What ails us?

When the police come to the wrong house, they are met by an old man with a shotgun aimed at them. A teenager coming home late is shot by his father who mistakes him for an intruder. A two year old reaches in his mother's purse and fires the gun that kills his mother. This is the stuff of the daily news. The guns that flood our society do not make us safer. They are not there for self protection.

Mass shootings reinforce that observation. Of the 300 people jammed into the Orlando nightclub apparently no one carried a weapon for self-defense. No one was able to protect himself as the gun advocates promise us again and again.

A population armed is not a safe population. The shotgun behind the front door more often kills loved ones than late night burglars. The population armed, again and again falls victim to mass shootings without being able to defend itself.

Why this fascination with personal armaments if they do great damage and do not make us more secure?

There are no doubt many answers to that question and none of them are very pretty. White Americans conquered this continent by making war on Native Americans. White Americans enslaved African-Americans and oppressed them with the whip and the gun. America has become "the most powerful nation on earth" by virtue of astronomical sums spent on sophisticated weaponry. We find violence wherever we turn in our own history.

Today that violence turns citizens against citizens. The latest mass shooting in Florida took place in a gay nightclub. On the same day police arrested a man, heavily armed, who was planning to disrupt a gay pride parade in California by shooting marchers. Violence against homosexuals has been encouraged in our country for a long time.

A significant number of voters are supporting Donald Trump whose message is largely a message of anger,  of the desire to hurt others, to injure them, to exclude them. Imagine what the country would be like if we were to deport 11 million of us, if 11 million were to be herded on buses, trains and airplanes. Imagine the families disrupted, the children and parents lost and in despair. Nevertheless many Americans resonate to the spirit of that plan. They too are very angry, they too want to hurt someone.
But they are very unclear about the sources of their anger and thus are willing to unload it on people they don't know--Mexicans, immigrants, Muslims.

Our nation is sick. Those of us who do not support Trump have nothing to offer the people who do, to ease their rage, to offer comfort or hope. Obama got elected eight years ago with the slogan of "Hope." He was unable to deliver on that if only because one person cannot give hope to an entire nation and only the nation as a whole can heal its own despair. And that despair takes many forms. One can support a very angry candidate for president. One can arm oneself and shoot people one loves. One can also buy guns and shoot a former girlfriend or wife, or kill one's children.

After the shooting in Orlando, some public officials exhorted citizens to love each other. But that is extremely difficult for those who feel  denigrated, exploited and, worst of all, ignored.

Making America great again would be to foster mutual trust that would not dream of arming oneself against one's neighbors. It would mean making us eager to work with each other to solve our problems rather than spending so much energy in obstructing each other. It would mean rekindling hope for a better future.

How can Americans learn to love each other again? That is the question to which we have no answer.

How to Reduce the Flood of Violence

The National Rifle Association tells us that "Guns do not kill people; people do." I have long thought that to be silly; without guns people would be a lot less lethal than they are. No one would be shot and killed if guns did not exist. But it is, of course, also true that the guns, by themselves do not make people kill. We are not violent because we have guns; we have guns because we are violent.
Gun lovers claim they need to be armed to resist a tyrannical government. But unless you are a young man of color or an immigrant without papers, our government is very unlikely to come after you with guns blazing. More likely they will threaten to sue and fine or imprison you. If you want to resist them, you need to hire a lawyer, lose days from work, spend a lot of time and money defending yourself. Investigators will interview your neighbors and embarrass you where you live. They will follow you to your workplace and perhaps make you lose your job. You will not need guns to protect yourself. That is pure fantasy.

But the fantasy, of course, betrays the violent world which you believe you live in and that belief determines how you and many other people see their world as a place of uninterrupted violence. The flood of violent movies and computer games that overwhelm us perhaps maintain the brutal fantasy world in which so many of us live, but are also a symptom of it. So are, of course, the gladiator games enacted on weekend where grown men inflict life-threatening injuries on each other for lots of money.

Symptoms are also the by now almost daily shootings by strangers who kill random people. Many people just buy weapons or go to the shooting range to live out their fantasies. But some, often troubled minds, actually make the violence a reality. What their less troubled fellow citizens just savor in their imaginations, these troubled souls act out. And then another headline announces the death of innocents.

Regulating gun sales is not likely to do improve this torrent of violence. Our problem is much more profound and serious: we are addicted to violence. If we did not have guns we would use knives or clubs to injure each other. For most of us that violence exists only in how we imagine the world. But that imagination spawns one war after the next, and our young men and women fall victim to the bloodthirsty fantasies of the elderly men, who surrounded the previous President, who themselves had carefully avoided real violence by dodging the draft.

In the more than 200 years of our existence as Americans, there was one period of twenty odd years--between World War I and II--when we were at peace. For most of the rest of these two hundred years the interval between wars was about 10 years. Do you know any more bloodthirsty nation, less able to put its weapons down and seek peace?

Violence is deeply embedded in our national character. Is there any way we can change? It seems clear that no single change in our way of life or thinking will transform us into a nation of peacemakers. The best we can hope for is to chip away at this cancer of violence.

Gun control: if a way can be found to keep guns out of the hands of seriously troubled individuals, we might be able to save some lives.

Teaching children to deal positively with conflicts might well be useful, if we tried, at the same time, to lower the level of violence they experience every day. But reducing violence in the experience of children is a large and challenging project. It would involve an end to violent television programs. No more cop shows, no more shootouts whether in inner-city neighborhoods or on the mythical Western frontier towns. No more violent movies where the hero in the ultimate moment saves the world from apocalypse. No more shooter computer games.

If children are to learn to be less violent than we are, we must make sure that their fantasy life is not like ours and that requires cleaning up what we choose to call "entertainment." Equally serious, of course, is assuring children a peaceful family life. That requires a reduction in family violence. It also requires a reduction of violence in sports. Once again sportsmanship has to become important, more important than winning, more important than inflicting serious injuries on your opponent.

Can we do any of this? The changes we need to make are difficult. They would also involve large financial losses for various media companies and major league sports. Will the owners and stockholders of companies that now enrich themselves by purveying violence be willing to move their efforts into different branches of business to make our daily life less violent? Will our politicians be willing to stop preying on the fears of ordinary citizens by endorsing war abroad and police violence at home?

As we send out more New Years cards that say "Peace on Earth" we should consider these questions.

How to Resist Violence

If anyone is in doubt whether it is ever defensible, current events offer only too much evidence that violence should be avoided at all costs. The devastation in Gaza, the brutality on all sides in the Syrian civil war, the continued fratricide among Muslim factions in Iraq coming after more than 10 years of a war to pacify that country, the murderous militias in Nigeria, in Libya and elsewhere should make any reasonable person conclude that violence should be avoided at all costs.

This sentiment is only reinforced by the memories of World War I, whose beginning 100 years ago we commemorate today, or by the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident, 50 years ago, where then president Lyndon Johnson made up a story of a naval attack on an American vessel. Lyndon Johnson used that lie to persuade Congress to escalate military action in Vietnam which ended only after to almost 60,000 American soldiers died there.

At this point, defenders of violence will ask whether we do not have the right to defend ourselves when attacked. What of armed men invading our house, or rapists and murderers attacking the innocent? It seems obvious to most people that we have the right to defend our lives and those of our loved ones. They claim that this readiness to maim and kill other human beings is part of human nature. That is who we are. There is nothing to argue about.

In 1914 the German armies invaded Belgium and France while telling their own people that Germany had been attacked. World War I was supposedly a war of national self-defense. 50 years later Lyndon Johnson persuaded Congress that we needed to defend our security in Vietnam. Today American hawks urge the current president to begin harsher military actions against Sunni insurgents because, they say, ISIS is a danger to our security, here in the US.

More often than not, the right to self-defense is invoked by the aggressor. It is most often used to conceal naked violence. The overwhelming share of violence in the world is blatantly evil and not to be justified.

Violence needs to be resisted. How do we resist violence? I do not carry a loaded gun, I don't even own one. I have serious doubts about the wisdom of going around armed and ready to kill someone. Is that all I can or should do?

But violence, while most spectacularly destructive when it uses weapons, whether primitive or technologically sophisticated, is not limited to people shooting at each other. Human beings are violent to each other and do tremendous damage to each other without threatening each others' bodily integrity. We inflict serious harm on others without guns and rockets, or knives, or rocks.

Children are injured by parental neglect, by fathers or mothers who simply disappear, or may remain in person but pay no attention to their children. Parents unload on their children the pain inflicted on them during their childhood. Children grow up to injure each other. Bullying in schools is widespread. Even more common are cliques that exclude. Children by and large are not taught to be thoughtful of one another or to be kind.

Some people think that the violence children experience is a good preparation for adult life when they will experience oppression at work, bosses that are insulting, and employers that exploit them, authorities that disrespect them. The violence that is ubiquitous in childhood just continues. The adults who have a say in our work life, or authorities that provide assistance, or experts who give advice about everything from cars and houses to how to save our marriages, are as likely as not to patronize us, to belittle our intelligence or good will. Everywhere we encounter persons who perpetuate the violence done to them as children by now visiting it on others, adults and children.

These thoughts came to mind recently when I attended a demonstration to express dismay over the destruction wrought in Gaza by Israeli bombs and guns. I realized suddenly that many people not only disapprove of blatant acts of violence but they take sides: the Israelis, some say, are simply defending their homeland and thus can do anything that puts an end to attacks by Hamas. On the other side are the people who regard Israelis as the reincarnation of German fascism. Whatever Palestinians do is thought to be correct. All members Hamas are heroes. Each party in the conflict, while, on the one hand, deploring the suffering of civilians, on the other hand, are cheering on their side. By their wholehearted approval, they encourage the fighting, the blind sending off of rockets and mortar rounds, of bombs out of the sky and drones. By taking sides, by encouraging the fighters of one side or another, Americans participate in the violence and perpetuate it.

The men or women behind the guns are not the only violent ones. Violent are the persons who send them onto the battlefield. Violent are the persons who support them, cheer them on and tell them that their cause is just.

No cause that kills large numbers of innocent bystanders is a just cause.

Instead of inventing nonexistent rights, such as the right to defend oneself, we should look into our own hearts and scrutinize our feelings and recognize the violence, the anger, the deep-seated suspicion that motivates so much of our behavior. We must acknowledge that in taking sides, we are involved in the big fights in the world and thus are, implicit in the death and destruction they perpetuate.

There is a clear difference between deploring the violence and destruction in Gaza, for instance, and taking sides by blaming one party and seeing the other party as heroes. It is hypocritical to weep over the children killed in Gaza and then support the Israeli government. It is equally hypocritical to weep over the children killed in Gaza and present Hamas as heroes defending the underdog victims.

If you take sides, you take upon yourself the guilt for children dying in Gaza.

The Pursuit of Happiness?

According to the Declaration of Independence we are endowed with the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Government actions are thereby delimited as well as government obligations defined. Governments may do nothing to limit their citizens life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. On the other hand governments must secure these rights as far as possible. They must protect our lives and liberties and safeguard our pursuits of happiness.

We do not often reflect about what that means. I shall try to do that here. Our "inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness" is not straightforward at all; it raises questions we may find difficult to answer.

The right to pursue one's happiness, we believe, implies that one is free to follow one's own desires and ones own beliefs about a good life. For many of us that means that we should be able to marry whom we please. No one else should be able to force us into marriages we do not want. We should be free to follow occupations we choose for ourselves. No one, whether family members or government agencies should be allowed to choose for us what work we do.

We should each be able to shape our daily lives as we consider best. This family says prayers before and after every meal. In that other family everyone eats at different times what ever they please. There is no private or public agency that should be allowed to criticize the way of life we choose. It is a task of the government to protect us against anyone who would interfere with how we choose to pursue happiness.

So the government needs to guarantee for us the freedom to choose life partners, to choose occupations, to choose where we learn and what style of life seems best to us.

No doubt questions come to your mind as you read this. Some people choose lives that are clearly destructive of the lives of their family members: they take drugs, they drink too much, they lead a life of crime, they are violent and coercive. Should someone not try to stop them and protect their family?

The government's duty to protect our pursuit of happiness is very unclear and full of difficult decisions.

Are there other ways in which we can expect our governments to protect our pursuit of happiness?

Children who are unable to go to school are severely limited in their life choices. We therefore restrict child labor and we believe that educational opportunities should be available to everyone. (It is another matter that we do not always act on that belief.) Ill health restrict life choices and many of us believe that everyone is entitled to the best health care that is available.

I have recently, purely by accident, read several novels that describe in excruciating detail the suffering war imposes on its victims. One novel describes the terrible struggles against PTSD of a young woman Iraq war veteran. Another follows a German and a French child through the crucible of World War II. In a third we hear of the brutality practiced by both sides in "The Troubles" in Ireland. The experience of war, whether as a soldier or a civilian, if we survive at all, leaves us overwhelmed by our losses and consumed by fears and regrets, by guilt long after the hostilities have ceased.

What future is ahead for the children in Gaza who emerge from the shelters to find the streets blocked by the rubble of their houses? Their parents, if they survive, are consumed by grief and hatred. Their chances for choosing a life they want are severely limited.

If it is true that one role of government is to protect and foster our possibility to choose the best life for ourselves, then governments surely may not engage in the violence of war. Our government has fought a number of major wars since the end of World War II. In each we sent massive troops and airplanes into foreign countries. In each case the wars ended with many Americans dead and many veterans whose lives continue to be seriously afflicted. In each war we left foreign countries in ruins, we affected the genetics of the population that survived so that after several generations their children remain frequently afflicted by terrible genetic diseases.

The wars we have fought left masses of people whose lives will never be freed from the burden of terrible loss, people would never be able to feel completely safe again, people who would always struggle with profound despair, with guilt and horror.

If all human beings have an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, if governments are to protect that right, must governments not abstain from violence?

The temptation is to reject this question as silly, to say that we needed to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Korea and Vietnam to protect ourselves and our liberties. But before you soothe your conscience with that bromide, think hard about the victims of war, both of the wars we have fought, and the wars we have enabled by supplying military hardware to one or both sides as happened in the conflict in Gaza. The cliché that governments take refuge in, that they must wage war in order to promote peace, is laughable. Governments have killed and plundered for thousands of years in order to promote peace. So far that hasn't worked. Why should it suddenly begin to work today?

If governments are to protect our right to pursue happiness, they must dedicate themselves above all to an end of all violence.

Violence in America

If one looks carefully at the different disagreements between advocates and enemies of gun control, one finds that each side has their own reading of history and their own set of facts. Appeals to history and appeals to facts therefore will not serve to resolve this disagreement. At issue are deeply buried attitudes, ancient themes in our culture. The pressing question is what we can do to weaken the influence of those cultural themes.

The disagreements:

1. The Second Amendment to the Constitution reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. "

Advocates of gun control claim that this Second Amendment refers only to militias and not to the rights of individuals to carry weapons when not serving as members of a militia. (Today we call that the National Guard.) It is unclear what makes Gun Control Advocates so confident of their reading of the Constitution.

Opponents deny that. They provide a detailed history of England in the 1600s – a history that was very much alive in the minds of the authors of the Constitution. According to that reading of English history, the opponents of monarchy and of what they called "tyranny" insisted on the rights of individual citizens to own and carry weapons as a necessary defense against dictators, tyrants, or absolute monarchs.

But this is a tendentious reading motivated by a belief that there is an individual right to bear arms. That belief precedes rather than being supported by the actual history.

2. There is wide disagreement about the facts with respect to the usefulness of private ownership of guns. Gun advocates cite between 2 and 3 million cases a year where someone managed to protect themselves and their family by the use of guns. Owning a gun makes a real difference, they say, in enabling citizens to protect themselves. Opponents believe there are somewhere between 60 and 70,000 such events per year. They cite, instead, large numbers of casualties of privately owned guns. Millions of guns owned by citizens make us less rather than more safe.

The people who collected these facts approach the matter with their minds made up. Each side believes that guns save lives or that, on the contrary, guns take lives. The facts do not convince anybody.

3. The debate over guns is in part a debate over the extent to which the federal government controls the lives of citizens today. One does not have to be a flaming conservative to see evidence of overreaching by the federal government wherever you look. In medical care, in education, in day care new rules are constantly being imposed and the individual practitioner is more and more under the supervision of bureaucrats.

But on the other hand, life is becoming more complex by the day and there are more opportunities for people to be ill treated, defrauded, or humiliated. The government has good reason for stepping in to protect citizens.

In each situation, defensible limits on government regulation are not easily established. More often than not choices for or against more government regulation will respond to some deep seated values which some Americans share and others do not.

What are those values? Here we need to look back at our own history. The original immigrants pretended that the North American continent was uninhabited. Europeans came and settled it, they said, and made it yield abundant crops. But that story falsifies the actual history: about every 10 years since Europeans first came to this continent, warfare erupted between whites and Native Americans. The feeling that one needed to carry a weapon at all times rests on the reality of whites stealing the land against the determined, often violent, resistance of Native Americans.

Add to that, the history of 200 years of slavery and another hundred years after the Civil War when African-Americans were regularly lynched with impunity. The history of slavery and Jim Crow is, above all, a very violent history. The condition of the slaves and the regime of Jim Crow could only be maintained by regular and unrelenting violence. It is a history of whites imposing their regime by force of arms. To maintain themselves they needed to carry weapons and always to be ready to do violence to the people they enslaved.

This history is still alive in the very basic attitudes of many Americans. They still feel that they need to be armed in order to be relatively safe. The imminent need for armed self-defense is a strong theme in our culture. That theme is not weakened by arguing about the Second Amendment or the usefulness or a danger of everyone carrying handguns.

We inherit our gun culture from our history. Our task is to weaken those traditions by resisting the glorification of violence in all aspects of our lives: in sports, in movies, in computer games, and, yes, in the debate about going around armed.

But the enemy is not the Second Amendment. Statistics about self protection or injury by handguns are beside the point. America must acknowledge it's terribly violent history and resolve to put it behind us.

Peace ?

Around the Holidays and the New Year, we wish each other peace. We wish for peace on earth and a peaceful new year. Now with Martin Luther King Day upon us, talk of peace escalates once again.

But like the weather, everyone talks about peace but no one does anything about it. Or, more accurately, few people do anything about it.

Domestically, we take great pride in our political institutions and the non-violent forms of change—change in policies and changes in leadership. We do not resolve our disagreements by violence, but we go to Court to have the judges decide and—once they have decided—we accept their verdict. We are solidly committed to peaceful resolution of our disagreements.

That is the story we tell ourselves and the world. It is a true story but it leaves out an important part of what we do. When a court has settled a disagreement, the judges issue an order. Citizens who do not want to accept that order will soon be confronted by police, by the sheriff, by armed soldiers. Yes, we turn to judges to resolve our conflicts. But their judgment is backed up by the clear threat of violence. The weapon of the policeman who serves papers on us, makes it very clear that the decisions of our Courts are backed by the threat of violence. The peaceful resolution of conflicts works because the court ordered decision are backed by credible threats of prison and other punishments.

Our dedication to peaceful conflict resolution is very limited.

At the same time there are alternative forms of conflict resolution which have made considerable progress in the last so many years. These go by different names, and follow somewhat different procedures. But they all begin with an agreement by parties in conflict to try as hard as they can to settle their disagreement, to work out a settlement freely accepted by all parties and make a major effort to make that settlement work. Here there is no appeal to a judge. No one tells the parties what they should do. No one gives orders. No one issues threats. There is no dependence on armed policemen. It is a genuine effort to settle conflict peacefully, to stay away from violence and even the threat of it.

In this alternative method for settling disagreements and conflicts, the parties tell their stories to one or more mediators, each in turn. In a series of meetings, they work out a mutually acceptable solution which they can own, take responsibility for, and execute. The mediator—in most cases—makes no suggestions. Mediators do not tell the parties what to do but try to create an atmosphere of careful listening, of responsible conversation, where issues can be clarified and perhaps reframed and solution hammered out by the parties in disagreement.

Today many colleges and universities offered mediation to their students when conflicts arise between students or between students and faculty. Most major institutions of higher learning offer one-or-two years degree programs in mediation.

Mediation is regularly used in international conflicts, but has proved less successful there. Today, mediation (in whatever form) is not a panacea, a ready made solution for the ubiquitous violence in the world. But the only available alternative—war with its mass killings of civilians as well as of combatants and vast destruction of cities, roads, schools, hospitals and homes. The Vietnam vet begging on the street corner should be a daily reminder for us of the unacceptably high cost of war.

Violence will remain the means to settle conflicts as long as we run to lawyers and courthouses with our conflicts. Lovers of peace can actually work for peace by learning about mediation and using it when needed.

Another wrong war

Another wrong war.

We should never have started the war in Iraq. The war in Vietnam was justified by the “domino theory” – if we did not resist Communism in Vietnam, the rest of Asia would also go communist. That theory is now thoroughly discredited suggesting that we should have staid out of the Vietnam War. Justifications for the Korean War were very similar; most likely it too should not have been fought.

We have an unfortunate inclination to get into unnecessary and unjustified wars .

Now comes news of another ill considered war. Forty years after the beginning of the “War on Drugs” a government commission has concluded that that war, too, failed. In the last 40 years, we have spent more than $650 billion—some reports say “ $1 trillion”-- to reduce the supply of marijuana, cocaine and heroin to US consumers. Two thirds of that amount was spent on incarcerating people arrested for drug offenses. Even the current U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn't worked. "In the grand scheme, it has not been successful," Kerlikowske told the Associated Press. "Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified."

The project was doomed as soon as it was called “ a war.” Wars are violent, they are extremely coercive, they are destructive of lives and property. Wars are not for the fainthearted. Combatants need to be hard, and merciless in the face of the suffering they inflict. Our war on drugs has been all of those: Violent, coercive, and mercilessly destructive. Our jails are overflowing with persons arrested for drug offenses. US drug gangs bring violence to city streets. Mexican drug gangs seriously undermine the power of their government. In Latin America, and now in Afghanistan, we try – with very limited success – to eradicate coca plants and poppies without any concern for the growers whom we deprive of their livelihood and often sicken with the herbicides we spray on their crops. All that is shrugged off as collateral damage.

We tried this experiment once before – during Prohibition –and found that you cannot force people to avoid substances that may be harmful to them. Draconian laws and their enforcement have not reduced the demand for drugs—neither during Prohibition nor today.

Addicts are souls in pain. Punishment only intensifies that pain. For many addicts, poverty, social isolation, lack of hope for a better life, leads to despair and addiction. When the policeman comes to arrest you and the judge puts you in jail, that simply confirms what you knew all along, namely that life is miserable and there is nothing to hope for. You might just as well get high and forget about your problems. The coercive spirit of the war on drugs encourages addiction rather than reducing it.

The war on drugs failed, not because it was poorly executed but because it was the wrong response to the problem of drug addiction. It was one more example where we allowed the haters among us to set public policy. They have only one response to problems: violence, destruction and intimidation.

We were not sufficiently concerned about fellow citizens whose lives are excessively difficult and unrewarding. We blamed and punished when we should have acknowledged that we are members of the same society and that if some of us suffer, the rest of us may well have some responsibility for alleviating the suffering if we can.

Politicians like to present themselves as “compassionate.” Our response to drug addiction has been anything but that. The 40 year failure of the war on drugs suggests that we should take compassion more seriously. Coercion is destructive; it does not solve any problems.

Disaster Lessons

Disaster Lessons

In Port-Au-Prince, devastated by an earthquake, the police are armed and looking out for violence. Newspaper reporters of a law-and-order orientation, many of them with racist agendas who project their own thirst for violence, are reporting gangs, armed with machetes, and looting. “Roaming bands of young men were carrying machetes, looting and robbing everywhere you go said one aid worker. “ (http://www.norcalblogs.com/post_scripts/ 2010/01/haiti-sees-140000-dead-fe.html). No doubt some people become violent in desperate situations. Some people are looking to take advantage of chaos and disorder; some people react violently to their own suffering. But most other observers see the terrible desperation of people who have lost everything, who lack food or water, and marvel at how peaceful they are. “Reports of armed gangs, including video of young men with machetes, have appeared in citizen and news video today. . . . But blog and media reports of looting appear to be based on only a few cases.” http://www.news5.etigari.com/haiti-instances-of-%E2%80%9Clooting%E2%80%9D-but-little-confirmed-evidence-of-post-quake-violence/).

It is Katrina all over. The poor and largely black population who survived the flood were reported to be violent and looting. The National Guard, armed to the teeth, were there to maintain law and order. Later reports showed that the violence reported existed mostly in the imagination of reporters. The greatest threat of violence came from the heavily armed troops. “Shades of Katrina emanate from the descriptions of "anarchy" engulfing the streets. Remember the Superdome, the "looting," the alleged explosion of mayhem? The media conjured images of death and destruction with voyeuristic zeal, while curating the stories to fit a prevailing narrative of savagery and social breakdown. Sharp criticism eventually emerged, too late, to debunk the initial portrayals of lawlessness as distortions, colored by latent anxieties about how black people might act in the absence of white domination. ” (http://www. racewire.org/archives/2010/01/please_dont_superdome_haiti.html).

There is a frightening lesson to be learned here. During natural disasters, the element of violence is mainly introduced by the heavily armed soldiers whom governments send to the scene of devastation-- in the case of Katrina, long before they sent any help for the victims. Reports of violence are often manufactured by angry persons, by haters, or persons terribly scared who are constantly expecting violence--hoping perhaps for an opportunity to be violent themselves. In Haiti too complaints have been heard that the US is preventing relief supplies from entering the country by giving preference to flights bringing in troops over flights bringing in relief supplies.

Violence is not primarily introduced by the victims of the disasters but by the heavily armed troops. Governments send in their soldiers, allegedly to prevent violence, but they actually are the most violent actors. Governments, whom we expect to preserve the peace, are often its greatest enemies. Its is they who introduce heavily armed men and women and promote the possibility of mayhem.

Iraq was a violent country to be sure under Saddam Hussein. But the damage he did to the Iraqi people pales besides the loss of life inflicted by allied troops. The same is true in Afghanistan. When will our government learn that war does not promote peace and killing does not save lives?

Can Violence bring Peace?

Israel and its US supporters defend Israel's recent attack on Gaza as self-defense. For a number of years, rockets have been regularly fired from Gaza into Southern Israel. There were not many casualties but the population of Israel was seriously frightened by the continued attacks.
During the Israeli incursion into the Gaza strip newspapers report less than fifteen Israeli and more than 1200 Palestinian casualties. Israeli bombing caused major property damage of more than $2 billion in the Gaza strip—already one of the most impoverished areas in the world.
Is all this violence, death and destruction justifiable as self-defense?
National self-defense is usually thought of as similar to that of individuals. Many people believe that if someone barges into your house and threatens the well-being of your family, you may, if necessary, kill him. But would you also be justified killing his entire family and burning down his house? Would it be an act of self-defense if you killed eighty people in response to one person invading your house? Surely that would be overreacting in a big way.
So it may well seem that the Israelis overreacted.
But that is not the end of the matter. Self-defense involves not only reactions to actual attacks but also looking toward the future and trying to prevent future threats. Individuals may build a fence around their house. They may move into a gated community where no one can enter without showing credentials to armed guards. They may even have an alarm installed in their house that summons the police of private security guards as soon as there is a sign of an unwanted intrusion. If even that does not seem to be sufficiently secure, they can hire armed security guards and surround themselves with burly men who would defend them when necessary.
Nations cannot look to an international police force—private or public—to keep them safe. They must make themselves secure for the future by making alliances with other nations or by neutralizing threats by their own military efforts. But even here, of course, nations may use excessive force. In 1983, for instance, President Reagan ordered an invasion of the Carribean island nation of Grenada—an island the size of Martha's Vineyard-- because of a coup by a hardline Communist group allied with the Soviet Union. One may doubt that any government of that tiny nation was a sufficient threat to the US to justify a military invasion. The seriousness of a threat determines what sorts of reactions are appropriate. A communist coup in Grenada could not justify a military invasion.
Nations that are strong and feel relatively secure in the world will be reluctant to use disproportionate violence against potential threats. Confident that they will be able to defend themselves they do not see every threat as potentially fatal to their nation's life. After centuries of cruel persecution of Jews culminating in the Holocaust, the Isrealis are inclined to see every threat as possibly fatal. A member of the Israeli peace movement put it as follows: “It is impossible to understand the viciousness of this war without taking into account the historical background: the feeling of victimhood after all that has been done to the Jews throughout the ages, and the conviction that after the Holocaust, we have the right to do anything, absolutely anything, to defend ourselves, without any inhibitions due to law or morality.” The victims of violence are likely to overreact to any new threat of violence. For centuries the Jews, not having had their own state, were unable to defend themselves. Now there is the Israeli state to offer protection and it will react viciously to any threat because Jews are victims of past violence.
That may explain the disproportionate response of Israel to the rockets from Gaza. But it also suggests that this excessive violence will be counterproductive. The Palestinians draw the same lesson from the violence wreaked on them that the State of Israel drew from the Holocaust: “we have the right to do anything, absolutely anything, to defend ourselves, without any inhibitions due to law or morality.”
Violence will only perpetuate itself. It is foolish to believe that wars will bring peace. The survivors of violence learn that anything is permitted in the cause of self-defense. Wherever possible they will use as much violence as they can. The Israelis do not use violence, moreover, against Germany that killed millions of Jews but against the Palestinians. Who will be their victim?