By Jorge Hernández Martínez on January 22, 2024
No interested person, scholar or connoisseur of the past or present realities of the United States would overlook the recurrent presence of a defined and notorious component of institutionalized violence, which reappears intermittently throughout its historical evolution as a nation. On a regular basis, the exercise of this violence is incubated in breeding grounds so saturated with intolerance that it operates as an ideological justification for certain actions promoted by various actors. Sometimes, the State, through government agencies, at other times, political parties or interest and special interest groups. Or, even, internal terrorist organizations or individuals with traumas caused by their war experiences, as well as alienated young people, victims of drugs and exposure to the direct violence of the environment in which they live or recreated by the entertainment industry; video games, movies, the Internet, digital networks etc.
According to the periodic records of a specialized institution, Gun Violence Archive, the number of deaths in incidents of gun violence in the United States between 2014 and 2022 was more than 150 thousand people, and at the end of last year, 2023, it was estimated that about 25 thousand were killed that way, thus averaging more than one hundred per day. So, statistically speaking, but at the same time, historically speaking, the practice of domestic terrorism is one of the frequent manifestations of violent behavior and sources of murders carried out with firearms. Violence, in short, is intrinsic to American society. Metaphorically, it can be said that it is in its DNA, that genetically, it is innate. It is born with capitalism as a system, since its emergence and, in the specific case of the United States, since it was installed when it emerged as a nation, expressed with cruelty and barbarism against the native Indian peoples and African slaves. The intolerance that sustains this violence does not have a political, but a cultural imprint, but it acquires it, and in that way it has made it its own, until today.
A closer reference is the one that has been expressed in recent weeks in many media and academic studies, which, with concern, warn of a growing fear of an increase in political violence, as the electoral campaign that will lead to the elections in November 2024 progresses. In that framework, attention is drawn to the activism of the conspiracy movement called QAnon, whose access to major digital platforms has been banned. Born in 2017 and composed of fanatical supporters of Donald Trump, they denounced the existence of an alleged elite, composed of pedophiles belonging to a satanic sect, which attacked the traditional American identity, conservative and of Protestant religiosity.
The movement bears the name of its leader, who calls himself Q, followed by the first letters of the word anonymous. This character established an extremist, radical right-wing preaching, aimed at overthrowing what he described as a “deep state”, that is, an elitist structure, made up of high government officials involved in pedophile networks, who seek to articulate a “new world order”, which only a strong charismatic president, such as Trump, would be able to defeat and thwart their perverse plans. Since 2019, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) considers QAnon as a major potential terrorist threat in the United States. Some of his followers, even from other parts of the country, traveled to the capital on January 6, 2021, attended and participated in Trump’s rally legitimizing, inciting and mobilizing the assault on the Capitol that day. For the analysts, the irruption and seizure of the seat of Congress, as the legislative branch, would be the greatest attack on the well-known American democracy, that is increasingly mythical, exclusionary and far from reality. The essence of the so-called “Trumpism” lies in a superlative intolerance.
The assault, as a political event, must be understood in the light of precedents. American history, based on certain milestones and stages, has been a repertoire of excesses, through which basic constitutional rights of citizens have been violated time and again, domestically. It is not a sum of individual and isolated or sporadic acts, but a reaction that persists over time, that is reiterated. It would suffice to recall the deadly mass shootings in schools and other educational centers, or the police outrages with overflowing violence in racist and anti-immigrant episodes. Hence we can speak of a culture of intolerance. It is characterized by the appeal to violence. It is based on rejection and hatred, on the legitimacy of contempt and marginalization of what is considered different from what is understood as typically American. To everything that departs from the yardstick with which the authentic white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant spirit is measured, the so-called wasp, a conventionally accepted term, taken from English, which summarizes the three attributes: white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. In the face of their identity, an otherness arose, understood and symbolized since then as a negative stereotype. The “other” was not only different, but inferior. This was the basis of white supremacism, which resonates with such force today.
The terrorist acts of 2001 take first place in the 21st century as a point of reference, reproducing a similar pattern. The threats, the enemies, the perpetrators of terrorism, come from abroad. Latin Americans, Arabs, Asians, as the case may be, are demonized and become the object of media manipulation, with segregationist and xenophobic criteria. They want to ignore and distort the fact that there is an old and long record of unlimited violence, which far from being alien to the national culture, is embedded in the same social and ideological fabric of the country.
A simple retrospective look leads to an incident that seems to have been forgotten, despite the trauma it entailed. On April 19, 1995, a truck bomb, loaded with approximately half a ton of explosives, destroyed a state facility in Oklahoma. The Alfred Murrah building contained numerous federal offices there, as well as a day care center, and under normal conditions, some 500 employees, not counting visitors, were concentrated there on a daily basis. The attack killed 168 people, including children. That same day, 17 other U.S. government buildings in different cities and states received bomb threats.
Several years earlier, on February 29, 1993, another terrorist action damaged, with explosives, no less than five floors of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, a facility that from that date and even much earlier, already had the same symbolism as eight years later, when they would be destroyed: they represented the heart of financial capital on Wall Street. That attack, in addition to causing numerous injuries, cost the lives of five people.
The prejudices, fears and hatreds against Muslim Americans and Latin American immigrants, under the banner of the fight against everything that signified anti-Americanism, were neither born in 2001 nor were they the patrimony, as is sometimes believed, of the Republican Party, but they spread through sounding boards in the civic and political culture, also within the Democratic Party. Since the middle of the last century, there were trends and entities expressive of right-wing extremism, related to fascism, with revival of old collective behaviors, including hate groups, such as neo-Nazis, skinheads, the Vigilante Movement, the Militias, the Aryan Nations, the Christian Identity Movement. With another connotation, one could mention the violence-promoting file, among others, the National Rifle Association, the Tea Party, the Alternative Right or Alt-Right.
As an eloquent illustration, it is appropriate to comment that, according to a report issued by a relevant conservative think tank, the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, right-wing extremists perpetrated two-thirds of the attacks and conspiracies in the United States in 2019, and more than 90 percent between January and May 2020. These troubling numbers led the country’s Department of Homeland Security (or Homeland) Security to conclude, in a report released in October of last year, that “racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists (particularly white supremacists), would remain the most persistent and deadliest threat in the homeland.” It is an acknowledgment made by the ideological apparatuses of the system itself, those who idealize the country as the perfect society, which makes the matter more serious. They had no choice but to recognize the truth.
Source: Cuba en Resumen