The proliferation of mass shootings and killings in the United States is no accident. It is the result of a monstrous and uncontrolled alliance between an all-powerful military industry and the forces of the free market, which rely on fear marketing.
Posted yesterday at 12:00 p.m.
The situation is so twisted that each new killing now represents a business opportunity, encouraged by delirious commentators who offer to arm teachers and provide bulletproof blankets for children. In a country with more firearms than people (more than 400 million guns), armed violence translates into terribly concrete terms the Darwinian principle that lies at the heart of liberal capitalism, that of the struggle of all against all.
In the United States, the thing becomes unfortunately every day more obvious, the man is a wolf for the man. The country is like a grim battlefield where owning a gun is not just about protecting one’s life and possessions, or even, as is often said when recalling the Civil War era, to s oppose a government that threatens the exercise of fundamental freedoms, but more radically, to fight forces that we are convinced are already at work everywhere.
In the minds of the killers, the shootings are acts of resistance against an order that must be undermined, in the same way that the terrorists, through their suicidal gestures, seek to stop the pace of the machine by exercising a nuisance power. In both cases, thought feeds on extremist discourse, where fantasies merge with reality.
Aim first and foremost at arms manufacturers
To solve the problem posed by armed violence, it is not enough to cry and pray, hoping that things will eventually work out. We must first target the arms manufacturers, who do everything in their power – and this power is great – so that their destructive inventions are accessible to as many people as possible, including those unbalanced young terrorists who seem to have chosen to celebrate their entry into adult life through the most sinister of rites of passage (Payton Gendron and Salvador Ramos, perpetrators of the Buffalo and Texas massacres, had just turned 18).
In short, it is the undue influence of the military industry on American society that must be targeted, as President Eisenhower already did in 1961: “In the assemblies of government, we must guard ourselves against any unjustified influence, whether or not it was solicited, exercised by the military-industrial complex. The risk of a disastrous rise of illegitimate power exists and will persist. »
In the decades that followed, nothing could stop the rise of power of this vast complex, which took the form of a state within a state, throwing all its weight behind the outbreak of certain wars and directing government decisions.
Moreover, those who announce the decline of the American empire should change their minds: its military-industrial complex still outrageously dominates the planetary market (59% of world production against 8.6% for Russia, its closest rival ). And the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine, reminiscent of the years of the Cold War, represents a windfall for this industry.
A new market to exploit
If mass killings are on the rise, with the last decade being the deadliest in American history, it is because of a shift in the military industry, which now sees the civilian population as a market to be exploited. . Ordinary citizens form a target clientele, in the same way as armed forces professionals. As a result, in the United States, arms sales have tripled since 2000, the pandemic also marking a peak, with nearly forty million weapons sold during the years 2020-2021. We are witnessing in this country an unprecedented extension of the field of war, which no longer takes place only on the external front, between enemy peoples, but also on the internal scene, between citizens who consider themselves enemies to be defeated, encouraged in this by the violent rhetoric of several media.
To commit their misdeeds, the perpetrators of mass killings do not content themselves with simple revolvers; they now have semi-automatic weapons designed to cause maximum casualties in minimum time. To reflect the change taking place, the National Rifle Association (NRA) should be renamed the National Submachine Gun Association.
The only way to counter this endemic violence is to place the burden of responsibility on the military industry itself, as the tobacco industry once did, to hold it to account for the acts of violence it makes it possible, even to accuse it of complicity, even involuntary or indirect, with the acts of internal terrorism which are multiplying.
A sign that times are changing, this charge of terrorism is now invoked in certain cases, including that which opposes the State of Michigan to the young author of a massacre in a secondary school which left four dead among his classmates. If upheld by the court, such a charge might force leaders to recognize that this industry poses a threat to the health of their country, that the disastrous rise to its illegitimate power, to put it with Eisenhower, is not no longer a risk but a reality.