By Liane Casten

As I finally put away all the lovely greeting cards that had arrived during the holiday season, I thought how ironic that half the cards delivered messages of peace. Do we Americans truly yearn for peace and are we willing to do what is required to achieve it?

William Blum, author of Rogue State (Common Courage Press, 2002), stated: “From the end of World War II to the beginning of the 21st century, the United States has attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist move-ments struggling against intolerable regimes. In the process, the U.S. has caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many million more to a life of agony and despair.

“Although our civil laws prohibit murder, robbery, rape and bribery, they do not keep us from intervening in and toppling foreign governments, quashing socialist movements, or dropping bombs on other nations, as long as those actions serve our leaders’ concept of the national interest.”

Martin Luther King put it succinctly: “My government is the world’s leading purveyor of violence.”

The American public, by and large, has stood by passively or been blindly supportive of these actions. Wes go about our daily business with little concern for the havoc and misery wrought upon other peoples. I list merely a few examples:

1954
U.S.-backed coup against democracy in Guatemala and subsequent U.S.-installed dictatorships contributed to the deaths of 120,000 people over a period of more than four decades.

1961-1971
U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, which included chemical warfare (Agent Orange), took the lives of more than one million Vietnamese.

1965
U.S.-supported coup in Indonesia; large-scale mob killings in the aftermath left an estimated 800,000 people dead.

1965
U.S. overthrow of the Dominican Republic government left 3,000 dead.

1970s
U.S.-sponsored terrorist war against the peoples of Southern Africa, particularly Angola, led to the deaths and mutilations of more than one million people.

1973
U.S.-sponsored coup in Chile against the democratic government of Salvador Allende resulted in 30,000 deaths.

1975
U.S. sponsorship of the Indonesian regime aided in the slaughter of more than 250,000 in East Timor—with the complicity of President Ford and then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

1980s
U.S. military aid to the dictatorship of El Salvador to quell a civil war contributed to killings and human rights violations by government troops and death squads; an estimated 75,000 people killed during the 12-year war.

1984
U.S.-sponsored terrorist war in Nicaragua, using illegal guns and an illegal blockade of its harbors, left more than 30,000 dead.

1989
U.S. invaded Panama, killing 8,000, in an attempt to capture George H. Bush’s former CIA partner, now “enemy” Manuel Noriega. The former leader is now in prison, prevented from revealing his knowledge of cooperative drug dealing with the U.S. government.

1991
U.S. attacked Iraq, leaving a lasting legacy of death from depleted uranium tanks and shells.

1970s to present
The School of the Americas has been teaching military men from Central America the art of violence to enable them to control and destabilize their own nations.

Buffeted by euphemisms such as “collateral damage” and “soft targets,” we have become desensitized to the steady stream of human suffering far from our shores. Thanks to an apathetic American public and compliant profit-driven media corporations that help our political leaders spread their propaganda, our government can get away with initiating unjustified wars and meddling in other countries with impunity.

American society is deeply invested in war. It is a social, financial and political part of our everyday lives—an organizing force. Today, the U.S. is the world’s lone superpower. Our military spending, at roughly $400 billion annually, now rivals the combined total military expenditure of all other major nations. It is more than half our national budget and comes at the expense of our schools, transportation infrastructure, health care, rehabilitation of our prisons, and the environment.

Our government has no compunction about increasing weapon sales and military aid to the world. These are made available not only to existing allies. In the wake of 9/11, our new policy is to arm govern-ments that were formerly considered unstable or otherwise off-limits due to gross human rights violations—now these same nations are assisting in the “war against terrorism.”

One of the most disturbing aspects of post-9/11 arms sales has been the arbitrary redefinition of dissident groups around the world as “terrorists.” The 38-year-long civil war in Colombia, for example, has been recast as a war between our Colombian allies and terrorists. In the Philippines, “counter-terrorism aid” has been dispensed to fight a band of Islamic militants, the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), despite the fact that government analysts admit the ASG poses no credible threat. In Nepal, counter-terrorism aid has been allocated to help the Nepalese military quell Maoist dissent despite State Department testimony that denies any Maoist connection to Al-Qaeda.

The U.S was born out of revolution and violence. Consider the massacre of the Native Americans, the enslavement of the blacks and the Civil War. Our nation has historically modeled itself as a dominator/patriarchal nation (see Riane Eisler’s watershed book, The Chalice and the Blade) in which social structures and religious institutions play a role in keeping the leader up and the rest of the group down. We are structured around authoritarianism, not peaceful coexistence and cooperation. This phenomenon can be seen in churches, synagogues, public schools, and most social, business and political organizations. We are trained early in life to be part of our dominator nation.

Thus we absorb the media messages and grand slogans without question: “Others are the true terrorists. We are peace-loving people. We must rid ourselves of those who have weapons of mass destruction.” Never mind that the U.S. has arsenals of mass destruction that could fill football fields. Or that we sold Iraq biological and chemical weapons. Or that we trained and armed members of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan back in the 1980s when it suited our interests.

Violence stems from myriad causes; primarily from the very roots of our commercialized society, inside our homes and outside through our culture. Many have wondered why our society is so much more violent than others. The reason is not just the easy availability of guns, which are the tools, not the motive for violence.

I suggest that the U.S. media, especially television, plays a major role in promoting violence. The media broadcasts countless violent stories between 6:00pm and 10:00pm. Cop shows and crime stories far outnumber cultural and educational presentations. Many entertainment offerings such as The Sopranos glamorize violence—one of critics’ most acclaimed episodes was about Tony Soprano and his nephew sawing up a body before disposing of it.

A long-term study indicates that boys and girls who watch a lot of violence on TV are more at risk of aggressive adult behavior including spouse abuse and criminal offenses (Chicago Sun-Times, March 10, 2003). Violence on television as well as video games and toys that promote winning by annihilation have been shown to be damaging to children.

On talk shows, many media pundits espouse violence over diplomacy as a means of political problem-solving. Rupert Murdoch’s FOX channel and Time-Warner’s CNN have been strong advocates of war, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Competing for ratings, each channel devotes much airtime to the endless punditry and sensational visuals—selling war as entertainment.

Weapons manufacturer GE, which owns NBC and MSNBC, has promoted war, sponsored pro-war rallies and numbed listeners with blind patriotism through its media outlets.

Meanwhile, dissent is vilified or ignored. Clear Channel Communications—the nation’s largest radio chain with 1,200 stations, half of the U.S. total—banned the Dixie Chicks from their hundreds of radio station playlists after the group criticized President Bush for his support for a war on Iraq.

Although violent crime has dipped in the past years, people feel more unsafe than ever. The media’s fixation on war, terrorism and crime conveys a distorted reality. This is especially dangerous when the media marginalizes certain groups and minorities— heterogeneous communities can develop suspicion or fear of other races or backgrounds.

Added to all this is the stream of unsubstantiated color-coded terrorist warnings from the authorities. The public is scared into condoning clampdowns on civil liberties and supporting acts of international violence such as the Iraq invasion. Whether or not we directly participate in it, continual aggression has become a recurring theme in our lives.

What we have in America is a value system, a profit system and a culture that not just permits violence, but extols it as a vital part of our American inheritance. Michael Moore’s compelling Bowling for Colombine says it all too well. We do not teach compassion or empathy. We identify with the victors who achieve their goals by any means necessary.

History tells us excessive military dominance has always led into decay as other values fall by the wayside. We corrupt and destroy ourselves from within. We need to find a way to reverse this self-destructive trend before we add our own country to the dust heap of the formerly powerful. It may be only a question of time.