“BARBARITY”
February 6, 2015
“Barbarity” is the word
President Obama used to describe the summary execution of a downed Jordanian
pilot, whose mission was to rain fiery death on the executioners with
US-supplied arms, the flow of which members of Congress now seek to increase http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/policy-budget/congress/2015/02/04/jordan-pilot-isis-iraq-syria/22845217/. We criminologists call that retribution, revenge,
an eye for an eye, lex talionis. The US
president chooses a term that denotes cruelty by an uncivilized group. He speaks for the dominant US political
culture that has similarly justified genocide of its indigenous peoples and
colonization of Latin America and the Philippines. European colonialism is our heritage. The prevailing US attitude, now linked “freeing”
markets to global capital, implies that our violence is superior to theirs.
We are civilized. The more than three thousand prisoners
awaiting prisoners have a chance to sit in isolation for a decade or more of
appeals before some of them are quietly but firmly strapped down behind walls
and fed a selection of chemicals to sedate them, suffocate them, and stop their
hearts in a process that often takes a while to finish, but eventually, quietly
ends. All this in a system heavily
weighted toward selecting poor men of color with white victims among homicides for
capital prosecution in the first place.
In many cases we humanely substitute sentences of life without parole
even to our younger offenders. In our
humanity, rather than being barbaric enough to use corporal punishment (in
public places at least), we hold a full quarter of all the world’s prisoners in
the continental US alone. Pretrial
detention aside there aside, the US has now been holding suspected Muslims as “terrorists”
of the ISIS kind, without charge, without evidence of wrongdoing, for over a
decade. And Jordanians aside, US planes
and drones themselves continually set people afire in the region where ISIS
rules—weapons too powerful, dropped from too far away to separate “the bad guys”
from those they live among, pretty terrifying, if that’s what “terrorism”
means.
The bottom line: by wealth and
military-technological-bureaucratic elaboration, US violence may be more
sanitized and restrained than those we call morally inferior, but it affects far
more people. We in the US justify
military and economic domination by projecting our own willingness to exact
revenge onto our foreign enemies, and displacing our personal violence onto
those we incarcerate and execute. Our
actions belie our claims to moral superiority, which in itself only feeds war.
President Obama has called for
us to begin reinvesting in care of our infrastructure. The military defense budget is 600 billion
dollars, larger than the oft-cited 500 billion for social security (which is
funded by workers and employers rather than by tax dollars). May the time come when our sense of moral, “civilized”
and “developed” superiority in war gives way to taking better care of each
other. Love and peace, hal
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