Sancties van de VS zijn illegaal en zijn oorlogsmisdaden die moeten worden gestopt

De sancties die de VS eenzijdig en dus illegaal oplegt aan landen die haar niet welgevallig zijn, zijn niets anders dan grove oorlogsmisdaden waardoor zelfs mensen om het leven komen..... Even ter herinnering: in de 90er jaren van de vorige eeuw legde de VS eenzijdig sancties op aan Irak, daardoor kwamen 500.000 Irakese kinderen om het leven, ofwel die werden in feite vermoord door de VS.... De minister van buitenlandse zaken destijds (onder opperschoft Clinton) was de Democraat en oorlogsmisdadiger Madeleine Albright, toen deze psychopaat in 1996 werd geconfronteerd met dit feit en haar werd gevraagd of ze er geen spijt van had, antwoordde deze enorme hufter dat ze daar geen seconde spijt van heeft gehad en dat het e.e.a. het waard was geweest.....

Ook nu zijn kinderen en andere zwakke mensen de klos, zo zorgen de sancties tegen Iran ervoor dat belangrijke middelen tegen (kinder-) kanker niet meer te krijgen zijn, of zo duur zijn dat praktisch niemand ze kan betalen........ Wat mij betreft een misdaad tegen de menselijkheid!!  

De VS legt landen sancties op, die zoals gezegd vooral de zwakste burgers treffen ('treffen': letterlijk en figuurlijk)........ Door deze illegale sancties ontstaan er voorts tekorten op allerlei gebieden, waardoor de economie in het slop raakt, daarop geeft de VS het land de schuld, bijvoorbeeld door te wijzen op een 'lamlendig economisch beleid', of door in geval van een links geregeerd land het socialisme de schuld te geven......... (tegelijk organiseert de CIA dan demonstraties, waarbij men het liefst ook op de demonstranten laat schieten door ingehuurde scherpschutter moordenaars, om daarmee de regering van zo'n land nog meer zwart te maken....) De VS hoopt daarmee  een opstand te ontketenen in zo'n land*,  terwijl de wat beter geïnformeerden weten dat de VS de schuld is van de ellende juist door die sancties, zie Venezuela en Oekraïne, waar deze smerige vorm van terreur bij de eerste (nog) geen succes heeft, waar het bij de laatste, zoals bekend, wel is gelukt......

Gelukkig ontstaat er wereldwijd steeds meer weerstand tegen deze smerige VS terreur, (beter is dit smerige spel niet aan te duiden, sancties die intussen tegen 39 landen (!!) worden toegepast en uiteraard voelen andere landen daar ook de gevolgen van, immers bedrijven kunnen geen handel meer drijven, daar de wereld afhankelijk is van de dollar als betalingsmiddel en de VS juist de bedrijven straft die toch leveren ondanks de sancties...... Rusland is intussen klaar voor de introductie van een nieuw internationaal betalingssysteem zodat het systeem van de VS, te weten: SWIFT, uitgerangeerd kan worden.

Het volgende artikel werd eerder gepubliceerd op Nation of Change (ICH meldt onterecht dat dit PopularResistance is) en door mij overgenomen van Information Clearing House. In het artikel een petitie om actie te ondernemen tegen de terreursancties van de VS, lees en teken deze ajb en geeft het door:

The world must end the US’ illegal economic war

The indiscriminate, illegal and immoral use of sanctions is an act of war.

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers

January 16, 2020 "Information Clearing House" - The United States is relying more heavily on illegal unilateral coercive measures (also known as economic sanctions) in place of war or as part of its build-up to war. In fact, economic sanctions are an act of war that kills tens of thousands of people each year through financial strangulation. An economic blockade places a country under siege.

A recent example is the increase in economic measures being imposed against Iran, which many viewed as more acceptable than a military attack. In response to Iran retaliating for the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani and seven other people, Iran used ballistic missiles to strike two bases in Iraq that house U.S. troops. President Trump responded by saying he would impose more sanctions on Iran. Then he ended his comments by urging peace negotiations with Iran. The United States needs to understand there will be no negotiations with Iran until the U.S. lifts sanctions that seek to destroy the Iranian economy and turn the people against their government.

The sanctions on Iran have been in place since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which made that country independent of the United States. Iran is not the only country being sanctioned by the United States. Samuel Moncada, the Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations, speaking to the summit of the Non-Aligned Movement of 120 nations on October 26, 2019, denounced the imposition of sanctions by the U.S., as “economic terrorism which affects a third of humanity with more than 8,000 measures in 39 countries.”

It is time to end U.S. economic warfare and repeal these unilateral coercive measures, which violate international law.

Sanctions are war. From havaar.org.

Sanctions are a weapon of war

The United States uses sanctions against countries that resist the U.S.’ agenda. U.S. sanctions are designed to kill by destroying an economy through denial of access to finance, causing hyperinflation and shortages and blocking basic necessities such as food and medicine. For example, sanctions are expected to cause the death of tens of thousands of Iranians by creating a severe shortage of critical medicines and medical equipment everywhere in Iran.

Muhammad Sahimi writes that in a “letter published by The Lancet, the prestigious medical journal, three doctors working in Tehran’s MAHAK Pediatric Cancer Treatment and Research Center warned that, ‘Re-establishment of sanctions, scarcity of drugs due to the reluctance of pharmaceutical companies to deal with Iran, and a tremendous increase in oncology drug prices [due to the plummeting value of the Iranian rial by 50–70%], will inevitably lead to a decrease in survival of children with cancer.’”

Diabetes, multiple sclerosis, HIV/AIDS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and asthma affect over ten million Iranians who will find essential medicines impossible to get or available only at high prices. The U.S. claims that food and medicines are excluded from sanctions but in practice, they are not because pharmaceutical companies fear sanctions being applied to them over some technical violation and Iran cannot pay for essentials when banks can’t do business with it. European nations failed to persuade the Trump administration to ensure that essential medicine and food were available to Iranians.

In Venezuela, due to the sanctions, 180,000 medical operations have been canceled and 823,000 chronically ill patients are awaiting medicines. The Center for Economic and Policy 
Research found sanctions have deprived Venezuela of “billions of dollars of foreign exchange needed to pay for essential and life-saving imports,” contributing to 40,000 total deaths in 2017 and 2018. More than 300,000 Venezuelans are at risk due to a lack of access to medicine or treatment. Economists warn U.S. sanctions could cause famine in Venezuela. Sanctions also cause shortages of parts and equipment needed for electricity generation, water systems, and transportation as well as preventing participation in the global financial market. Sanctions, which are illegal under the UN, OAS and US law, have caused mass protests in Venezuela against the U.S. 

Sanctions against Iran and Venezuela could be a prelude to military attack, i.e. the US weakening a nation economically before attacking it. This is what happened in Iraq. Under pressure from the United States, on Aug. 2, 1990, the UN Security Council passed sanctions that required countries to stop trading or carrying out financial transactions with Iraq. President George H.W. Bush said the UN sanctions would not be lifted “as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.” The U.S. continued to pressure the increasingly skeptical Security Council members into compliance even though hundreds of thousands of children were dying. In 1996, then-U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright was asked about the death of as many as 500,000 children due to lack of medicine and malnutrition exacerbated by the sanctions, and she brutally replied, “[The] price is worth it.” Sanctions were also used against Libya and Syria before the U.S. attacked them.

This is consistent with the U.S. ‘way of war’ described by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States,” which describes frontier counterinsurgency premised on annihilation including the destruction of food, housing, and resources as well as ruthless militarism. The U.S. has waged a long-term economic war against Cuba (sanctions in place since 1960), North Korea (first sanctions in the 1950s, tightened in the 1980s), Zimbabwe (2003) and Iran (1979) 

Sanctions hurt civilians, especially the most vulnerable—babies, children, the elderly and chronically ill—not governments. Their intent is to shrink the economy and cause chronic shortages and hyperinflation while ensuring a lack of access to finance to pay for essentials. The U.S. then blames the targeted government claiming that corruption or socialism is the problem in an effort to turn the people against their government. This often backfires as people instead rally around the government, quiet their calls for democracy and work to develop a resistance economy.

Stop Sanctions destroying lives from BrightonAndHoveNews.org.

The movement to end sanctions

In recent years, a movement has been building to end the use of illegal economic coercive measures. The movement includes governments coming together in forums like the Non-Aligned Movement, made up of countries that represent 55 percent of the global population, as well as UN member-states calling for international law and the UN Charter to be upheld and social movements organizing to educate about the impact of sanctions and demand an end to their use. This June, the Non-Aligned Movement called for the end of sanctions against Venezuela.

Popular Resistance is working with groups around the world on the Global Appeal for Peace, an initiative to create a worldwide network of people and organizations that will work together to oppose the lawless actions of the United States, and any country that acts similarly. A high priority is opposing the imposition of unilateral coercive economic measures that violate the charter of the United Nations. The UN and its International Court of Justice have been ineffective in holding the U.S. accountable for its actions. No one country or one movement has the power alone to hold the United States accountable, but together we can make a difference. Join this campaign here.

With 39 countries targeted with sanctions, and other countries impacted because they cannot trade with those countries, nations are challenging the U.S.’ dollar domination. Countries are seeking to conduct trade without the dollar and are no longer treating the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency while also avoiding Wall Street. The de-dollarization of the global economy is a boomerang effect that is hastening due to the abuse of sanctions and will seriously weaken the U.S. economy.

Foreign Minister Zarif, who describes sanctions as “economic terrorism,” warned that “the excessive use of economic power by the United States, and the excessive use of the dollar as a weapon in U.S. economic terrorism against other countries, will backfire.”  As the blowback continues to grow, the negative impact on the U.S. economy may force the U.S. to stop using sanctions. The end of dollar domination will add to the demise of the failing U.S. empire.


End the Deadly Sanctions banner on the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, D.C. From the Embassy Defense Collective.

Time to end the use of illegal economic sanctions

The combination of countries acting against U.S. sanctions, and people’s movements pressuring the U.S. government has the potential to end the abuse of sanctions. The EU has moved to blunt the impact of the sanctions against Iran by creating an alternative to the U.S.-controlled SWIFT system for trade. This is spurring the end of the dollar as the reserve currency. Some officials in the EU have called for retaliatory sanctions against the U.S.
Trump left a small opening for potential diplomacy with Iran that could lead to the end of sanctions against that country. Trump bragged about the U.S. being the number one oil and gas producer, taking credit for an Obama climate crime, and therefore no longer needing to spend hundreds of millions a year to have troops in the Middle East. He concluded with a message to the “people and leaders of Iran” that the U.S. was “ready to have peace with all those who seek it.” He said the U.S. wanted Iran to have a “great and prosperous future with other countries of the world.”

That future is only possible if the U.S. moves to end the sanctions against Iran. Iranians have learned the U.S. cannot be trusted. Iran lived up to the requirements of the Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, but Trump did not when he withdrew from it and re-instated draconian sanctions lifted by Obama. Trump added even move sanctions. This also angered European allies who had negotiated the agreement and were put in the position of being subservient to the U.S. or going against it. To regain Iran’s trust, the U.S. needs to make a good-faith gesture of ending punitive economic measures.

North Korea, which has been sanctioned by the U.S. longer than any other country, had a similar experience after they reached an agreement with the United States in 1994 under the Clinton administration.  The George W. Bush administration wanted to put in place a national missile defense system but the agreement with North Korea blocked that. John Bolton and Dick Cheney falsely accused North Korea of violating the agreement, increased sanctions against it and claimed it was part of the Axis of Evil, along with Iran, and Iraq. 

North Korea, like Iran, learned they cannot trust the United States. Sanctions are causing thousands of deaths in North Korea. Now, China and Russia are allied with North Korea and are urging relief from the U.S. sanctions. Russia and China have also ignored U.S. sanctions against Venezuela and continue to do business with it.

On December 17, the Senate passed a Sanctions Bill that put in place sanctions against corporations working with Russia to develop gas pipelines to Europe. The action is naked U.S. imperialism seeking to prevent Russia from being the main natural gas exporter (NS2) to the EU market and to replace it with more expensive U.S.-produced gas, a move to save the financially-underwater U.S. fracking industry. Russia, Germany, and others have defiantly told Washington its weaponizing of economic sanctions will not halt the gas pipeline construction. 

The indiscriminate, illegal and immoral use of sanctions is an act of war. Unless they are authorized by the United Nations, unilateral coercive measures are illegal. A critical objective of the peace and justice movement in the United States, working with allies around the world, must be to end this terrorist economic warfare. The U.S. economy currently depends on financial hegemony and war. The slow, steady collapse of the dollarized economy means the 2020s will be the decade U.S. domination comes to an end. The U.S. must learn to be a cooperative member of the global community or risk this isolation and retaliation.

Kevin Zeese is an American political activist who has been a leader in the drug policy reform and peace movements and in efforts to ensure a voter verified paper audit trail. Margaret Flowers, M.D., is a Maryland pediatrician seeking the Green Party nomination for the US Senate. She is co-director of PopularResistance.org and a board adviser to Physicians for a National Health Program and is on the Leadership Council of the Maryland Health Care Is a Human Right campaign.

This article was originally published by "PopularResistance" -

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* Tegelijk stoken zoals gezegd CIA agenten het vuurtje op en bewapenen in veel gevallen een aantal scherpschutter moordenaars, zodat deze slachtoffers maken onder de demonstranten, vervolgens wordt de schuld daarvoor in de schoenen van de onwelgevallige regering geschoven..... Iets dergelijks wordt een 'false flag operatie' genoemd, de VS gebruikte dit o.a. in Oekraïne en Syrië, waar deze terreuroperatie in het laatste land mislukte.

Zie ook:
'Moordenaar van Soleimani komt om bij neerhalen van VS spionage vliegtuig in Afghanistan' 

'KLM vliegt weer over oorlogsgebied Iran - Irak, terwijl andere maatschappijen waaronder Air France het gebied mijden' (en zie de links in dat bericht anders, dan de hier getoonde)

'Soleimani moord: VS pleegde een daad van oorlog' 

'Rampvlucht TWA 800 vs. PS752'

'Trudeau (premier Canada): de VS is verantwoordelijk voor de vliegramp in Iran'

Voor meer berichten over sancties of andere zaken uit dit bericht, klik op de betreffende links, die je direct onder dit bericht terug kan vinden. 

Schietpartijen VS gevolg van witte overheersing die is 'gefundeerd' in de grondwet

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

• Check out and buy Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’ book Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment.
• See her other work here.

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* 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.