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This is Eve. Vocal criticism of the second assassination attempt on Trump and linking it to our culture of violence is not as common as it should be. Instead, there is too much mainstream commentary, where the weakest condemnations of the violence are often followed by a return to the same (and sometimes even more intense) harsh criticism of Trump, or a “he got what he deserved” sentiment.
While this article focuses on how guns instantly and irrevocably satisfy the desire to harm or subjugate others, the glorification of violence in the Anglosphere seems to have reached new (pathological) levels. Israel’s genocidal bloodlust seems to be gaining more followers. Twitter exploded with tweets praising the Mossad’s ingenuity for finding new ways to carry out mass terrorism via exploding pagers and walkie-talkies. Glenn Greenwald explained that many of them were from a psychosexual perspective, gleeful at the prospect of blowing up the testicles of Hezbollah members. They would no doubt be disappointed to learn that eye injuries were more common and that in addition to the two children killed, two medical workers were also killed in the exploding pagers. From Le Monde:
Doctors in Lebanon described horrific eye injuries and severed fingers on Wednesday, September 18, the day before a Hezbollah paging device exploded in the country, killing 12 people and injuring 2,800. “The injuries were mainly to the eyes and hands, with some suffering from severed fingers, shrapnel in the eyes, some losing their sight,” said Joel Khadra, a doctor working in the emergency room at Beirut’s Hotel Dieu hospital.
Khadra told AFP that the Hotel Dieu in the Lebanese capital’s Christian-majority Ashrafieh district treated around 80 injured people. “Around 20 people were immediately taken to intensive care and put on ventilators to prevent them from suffocating due to facial swelling,” she said…
A doctor at another Beirut hospital, who worked through the night, said the injuries were “out of this world. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“We’ve seen a lot of finger amputations,” he said, because people were holding the pagers in one or both hands, and some people who were sitting on the floor suffered leg injuries. But the “most devastating” injuries came when pagers exploded in people’s faces, he said, adding that 40 patients suffered eye injuries, most of them serious.
About three-quarters of these patients “have a complete loss of one eye and some or no salvage of the other eye,” while “15 to 20 percent have irreparable loss of both eyes,” he said.
As Zagnostra said in the comments:
I don’t think people have yet come to understand the psychological changes wrought by remote-exploding modified pagers, iPhones, and solar panels. We are entering a new phase of techno-fascism that will take years to spread throughout society.
Snowden’s warnings are theoretical, these bombings are real, and people are dying. Why am I still using my phone when the phone I’m holding could be a time bomb? We’ve all been exposed to the full force of evil.
The US will face retaliation, but the primary concern is not physical.
That’s the high point. Israel’s actions in the two bombings in Lebanon and Syria also created an explosive market for U.S. and Israeli technology, components and software.
Future global marketing will emphasize American and Israeli products without any blemish. https://t.co/7IV3ADGdXB pic.twitter.com/Z5ysazSaSR
— Kathleen Tyson (@Kathleen_Tyson_) September 19, 2024
Article by Robert C. Koehler, an award-winning Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. A common dream
“the man Suspect in the caseAccording to court documents filed Monday, the man had been camping outside a golf course in West Palm Beach with food and a rifle for nearly 12 hours, allegedly lying in wait for the former president until Secret Service agents opened fire, thwarting a potential attack.
This man was apparently trying to assassinate Donald Trump. It was the second attempt to assassinate the former president this election season. The would-be assassin was thwarted before he could fire a shot, but still…
What the heck?
Something is seriously wrong in the land of the free and home of the brave. In advertising terms, it boils down to this: Easy ways to get your point across – to win an argument – are all too easily available. Don’t like someone’s politics? Feel ignored? Feel your interests are threatened? There’s a much easier “solution” than actually trying to address the problem in the real world. Just do it!
While I support stricter gun control, I do not believe this deeply spiritual and mental problem can be solved by bureaucratic means alone. America is the heir to an imperial delusion, not only geopolitically but also domestically. Our country was born not only of the cry for freedom of some people, but also of the theft of their land through slavery and genocide. This hellish aspect of our history has not yet disappeared. Our national faith in violence may be hidden behind the words of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired people, your poor people, your multitude that yearns to breathe free…”, but this faith is at the core of who we are and what we do.
In other words, this is the God we worship.
We have a trillion dollar annual military budget, and have waged incredibly horrific wars around the world for my lifetime. We have flown the banner of global colonialism. As Vice President, I stand up for our “interests” (excuse me, our security and our values). Kamala Harris It has been described as “the most powerful and fearsome fighting force in the world.”
That’s how the cheers go: We move things. We move the planet. Yay! What I want to say here is that this attitude is spreading like a social disease in the country. If you are a staunch and unquestioning patriot, you have no choice but to worship the god of violence. And you probably feel the presence of this god not only abstractly at the national government level, but in your soul. Put a gun in your hand and suddenly you have the powers of a commander in chief. It is not hard to imagine what happens next. In fact, as we know, it happens all the time.
In other words, mass murders, political assassination attempts, or resort to violence, especially when such phenomena begin to become “normal,” are indicative of a social problem that goes beyond the availability of guns. Why is this happening? This is a social problem that is, so to speak, psychological in nature, and must be addressed as such, whatever that means.
At least, we as a society, as a species, have come to terms with the god of violence, or as theologian and author Walter Wink puts it, The myth of redemptive violence“We need to move away from the unquestioned assumption that it will resolve conflict and solve our problems. Moving through conflict by talking to one another — negotiating with our enemies and working to create a world that works for everyone — is incredibly complex. It’s not something that will make for a quick and easy headline or a movie plot.
In fact, in the real world, violent “solutions” always cause more harm, even if they produce temporary good: violent victories are accompanied by repression and ultimately backlash, but the myth of redemptive violence hides this from us because it endlessly portrays violence, “good violence,” as without consequence.
As I wrote years ago:
Get the orchestra going. Here’s how it plays: John Wayne, aka Ringo, climbs onto a stagecoach, and as the music swells, the Apaches chase them. Two minutes into the 1939 John Ford classic. Stagecoach“I counted fifteen Indians dead, each one jumping dramatically from his horse. Hundreds of Indians were hooting and yelling and raising their rifles, but none of them fired. It had little effect on the gallant stagecoach, and four white men returned fire with grim accuracy on the savages, one of whom actually smiled wryly, enjoying the opportunity to do so. They fired. Presently the cavalry appeared, and the Indians fled.
Yes, the myth of redemptive violence is God’s gift to screenwriters, or rather, God’s false gift to lost souls who decide their greatest hope is to blow away all the Earth’s problems.
I write this with the simple belief that violence will never completely disappear, but that national policies must go beyond war. All we can do is continue to move beyond the myth of redemptive violence toward redemptive connection and understanding.
I conclude with the words of a 12-year-old boy named Jose, in whose writing class I taught many years ago at a Chicago elementary school, from whom I learned much about the nature of gang life, including the ritual of throwing the shoes of someone shot or killed on the telephone wires in tribute.
In a writing exercise, Jose wrote:
One of my friends was stabbed with a pencil because he belonged to a gang, but now he’s not in a gang because he doesn’t want his family to see his shoes hanging from a telephone wire, and he wants to go back and right all the wrongs he’s done, and he never wants to be associated with gang members, and now he plays video games at my house.
America, America, you can transcend war. You can stop worshiping the god of violence.
