Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “Peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com
January 22, 2013
I defy
anyone to click the link to today’s “Democracy Now!” segment on the film “Dirty
Wars” that Jeremy Scahill and Rick Rowley are premiering at the Sundance Film
Festival, and conclude that the US Government is the world’s leading and still
growing terrorist force and state sponsor of terrorism, and since President
Truman’s acceptance speech at the 1948 Democratic Convention has constructed and swelled the ranks of
anti-US guerrilla forces by giving them a common surnames, originally “Communists,”
now “al Qaeda.” If terrorism is the
greatest threat to US national security, meet the enemy: the enemy is us. If we US criminologists allow ourselves to
include state action in our definition of terrorism, if we define terrorism as
first-degree murder, and if serial first-degree murder is the most serious
of violent crimes, should not our theories of today’s violent criminal careers
be grounded in the study of habitual offender groups like the US Special
Operations Command and its commanders, who carry on globally terrorizing and
killing innocents in our name? Without
that conceptually grounding, our claims to knowledge of international violent
crime are premature, if not morally bankrupt.
Love and peace--hal
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