Isn't What Happened in Arizona Media-Fed Bigoted White Christian Male Terrorism?
MARK KARLIN, BUZZFLASH EDITOR FOR TRUTHOUT
Where does one start in the wake of the political killing spree that occurred in Arizona on Saturday?
With John Wilkes Booth putting a bullet into the head of Abraham Lincoln?
With the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy?
With the shooting of Martin Luther King?
The right-wing culture of hate and implicit coded call to kill the enemy, as if on a mission from God, is a subset of our larger national culture of violence.
From our policy of maintaining superpower status through wars and coups to going back to the conquest of America by the slaughter of Native Americans, we have had a history of a large segment of our population that views violence as a remedy for personal and political grievances - as well as the fulfillment of ideological goals. For them, "putting down your enemy" is as American as apple pie.
Whenever it comes to political assassinations - and the senior federal judge of Arizona was killed on Saturday, along with the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the deaths of others - the shills for the establishment of a Christian-white-male-ruled authoritarian society try to distance themselves from the "crazy people" who heed their call and pull the trigger.
Truthout's William Rivers Pitt so poignantly described the devastating results of such a grotesque dynamic in terms of how effective it is as a strategy. The liberal leadership of the '60s was killed off, leaving the country to veer right. As Pitt laments, "Imagine what the Democratic Party would be like today if this generation of leadership had been able to enjoy the privilege of that generation's wisdom."
The violence-inciters kill more than individuals; they murder the heart of a nation's dreams and aspirations.
This can also be called terrorism.
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