SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
The God of War
There's Mars, the god of war, perched in a parking garage in Dallas, annihilating the enemy with utter impunity. Mars, you sicko! Just listen to President Obama:
"By definition, if you shoot people who pose no threat to you -- strangers -- you have a troubled mind. What triggers that, what feeds it, what sets it off, I'll leave that to psychologists and people who study these kinds of incidents."
Jul 14, 2016
There's Mars, the god of war, perched in a parking garage in Dallas, annihilating the enemy with utter impunity. Mars, you sicko! Just listen to President Obama:
"By definition, if you shoot people who pose no threat to you -- strangers -- you have a troubled mind. What triggers that, what feeds it, what sets it off, I'll leave that to psychologists and people who study these kinds of incidents."
Pardon me while I scream. Let's all loose a primal scream as we absorb the daily news and the secret news. What's happening to the United States of America -- what's happening to Planet Earth -- is beyond words, yet the words march on. The same New York Times story that delivered the president's words condemning Micah Johnson's killing of five police officers last week also reported the killer's military service and apparently life-consuming military mindset.
Johnson, the story reported, "had returned in disgrace from his stint abroad in the Army Reserve, but then continued a training regimen of his own devising, conducting military-style exercises in his backyard and reportedly joining a gym that offered martial arts and weapons classes."
He had also spent the last two years "building his arsenal . . . stockpiling guns and gathering the elements to build explosives," according to CBS News.
And as Joshua Holland wrote recently in The Nation: "Micah Johnson was what Wayne LaPierre might call a 'good guy with a gun'--a combat veteran with no criminal record. . . .
"And last Thursday, donning body armor, Johnson grabbed at least one 'military-style weapon' and gunned down 12 people in the streets. Dallas Police Chief David Brown said that his investigators are 'convinced that this suspect had other plans and thought that what he was doing was righteous and believed that he was going to target law enforcement -- make us pay for what he sees as law enforcement's efforts to punish people of color.'"
The insanity begins at the top. That is to say, he fit the true believer's definition of a Second Amendment stalwart: an armed patriot rising up to fight government tyranny.
There's Mars, the god of war, perched in a parking garage in Dallas . . .
The insanity begins at the top. The U.S. government is engaged in endless war. Our defense budget, in all its waste, hovers at the edge of a trillion dollars a year, surpassing virtually all domestic spending, yet is never, never, never discussed publicly by politicians, including presidential candidates.
War accomplishes nothing except to ensure the conditions for further war and to maintain dominance of humanity's collective mindset. War's handmaiden is public relations: Our enemy is evil and killing him (or dying in the process of trying to kill him) is the essence of glory. Everyone longs for glory. All you have to do to get it is kill someone evil. This is the theme of our mass entertainment and our video games. It's the bait that lures the adolescent soul into surrendering his life to the military, which Micah Johnson apparently did.
"But Mr. Johnson did not succeed," the Times reported. "While overseas" -- in Afghanistan -- "a female soldier in Mr. Johnson's unit accused him of sexual harassment. When the Army considered kicking him out, he waived his right to a hearing in exchange for a lesser charge."
The Times story dropped the subject there, leaving the implication that Johnson was merely a bad participant in an otherwise good institution. But glory and sexual assault are permanently linked. As Nan Levinson wrote recently at Waging Nonviolence: "By the Pentagon's own estimate, some 20,300 sexual assaults involving the U.S. military took place in the last fiscal year. About one quarter, or 6,083, of those were reported . . ."
The point I'm making here is that the national ritual after every mass killing is to isolate the murderer and focus on his weirdness and inability to be normal: his "troubled mind," as Obama put it. But in fact, mass killers embrace our essential national values. Johnson's mind was no more troubled than the collective mind called national defense, which identifies and dehumanizes our enemy of the moment, then proceeds to take that enemy out as efficiently as possible.
And the process is completely impersonal. In war we kill "strangers" who have not done us personal harm; they merely represent -- by their uniform or simply by their presence in enemy territory -- the large wrong we are attempting to eliminate.
In the shadow of the Department of Defense lurks the Second Amendment, which ensures that war doesn't vanish simply because we're safely within the borders of the greatest country there is. Bad people are everywhere and the need for defense never ends. This, too, is part of the context in which Johnson and all the other celebrity mass murderers have acted. Add to this our increasingly militarized police departments and the de facto war being waged on people of color and what we have is an almost endless justification for violent behavior.
The only way out is to think beyond war: to mourn, to grieve for so many lives cut short, and to refuse to dehumanize anyone.
Dehumanizing others is so easy when you're armed.
An Urgent Message From Our Co-Founder
Dear Common Dreams reader, It’s been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should serve the public good, not corporate profits. It was clear to us from the outset what it would take to build such a project. No paid advertisements. No corporate sponsors. No millionaire publisher telling us what to think or do. Many people said we wouldn't last a year, but we proved those doubters wrong. Together with a tremendous team of journalists and dedicated staff, we built an independent media outlet free from the constraints of profits and corporate control. Our mission has always been simple: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. Building Common Dreams was not easy. Our survival was never guaranteed. When you take on the most powerful forces—Wall Street greed, fossil fuel industry destruction, Big Tech lobbyists, and uber-rich oligarchs who have spent billions upon billions rigging the economy and democracy in their favor—the only bulwark you have is supporters who believe in your work. But here’s the urgent message from me today. It's never been this bad out there. And it's never been this hard to keep us going. At the very moment Common Dreams is most needed, the threats we face are intensifying. We need your support now more than ever. We don't accept corporate advertising and never will. We don't have a paywall because we don't think people should be blocked from critical news based on their ability to pay. Everything we do is funded by the donations of readers like you. When everyone does the little they can afford, we are strong. But if that support retreats or dries up, so do we. Will you donate now to make sure Common Dreams not only survives but thrives? —Craig Brown, Co-founder |
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Robert C. Koehler
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. Koehler has been the recipient of multiple awards for writing and journalism from organizations including the National Newspaper Association, Suburban Newspapers of America, and the Chicago Headline Club. He's a regular contributor to such high-profile websites as Common Dreams and the Huffington Post. Eschewing political labels, Koehler considers himself a "peace journalist. He has been an editor at Tribune Media Services and a reporter, columnist and copy desk chief at Lerner Newspapers, a chain of neighborhood and suburban newspapers in the Chicago area. Koehler launched his column in 1999. Born in Detroit and raised in suburban Dearborn, Koehler has lived in Chicago since 1976. He earned a master's degree in creative writing from Columbia College and has taught writing at both the college and high school levels. Koehler is a widower and single parent. He explores both conditions at great depth in his writing. His book, "Courage Grows Strong at the Wound" (2016). Contact him or visit his website at commonwonders.com.
There's Mars, the god of war, perched in a parking garage in Dallas, annihilating the enemy with utter impunity. Mars, you sicko! Just listen to President Obama:
"By definition, if you shoot people who pose no threat to you -- strangers -- you have a troubled mind. What triggers that, what feeds it, what sets it off, I'll leave that to psychologists and people who study these kinds of incidents."
Pardon me while I scream. Let's all loose a primal scream as we absorb the daily news and the secret news. What's happening to the United States of America -- what's happening to Planet Earth -- is beyond words, yet the words march on. The same New York Times story that delivered the president's words condemning Micah Johnson's killing of five police officers last week also reported the killer's military service and apparently life-consuming military mindset.
Johnson, the story reported, "had returned in disgrace from his stint abroad in the Army Reserve, but then continued a training regimen of his own devising, conducting military-style exercises in his backyard and reportedly joining a gym that offered martial arts and weapons classes."
He had also spent the last two years "building his arsenal . . . stockpiling guns and gathering the elements to build explosives," according to CBS News.
And as Joshua Holland wrote recently in The Nation: "Micah Johnson was what Wayne LaPierre might call a 'good guy with a gun'--a combat veteran with no criminal record. . . .
"And last Thursday, donning body armor, Johnson grabbed at least one 'military-style weapon' and gunned down 12 people in the streets. Dallas Police Chief David Brown said that his investigators are 'convinced that this suspect had other plans and thought that what he was doing was righteous and believed that he was going to target law enforcement -- make us pay for what he sees as law enforcement's efforts to punish people of color.'"
The insanity begins at the top. That is to say, he fit the true believer's definition of a Second Amendment stalwart: an armed patriot rising up to fight government tyranny.
There's Mars, the god of war, perched in a parking garage in Dallas . . .
The insanity begins at the top. The U.S. government is engaged in endless war. Our defense budget, in all its waste, hovers at the edge of a trillion dollars a year, surpassing virtually all domestic spending, yet is never, never, never discussed publicly by politicians, including presidential candidates.
War accomplishes nothing except to ensure the conditions for further war and to maintain dominance of humanity's collective mindset. War's handmaiden is public relations: Our enemy is evil and killing him (or dying in the process of trying to kill him) is the essence of glory. Everyone longs for glory. All you have to do to get it is kill someone evil. This is the theme of our mass entertainment and our video games. It's the bait that lures the adolescent soul into surrendering his life to the military, which Micah Johnson apparently did.
"But Mr. Johnson did not succeed," the Times reported. "While overseas" -- in Afghanistan -- "a female soldier in Mr. Johnson's unit accused him of sexual harassment. When the Army considered kicking him out, he waived his right to a hearing in exchange for a lesser charge."
The Times story dropped the subject there, leaving the implication that Johnson was merely a bad participant in an otherwise good institution. But glory and sexual assault are permanently linked. As Nan Levinson wrote recently at Waging Nonviolence: "By the Pentagon's own estimate, some 20,300 sexual assaults involving the U.S. military took place in the last fiscal year. About one quarter, or 6,083, of those were reported . . ."
The point I'm making here is that the national ritual after every mass killing is to isolate the murderer and focus on his weirdness and inability to be normal: his "troubled mind," as Obama put it. But in fact, mass killers embrace our essential national values. Johnson's mind was no more troubled than the collective mind called national defense, which identifies and dehumanizes our enemy of the moment, then proceeds to take that enemy out as efficiently as possible.
And the process is completely impersonal. In war we kill "strangers" who have not done us personal harm; they merely represent -- by their uniform or simply by their presence in enemy territory -- the large wrong we are attempting to eliminate.
In the shadow of the Department of Defense lurks the Second Amendment, which ensures that war doesn't vanish simply because we're safely within the borders of the greatest country there is. Bad people are everywhere and the need for defense never ends. This, too, is part of the context in which Johnson and all the other celebrity mass murderers have acted. Add to this our increasingly militarized police departments and the de facto war being waged on people of color and what we have is an almost endless justification for violent behavior.
The only way out is to think beyond war: to mourn, to grieve for so many lives cut short, and to refuse to dehumanize anyone.
Dehumanizing others is so easy when you're armed.
Robert C. Koehler
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. Koehler has been the recipient of multiple awards for writing and journalism from organizations including the National Newspaper Association, Suburban Newspapers of America, and the Chicago Headline Club. He's a regular contributor to such high-profile websites as Common Dreams and the Huffington Post. Eschewing political labels, Koehler considers himself a "peace journalist. He has been an editor at Tribune Media Services and a reporter, columnist and copy desk chief at Lerner Newspapers, a chain of neighborhood and suburban newspapers in the Chicago area. Koehler launched his column in 1999. Born in Detroit and raised in suburban Dearborn, Koehler has lived in Chicago since 1976. He earned a master's degree in creative writing from Columbia College and has taught writing at both the college and high school levels. Koehler is a widower and single parent. He explores both conditions at great depth in his writing. His book, "Courage Grows Strong at the Wound" (2016). Contact him or visit his website at commonwonders.com.
There's Mars, the god of war, perched in a parking garage in Dallas, annihilating the enemy with utter impunity. Mars, you sicko! Just listen to President Obama:
"By definition, if you shoot people who pose no threat to you -- strangers -- you have a troubled mind. What triggers that, what feeds it, what sets it off, I'll leave that to psychologists and people who study these kinds of incidents."
Pardon me while I scream. Let's all loose a primal scream as we absorb the daily news and the secret news. What's happening to the United States of America -- what's happening to Planet Earth -- is beyond words, yet the words march on. The same New York Times story that delivered the president's words condemning Micah Johnson's killing of five police officers last week also reported the killer's military service and apparently life-consuming military mindset.
Johnson, the story reported, "had returned in disgrace from his stint abroad in the Army Reserve, but then continued a training regimen of his own devising, conducting military-style exercises in his backyard and reportedly joining a gym that offered martial arts and weapons classes."
He had also spent the last two years "building his arsenal . . . stockpiling guns and gathering the elements to build explosives," according to CBS News.
And as Joshua Holland wrote recently in The Nation: "Micah Johnson was what Wayne LaPierre might call a 'good guy with a gun'--a combat veteran with no criminal record. . . .
"And last Thursday, donning body armor, Johnson grabbed at least one 'military-style weapon' and gunned down 12 people in the streets. Dallas Police Chief David Brown said that his investigators are 'convinced that this suspect had other plans and thought that what he was doing was righteous and believed that he was going to target law enforcement -- make us pay for what he sees as law enforcement's efforts to punish people of color.'"
The insanity begins at the top. That is to say, he fit the true believer's definition of a Second Amendment stalwart: an armed patriot rising up to fight government tyranny.
There's Mars, the god of war, perched in a parking garage in Dallas . . .
The insanity begins at the top. The U.S. government is engaged in endless war. Our defense budget, in all its waste, hovers at the edge of a trillion dollars a year, surpassing virtually all domestic spending, yet is never, never, never discussed publicly by politicians, including presidential candidates.
War accomplishes nothing except to ensure the conditions for further war and to maintain dominance of humanity's collective mindset. War's handmaiden is public relations: Our enemy is evil and killing him (or dying in the process of trying to kill him) is the essence of glory. Everyone longs for glory. All you have to do to get it is kill someone evil. This is the theme of our mass entertainment and our video games. It's the bait that lures the adolescent soul into surrendering his life to the military, which Micah Johnson apparently did.
"But Mr. Johnson did not succeed," the Times reported. "While overseas" -- in Afghanistan -- "a female soldier in Mr. Johnson's unit accused him of sexual harassment. When the Army considered kicking him out, he waived his right to a hearing in exchange for a lesser charge."
The Times story dropped the subject there, leaving the implication that Johnson was merely a bad participant in an otherwise good institution. But glory and sexual assault are permanently linked. As Nan Levinson wrote recently at Waging Nonviolence: "By the Pentagon's own estimate, some 20,300 sexual assaults involving the U.S. military took place in the last fiscal year. About one quarter, or 6,083, of those were reported . . ."
The point I'm making here is that the national ritual after every mass killing is to isolate the murderer and focus on his weirdness and inability to be normal: his "troubled mind," as Obama put it. But in fact, mass killers embrace our essential national values. Johnson's mind was no more troubled than the collective mind called national defense, which identifies and dehumanizes our enemy of the moment, then proceeds to take that enemy out as efficiently as possible.
And the process is completely impersonal. In war we kill "strangers" who have not done us personal harm; they merely represent -- by their uniform or simply by their presence in enemy territory -- the large wrong we are attempting to eliminate.
In the shadow of the Department of Defense lurks the Second Amendment, which ensures that war doesn't vanish simply because we're safely within the borders of the greatest country there is. Bad people are everywhere and the need for defense never ends. This, too, is part of the context in which Johnson and all the other celebrity mass murderers have acted. Add to this our increasingly militarized police departments and the de facto war being waged on people of color and what we have is an almost endless justification for violent behavior.
The only way out is to think beyond war: to mourn, to grieve for so many lives cut short, and to refuse to dehumanize anyone.
Dehumanizing others is so easy when you're armed.
We've had enough. The 1% own and operate the corporate media. They are doing everything they can to defend the status quo, squash dissent and protect the wealthy and the powerful. The Common Dreams media model is different. We cover the news that matters to the 99%. Our mission? To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. How? Nonprofit. Independent. Reader-supported. Free to read. Free to republish. Free to share. With no advertising. No paywalls. No selling of your data. Thousands of small donations fund our newsroom and allow us to continue publishing. Can you chip in? We can't do it without you. Thank you.