By Robin Lehman
Our species is a violent one. We've never shied from inflicting our violence on others or ourselves. We keep making excuses of course. It's the war to end all wars; we have to defend our sacred honor; they attacked us first, on and on.
In the last 500 or so years it's been mainly white Christian northerners abusing and killing themselves and every other people on the face of mother earth. I give you a few examples:
The slave trade
The genocide of the natives of North America
The genocide of the natives of South America
The genocide of the natives of Australia
The attempted genocide of the Jews in Germany
World Wars I and II
The attack on North Korea
The attack on Vietnam
The attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan
The droning to death of young Yemeni men
The militarized police murders and incarceration of black boys and men in most states
And many, many more.
But my point is what Henry Giroux calls the "violence of organized forgetting." When our government puts out its propaganda and the media just copy that propaganda without context, it helps maintain this hyper-violent world that we exist in today. It creates a world in which we Americans feel this sort of self-righteous anger at the rest of the world and those of us here at home that are different from us. It abets our feeling of rage and hopelessness.
So when the American journalist James Foley is killed by the ultra-violent ISIS, it is indeed a terrible thing. But ISIS exists largely due to our intervention in Iraq a decade ago. Our barbaric cowardice dismantled the state of Iraq, ruining its terribly flawed and violent government and its somewhat liberal civil society. Into this destroyed state we installed a right-wing Shiite government headed by Nuri Al-Maliki, a quasi-dictator who then proceeded to disenfranchise the Sunni minority. The Sunnis became very frustrated and so supported or at least put up with ISIS, which is Sunni.
When our news sources "forget" the history, context and our involvement in violent aspects of reality they are abetting the violence around the world and here at home. So instead of reporting a story that helps the American people make rational choices, realizing our culpability, it increases fear and irrationality tending to increase violence around the world.
Lehman lives in Warren.
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