded some Americans are to the violence they are perpetrating around the globe. All the politicians and editorial boards rushing to condemn this violence on the home front are the same ones condoning, and even cheering, the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians at the receiving end of the military might gifted by the US to the Israeli army.
But we need not go around the world to see how deluded Americans are in failing to recognise how definitive this endemic violence is to the entire history of the US.
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Soon after President John F Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Malcom X (who would himself be assassinated less than two years later) was demonised for remarking on “chickens coming home to roost”.
In January 2020, Trump ordered the targeted assassination of Qassem Soleimani, a top Iranian general, in a drone strike in Baghdad. Before him, President Barack Obama ordered the assassinations of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki. We can go down memory lane and recall how the US tried to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, Indonesia’s Sukarno, and God only knows who else.
No American leader has ever managed to combat the extraordinary power of the gun lobby in this country
Americans have not been any gentler or kinder to their own presidents and political leaders who have been the targets of failed or successful assassinations, from Abraham Lincoln to James Garfield, William McKinley, Franklin D Roosevelt, Harry Truman, JFK, Robert Kennedy, George Wallace, Marin Luther King Jr, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George W Bush, and so on.
Then consider the epidemic of gun violence: Scarcely a day or a week goes by without news of a mass shooting somewhere in the US. No American leader has ever managed to combat the extraordinary power of the gun lobby in this country, no matter how rampant the violence, with more than 630 mass shootings reported last year.
Exporting violence
This made-in-the-USA violence is the country’s most lethal export, as American-made assault weapons have turned our entire world into a slaughterhouse. According to one report, the US “accounts for nearly 40% of global military spending, and devotes a larger share of its GDP to defense than most other countries”. Who can even count the number of wars the US is currently conducting or financing around the globe?
“My fellow Americans,” Biden told his audience after the attempted assassination of his chief political rival, “I want to speak to you tonight about the need for us to lower the temperature in our politics and to remember, while we may disagree, we are not enemies.”
We should all abide by that wise counsel and “lower the temperature” – perhaps beginning with Biden himself. He said this just days after ordering the resumption of shipments of 500-pound bombs to Israel, which will drop them on Palestinian men, women and children, slaughtering them by the thousands.
Well, he did lower the temperature, he might say – for he has not yet resumed sending Israel 2,000-pound bombs to kill even more Palestinians.
Nothing, not even the dark humour of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), can fathom the sheer psychotic lunacy of “Genocide Joe” going on national television to preach about the need to avoid violence in politics. It is not only he who appears to have gone senile; this entire country seems incurably demented.
The US was founded upon the genocide of Native Americans; its citizens go on mass shooting rampages on a regular basis; they target and kill their elected officials; they export lethal weapons around the globe; they bomb other nations with impunity; they arm Israel’s genocide of Palestinians; and then they publish editorials telling themselves and the world that violence is “antithetical to America”.
“Beam me up, Scotty!” That’s all that is left to be said.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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