 |
| Kent State, 1970 14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio, crying over the body of 20-year-old Jeffery Glenn Miller. Photo: John Filo |
As can be expected, in the aftermath of the horrific San
Bernardino mass murder committed by Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik in
December, the issue of “gun control” and “gun violence” comes to the fore
again, highlighted by a teary appeal from President Obama for new “gun safety”
measures. I’ve dealt with the issue of gun rights in a comprehensive
essay after a previous mass shooting (Sandy Hook), and I stand by the
position laid out therein.1
There are two considerations that, I think, count for something:
1) The right to own firearms is an important political
right. That is not a right-wing position. In fact, I consider the defense of
that right part of the populist tradition in left revolutionary politics. Therefore,
any necessary regulations on that right – and there will be some – must be as
carefully considered as the limitations on any other important right.
2) The American capitalist state is an apparatus whose
main purpose is to protect class rule and its accompanying injustices, and to project
compliance-inducing aggression on behalf of the American elite and its favored
allies — locally, nationally, and internationally. Any mitigations of these
injustices and aggressions are not the products of the liberal state’s inherent
neutrality and altruism. They are the hard-won, always-precarious, fruits of
social movements that scare the liberal capitalist state into forgoing
particular wars, advancing particular minority and civil rights, establishing
remunerative social welfare policies. etc.
In most “gun control” discourse, the first point — that gun
ownership is a fundamental political right — counts for less than nothing. Most
such discourse, in fact, considers it important that gun ownership not be considered a right, but some kind
of frivolous luxury. Those who think that should acknowledge it, and advocate
openly for the rescission and denial of that right, as do now the major organs
of mainstream liberal opinion in the United States, the Washington Post (“The
problem with Obama’s promise not to take away your guns”) and the New York Times (“it would require
Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up”). The strongest, most
forthright, statement of this position is given by Israeli-American sociologist
Amitai Etzioni in his Huffington Post column, “Needed:
Domestic Disarmament, Not 'Gun Control'”.2
If, deep-down, under the flimsy and perfunctory “I respect your right” façade, you agree
with Etzioni that “domestic disarmament is a true, compelling vision,” then
argue explicitly for it. Understanding, of course, as he does, that you will
have to do this “through the back door” (because of that pesky Second Amendment),
and using the armed force of the state to criminalize the 40 million or so
people who own guns, who have done and will do nothing wrong with them, and who
are passionately committed to their right. It’s a hell of a popular base that
people who consider themselves leftists blithely ignore — nay, hold in
contempt.
For most “gun control” proponents, the second point — the
core injustice and aggression of the American capitalist state — also counts
for nothing when it comes to this issue.
They righteously protest rampant police brutality against minorities and the
poor, the mass-incarceration state, the increasing restriction of rights in the
name of surveillance and security, and the thoroughgoing purchase of the
American political system by a corrupt oligarchy that oversees it all. But when
it comes to this issue, most liberal gun-control proponents shift back into the
mindset that, by and large, the American capitalist state is a benign, neutral
force that mediates social conflicts fairly, and actually does, or at least
sincerely tries to, look out for everyone’s lives and well-being equally. They
must, musn’t they, or they would consider it a little problematic to have teams
of armed agents of the state and its approved security firms saturating social
spaces, ostensibly protecting them from the dangers they will have no means to
protect themselves against. They would consider that it might be a bit
problematic to create new crimes, and
sic teams of armed agents of the state to forcefully disarm and/or imprison those
40+ million people who have done and will do no harm to any other human being.
Or perhaps I have missed the gun-control proposals that include disarming the
police and the repressive state apparatus.
It Won’t Fly
The reaction to the San Bernardino shootings perfectly
illustrates this combination of contempt for fundamental rights combined with
reverence for the benevolent power of the state. One proposal seems so obvious:
Deny the right of gun-ownership to those on the “no-fly” list. After all, those
people are already identified as the most dangerous, aren’t they? Who could object
to denying them the right to purchase guns? That’s the seemingly inarguable
proposal that Connecticut’s Democratic Governor, Dannel
Malloy jumped on with “his plan to use an executive order to prevent people
on federal terror watchlists from buying guns.”3
Except liberals and leftists and everyone concerned with fundamental
citizens’ rights have been pointing out for years that these watchlists are, as
the ACLU
says: “unconstitutionally vague, and innocent people are blacklisted
without a fair process to correct government error.” That’s why the ACLU “cautioned against using
the no-fly list in its current form as a reason to deny a person a firearm.”4
Please note the plural in the Malloy story – watchlists. The no-fly thing is not just one
list, but an opaque, complicated system of lists. As
Gadeir Abbas, attorney for U.S. Air Force veteran Saadiq
Long, who has been put through the “no-fly” wringer for three years, puts
it: “It is as if the U.S. has created a
system of secret law whereby certain behaviors — being Muslim seems to be one
of them — trigger one’s placement on government watchlists that separate people
from their families, end careers, and poison personal relationships. All of this
done without any due process.”
It’s impossible to overstate how arbitrary and capricious
these lists are.
As I pointed out in a previous
post on the topic, the strict
no-fly list actually deliberately excludes those whom American
intelligence agencies consider the most dangerous — the very people for whom
it’s ostensible designed. On the other hand, various
less-stringent versions have included conservative Republican Congressman Tom
McClintock, liberal Democrat Ted
Kennedy, Bolivian President Evo Morales, the ghosts of Saddam Hussein
and Osama bin Laden, and, oops, in entirely separate, continentally disparate
instances, my wife, and me.5
Now that the right in question is gun ownership, what do the
liberal supporters of the Malloy proposal, who have spent the last decade or so
criticizing these no-fly watchlists, have to say? “[T]hey say the lists are adequate
enough to deny gun purchases.”
Remind you of anything? It reminds me of Hillary Clinton,
targeting the powerful tool of end-to-end encryption, arguing
that horrors like the San Bernardino shooting require us to accept more
surveillance, more censorship, further restrictions on rights of privacy and
free expression: “[W]e have to deny them [ISIS, et. al.] online space… we’ve got to shut off their means of
communicating.” She has no problem “waving off” the concerns of those usual
suspects who always insist on protecting those rights, with a dismissive: “You’re
going to hear all of the usual complaints, you know, freedom of speech, et
cetera.”6
Gun rights, free-speech rights, yada, yada.
Are not Malloy and Clinton working off the same template?
The War on Terror — No, really, ISIS,
c’mon now! — requires us to accept new restrictions on some of our
fundamental rights (perfunctory nod to free speech, gun ownership). And even
though, yeah, our “government” hasn’t always been so careful when we
surrendered some of our rights in the past, and even though we’ve been
criticizing the very programs and agencies we will be surrendering them to this
time (the no-fly list, the NSA), we just have to trust it. It’s our government,
out to protect us, after all — this imperial American state. It’s adequate
enough.
One can only not see that the same thing is going with gun
rights as with free-speech and privacy rights, that the same imperative to
surrender to the care and protection of the state is in play, if one assumes
that 1) Gun rights, yada, yada, are
not really important -- not really, you know, rights, or 2) There’s some reason to be completely trustful of the
American capitalist-imperialist state, or to be more trustful when surrendering
one set of rights to it rather than the other.
Liberals who adopt any set of those assumptions are, I would
contend, mistaken, but there’s a debate to be had as long as they are
acknowledged. I’m less kindly disposed to those liberal gun-control proponents
who call out the flimsy, perfunctory preludes to undermining free-speech and
privacy rights but adopt or ignore the same rhetorical strategies in relation
to gun rights, and who contemptuously dismiss those who recognize the
discrepancy.
Color me crazy, but I would think leftists might want to
seek alliances with 40+ million people in defense of rights that are important
to various groups, maybe even including everyone’s right to a decent
socio-economic life.
By the way, Governor Malloy, this is how that works: As I
said in my previous
gun-rights post, I don’t own a gun. I don’t have a lawyer, either. I don’t
need either at the moment, but I value my right to avail myself of either
should I feel the need. The only thing that might get me to purchase a gun, as
it’s already
got millions to do, is a threat to eliminate that right. Proposing to use
the no-fly list to deny that right might just do the trick.
But Guns Kill People,
Encryption Doesn’t
Guns and lawyers protect from particular threats, and give
you a certain amount of equalizing power.
Let’s look at three mass killings in which 14 people were
killed between October 1st and November 27th this year.
In one of them, a 21-year-old man named Anton went to a school wearing what the
kids thought was a Star Wars mask, posed for some pictures with students, then
went inside and killed a 17-year-old boy and a teacher, before being shot dead
by police. In another, a 26-year-old man named Chris killed 9 people on a
community college campus before shooting himself. In the third, a 57-year-old
man named Robert killed 3 people in a medical clinic, before being arrested.
One of these guys was some kind of anti-immigrant neo-Nazi;
one fancied himself a Christian warrior, with a history of violent behavior;
one was a mixed-race young man who was isolated, sexually frustrated, and had
anti-religious and white-supremacist views. All were very confused men, stewing
in a toxic brew of persistent psychological derangement that became “inspired”
by, and attached to, some intense ideological memes circulating in the culture
that, they thought, gave their lives a higher purpose.
Two of them killed with guns, one with a sword and a knife.
All of these incidents were ended by people with guns.
What do we want to talk about when we talk about incidents
like these? The weapons used? The weapon did not cause the crime. A state of
mind did. The state of mind is the power behind the weapon. Some weapons may
make the act more deadly than others, but persons in a certain state of mind
will find a way to carry out such attacks, with whatever weapons they can — guns,
knives, swords, or pipe bombs.
This is often, but not always or just, a psychological
problem. Any rage-filled act of mass violence will be overdetermined, and, the
attacks by these three guys were psycho-political — more psycho than political,
I would say. They were not part of any coherent strategy, and were
predominately driven by a rage rooted in the psyche.
Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik’s case is different.
They acted as a couple, and there is no indication of the kind of psychological
derangement these men suffered. If the jihadi
“inspiration” that has been ascribed to them is confirmed,7 we
can characterize them as driven by a religio-political motive,8
without the strong tinge of psychosis, but definitely with a sense of higher
purpose. The fear-inducing potential of such purposeful acts makes them
particularly useful for discourses that insist on the need to restrict more
rights, even though everyone acknowledges that they comprise a tiny, atypical
bit of the ongoing everyday violence (“gun” and other) that bedevils American
society. Highlighting such dramatic incidents also distracts from the inconvenient fact that the gun homicide rate has decreased, even as gun ownership has increased.
What unites all these cases is a powerful, compelling, state
of mind.
It was a state of mind — more psychotic than political —
that drove Anton and Chris and Robert to slaughter random people at a school in
Sweden, a college in California, and a Planned Parenthood Center in Colorado.
It was a state of mind — more political than psychotic, call it a conviction — that drove Syed and
Tashfeen to shoot up a holiday party in San Bernardino.
I was also, by the way, a state of mind, a definite
conviction, that drove the young, future “domestic disarmament” proponent, Amitai Etzioni to drop
out of high school and join the elite Zionist commando force, Palmach, that was
killing Brits and Palestinians with guns and bombs and whatever.9
Which is more powerful, a state of mind or a gun? Not a
rhetorical question.
In all of these instances, the tools used were not the causes
of the problem. They may have been exacerbating factors, but focusing on the
weapons used does exactly nothing to address what produces such states of mind.
In fact, I would argue, focusing energy constantly and obsessively on the
weapon distracts from addressing the much harder and much more important questions
regarding what produces such states of mind.
It precisely treats the fundamental cause of the act – whether that
cause be psychological, or political, or some combination of the two – as less
important than the tool that was available. Would it be productive for a
discussion of Amitai Etzioni’s violent acts in Palestine to be about “gun
control” rather than his Zionist convictions?
Talking about guns displaces talking about causes of the
rampant psychotic rage that is infecting so many young men, and about the gigantic pustule of jihadi
and imperialist violence and pathology — retail and wholesale, perpetrated by
lone-wolves, psychotics and clear-headed warriors, occupation forces and jihadi proxy armies, special ops teams,
air power, and police forces — of which the San Bernardino shooting is but one
suppurating lesion.
Talking about guns does absolutely nothing to address any of
that. But it does make a lot of people who feel no need or reason for gun
rights (except the right of the police and army of their state to have all the
weapons they need to protect them) to
feel morally and intellectually superior to the millions of people who do
understand that right, and who own guns and will never do a wrong thing with
them.
Let’s get back to how gun rights and other rights
intertwine. Remember that California has the most stringent gun laws in the country,
that all of the weapons used in San Bernardino were purchased legally (though
some may have been illegally transferred and modified) by Syed Farook and his
neighbor, Enrique Marquez, both American citizens, and that no
proposed gun-control laws would have prevented the attack.10 How
exactly shall we change those laws to make it impossible for people just like
them to obtain a weapon? Make being Muslim a disqualifier? Or, re Marquez,
being lonely and desperate to please a friend? How about visiting a radical
Islamist website? Or any radical, “violent” website? As defined by whom? Being born in, having
family in, or visiting a Muslim country? A country in which there are armed
groups killing people constantly in violation of international law and common
decency? You know, like the Israeli army.
Please, tell me how that is going to work. Can we really give up the right to gun
ownership without giving up other rights? Can we pretend for a second not to know that
any new, stricter regime of “gun control” enforced by the American capitalist
and imperialist state will result in a greater curtailment of many rights, in
more surveillance, in more criminalization of dissident radicalism, directed
fiercely and selectively against the opponents of imperialism and Zionism?
Because it’s not just I who notices that, when looking for
the fundamental causes of violence, states of mind are more powerful than guns.
State authorities, while ignoring the underlying injustices, will insist,
correctly, that the networks of communication through which people are inspired,
enraged, and convinced are crucial in creating the practical and ideological
infrastructure of a determined fighting force. If you’re going to eliminate the
scourge of violent attacks, and you’re not going to address its structural and
historic causes honestly, you’ve got to disrupt the those networks somehow.
So, we need more surveillance and more gun control, just as the state insists. If you were
planning a violent attack, which would discomfit you more, stricter gun-control
laws or unrestricted comprehensive surveillance? Disabling end-to-end
encryption will make it easier to
prevent deadly plots, just as would random warrantless house searches and
backdoors in every computer and cellphone, and shutting down radically
“inspirational” websites -- just as more gun control will make mass shooting attacks less likely, less deadly,
less something. Unless it doesn’t. Because
those clever, convinced, and dedicated villains might find a way to talk to
each other without infected electronics, and to kill a lot of people without legally-acquired
guns. Maybe with bombs, grenades, poisons, or knives?
Tragedy and Farce
So we need knife control!
Really, the Brits seem to think so:
 |
|
|
 |
Get a Life, Bin that knife!
|
These pictures are not from The Onion. They are from local papers in England, where authorities
conducted a “Save a Life, Surrender Your Knife” campaign against “knife crime,”
inducing people to turn in their deadly pointed instruments, including “swords,
machetes and commando knives.” The weapons were used to “create a Guardian
Angel sculpture, which will act as a national memorial for victims of knife
crime [and “symbolise the nation’s stand against this tragic topic.]”….Detective
Chief Inspector Steve Dowson said: ‘We are keen to raise awareness of the
devastating impact of knife crime.’”11
And who of us can gainsay the importance of the tragic topic
of knife crime in Lancashire? Perhaps there have been some dramatic attacks
that were exacerbated by the use of knives, and the dreaded assault
commando knife, in, say, domestic disputes. Indeed DCI Dowson specifically
invokes “the number of families affected.”
So, knife control for knife crime, that’s the ticket.
Or, moving from the farcical to the tragic, perhaps we can
consider the “young Palestinians with kitchen knives who are waging a ceaseless
campaign of near-suicidal violence” against Israeli soldiers and civilians.
It’s a campaign that has American and Israeli pundits scratching their heads
and asking “What
drives the Palestinians who attack Jews with kitchen knives?”12
Is it at all helpful to make this a discussion about “knife
violence”? Should we call Inspector Dowson? What role should the weapons –
sometimes a potato
peeler! – have in our consideration of what’s going on here? The one thing
they elucidate is the imbalance of armed power as a precise reflection of the
imbalance of political empowerment and enfranchisement. Palestinian Arabs have
only kitchen knives and potato peelers to defend themselves, or to advance
their legitimate human and national interests, while Israeli Jews have one of
the world’s most powerful armies and a civilian – including settler –
population that defends and advances their colonial interests, armed like this:
The problem here is not the guns in the hands of the family
above, or the knives in the hands of the Palestinians. The problem is not
“knife violence” or “gun violence.” It is colonial
violence. It is the violence inherent in the political relationship based
on the assumed right of one ethno-religious group to conquer, expel, and/or
exterminate another. It is that relationship that determines who gets guns and
who gets potato peelers, and what they are used for. It is that relationship
that does the violence.
Does this mean that Palestinian Arabs would be better off if
they were better-armed — or more precisely, if there were a more equitable
balance of armed power between them and their colonizers? Everything else being
equal, yes. Of course, in the present
circumstance, in the absence of more fundamental political assets (a militant,
disciplined mass movement, unity of purpose, focused and accountable political
leadership, strong strategic alliances, etc.), replacing knives with guns would
only be more suicidal.14 Despite
the illusions of certain American gun enthusiasts, guns are not magic
instruments that will ensure freedom if you carry them around. Arms are not the
most important — and certainly not the most immediate — missing tools of the
Palestinian liberation struggle, in the single polity where Palestinian Arabs
are now the majority. A firearm is never the first tool of such a struggle.
Still, despite the illusions of certain American imaginary
pacifists, it is an important and inevitable one. Nobody understands better
than the Israeli government and settlers that the disparity in the armed power
of colonizer versus colonized populations is a crucial, enabling element of
colonial oppression. And every ally of Palestinian liberation should understand
that ending that disparity will be a necessary element of ending that
oppression – and that, whatever tactical or strategic considerations
Palestinians have about arming themselves at any given time, they have the
fundamental political and ethical right to do so.
Remember Professor “domestic disarmament” Amitai Etzioni? He
certainly understands, and accepts, the necessity of armed power in maintaining
relationships of domination and submission. In a 2014 article in the Forward, called “Israel’s
Moral Dilemma in Waging Gaza War,” Etzioni ponders “the moral and tactical
challenges…facing the IDF,” and “the importance of achieving moral clarity on
the issue at hand,” the choice “people hate to face” — that issue being the
choice to: “Either allow terrorists to act with impunity by mixing in with the
civilian population, or be forced to
bomb homes from which terrorists launch their rockets [my emphasis].” For
tough-thinking Amitai: “Those who waffle on this issue unwittingly prolong the
agony.”15
So, for Etzioni, Americans need to be disarmed (and don’t
even think Palestinians), but the IDF, and maybe the settlers pictured above,
are permitted to keep their weapons in order to continue the colonizing project
for which Etzioini himself picked up the gun as a teenager. There are some
people who are just “forced to” be armed, and some who have to be disarmed by
force. And Amitai Etzioni knows who they are.
What’s the Matter
But what does all this Israeli stuff have to do with the
United States. Surely you’re not
suggesting that the American citizens have a similar relation to the American capitalist
state as Palestinians have to the Israeli Jewish state!
Of course not maybe.
First of all, it may be easier to see, as an outside
observer, how futile and distracting it is to focus on knives and/or guns as
the source of violence in Israel-Palestine, rather than the underlying colonial
situation. But it is no less futile and distracting to focus on guns as the
source of violence in America. Guns in America are no more of a determining
variable, independent of the potent brew of psychological and political
psychosis, social inequality and cruelty, authoritarian-imperialist state
exceptionalism, class- and race-determined injustice and police impunity and
drug-war-mass-incarceration complex, upon which those guns float. This is the
American class-warfare capitalist state and society in which we live, and it is
that which does the violence.
The predominant liberal discourse of “gun-control” does
nothing, and is meant to do nothing, about any of that. Indeed, its now less-hidden
goal of “domestic disarmament” would only further solidify that state of
affairs.
So, do American citizens have a
similar relation to the American capitalist state as Palestinians have to the
Israeli Jewish state?
Well, which citizens?
Has there not been a Black Lives
Matter-Ferguson-Palestine solidarity movement, based on similar treatment by
armed state agents as occupation forces? The perception of that similarity is based
on the reality of the training of American urban police forces by Israel. For
some reason, the masters of the American polity think it’s been appropriate to engage
in a process that Max
Blumenthal, Rania
Khalek, and others have analyzed as the “Israelification of American
domestic security.” For the last twelve years, some 9,500 law enforcement
officers — including at least two of the four law enforcement agencies deployed in Ferguson — to Israel to
learn how to police American neighborhoods. For some reason. Do you think Israel
trains American police to treat their subjects the way the Israeli police and
army treat the Jews of Israel — as fully enfranchised partners in a society, or
the way they treat the Arabs — as a subjugated population, to be controlled? That
is a rhetorical question.16
So, while white professionals may
think it ridiculous to imagine their relation to the armed agents of the state
on the Israel-Palestine model, for many others it is quite cogent. The
Israelis, of course, are not the source of this, but it is amazing how their
apartheid ideology and practices have been stitched into the system of urban policing
and social “caging” that was described by Randy Newman 44 years ago in a
scathing song (“Rednecks”). That
song, by the way, is absolutely accurate to this day. It smacks the “race-blind”
northerner in the face with the enduring racism in which s/he is entwined, and
which is exactly what gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. (Warning:
If you don’t know this song, you have to listen to it all the way through.)
Because America is a class- and race-divided society, different
people have different relations to the state and its armed agents. Some
perceive, correctly, that the state protects them with agents they pay to carry
guns for them; others perceive, correctly, that they had better protect
themselves with their own weapons in their own hands. And, despite what many
liberals think, this is not a simple racial divide.
It should be no surprise, given the history of America, that
gun-control policies have been directed against minorities. The classic example
is the southern states’ Black Codes, enforced by what Adam Winkler calls
“the most infamous … disarmament posse” --- the Ku Klux Klan.17 The
wave of gun-control legislation in the 1960s was precipitated by Ronald
Reagan’s shock at the Black Panthers armed march on the California Capitol in
1967 and white fear of armed black neighborhoods after the 1968 riots.
Pushing back, historically and now, African-Americans have
insisted on, and benefitted from, their right to armed self-defense. Macolm X
insisted that ”America is based upon right of people to organize for
self-defense.” Fannie Lou Hamer was clear: "I keep a shotgun in every
corner of my bedroom, and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw
some dynamite on my porch won't write his mama again." Martin Luther King’s
home was at times an “arsenal” of guns protected by armed supporters. Robert F.
Williams, author of Negroes with Guns,
trained the Monroe, North Carolina NAACP chapter in armed self-defense. When
they successfully prevented the Klan from mutilating the body of a comrade, he
wrote, "That … really started us to understanding that we had to resist,
and that resistance could be effective if we resisted in groups." Significantly, he found that being armed
changed their relation to the police and the law: "The lawful authorities
of Monroe and North Carolina acted to enforce order only after, and as a direct result of, our being armed."
[Do check out the video
of Williams’s wife, Mabel, talking with Kathleen Cleaver, about how Williams
argued that arming the black community “reduced the level of violence,” because
it forced white racists “to make a calculation: are they willing to risk their
superior life to take your inferior life,” and how “All the black people had
guns…It was just not even discussed ..If in fact they heard the Klan was going
to ride, they would be prepared. There was no discussion.” They stressed that,
for black revolutionaries: “That was fundamental: the notion that people had to
accept the responsibility for standing up for themselves.”]
Today, again, for understandable reasons, the “call for an
armed black citizenry, [is] gaining traction,” with organizations like the Huey
P. Newton Gun Club of Dallas (loosely related to the New Black Panthers), and
allied groups like the Indigenous People's Liberation Party.18
 |
| Charles Goodson, co-founder of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club. Photos: Bobby Scheidemann |
 |
| Tina González of the Indigenous People's Liberation Party |
 |
Huey P. Newton Gun Club members march through
the Dixon Circle neighborhood of Dallas
|
It’s not about whether one endorses the program of the Huey
P. Newton Gun Club, or of Don’t Comply,
a white armed group that defies the law to distribute food and clothing to the
homeless on the streets of Dallas. There’s a lot of bluster, and political
confusion, in groups of people, black or white, parading around with guns.
There’s also always a rage, and a refusal to be ignored, that, however
confused, points to a social fault line that needs to be taken seriously — and it’s
not “guns.”
It’s easy and common, but wrong, for liberals today to
characterize gun rights as a pet peeve of racist rednecks (and they really
should listen to the song, before they do). There are certainly racists who
promote gun rights, and that fact gets highlighted by the media liberals favor,
but there are other voices, and another, ongoing history, and there is no
intrinsic connection between racism and gun rights. In fact, gun ownership has been increasing faster among Democrats:
Liberal media outlets, which don’t much like gun rights,
constantly present the confused and aggressive tactics of people like the
Bundys — the kind of people their audience lives to ridicule — to remind us
that only stupid crackers are interested in gun rights. Right-wing media, which
don’t much like black people standing up to the cops, constantly present images
of the confused and aggressive tactics of folks like the New Black Panther
Party — the kind of people their audience lives to fear — to remind us that
only ghetto thugs are interested in the right to refuse apartheid policing. Respectably
establishment liberal and conservative pundits, who don’t much like any dynamic
of dissent that threatens the increasingly precarious stability of the best-of-all-possible-worlds
American capitalist state, constantly present images of violent Muslims like
Syed and Tashfeen — the kind of people everyone wants protection from — to
remind us that only naïve fools and terrorists are interested in encrypting
their Twitter accounts. Each finds the appropriate prop for the right it wants
to dismiss.
Sure, there are plenty of pissed-off white people. Should
there not be? Should working-class whites (and every other working-class
constituency, and all of their progressive allies) not be furious that their
lives have been destroyed over the past thirty years by what Paul Street calls
“a relentless top-down class war on
their livelihoods, unions, and standard of living,” and over the past
eight years by the largest
transfer of wealth in the history of the country to the top ten-thousandth
of the population? Should they not bridle at the endless series of wars and
infinite increase in military spending that have no discernible interest for
them? Should they not be livid at the utterly corrupt private health insurance
system, now called Obamacare, that is flaying them to death with increasing
premiums, co-pays, and deductibles, for fewer coverage options?
Should middle-aged white Americans not find it disgraceful
that they have been struck by one of the starkest indicators that they’ve been
relegated to the social wastebin: “Unlike every other age group, unlike every
other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich
countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.” As two Dartmouth
economists remark:
“It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this
magnitude.…Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this.”
This is the kind of scourge that happens when a population has been discarded
and has lost hope, as have “Millions of
once ‘productively employed’ white working class people … [who have] become ‘surplus
Americans’ in a time when Silicon Valley geniuses soberly design the near total
elimination of manual labor and intellectuals debate the coming of “a world without work.”19
Liberals delight in perplexing about how working-class
Republican voters can be too ignorant to realize how they’re being conned by
oligarchs in populist drag. It’s the process Christopher Hitchens, in his
better days, called “the essence of American politics…the manipulation of
populism by elitism,” and Paul Street restates
as: “the cloaking of plutocratic agendas, of service to the rich and powerful,
in the false rebels’ clothing of popular rebellion; the hidden and unelected
dictatorship of money masquerading in the dress of the common people.”20
But perhaps those liberals should perplex in the mirror. As Steve Hendricks points
out:
For decades now, we liberals have been shaking our heads in wonder at the working stiffs who give the rich pashas atop the GOP their votes. There’s hardly a liberal alive who can’t recite what’s the matter with Kansas: the parable of the downtrodden whites in their double-wides, so enraged by their dwindling slice of the American pie that they vote for hucksters…[who] go off to D.C. and sock it to the suckers who sent them there — shipping their jobs abroad, rigging the tax code against them, gutting their schools, taking swipes at their Social Security and Medicare.
But here’s an equally pathetic farce you don’t hear about much: Democrats are just as conned…Ask a group of liberals what they want in a candidate, and you’ll get a sketch of a champion who will fight for income equality, rein in big banks, defeat ruinous trade agreements, restore our battered civil liberties, look to diplomacy before war, and stop the devastation of our climate. Sure enough, in every election year Democratic candidates come along peddling such wares as these, and the winners go off to D.C. and sock it to the suckers who sent them… Any leftist who wonders why her voice isn’t heard in Washington shouldn’t be asking what’s the matter with Kansas. She should be asking what’s the matter with New York.21
Conservative Kansans fall for a plutocratic, imperialist
agenda cloaked in patriotism, religion, and nostalgia for the good old Ed
Sullivan days; liberal New Yorkers fall for the same plutocratic, imperialist
agenda dressed up in multiculturalism, identity politics, and celebration of
the good new Caitlin Jenner days. Who’s the bigger fool? How’s that working out
for everybody? For the millions of victims
of that top-down, plutocratic class war — in the ghettos of the cities and the hollows
of Appalachia? For the Syrians, Iraqis, and Libyans, whose countries have been
destroyed? Ad infinitum.
In such a context, where the American capitalist state has
demonstrated its commitment to anti-democratic, oligarchic, austerity, and
imperialist agendas, imagining that armed militancy is a reactionary stance is
historically false and an important failure of political imagination. By all
means, let’s oppose armed militants seeking the privatization of public
land. Let’s also, however, imagine what
it might mean for armed militants to prevent foreclosures in a neighborhood, or
to occupy and operate the water supply system for Flint. Doesn’t sound horrible
to me. It is not impossible that, as happened with Robert Williams, the lawful
authorities would change their tune as a direct result of armed action.
[Breaking: As I
write, “A militia in Michigan has joined Michael Moore… to seek justice over
the ongoing water crisis in the city [of Flint] which left residents drinking
and bathing in water so contaminated that the EPA deemed it “toxic waste.”(Militia
Joins Flint Water Crisis Protest)
Let’s see how that develops.]
The fundamental problem with right wing populist militance
is not the guns it may brandish, but the foolish and self-destructive mindset
that underlies it. The problem with left-wing populist militance is that there
isn’t any, because what passes for the left in this country is forbidden from
imagining such a thing by its fundamental fear of breaking up either the
Democratic Party Blue Tribe or the American liberal capitalist state, which it
imagines can be turned back into a Good Daddy.
By all means, denounce reactionary and racist ideas and
programs, but not the populist militance itself. Let’s, indeed, respect and
address the pissed-off populace, demonstrate that we actually care about their,
and everyone else’s, working-class concerns —
if the so-calledd left can bring itself to identify things in such
terms. Let’s stop telling them they
should be grateful for the destruction of Libya and Syria, for the bailout of
Wall Street, and for the fraud
that is Obamacare.22 Let’s
actually be angry and concerned about the unprecedented rising death rate among
working-class whites, maybe a fraction as much as we have been about the
HIV/AIDS phenomenon it’s comparable to. Let’s finally drop any reluctance to exit
the Blue Tribe comfort zone, join popular militance, and redirect it in a radically
progressive direction. In that regard, I guarantee: You’re not going to make
anybody less racist or more progressive by taking away his or her gun.
And you don’t need to, and there’s nothing “left” about
trying to.
The thing about fundamental rights is, they are not diminished
or negated because people we don’t like use and defend them. Nasty, guilty people
have the right to a lawyer.
There is an enormous amount of political confusion — not to
say, stupidity (even among smart, well-educated people) — rampant in the United
States today, all wrapped up in some kind of Red
vs. Blue tribalism that’s supposed to (the very stupidest thing) correlate
with the political “right” and “left.”23 Some people think that a billionaire
real-estate crook is a man of the people. Some people think that voting for a
war-mongering, slut-shaming, red-baiting, bankster-backed Democratic
Presidential candidate is a “left” (Socialist-Feminist!) imperative. Some people think
asserting their personal autonomy by carrying guns around makes for a free
society. Some people think the American capitalist state can be a fine and fair
vehicle for solving social problems if only everyone were disarmed, and we
elected the right Democratic President and Congress. A pathetic farce, indeed.
None of this has anything to do with what I understand as
“left” politics. It may be unfortunate — it has and will be substantially
damaging — that people with such silly ideas have the right to vote and
determine the future of our country, and the life-or-death fate of millions of
people in the world. But they do, and must. They also all have the much less
powerful and dangerous right to own a gun. And the right to a lawyer. And the
right to keep the cops and spies out of their encrypted business unless they
have a warrant. And the right to post whatever nonsense they want on the
Twitters. And nothing that happened in San Bernardino, or, more horribly,
Sirte, should take any of those rights away from any of them.
As I said, I don’t own a gun. This isn’t about the gun; it’s
about the right. I think there should be fewer guns in evidence, playing a
lesser role in our polity. I think we should have a more pacific society, where
everyone has the right to possess a firearm, and nobody much knows or cares who
does, where our civic space is less tense and less saturated with arms and
potential violence (as it now is in the form of various armed agents of the
state) — because all people feel secure in their socio-economic lives, welcomed
in their identities, and confident in their democratic polity. We are far from
such a situation. And it’s not the right to possess a firearm that keeps us
from it. And I guarantee: Denying that right that will not bring us closer to
it.
___________________________________________________
Related Posts: The
Rifle on the Wall: A Left Argument for Gun Rights
Links and Notes
2
Max Ehrenfreund, The
problem with Obama’s promise not to take away your guns - The Washington Post,
End
the Gun Epidemic in America - The New York Times, Needed:
Domestic Disarmament, Not ‘Gun Control’ | Huffington Post
3
Connecticut
Governor Rejects Liberal Concerns Over Using Terror Watchlists To Stop Gun
Purchases - BuzzFeed News
4
Until
the No Fly List Is Fixed, It Shouldn’t Be Used to Restrict People’s Freedoms |
American Civil Liberties Union
7
It is important to state here that we do not know what motivated them. There
have been confusing and contradictory assertions that one or another made
statements expressing intent to commit mass murder in the name of some
Islamo-political agenda, but as far as I know, nobody has shown the public
those actual statements.
8
I’m going to say here that I consider the “religious” to be a disguised form of
the political.
10
Marco
Rubio’s claim that no recent mass shootings would have been prevented by gun
laws - The Washington Post, White
House Unable To Explain How Gun Control Will Stop Mass Shootings | Zero Hedge
11
Handed-in
knives to be melted down and turned into memorial for victims (From Lancashire
Telegraph), 500
Knives Handed In During Amnesty | Local News | News & Info | The Bay, Bin
your weapon, new bin launched in Aston - Birmingham Eastside, ‘Street
Pastors’: the new Samaritans | ThePrisma.co.uk
12 What drives the Palestinians who attack Jews with
kitchen knives? - The Washington Post, Israel calls Palestinian knife attacks 'a new
kind of terrorism' | Middle East | News | The Independent (“carried out mostly by unmarried youths who decide
on their own to pick up knives or axes or potato peelers”)
13
This is a photograph that was removed from the Palestine Info Center Facebook
page for “violating Facebook Community Standards.” See: Facebook censors
cartoon critical of Israel – Mondoweiss
14
There has been one shooting of an Israeli setter, allegedly by a Palestinian
who escaped: PressTV-'Palestinian
shoots Israeli in al-Khalil'
15 Amitiai
Etzioni, Israel’s Moral Dilemma in Waging Gaza War - Israel –
Forward.com, This article is a fine
example of what Jonathan Ofir calls the
“”moral’ argument” (his scare quotes on “moral”) for “shooting and crying,” an
argument that bemoans “the inevitable violence of such subjugation,” in: What's the big difference between Israel's 1967
occupation and its 1948 occupation?,
Mondoweiss.net.
16
Rania Khalek, Israel-trained
police "occupy" Missouri after killing of black youth | The
Electronic Intifada, Max Blumenthal, From Occupation to “Occupy”: The
Israelification of American Domestic Security | Al Akhbar English
17]
The
Secret History of Guns - The Atlantic, Alex Gourevitch, Gun
control’s racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power
- Salon.com
18
For
Some African-Americans, Gun Ownership Underscores Segregated Past : NPR, Huey P. Newton
Gun Club in Dallas Are Responding to Police Brutality with Armed Community
Patrols | VICE | United States, A
Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King,
p. 32,
19
The
Wages of Whiteness is Early Death, Death
Rates Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans, Study Finds - The New York Times,
Obama
Instituted the ‘Greatest Transfer of Wealth in History’ to the 1% | The Free
Thought Project
20
OWS and the Politicians: Against the
Manipulation of Populism by Elitism ‹ The Official Web Site of Paul L. Street
22
Obamacare
is Doomed by Its Internal Logic | Black Agenda Report, Obamacare:
The Biggest Insurance Scam in History, The
Polemicist: Who’s the Boss? The Obamacare Deception
23
For an interesting discussion of Red-Blue tribalism, see Scott Alexander’s
post: I
Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup | Slate Star Codex
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments will be lightly moderated, with disfavor for personal attacks and stunning irrelevancies, and deference to the trenchant and amusing.