You can always count on Trump to exploit any tragedy as an excuse to smear and stigmatize a vulnerable group. In the wake of the shooting in D.C. of two national guard members, Trump of course wasted no time in blaming Afghani nationals collectively, and calling for a halt to all further migration from that war-torn nation (even though U.S. intervention over decades is a large part of what made it so war-torn).
Now, on Thanksgiving weekend, Trump has broadened his attack to include immigrants of every nationality and legal status. Borrowing a term from European white nationalists, Trump called openly on social media for "reverse migration"—a term that in Europe is generally understood to refer to a call for the ethnic cleansing of non-white people from the continent, regardless of their citizenship status.
Trump also called for stripping some people of citizenship and spoke in ominous terms about deporting people who are deemed "non-compatible with Western Civilization."
Plainly, this language pleased the Groyper contingent that infests the highest levels of the administration staff. The official White House social media account reportedly drew extra attention to Trump's anti-immigrant screed, saying it was "one of the most important messages ever released by President Trump."
None of this should surprise us. Trump spent the week prior to the shooting bashing Somali refugees in Minnesota and stripping Temporary Protected Status from Burmese and Haitian nationals. This is a man who has never missed an opportunity to stereotype an entire group based on a negative impression of individual members—which is, by the way, the very definition of racism—lest that concept has lost all meaning for us.
Even though this is a predictable response from Trump, though—it's still rather alarming to see the speed and scale at which he has chosen to indulge in his reflexive white nationalism—and the eagerness with which his far-right staffers have leapt to promote this screed as the starting gun of the final solution they have been plotting for years.
There are quite different lessons we could take from the attack in D.C., however—other, that is, than a remit for white nationalism and ethnic cleansing. One could point out, for instance, that Trump's national guard deployments were designed in the first place to create a crisis of just this sort. Clearly, Trump has been mobilizing troops in the hopes that they would ignite violence in one way or another, which would in turn make his military crackdown self-justifying.
I wasn't sure—when this deployment began—whether the violence would come from national guard troops firing on civilians, as at Kent State in 1970—or whether it would come the other way around—from some misguided person attacking the troops, as proved in this case—but the entire mobilization was clearly intended to create an incident of some sort.
Trump deliberately put these young men and women into harm's way—in a totally unnecessary deployment against their fellow citizens, in order to create a violent confrontation that would then prove the case for the deployment in the first place. He meant to stoke gratuitous violence, by doing so, in order to justify the expansion of his authoritarian power.
And it worked. He got the bloodshed he was seeking; it just came at the expense of two innocent guardsmen who had signed up to protect their country, on the promise that they would only be deployed under necessary and justified circumstances—a promise that Trump betrayed.
Another lesson we could take from this: that what appeared at first to be an unmotivated act of aggression—from a non-U.S. national and a non-state actor—actually turns out to have its roots in the abuse of U.S. state power.
As journalists delved into the background of the alleged shooter, they quickly found that his work with U.S. forces in Afghanistan involved serving in CIA-operated strike forces, which human rights groups have condemned for years as "death squads." We don't know what his mission for these groups entailed—but if his team was like the other CIA strike forces, it may have involved committing extrajudicial killings or other atrocities.
Whatever he saw or did during his time with the CIA appears to have addled his brain. A childhood friend of the suspect reportedly told the New York Times that that he "had suffered from mental health issues and was disturbed by the casualties his unit had caused."
I am reminded of what Gore Vidal wrote about the Oklahoma City bombing. As Vidal dug into the biography of the primary suspect, Timothy McVeigh (with perhaps too much sympathy for some readers' tastes), he discovered that the unprovoked massacre at the Oklahoma federal building was actually not the first mass killing in which McVeigh had been involved.
Before he turned his weapons against the U.S. federal government—killing 168 innocent people—McVeigh had been a veteran of the First Gulf War, where he witnessed horrible things—mass graves and people starving. The experience reportedly made him question the justice of the war and to second-guess the "hyped up" mythology about the conflict that had been used to justify U.S. involvement.
Years later—Vidal reports—McVeigh would quote words from Justice Brandeis in his own defense: "Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example. [...] If the government becomes the law breaker, it breeds contempt for laws; it invites every man to become a law unto himself."
To quote Thomas More's Utopia: If [...] you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this but that you first make thieves and then punish them?' (Miller trans.)
Likewise, the U.S. government, in its role as omnipresent teacher, is the one that first taught the suspect in the D.C. shooting how to kill. Our own government is the one that trained him in secret to take part in a CIA-sponsored death squad. Can we be surprised, then, when that first act of violence breeds more violence in turn?
What we have here is a classic case of "blowback." Just as 9/11 was carried out by some of the same people whom—decades earlier—the U.S. government had trained and equipped with weapons as part of the contingent of "mujahideen" fighting the USSR in Afghanistan—so too, the shooting this week in D.C. appears to have been committed by someone our own government first furnished with arms and told to kill his neighbors.
"What else is to be concluded from this but that you first make thieves and then punish them?" More asked. So, too—as Trump calls for blood and demands a gruesome punishment for the alleged shooter—"if the bullets going in the opposite direction haven’t already done that"—as he darkly put it—we must ask: but what else is to be concluded from this suspect's personal history but that the U.S. government first made a murderer and then punished him for it?
Trump's unhinged statement on social media calling for "reverse migration" repeatedly blames immigrants for bringing crime to the United States. Not only is this claim statistically unsubstantiated, though—it is the exact reverse of the truth. Time and again, the U.S. government is the one that has brought crime and violence to other societies; and then expressed horror and outrage when the consequences of that violence reach our own shores.
As the writer Mike Gold once observed it in his 1930 memoir, Jews Without Money, the Ku Klux Klan and other antisemites of his day used to accuse Jewish immigrants, like Gold's parents, of bringing the "gangster system" to America. "What nonsense!" Gold retorts in the book's preface. "There never were any Jewish gangsters in Europe. [... I]t is America that has taught the sons of tubercular Jewish tailors how to kill."
So too, in this case—it was the U.S. government that taught the D.C. shooting suspect how to kill. And now—seeing the consequences of its own actions—that same government seeks to scapegoat all Afghani immigrants and refugees for the crimes its own hands have wrought. "What nonsense" indeed!
To say, as I do, that a history of U.S. state violence lay behind this attack—to say that the U.S. government first taught this man to kill, before he turned his weapons against his own former employer—to say that the U.S. government stood in this case in the role of the original lawbreaker and therefore the parent of crime, just as Brandeis had warned—is of course not to excuse or justify the attack. As Gore Vidal was likewise at pains to point out in his post-9/11 essays, to explain is not to justify.
Certainly, the two national guardsmen who were shot—at least one of them fatally—were wholly innocent. Indeed, they were better than innocent. They courageously volunteered to keep their country and their fellow citizens safe; on the implied promise from the White House that they would only been sent into harm's way when necessary.
It was our government that failed them, from first to last—first by training up death squads in Afghanistan and putting them on brain-addling missions of death; then by mobilizing national guardsmen to U.S. streets in wholly unjustified and unnecessary missions designed to stroke the president's vanity and provide him with a pretext to further his authoritarian powers.
It is our government—that "omnipresent teacher"—that has their blood on its hands.
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