John
McEvoy van The Canary schreef het verslag van een interview met
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, een historicus die is gespecialiseerd in het
tweede amendement van de grondwet in de VS. Het interview o.a. naar
aanleiding van de laatste meervoudige moord door een neonazi in El Paso (deze neonazi werd gepord door het 666 beest Trump, die latino’s uitmaakte voor moordenaars, verkrachters, drugsdealers en dieven).
Dunbar-Ortiz
betoogt in het interview dat witte overheersing is ingebakken in de
grondwet van de VS. Veelal wordt het tweede amendement gezien als
bescherming van burgers tegen een autoritaire overheid, die schijt
heeft aan de rechten van de burgers. Ter verdediging tegen zo’n
overheid zou het volk recht hebben op wapenbezit (en in een aantal
staten mogen deze zelfs openlijk worden gedragen)……
Dunbar-Ortiz
betoogt dat het tweede amendement veel meer was bedoeld voor witte
milities die zich moesten kunnen verdedigen tegen de oorspronkelijke
volkeren van de VS >> lees: het verjagen van de oorspronkelijke
volkeren, gepaard gaande met het uitroeien van hele
stammen van die oorspronkelijke volkeren in de VS…… Anders gezegd: de witte immigranten voerden een genocide uit op de oorspronkelijke bevolking, samen met de genocide in Latijns-Amerika, de grootste genocide ooit…….. Deze genocide ging verder gepaard met martelingen, verkrachtingen en de gruwelijkste vormen van moord…….
Deze
milities werden later ook ingezet om weggelopen slaven op te pakken
of opstanden onder slaven uiterst gewelddadig te onderdrukken…..
Het zal je niet verbazen dat deze milities later opgingen in de Ku
Klux Klan (KKK)………
Dunbar-Ortiz zegt niet te geloven dat Hollywood films en tv series bijdragen aan geweld, het zal je niet verbazen dat ik het daar volkomen mee oneens ben. Dagelijks wordt men in de VS gehersenspoeld met leugens als zouden ‘Amerikanen’ (VS burgers) de goede partij zijn en alles wat van buiten de VS komt of een andere religie dan het christendom aanhangt, is fout….. Opvallend ook dat de VS bevolking veelal als slachtoffer van buitenlandse agressie wordt neergezet, terwijl de praktijk het volkomen tegenovergestelde laat zien……* Tevens wordt de geschiedenis van de VS vervalst middels die films en series……. (hetzelfde gebeurt overigens in de rest van wat men het westen noemt, voorbeelden te over, ook op de Nederlandse tv…..)
Lees het verder uitstekende artikel van Dunbar-Ortiz, waarin zij de zaak
veel uitvoeriger beschrijft (heb het artikel overgenomen van TheCanary):
Amid
mass shootings, leading historian says ‘white supremacy is baked
into the US constitution’
John
McEvoy
6th
August 2019
The Second
Amendment of
the US Constitution becomes the focus of intense and
polarised debate in
the wake of each mass shooting. It is a debate pierced by
economic interest groups and fierce emotional impulses; yet history
rarely enters the conversation at the exact moment that it’s most
needed.
After
the recent white
supremacist mass
shooting in El
Paso (the eighth
worst in
recent US history), The
Canary spoke
with leading historian on the Second Amendment, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.
She is the author of Loaded:
A Disarming History of the Second Amendment,
which illustrates how the white supremacy of the country’s settler
colonialists lives on in the country – not least through gun
legislation.
After
each mass shooting in the US, we hear a range of arguments across the
media calling for greater gun control. What are the biggest
misunderstandings and lies told about the Second Amendment, and how
should we really understand it?
Any
conversation about dealing with gun violence in the United States has
to begin with the second amendment and its true function from its
establishment, throughout the 19th-century brutal conquest of the
continent, and its ideological function propping up white nationalism
today.
The
US constitution is unique among nations in mandating a general
individual right to bear arms… A problem with discussing the US
constitutional provision is the regard US people have for the
constitution itself, as a kind of god-given covenant, whereas other
nations’ constitutions are easily amended or replaced entirely and
do not carry a sacredness given to the US constitution, with the
authors, ‘founding fathers,’ near demigods.
Adding
the right to bear arms to the constitution as one of the initial ten
amendments was not the creation of a new right, rather a validation
of an already existing practice of Anglo settlers forming their own
militias to burn and loot Indigenous towns, burning their fields,
killing and raping, torturing, and seizing of the already
Indigenous-developed farms and fisheries of the Atlantic Coast,
colony by colony, to push Native peoples to the peripheries. Those
militias arrived with the first invaders, led by the mercenary John
Smith at Jamestown and mercenary John Mason in the Massachusetts
colony. When racial slavery—the slave codes–became established by
the late 1600s, these militias became slave patrols. The second
amendment contains colonial violence in a nutshell, and neither
liberals or conservatives want to acknowledge that reality.
Many
people have observed that the El Paso shooter’s ‘manifesto’
echoes how Donald Trump speaks about
immigrants, and accused Trump of ‘stochastic
terrorism‘.
Is the white supremacist rhetoric coming out of the White House a
departure from normal US politics, or does Trump reflect the soul of
the US in ways that people would rather not confront?
The
United States was founded as a white republic and white supremacy is
baked into the constitution and institutions that exist today. For
instance, the slave patrols, citizens’ militias, that were tasked
with controlling slave populations in the slave states, continued to
function during the Civil War that ended in outlawing slavery. But
these slave patrollers simply put on hoods and robes and continued to
play the same role in terrorizing and controlling the freed Black
population. Although illegal during the US military occupation of the
South, they were so many and so widespread that they could not be
stopped. When the Army pulled out, they took off their hoods and
robes and became the local sheriffs controlling the Black population
under Jim Crow. With the Black diaspora escaping the South to
northern and later west-coast cities, southern whites also migrated,
forming all-white police forces in cities. In 1950, the US was a
locked-down white male republic, African-Americans living segregated,
Native peoples on tiny portions of their original territories,
Mexicans as indentured agribusiness workers, women with few rights,
especially if they were married…
With
the humiliating loss of the US war in Vietnam in the mid-1970s, and
with nearly 700,000 combat veterans back in civil society, armed
white nationalist groups multiplied. Ronald Reagan’s presidency was
openly, although coded, white nationalist, with the US covert
counterinsurgencies in Afghanistan and Central America employing many
of the disgruntled, out-of-work vets as mercenaries and domestic
terrorist groups appearing, particularly in eastern Washington and
Oregon, Montana, Colorado, and in the 1990s spreading to the entire
continent. War fever, with the invasions of Panama, the Gulf war, and
the post-9/11 wars produced more armed white nationalists.
The
election of a liberal Black Democrat to the presidency in 2008 was a
blow to increasingly normalized white nationalism, with Muslims as a
new Brown enemy. Immediately, the Tea Party movement began, and
Donald Trump – reality TV star and real-estate developer – began
his campaign to prove that Obama was not US-born, a great boon to
white nationalists who then carried him to the presidency.
Trump
abandoned the ‘dog whistle’ white supremacy that the Republican
Party embraced with its ‘Southern strategy’ under Richard Nixon,
and has gotten by with outspoken white supremacy with no damage to
his solid 40% base. Clearly, the El Paso mall shooter was empowered
to act based on Trump’s characterization of Central American
refugees as invaders.
How
is the relationship between white supremacy and gun culture
reinforced through popular culture – films, action figures and toy
guns, the stories Americans tell about their country – in the US?
I
don’t believe that popular culture, in terms of films, video
gaming, toys, etc. have that much of an effect in reinforcing white
supremacy and gun culture. I do think the reality, not so much the
representation, of US militarism and endless wars against
non-European peoples, which are a continuation of the centuries of
militarism and warfare in seizing the continent, with Native American
peoples and Mexicans being the enemy, form a permanent culture of
violence.
With
the second amendment permission for unlimited gun ownership, that
violence goes beyond words and fist fights. The NRA [National Rifle
Association] and Republican Party talking points about gun violence
attempt to construe popular culture as the cause, particularly
‘Hollywood’ and video gaming, but dozens of studies and simple
observation nullify the argument. The US origin and historical
narratives glorify what are actually acts of genocide in the
establishment of the original colonies and the expansion to the
Pacific.
Rather
than having a reckoning with that past at the end of the Vietnam War
and honoring the anti-war movement and the disobedient soldiers, the
ruling class turned the US into a victim, enabling and encouraging
the myth of US soldiers missing in action in Vietnam. During the
1980s, the continued US wars had to operate clandestinely, covertly,
because the majority of the population was anti-war. But by 1989, the
Marines could invade and occupy Panama and change the regime there
without notable protests; two years later, the US could amass a half
million troops to invade and occupy Iraq. The shadow wars of white
nationalist militias grew domestically, nourished by war fever and
violence. It only got worse after 9/11.
Yes,
John Wayne killing Mexicans and Indians and Rambo killing Asians have
been wildly popular, but they never come near the real thing in
instilling violence and gun fetishism.
Congressman
Steve Cohen tweeted after
the El Paso shooting: “You want to shoot an assault weapon? Go to
Afghanistan or Iraq.Enlist!” (He later deleted the tweet.) How was
the US military apparatus forged through the white supremacist
genocide of Native Americans, and how does US foreign intervention
reify gun culture at home today?
The
US military was forged in the hundred years war to take the
continent. The first 70 years, from founding to the Civil War, the
goal was to ethnically cleanse all the territory east of the
Mississippi, generating dozens of wars of aggression and expulsion
against the southern Indigenous nations, marked by three declared
wars against the Seminole nation in Florida, where they gave refuge
to enslaved Africans who escaped. With the Indigenous survivors
forcibly relocated to Indian Territory (Oklahoma), the US invaded and
occupied Mexico, taking the northern half, thereby US territory
reached its Pacific Coast limit…
The
same officers who led those two decades of genocidal war headed the
troops that were sent to conquer Spanish-held territories in the
Pacific and Caribbean. Genocidal tendency is baked into the US armed
forces, particularly the Army and Marines.
US
foreign interventions into non-European countries throughout the 20th
century and continuing in the 21st are essentially ‘Indian wars,’
wars of erasure and chaos, dismantling local and national
institutions, creating dependency, particularly food.
Active
duty lifers and veterans of these foreign interventions are
prominently represented among white nationalists and gun hoarders.
There is is close correlation between multiple gun ownership and
military service.
An
overwhelming response to the latest shootings is to demand greater
‘protection’ from the US state (more funding for an increasingly
militarised security and surveillance state).
But if US gun legislation is inseparable from a legacy of violent
state-sanctioned terror, how can this be a satisfactory response, and
how can US society resolve its unhealthy relationship with guns?
Yes,
the solution is said to be ‘more good guys with guns,’ more
militarized police forces, further developing fortress America.
However, the mass shootings are used opportunistically for that
agenda. Tragic as mass shootings are, the deaths incurred make up
only 1% of US gun deaths each year, while 3/4 of gun deaths are
suicides. The easy availability of guns makes what might otherwise be
an attempted suicide a certain death. Likewise, deaths that result
from domestic violence and road rage are soaring with guns in cars
and homes.
One
place to begin resolving the problem is for leaders and professionals
of good will to acknowledge that mental illness is not the cause of
gun violence; rather ‘the need’ to possess firearms, many of
them, is itself a form of mental illness, paranoia. The late
historian Richard Hofstadter wrote of ‘the paranoid style in
American politics’ (1964).
He
had his finger on the pulse of the rising white paranoiac response to
the Black freedom movement. The majority of the white younger
generation embraced the anti-racist struggle, but a significant
minority of white men in particular panicked and reproduced their
paranoia in the following generations, fused with virulent
anti-communism and homophobia, often couched in Christian evangelism,
coming to dominate national politics.
In
fact, this white minority owns the US origin story and carries it
forward. As long as the measure of civic patriotism is based on the
founding narrative and militaristic fetishism, guns will play a
central role in US society, and no laws will be enacted to any
effect.
Cleansing
history
A key facet of ethnic
cleansing is to cleanse the historical record of the act itself. An
honest account of the white supremacy that runs throughout US
history, then, could offer a real solution to the country’s broken
relationship with guns.
For all those who find
‘thoughts’ and ‘prayers’ an insufficient solution to US mass
shootings, Dunbar-Ortiz’s work is essential reading.
Featured image
via WikiMedia
– Gregory Varnum
Get
involved
======================================
* Alleen deze eeuw heeft de VS al meer dan 2,5 miljoen mensen vermoord, veelal met hulp van de NAVO, een terreurorganisatie die altijd onder militair opperbevel van de VS staat……
Zie ook: ‘VS geweldcultuur gevaar voor iedereen‘
Voor meer berichten over het wapenbezit in de VS, klik op dat label, direct onder dit bericht.
