Much better is to pour arms unrestricted into the population, give them legal cover and political encouragement to take political matters into their own hands with laws like "Stand Your Ground". That way you wind up creating a political culture of atomized, fear-fueled citizens who think they're literally at war with each other, and their only way out is to fend for themselves and their family. Mark Ames
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It's a long article and I had to read it twice to figure out where it was going. I had listened to a version of the above on Doug's show, but couldn't quite follow the drift. It seemed to far off to the side of Sandy Hook. My mind was still on the kind of horrible destruction of little kids like my grandkids.
Anyway the above seems to capture the central thesis.
Take a look at the other shift in the late 1970s. It was characterized in retrospect as a rise back to a militaristic mind set that implied that most social ills could be cured with a gun. Kill some people, jail others and the social problem will go away. It's part of the law and order politics of the drug wars and heavy oppression of domestic police forces. Most people don't seem to notice that cops arrive AFTER a crime, so how could they prevent crime in the first place?
The important point is not about deterrence, which is a factor that does prevent some crimes. The point is the mind set that thinks there are police and military answers to social ills through violent suppression. I agree with the above about a fear-fueled citizenry. But it's the politics of how that fear is mobilized through social animosities that strikes me. This military model is drilled into us everyday.
The other linkage that's missing is the connection to the neoconservative ideology that has dominated the US since the late 70s. It was very clear in my mind that the sole purpose of the military was to destroy societies. Somehow that primordial lesson [of Vietnam] was in some kind of denial mode. No, war was about saving lives, protecting liberties, restoring order. The public perception that was just nonsense, seemed to diminish.
Iran became the central focus and obviously needed killing. We were off on the enemy path and military solutions to rid the world of the Iranian menace. It has only been compounded over and over and over.
That's about as far as I've got. It's the cult of the warrior maybe not as obvious as Sparta, but near enough to work. I don't understand quite how this works out at the level of the psyche, but it has something to do with sheer intensity of the emotive forces of fear and rage which are somehow coupled, maybe trivialized by naming it testosterone. But these are all of a package and correspond nearly exactly to the perfect age and gender for violent crimes and `good' soldiering, and a great deal of social instabilities of all kinds.
It's not just the warrior cult, but its political economic analog transformed into the idea that competition to the death is at the core of capitalism's ideology that is also endemic. There are only a few winners and that it is just and right that there are many losers. How is that supposed to make a sociable, equitable, and easy going society?
CG