Colorado Carnage: Proof of Obama Ineptitude
Sick individuals are the
product of a "sick society"
By Finian Cunningham
Global Research, July 24, 2012
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32041
In
a society which criminalizes and degrades whole communities on the
basis of skin color and low economic status and which refuses appeals
for clemency even for mentally sick individuals is it any wonder when
certain other members of that society treat their fellow citizens with
brutality over perceived grievances and grudges? Sick individuals are
the product of a sick society. President Barack Obama has led the
American nation’s soul-searching over the latest shooting spree in their
country in which 12 people were murdered in a Colorado cinema house by a
seemingly crazed 24-year-old man.
Obama said he was “shocked and saddened by the
horrific shooting” in which a university doctoral student calmly,
callously opened fire on families and friends who had packed a theater
in Aurora, Colorado, for the opening night of the latest Batman movie,
The Dark Knight Rises.
James Holmes, the alleged shooter, had likened
himself to The Joker, the arch-villain of the Batman series.
Methodically, he entered minutes after the movie began screening at
midnight last Thursday, wearing a helmet and gasmask and clad in full
body armor. Holmes set off two tear gas grenades and then proceeded to
spray the terrified audience with bullets from a 12-gauge shotgun, a
0.40 Glock handgun and a semiautomatic assault rifle. Tragically, some
of the people initially thought it was a promotional stunt for the film.
In somber tones, Obama urged fellow Americans, “When confronted by moments of darkness and challenge, we must now come together as one American family. We must stand together.”
Moments of such darkness recur with disturbing
frequency in the American society. Since Obama took office in early
2009, there have been at least six mass shootings across the United
States, from Binghamton in New York where 13 people were killed in April
2009 at an immigration services centre, to Oakland, California, where
seven people were shot dead at a Christian college earlier this year.
Before that, the biggest murder spree was in 2007 at
Virginia Tech when a gunman killed 32 people at a college before taking
his own life. In 1999, only 17 miles from the latest massacre, two
teenagers went on a shooting rampage in Colorado’s Columbine High
School, killing 12 of their fellow students and a teacher, and then
turning their guns on themselves.
What is it about the American society that makes the wanton destruction of human life such a routine occurrence?
Some point to the constitutional right for all
citizens to bear firearms and the easy access of buying even
high-powered weapons over a shop counter. Campaigners for stricter gun
controls point out that there are more firearms in the US than there are
citizens - some 300 million. Such is the prevalence of mass shootings
in the US that even conservative public figures, such as commentator
Bill Kristol and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, are now calling for
greater restrictions on gun ownership.
The American gun lobby claims that the perpetrators
of such horrific killings are simply sick individuals who have become
unhinged, morally and psychologically.
Added to the debate are complaints that American
popular culture has become saturated with gratuitous violence, from
Hollywood to television to video games, which has desensitized young
people to killing and maiming. Indeed, the Batman movies themselves are
known for scenes of unremitting, explosive violence.
However, the spectrum of American politicians and
media pundits does not seem capable of acknowledging nor even being
cognizant of a deeper malaise for these mass killings. This malaise
stems from how deeply engrained and integrated violence is in the very
fabric of US society. That is because it stems from America’s capitalist
social disorder of haves and have-nots, its structural violence against
marginalized communities, its system of self-enriching cronyism for
ruling elites at the federal and state levels, the looting of public
finances by banks and corporations, and from the country’s increasingly
lawless and destructive relations with the rest of the world. What makes
the systematic violence of the US so lamentable is that not one of the
political parties or mainstream media is able to provide a comprehensive
narrative for the root cause. They are intellectually bankrupt.
Therefore the solution will continue to elude and the violence will
continue, again and again.
A look back at some of the incidents and news in the
days preceding and following the Colorado cinema shooting casts some
light on where such depravity may stem from.
Earlier in the week that the shooter held his finger
on the trigger, there was another gratuitous homicide. US Navy men
onboard a 670-foot warship, the USNS Rappahannock, opened fire with
heavy machine guns on a small fishing boat in the Persian Gulf.
Survivors among the Indian fishing crew said that without warning shots
or signals, their vessel was sprayed with a hail of lead from 0.40
caliber armor-piercing guns. One of fishing crew died when his body was
torn into three pieces from the gunfire, while three others were
critically wounded. The US Navy ship didn’t even stop to tend the
injured. Respect for law, human life? Not as far as US government
military forces are concerned in this instance as in so many other
instances in Afghanistan, Iraq and countless other countries where they
operate.
The day before the Colorado murders, the American
mainstream media reported that Congress had approved an annual budget of
$606 billion for Pentagon military expenditure, including overseas
operations such as the massive build-up of American warships and fighter
jets in the Persian Gulf against Iran, and the ongoing 11-year war in
Afghanistan - the longest war in American history. Such official
disclosure of military spending - larger than that of all countries of
the world combined - eclipses total American government spending on
health, education, employment and training, research and development,
community and social welfare, public infrastructure and utilities, and
it comes at a time when poverty is ripping apart families and
communities the length and breadth of the US, afflicting some 50 million
Americans. This is an economy of war and violence writ large. An
economy dictated by a few, unaccountable to the majority.
A macabre form of cost-cutting came in the form of
the Texas state execution of death row prisoner Yokamon Hearns. Just
hours before the Colorado slayings, mentally disabled Hearns was put to
death with a single lethal injection - instead of the customary
administering of three chemicals. The single injection of pentobarbital
will presumably save the state money. Pleas for clemency were ignored by
the Texan authorities, even though Hearns was intellectually disabled
from childhood. A second African-American man, Warren Hill, is to be
executed this week, also by single lethal injection, in the state of
Georgia, after more than 20 years on death row. Like Hearns, Hill is
also mentally disabled. Their cases illustrate disquieting trends in the
American justice system. First, the number of death row prisoners has
increased five-fold from the mid-1970s, when the death penalty was
reinstated, to some 3,100 currently. Second, the numbers awaiting
execution are disproportionately higher for men from poor, black
communities. And, thirdly, this capital punishment is being used
increasingly on individuals who have clinical conditions of mental
impairment. In 2002, the US Supreme Court ruled that execution of
intellectually disabled inmates was “cruel and unusual punishment” - but
the practice continues in many states.
In a society which criminalizes and degrades whole
communities on the basis of skin color and low economic status and which
refuses appeals for clemency even for mentally sick individuals is it
any wonder when certain other members of that society treat their fellow
citizens with brutality over perceived grievances and grudges? Sick
individuals are the product of a sick society.
And the week of American violence was not over yet.
Almost a full week before the Colorado shootings,
massacres, shooting and bombings were intensified in Syria under
Washington’s proxy war against the government of Bashar Al Assad. For
the past 16 months, thousands of Syrian civilians have been murdered,
kidnapped or dispossessed by foreign mercenaries waging a covert war at
the behest of Washington and its allies Britain, France, Turkey, Israel
and the Persian Gulf Arab monarchies. The illegal objective of “regime
change” is now openly exulted by President Obama. Indeed, only last week
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned of yet more violence to
bring down the Syrian government, a threat that culminated in the murder
of four senior Syrian Cabinet members in a bomb attack that has all the
hallmarks of a Western intelligence operation.
Needless to say, Washington did not condemn that act
of mass murder. Days later, US lawlessness was underscored when John
Bolton, the Bush-era neocon and former ambassador to the United Nations,
urged the state of Israel to launch a military strike against Iran on
the basis of outlandish allegations that the Islamic Republic had been
involved in the car-bombing of seven Israeli tourists in Bulgaria. Just
like that, acts of war dispatched from American mouths, as easy as
rounds from a semiautomatic. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
has since given notice that long-held joint American war plans towards
Iran have been brought forward.
Meanwhile, American unmanned drone strikes continued
to kill people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The latest
victims include two civilians in Nuristan, northeast Afghanistan, and 12
unknown people in Pakistan’s North Waziristan province. These victims
were presumably shortlisted by President Obama in his weekly meetings
with Pentagon chiefs to sanction the coming week’s assassination “hits”
(- perhaps around the same time that he was preparing his somber speech
for the victims in Colorado).
Over the weekend, as the people of Aurora, Colorado,
were mourning their family and friends, eight US-led soldiers were
killed in Afghanistan in separate Taliban attacks, bringing the total
troop fatalities in that country to 258 so far this year. Obama will no
doubt claim that such loss of life is testimony to America’s “leading
the world in the cause of freedom.”
Although, over the same weekend, when American
citizens at home protested for freedom from poverty, unemployment and
homelessness, they were batoned and shot at with rubber bullets and
pepper spray by riot-clad police officers. The levels of police
brutality in cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles have reached
new heights. Only days before the Colorado killings, a San Francisco man
who was handcuffed by police was shot twice fatally in the chest by
officers. Two days after Colorado, another man was shot in the back as
he ran away from officers in Anaheim, Los Angeles. In that incident,
unarmed Manuel Diaz was brought down with the first volley and then as
he fell wounded he was shot in the back of head. Local people said
police officers handcuffed his prone corpse before carting it away. When
Diaz’s neighbors came out on their street to peacefully denounce police
conduct, they were fired on with rubber bullets and set upon with
police dogs.
Such gratuitous state violence towards its citizens
makes a mockery of Obama’s exhortations for Americans to “stand together
as one family.”
In his speech on the Colorado shootings, Obama added,
“We may never understand what leads anybody to terrorize fellow human
beings like this. Such violence, such evil is senseless. It’s beyond
reason.”
What is beyond reason is just another week of American violence, at home and abroad.
