The Brutal Inevitability of American Carnage

Living in the 21st-Century United States of America, one gradually comes to accept the monstrous slaughter of American students as a normal, ordinary, even a banal, way of life, an everyday occurrence. The reader may wonder incredulously, Why would a writer make such a preposterous statement, implying Americans have become desensitized and thereby indifferent to the periodic mass killings now taking place regularly in the United States in an almost casual way? This writer's response to their incredulous question would be the following assertion: the American National Character has gone through various stages of being reconciled, pacifistic, and, finally,  submissive both unconsciously and consciously to the pervasive evil of collaboration with the killers tied in one way or another to the Fascistic collective ways of American imperialism.

Yes, the American people have allowed themselves to function as collaborators in collusion with the malevolent capitalist classes — the plutocracy — governing the United States, not unlike leaders in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy who subdued their populaces with promises —

• promises of a better life;
• the promised plunder from other countries through waging war; 
• a promised "pure" racial vision of community if only they were willing to destroy those whose cultural identity such as Slavic, Jewish, African or any other non-European or non-white ethnicity or nationality would be declared 'contamination;'

The Americans who at one stage in their late 20th Century history became the “Ugly American” through exploitation in modern wars, would later succumb to the belief there was no greater truth than to deceive oneself about one’s own social, political and personal depravity.             

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So-called "Fake News" is not merely the dissemination of narratives about fictitious events that never happened, told in a fictional voice impersonating reality, it is also a vehicle for more insidious propaganda resulting in losing one’s own humanity by not accepting actual events as they take place in real time, with the basest of contradictions regarding indifference to violence and abuse to one’s own fellow citizens being a part of the social fabric we claim is just or normal. In this way, Americans have learned, or been trained, or even conditioned by repeated exposure to these headlines or news bulletins,   to ‘adjust’ to butchery of other human beings that have become considered either expendable or less than human. News of slaughter becomes the new normal reality,  the given, a reality that becomes fixed in the American National Character as simply something one must now unavoidably live with, even if it is tinged with immediate, irreconcilable mass murders on any given day. There's always the latest “Breaking News”  update, broadcast <not broadcasted> on multiple television stations almost immediately after more killings take place in yet another American high school or college.  During the first time many see the horrific scenes of students running across a school parking lot or athletic field to escape from the killer or killers, we stare at the television screen, shocked speechless while consumed with deciphering every verbal and gestural nuance of the emotional accounts of the carnage.  We are mesmerized — like a deer caught in the middle of a highway, transfixed by an onrushing auto’s headlights coming toward... us, at our peril!

Slowly, but surely, we lose our humanity, although we do not know it at the time, as our American society breaks down little by little to accept the malignant social, political and even personal evil that consumes us.  This is accomplished in part by endless repetition of certain phrases or keywords used not only by the current American President Mr. Trump himself, but also by both political parties, to deny  and negate the factual existence of actual events which have truly occurred in harsh reality. These governmental and media repetitions of language achieve a pervasive banality in the same way Americans become immune and indifferent to the slaughter of students in the United States, repeated phrases echoing endlessly like gunshots at a shooting range — the ringing of bullets drowned out by “They are in our hearts and Prayers”; “An unfortunate attack has taken place”; “We are organizing a committee to look into this tragedy”; "We are going to have round- table discussions;” and then back to the chanting refrain, “What is going to happen is a beautiful thing”… followed by one-syllable words “sad”, “great” and finally the threat of “fire and fury like the world has never seen ” etc., and then once again in a week or  a month or so, another killing spree of students, with Black Americans, Latins and Hispanics, Arab Americans, and others again butchered in schools and on the streets of America.  And the killers become the terroragainst the students and workers who want economic and political parity in the United States. Who will safeguard us against these American Fascist killers that kill at will? 

And so we now  have a Fascist-generated integration of the acceptance of massive slaughter, murder, and persecution of those who do not accept neo-Fascist ideology of white supremacism, as part of the American political culture. The new foot soldiers who are part of this racist and Fascist political ideology, this machinery, have chosen to terrorize even those Anglo-American people (which includes white students) who do not bend to what they conceive as a new order in the United States, which they would be loath to accept as an economic class struggle, with the historical dialectics that has only grown more politically violent and antagonistic between the American Military-Industrial Complex, the corporate oligarchs, and segments of the middle class against their class enemy, the American working class. This conflict, this social battle is a continuation of class antagonisms going back decades, especially prior to World War II.  Typically, the class struggle in America is rooted in economic exploitation which is also inherently violent. Thus, economic division creates the killing fields in all societies.  Furthermore, the opportunistic capitalist profiteering of the selling of guns and weapons in the United Sates has engineered this annihilation of students and other targets of rage.

 As the American literary theorist Kenneth Burke wrote in his day, during the rise of Fascism in the 1930s in the United States, “Already, in many quarters of our county, we are 'beyond' the stage where we are being 'saved' from Nazism by our virtues. And Fascist integrations is being staved off, rather, by the conflicts among our vices. Our vices cannot get together in a grand united front of prejudices; and the result of this frustration…”   Ironically, there's now as President of the United States a man  with  psychotic and narcissistic tendencies who believes HE has the ‘answer’ -- this ringmaster of the circus, hustling his electorate with the “snake oil” of “Make America Great Again” — slogans and tactics he's borrowed from a prior Fascist leader, Italy's Benito Mussolini, who not only originally coined that phrase Trump has purloined to represent his present aspirations for the United States, but who had high hopes in his time that the people of the United States would become an ally of his “Fascisti movement”. 

What should also be remembered, when we speak of societal indifference to the slaughter of the innocents in America, is this: once upon a time,  newspapers and magazines  in the United States  paid homage to Fascist leaders like Mussolini. The Saturday Evening Post, New York Tribune, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Chicago Tribune and even the New York Times lauded Fascism for “returning turbulent Italy to what it called “normalcy.”” Hemingway was one of the few American writers who wrote for the New Yorker which empathically rejected the acceptance of “anti-democratic Mussolini:”  What should be noted here is that in the United States there were large swaths of the American media and the American people who acquiesced to the normality of Fascism in Europe, while there were also thousands of Americans who yearned for a dictator who would assume a Fascist leadership that mirrored the National Will of Anglo-American supremacy. 

I contend the normalization of "commonplace" mass murders of students and others in the United States is actually the first stage of an American Holocaust. If at the beginning of the founding of the United States there had been logical rationalization based on either a religious creed or an idealist vision taken from Imperial Athens regarding “Democracy” but which in reality was a Democracy for the few, the American political oligarchs and the Military-Industrial Complex would now no longer even rationalize about the desire for complete control and repression of the American people. In the 21st century, white supremacy nationalism would become the order of the day, as envisioned by the various establishment political parties that yearn for national unity.  A naïve nostalgia, as advocated by their leader, the American President Donald Trump, would bring them back from the precipice of so-called moral decay and economic decline. How better to deflect their anger, their frustration with the world at large which no longer feared their imperialistic power, than to create an America with Fascist foot-soldiers who begin to bring the American people to heel, and then the world would follow suit down the same Pan-American vision of world order.

Here's a prescription to drive terror into the American people: first kill their sons and daughters in their schools or wherever they gather, without regard to their class, ethnic or religious background. Such 'every-day' murder of the American people, beginning perhaps historically with the mass killings of the students at Columbine High School, was the signal of this Holocaust yet to come. Those who in any way opposed white nationalism with its openly Fascist agenda would not be tolerated, but dealt with accordingly by those disaffected youth, primarily Anglo-American students who wanted to be a part of the greater Fascist build-up taking place in the United States.  And again I ask, Who was to stop them?

As it declines, it's not unusual for a country, a nation-state, to believe it can will itself to greatness again — via the sheer force of militarism and the terrorism of its citizenry  in order to achieve its projected nationalistic aspirations.  Various Presidents in the United States have lied to the American people about how the implementation of force is more effective than acknowledging the dialectical nature and contradictions of their class differences and the resulting class struggle that must inevitably take place in history.  In essence, the capitalist political system in the United States creates its own illusion -- how a militaristic army, an army that invades other countries countless times — this process will save them from economic disaster and internal terror at home.

The chauvinistic American bourgeoisie currently led by US President Donald Trump and his reactionary Republican party — whereby their leader vacillates between playing the role of a Bismarck with American military iron fist — do not understand that their seeds of their own self-destruction lay within the imploding American social fabric itself. Regarding the force Trump and his allies desire when they integrated the idea of American nationalism among the American people, they do not realize, as Frederick Engels wrote, “… that force is only the means, and that the aim is economic advantage.  And inasmuch as the aim is more fundamental; than the means used to secure it, so in history the economic side of the relationship is much more important than the political side.”  

In a great and awful irony, it is the American students and those parents who have lost their sons and daughters, who have been taught this cruel lesson — how economic disparity, economic class differences among the student population — is a living political issue. It is that very human despair and economic frustration which is the actual struggle that brings about the forces of change in history.  The cumulative slaughter, these heartless, bloody massacres, this carnage which begets a Holocaust, as future historians will likely view this profound tragedy in the American way of life, will only end once the consciousness of class struggle becomes a motivating political idea among the American people, whereby that struggle ends a capitalist society that bred one of the final most heinous acts of insidious betrayal by an American political leadership.

Source: USA Really