Trump has not yet accepted electoral defeat, and his remaining days as U.S. presidency until Biden’s inauguration may represent the period of greatest threat of armed intervention in Venezuela, especially before December 6, the date of the country’s next legislative elections.
In addition to trying to judicially question the outcome of the elections – an increasingly remote possibility – Trump may decide, before Biden takes office, to try an armed invasion to oust the Venezuelan government of President Maduro in an attempt to bolster his standing within the U.S., including among Democratic Party members.
Hostility to the Venezuelan government is a bipartisan consensus in the U.S. It was former President Barack Obama who declared Venezuela a “threat” to the U.S. The rising star of the Democratic Party Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez characterized the Venezuelan government as “authoritarian” and “anti-democratic” – which led one of its supporters to send an open letter denouncing her position. This letter – which is worth reading – is here:
https://medium.com/@stangoff/open-letter-to-rep-ocasio-cortez-on-venezuela-98169c5f7561
And both Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders supported the attempted coup in Venezuela in February 2019 under the guise of ‘humanitarian aid’. On that occasion, Bernie Sanders declared “The people of Venezuela are enduring a serious humanitarian crisis. The Maduro government must put the needs of its people first, allow humanitarian aid into the country, and refrain from violence against protesters.”
To this, Roger Waters – from Pink Floyd – replied through twitter:
Bernie, are you f-ing kidding me! if you buy the Trump, Bolton, Abrams, Rubio line, “humanitarian intervention” and collude in the destruction of Venezuela, you cannot be credible candidate for President of the USA. Or, maybe you can, maybe you’re the perfect stooge for the 1 %.
More on Sanders’ statement, the position of Ocasio-Cortez and Roger Waters’ reaction can be found in this other article:
It is also important to remember that the United States corporate media, virtually in unison, have always been hostile to Venezuela and have supported not only the economic sanctions against the country but also the successive coup attempts that have so far failed.
The upcoming legislative elections in Venezuela are a threat to the empire’s fake narrative about Maduro’s ‘dictatorship’. That a considerable part of the Venezuelan opposition has agreed to participate in the elections, repudiating the self-appointed ‘president’ Juan Guaidó, spreads a shovel of lime over any trace – if there still is one – of legitimacy in the opposition represented by Guaidó and his cronies.
A U.S. military attack before the December 6 Venezuelan elections would be yet another attempt to prevent these elections. Recent joint manoeuvres by the Brazilian and the U.S. navies in the Caribbean region indicate that preparations for an attack are already underway.
If Trump decides on such an intervention, virtually no criticism – much less real opposition – can be expected from the United States corporate media, or from the Democratic Party, or from the United States military cadres. Trump would then be free to move to front and centre stage and once again dominate the news cycle, projecting and affirming to a much wider public than that of his current supporters the image of the ‘strong man’, the ‘presidential’ leader who can recover America’s lost ‘greatness’. And this could bring him the necessary support for a new coup attempt before Biden’s inauguration. He has few options left to remain in power, and for Trump, this may be the only plausible one. Trump’s last days as president may be the most dangerous period ever faced by the Maduro’s Government.
Franklin Frederick is a Brazilian writer and political activist
It is happening here.
The soul of America is like the character Two Face in the Batman movie series.
One defeat of the Party of Trump and its 73 million apparatchiks is not enough. In Trump, the United States has bred its own dictator in waiting and he’s got an army of servile apostles willing to fight and die for him. Vigilance by his opponents has never been more important.
“This Fuhrer dictatorship could produce only lackeys and profiteers of the most reactionary and aggressive part of German imperialist reaction. Its Germanic democracy reared the repulsive type of a human breed that was boundlessly servile to men of higher rank and just as boundlessly cruelly tyrannical towards men below it.” The Destruction of Reason, Georg Lukacs
Incumbent President Donald Trump now owns the Republican Party, lock, stock and barrel. With 73 million restless apparatchiks clearly beholden to the cult of Trump, will it be long before the Republican Party gets rebranded as the Trump National Party; or, perhaps, the MAGA Party (Make America Great Again)? Maybe Trump sells-off his faltering real estate empire and creates a media conglomerate—consisting of television, radio,and the Internet/WWW—that spews out divisive, fascist, ultraconservative fare 24 hours a day, 7 days week. Trump Media would absorb the National Review, New York Post and similar conservative publications/websites.
Sky’s the limit for Trump: His 73 million followers include an increasing number of Blacks and Latinos who appear to revere him for his apparent strength, tough talk and sense of honor.
According to Fortune Magazine, “As Trump once put it: ‘Real power is fear. It’s all about strength. Never show weakness. You’ve always got to be strong. Don’t be bullied. There is no choice.’”
Adolf Hitler Said That Too
“Brutality is respected. The ordinary man in the street only respects brute force and ruthlessness. The people need to be kept in a salutary state of fear. They want to fear something. Why make a fuss over brutality and wax indignant over tortures? The masses want ti. They want something that will give them shudders of terror. Moralistic platitudes are essential for the masses. There could be no greater mistake for a politician than to be seen posing as the immoral superman. Of course I shall not make it a matter of principle whether or not to act immorally in the conventional sense. I do not abide, you see, by any principles whatever.” (Adolf Hitler quoted in The Destruction of Reason by Georg Lukacs)
We are all familiar with these wicked sentiments expressed by Trump and Hitler and assorted cult leaders, or should be. The history books are replete with tales of dastardly kings, princes and dictators who said nearly the same things and lived and ruled by such dictates. Democracy has been the aberration in politics, not dictatorship or kingship.
The Path to an American Hitler
The Destruction of Reason by Lukacs traces the development of irrationalism and fascism in Germany; specifically, the intellectual fertilizer that led to Hitler’s rise to power and National Socialism. His analysis reaches back to 1789 and includes commentary on Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, Engels, and scores of other philosophical heavyweights.
In an epilogue to the book titled Post World War II Irrationalism, Lukacs argues that the USA achieved all that Hitler sought without all the baggage of National Socialism, psychopathic leaders and the industrialized murder of the Jewish people. He kicks off the epilogue by quoting from Norman Mailer’s novel the Naked and the Dead, specifically the character of General Cummings:
“As kinetic energy, a country is organization, coordinated effort, your epithet, fascism. Historically the purpose of this war is to translate America’s potential into kinetic energy. The concept of fascism, far sounder that communism, if you consider it, for it is grounded firmly in men’s actual natures, merely started in the wrong country, in a country that did not have enough intrinsic potential power to develop completely. In Germany with that basic frustration of limited physical means there were bound to be excesses. But the dreams, the concept was sound enough. For the past century the entire historical process has been working toward greater and greater consolidation of power.”
Lukacs puts a fine point on the United States succeeding where Hitler could not:
“In contrast to [Nazi] Germany, the USA had a constitution which was democratic from the start. The ruling class managed, particularly during the imperialist era, to have the democratic forms so effectively preserved that by democratically legal means, it achieved a dictatorship of monopoly capitalism at lest as firm as that which Hitler set up with tyrannical procedures. This smoothly functioning democracy, so called, was created by the Presidential prerogative, the Supreme Court’s authority in constitutional questions (and the monopoly capitalists always decided which were the constitutional questions), the finance monopoly over the press, radio, etc., electioneering costs, which successfully prevented really democratic parties from springing up besides the two parties of monopoly capitalism, and lastly the use of terrorist devices (the lynching system—targeting Blacks). And this democracy could in substance realize everything sought by Hitler without needing to break with democracy formally.”
Lukacs also notes in passing that Hitler was a fan of American advertising and used what he learned from that field to ply his destructive trade in Germany and across Europe.
Lost Souls
Now we turn to Trita Parsi the Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute discussing the tortured soul of America. The insight could not have been penned any better than this:
“If Joe Biden was right and the 2020 presidential elections were a contest over the soul of America, then his victory is bittersweet. With almost half of the votes cast for Donald Trump, he is undeniably very much a part of the American soul…Trump is not an aberration, but a reflection of the ugliness that very much is, and always has been, a part of us. While the US may not yet be ready to grapple with this reality, the rest of the world can no longer afford to live in denial. Around the world, many hoped that the lies we have told ourselves of our American innocence – the lies that form the bedrock of American Exceptionalism and neatly separate us from the desperate impulses that brought forward Trump – would prove true. They didn’t.
Almost eight million more Americans voted for Trump this past Tuesday than they did in 2016. They saw the divisions he fueled, the xenophobia he embraced, the children he caged, the white supremacists he refused to condemn, and the pandemic he bungled; and they weighed that against the tax cuts they won, the conservative Supreme Court judges he appointed, the climate chaos they can ignore, and the punishments he inflicted on the “liberal elites”. They decided they wanted four more years of Trump.”
As the legendary American actress Betty Davis once said in character, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”
John Stanton can be reached at jstantonarchangel@gmail.com
Indians are ‘rejoicing’ over Kamala Harris becoming the ‘first’ woman vice president and that too with Indian origin. The other day, we saw Priyanka Radhakrishnanan being sworn in the Newzealand Ministry and Keralites have been proud of her ‘achievements’. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau already has four Ministers of Indian origin, three of them being Sikhs who are represented far better than in Narendra Modi’s cabinet in India. Apart from them there is one woman Minister too. In the United Kingdom, Rishi Sunak heads the Finance, Priti Patel is Home Secretary and Alok Sharma is Secretary Business and Industries.
There are many other leaders of Indian origin who were leaders of their countries like Surinam, Gayana, Fiji and Mauritius but yes, these countries had indian who suffered a lot and were taken as indentured labourers or I would simply call them as ‘slave labour’ even when slavory was abolished by that time, by the British to work in their plantation fields but over the years they slowly rebuild their lives and many of them became the leader of their countries. Obviously, they loved their Indian roots but had no connection with India as their forefathers had left long back and had no support like the NRIs today have. Those were the difficult years but they managed to maintain their dignity and succeeded in these countries.
The stories of Kamala Harris, Priti Patel, Priyanka Radha Krishnanan and other ‘successful’ politicians of Indian origin in US, UK, Canada and Newzealand is bigger proof of the diversity and opportunities provided by these countries and rather than a ‘contribution’ of India or Indian system. Kamala Harris’s grandfather i.e. Nana was a joint secretary during Jawahar Lal Nehru’s time and he sent his daughter to study in the US which was a favorite of youngsters who could afford to go in search of better opportunities. All these new leaders who we all are feeling proud of, are just first and second generation who migrated to these countries in either mid 1950s or 1960s and many are of 1980s generation and yet they got the opportunity to lead.
Listen to Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and they are speaking of inclusion, fight against systemic racism and unity of the country. Kamala Harris’s success is attributed to the fact that the US is a country of possibilities and hope for migrants. So most of these leaders who have flourished are not there for several generations but not more than fifty years. What is happening back in our country. The leaders of division and hatred don’t want people whose seven generations are settled in India. We are asking hundreds of questions about the history of some body great great great great great great grandfather. We are seeking revenge for the wrongs of the past. A government or political class which is stuck in the ‘wrongs’ of history can not provide vision for the future. What happened to the issue of Sonia Gandhi when she could have become the leader of Congress Party. Even after refusing to be leader, she has been harassed and humiliated by the Sanghi media. How can you make a country stronger if you make 12% Muslims suspect of all the evils and wrongs of the country.
What would have happened to Kamala Harris if she were in India. Her marriage to a Jew would have become the hunting ground for Sangh Parivar and they would have brought the conspiracy theory of ‘converting’ our ‘innocent’ women. The whole attempt to bring Love Jehad laws state after state are nothing but to harass the couples particularly where the male partner is a Muslim or Christian. Why are we celebrating for Kamala Harris ? Because we don’t want our children to decide their own fate ? Because we don’t treat our minorities equally or make them look suspect ? Because the representation of minorities is reducing in every sector and our politicians want to intimidate them and suggest to them that you are a second class citizen of this country and because we don’t want to give protesters even the right to protest and file cases after cases against them.
There is a lot for Indians and Indian ‘nationalists’ to introspect on what has happened in india. Just before ‘celebrating’ about Kamala Harris or Priti Patel or Priyanka Radhakrishnan please peep into your own prejudices and how you have made every neighbour of our look unwanted. Societies which embrace diversity and are inclusive in nature, which leave their prejudices aside will grow and progress. Indians who want to enjoy democracies elsewhere need to strengthen the same kind of structure in their own country. Whether it is USA or Canada or New Zealand or England, we need to ensure that we too respect freedom of expression of the minorities, respect individual’s right to choose their faith and partner, respect differences of opinion and as Joe Biden said that differences do not mean that our opponents are anti national. Let us understand that providing a level playing field to all will make us better and encourage minorities and migrants to be part of our decision making will always bring their knowledge and strength to our political structure. At the moment, we hope that leaders of Indian origin will prove successful in raising issues of minorities and immigrants and will have the same message back home in India to respect the similar values so we become a true democracy. A country without fair representation of marginalised and minorities can not become a true democracy. Let us hope our political class will read the message of hope, love and healing from these the outcome of the elections in the United States.
Vidya Bhushan Rawat is a social activist. Twitter @freetohumanity
The discussion on institutional Israeli racism against its own Palestinian Arab population has all but ceased following the final approval of the discriminatory Nation-State Law in July 2018. Indeed, the latest addition to Israel’s Basic Law is a mere start of a new government-espoused agenda that is designed to further marginalize over a fifth of Israel’s population.
On Wednesday, October 28, eighteen members of the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) conjured up yet another ploy to target Israeli Arab citizens. They proposed a bill that would revoke Israeli citizenship for any Palestinian Arab prisoner in Israel who, directly or indirectly, receives any financial aid from the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Worthy of mention is that these MKs not only represent right-wing, ultra-right and religious parties, but also the Blue and White (Kahol Lavan) ‘centrist’ party. Namely, the proposed bill already has the support of Israel’s parliamentary majority.
But is this really about financial aid for prisoners? Particularly since the PA is nearly bankrupt, and its financial contributions to the families of Palestinian prisoners, even within the Occupied Territories – West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza – is symbolic?
Here is an alternative context. On Thursday, October 29, the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, revealed that the Israeli government of right-wing Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, plans to expand the jurisdiction of the Jewish town of Harish in northern Israel by 50 percent. The aim is to prevent Palestinians from becoming the majority in that area.
The contingency plan was formulated by Israel’s Housing Ministry as a swift response to an internal document, which projects that, by the year 2050, Palestinian Arabs will constitute 51 percent of that region’s population of 700,000 residents.
These are just two examples of recent actions taken within two days, damning evidence that, indeed, the Nation-State law was the mere preface of a long period of institutional racism, which ultimately aims at winning a one-sided demographic war that was launched by Israel against the Palestinian people many years ago.
Since outright ethnic cleansing – which Israel practiced during and after the wars of 1948 and 1967 – is not an option, at least not for now, Israel is finding other ways to ensure a Jewish majority in Israel itself, in Jerusalem, in Area C within the occupied West Bank and, by extension, everywhere else in Palestine.
Israeli dissident historian, Professor Ilan Pappe, refers to this as ‘incremental genocide’. This slow-paced ethnic cleansing includes the expansion of the illegal Jewish settlements in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and the proposed annexation of nearly a third of the Occupied Territories.
The besieged Gaza Strip is a different story. Winning a demographic war in a densely populated but small region of two million inhabitants living within 365 sq. km, was never feasible. The so-called ‘redeployment’ out of Gaza by late Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, in 2005 was a strategic decision, which aimed at cutting Israel’s losses in Gaza in favor of expediting the colonization process in the West Bank and the Naqab Desert. Indeed, most of Gaza’s illegal Jewish settlers were eventually relocated to these demographically-contested regions.
But how is Israel to deal with its own Palestinian Arab population, which now constitutes a sizeable demographic minority and an influential, often united, political bloc?
In the Israeli general elections of March 2020, united Arab Palestinian political parties contesting under the umbrella group, The Joint List, achieved their greatest electoral success yet, as they emerged as Israel’s third-largest political party. This success rang alarm bells among Israel’s Jewish ruling elites, leading to the formation of Israel’s current ‘unity government’. Israel’s two major political parties, Likud and Kahol Lavan, made it clear that no Arab parties would be included in any government coalition.
A strong Arab political constituency represents a nightmare scenario for Israel’s government planners, who are obsessed with demographics and the marginalization of Palestinian Arabs in every possible arena. Hence, the very representatives of the Palestinian Arab community in Israel become a target for political repression.
In a report published in September 2019, the rights group, Amnesty International, revealed that “Palestinian members of the Knesset in Israel are increasingly facing discriminatory attacks.”
“Despite being democratically elected like their Jewish Israeli counterparts, Palestinian MKs are the target of deep-rooted discrimination and undue restrictions that hamstring their ability to speak out in defense of the rights of the Palestinian people,” Amnesty stated.
These revelations were communicated by Amnesty just prior to the September 27 elections. The targeting of Palestinian citizens of Israel is reminiscent of similar harassment and targeting of Palestinian officials and parties in the Occupied Territories, especially prior to local or general elections. Namely, Israel views its own Palestinian Arab population through the same prism that it views its militarily occupied Palestinians.
Since its establishment on the ruins of historic Palestine, and until 1979, Israel governed its Palestinian population through the Defense (Emergency) Regulations. The arbitrary legal system imposed numerous restrictions on those Palestinians who were allowed to remain in Israel following the 1948 Nakba, or ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
In practice, however, the emergency rule was lifted in name only. It was merely redefined, and replaced – according to the Israel-based Adalah rights group – by over 65 laws that directly target the Palestinian Arab minority of Israel. The Nation-State Law, which denies Israel’s Arab minority their legal status, therefore, protection under international law, further accentuates Israel’s relentless war on its Arab minority.
Moreover, “the definition of Israel as ‘the Jewish State’ or ‘the State of the Jewish People’ makes inequality a practical, political and ideological reality for Palestinian citizens of Israel,” according to Adalah.
Israeli racism is not random and cannot be simply classified as yet another human rights violation. It is the core of a sophisticated plan that aims at the political marginalization and economic strangulation of Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority within a constitutional, thus ‘legal’, framework.
Without fully appreciating the end goal of this Israeli strategy, Palestinians and their allies will not have the chance to properly combat it, as they certainly should.
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
During the last 10 years I have written multiple articles documenting how Cuba has better medical practice and education than the US. To be honest, I have known for a long time that there is an area of medical training where medical students in the US get considerably more training than do those who study in Cuba.
This realization came to me when my daughter Rebecca was in her first year of medical school in Havana. When I phoned after she had been there for a few months, she said, “Dad, I am really glad that when I was a girl you gave me a needle and thread to sew up rips in my clothes. In clinic today, we saw someone with his head whacked open by a machete and a medical student was sewing it back together. It was clear that the guy trying to sew the wound did not have experience with a needle and thread and that the guy getting his head patched up could tell. With the sewing I’ve done, I know that I could handle a wound.”
We chatted about other injuries she had come across and I asked, “How many gunshot wounds have you seen?” She told me that she had never seen one but she would ask other students in her class. None of her friends had treated a gunshot wound.
The subject dropped until a couple of years later when she let me know, “A while back you asked me if any of the med students I know had seen a gunshot wound. Well, someone just told me she had. She treated a cop who had taken a gun out of his holster after getting off work, and, before he put the safety on, he dropped it, it hit the floor and went off, with a bullet going into his foot.”
At that moment I understood that, while there are innumerable false accusations regarding Cuban medicine, one thing could be said that is true: students who study medicine in Cuba get a lot less practice in handling gunshot wounds than do those who study in the US.
* * *
Why is it that Cuba has so many fewer gun injuries that does the US? It is definitely not because it is an island of pacifists who never get in fights. When I was walking down a back street early one morning, a rum bottle came skipping along the pavement and stopped near my feet. I saw two men tying to restrain a third who was yelling something in Spanish that I was unable to understand. Ten or 15 yards away another guy was similarly yelling and being held back. In my daughter’s home, I described the scene and heard, “They had probably been drinking rum all night and got into a fight over a woman. There’s cuts and bruises in the Emergency Room all the time from crap like that.” Other events I heard about taught me that Cubans can get into pointless scraps as much as Americans do.
Could less gun violence be because Cuba has virtually no crime? No, that is not it. I remember being awakened from the screaming of a neighbor’s outrage at his two turkeys being stolen from his Havana yard. I’ve been robbed three times in my life – twice in St. Louis and once in Havana. When boarding a Havana bus, I was knocked down, thinking that someone had slipped against me. But when we got off the bus, I reached in my briefcase for my camera to find it missing. My daughter explained, “I bet that guy bumping into you was not an accident. He might have seen your camera at the last stop and grabbed it out of your bag when you fell down.” Getting robbed is thoroughly unpleasant anywhere, but it is quite a bit less odious to have something picked from your briefcase than have a gun pointed at you (as occurred both times when I was robbed in the US).
This leads directly to the question of whether gun violence in the US could be greater than it is in Cuba due to the availability of guns. Vastly more Americans keep a gun handy. “The United States is the most heavily armed country in the world with 90 guns for every 100 citizens.” Yet, the Centre for Economic Policy Research found no support for the belief that more guns cause more homicides and documented methodological flaws in research that claimed a link existed.
Additionally, I suspect there is a difference between Cubans and Americans in their attitudes toward guns. Not being an expert in Cuban law, I asked multiple folks about laws on gun ownership. Some said they could not own a gun and others said they could. The clarity that emerged from this ambiguity is that none of the Cubans I spoke with seemed to be concerned with the topic until I asked them. Not one Cuban said anything remotely like, “I must have a gun to protect myself from someone breaking into my home.”
What a sharp contrast to the US! While some say that guns would cause more danger than protection, millions insist that a gun is the best way to keep their families safe and a very large number become hysterical at the very thought that guns could not be an important part of their lives.
Could the reason that there are so many homicides by firearm in the US be that so many Americans are trained to fight in wars? David Swanson thinks so. He did a careful analysis of mass shooters in the US and found that “34% of US mass shooters … are military veterans, as compared with 14.76% in the general population.” After a string of mass shootings in the US, he insisted that the solution would be to “Ban the damn guns. All of them. Everywhere. Do it now, you fucking idiots!”
That’s a very intense opinion; but it is also a wrong one. In addition to the previously mentioned research showing more guns do not lead to more homicides, mass shootings account for only for a small number of gun deaths in the US.
Also, there is the contrast between US veterans in its war against Viet Nam vs. Cuba’s participation in the Angolan Wars of 1975 – 88 which I document in Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution. Those military interventions had profound effects on each country. While 2.5 million Americans had tours in Viet Nam, over a third of a million soldiers from Cuba (a much smaller country than the US) served in Angola. Cubans were roughly three times as likely to go to Angola as Americans were to go to Viet Nam. Of course, a major difference was that US actions were to bully a smaller country while Cuba’s actions were in solidarity with black Africans and were critical for elimination of apartheid domination in South Africa.
To have an accurate picture, it is important to be aware that the US is not the most violent country in the world and Cuba is not the most non-violent. The PBS News Hour lists Brazil as the most violent, with 43,200 gun-related deaths and the US as the second most violent with 37,200 such deaths. Other countries topping the most violent list are largely in Latin America, along with South Africa. Knoema gives Cuba a ranking of fifty-third most violent with 27 gun deaths annually, below many European countries. Though the US has about 30 times the population of Cuba, it has 1378 times as many gun deaths.
This enormously higher level of gun killings in the US than Cuba cannot be explained by pacifism on the island, absence of Cuban crime, the higher level of US gun ownership, or involvement in international conflicts (though the last mentioned could have a strong twist). However, two factors are likely to play a strong role in American gun killings.
There is a climbing mountain of consistent and well-researched evidence that unequal wealth distribution is associated with death by firearms. The journal BMC Public Health documents that, among 3244 US counties, those “with growing levels of income inequality are more likely to experience mass shootings.” Authors reason that income inequality fosters anger and resentment, leading to mass murder.
Research between countries likewise confirms that a high rate of homicide by firearms accompanies greater income inequality. An article in Scientific American summarized multiple research reports. One reported an “unambiguous” finding that “income inequality alone explained 74% of the variance in murder rates.” Also, World Bank research confirmed a global link between unequal distribution of resources and murder rates.
The other likely factor in gun deaths is based less on numbers because it is historical and cultural. As Noam Chomsky describes so clearly, the US War for Independence was based on the desire of wealthy colonists to (a) expand westward to thieve more land from Native Americans and (b) increase slavery. Since England opposed both, the colonists created a culture of gun violence to crush Indian and slave revolts. Chomsky explains that the US Civil War was followed by a lull in the desire for guns, but the craving was exhumed decades later by fabricated visions of the Wild West.
Many Cubans find American obsessions with violence to be a bit vile. As Cuban physician Dr. Gilberto Fleites Gonzales told interviewer Candace Wolf: “There are many things that are very bad in the States, such as not having universal health care and the high rate of violence in your society.… You are on your way to destroying the earth and the peoples of the planet with your greed and your nuclear weapons.”
Part of the reason that liberals want to take away guns rather than understand the centrality of a culture of violence is their intense belief that capitalism is eternal, making it impossible to create a different society. They fail to grasp that violence has been nurtured by capitalism much like racism and sexism are exacerbated by economics of dominance. Just as racism and sexism and many other forms of oppression will exist long after capitalism has fallen, so violence in general and gun violence in particular require struggles of consciousness to overcome them. No shortcuts such as “taking guns away” will ever work as long as economics of dominance are in the drivers’ seat.
Just as it would be foolish to “wait until after the revolution” to combat discrimination, we cannot delay challenging the culture of violence that permeates every aspect of capitalism. Struggles which challenge oppression without being victorious will prepare us for and prefigure struggles that can change humanity once the disease of capitalism has been overcome.
Nevertheless, it is critical to recognize that personal squabbles are not in the same league as violence taught in a culture of domination. Such a culture trains people from childhood that they are entitled to kill because they are superior to others – superior because of their class, or superior due to race or religion or caste, or, increasingly important, superior because they live in a country that has an inborn right to rob wealth from people of the world they consider to be inferior.
This is what is fundamentally different from the US incursion into Viet Nam and Cuba’s participation in wars of southern Africa. The US went into Viet Nam to subjugate that country to its will. Cuba went into Angola and fought South African troops to liberate people from racist domination. Thus, wars could well prepare soldiers for mass killings if they are wars of domination.
This charts a meaningful path to lowering gun violence in the US. The US must end its massive and increasing wealth disparity and non-stop wars of domination if it is to reduce killings within its borders. Or, to put it another way, it must cease the plundering of wealth both internally and externally.
Omitted from most rants against gun ownership is a very old, very true and very obvious observation: If the government takes away everyone’s guns, then the only ones to have guns will be the government. It is time for folks to get real about the US government, military and police. There is no force on earth more violent and murderous than the US ruling class, which for over 200 years has been drenched in the blood of native peoples whose land it pillaged, slaves dragged into chains at gunpoint for forced relocation and labor without pay, and waves of immigrant groups who have successively been beaten down and now watch their children in cages. Are we to believe that these legalized butchers are the ones to “protect” us by having a monopoly of guns? Please be serious.
A final note on the bright side. An American who is thinking of going to medical school in Cuba should not worry about being ill-prepared for treating gunshot wounds. Completing a residency in any US city and working in the Emergency Room during a couple of Friday and Saturday nights will give that student all the practice needed.
Don Fitz (fitzdon@aol.com) is on the Editorial Board of Green Social Thought where a version of this article first appeared. He was the 2016 candidate of the Missouri Green Party for Governor. His book on Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution has been available since June 2020.
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